Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?
So, Apple recently stopped supporting the last version of OS X that would run on a 2012 15" retina MacBook Pro. In case you missed it, this design was the last one influenced by Steve Jobs and was absolutely epic, untouchable for almost a decade, really not surpassed until the M1 MacBooks came out.
Odds of me getting away with not using OS X are slim to none. But, I do enjoy my old ThinkPads running Ubuntu and find myself wondering if there are any non-Lenovo options that are real contenders these days. Any recommended go-bys for set-up or feature selections would be especially appreciated. My quick review suggests the top choices are listed below, but of course write-ins are welcome.
439 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadThe DeskMini is slightly larger and heavier than most mini PCs, but it is the only one I know whose cooling fan can be a high-quality quiet Noctua fan.
Beats buying a laptop for double the price and likely worse linux compatibility.
Note on your methodology: a purely numeric vote is an automatic win for Lenovo simply based on market share, so you should ask people about problems, if any.
This was my first time purchasing a laptop that isn’t a MacBook, and I really like it! My favorite aspect is probably the keyboard, which I find a lot more enjoyable to type on than my MacBook for work.
I purchased this laptop to pair with a nice desktop setup, so I wanted something lightweight (~2 lbs.) for traveling that just worked. I’m a software developer who primarily uses Firefox, kitty, and VS Code.
I was concerned about the “just works” aspect before purchasing, but after some very slight initial tweaking, I find that it does just work and never gets in my way of productivity. Gnome Extensions made that minor tweaking much simpler than setting up an Arch environment.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with this laptop and hope to use it for years to come.
They never worked correctly, and these folks spent a non trivial amount of time diagnosing them, even taking up meeting time to explain the latest arcane fix that was needed so $whatever would come up properly after sleep.
They would also complain that dev tooling wouldn’t work for them when they were maybe a handful out of hundreds with MacBooks.
When the day came they were forced to migrate to Macs, they grumbled as expected, but their productivity went way up.
I will say that what happened to your linux people at Acquia has happened to me when I was forced to switch to OSX for some kind of vague security reasoning at a job once. My productivity plummeted, I can't believe the defaults in OSX people just... live with for the most part. Sure, a tiled window manager isn't for everyone, but truly, people just accept a new window opening and flying off to some apparently arbitrary portion of the screen, at a completely random seeming width and height? People truly just have a massive dock taking up a significant portion of the bottom of their screen? Eck.
I know you can customize all that but that took me a long time to wrangle OSX into an acceptable dev environment, and that's before I get into all the issues I had with various packages. Lord forbid you want to use emacs. This as well is arbitrary, maybe I should "just be a vscode guy" cause that's what everyone uses, but they already spent the money on hiring me so it's like, consider the economics of "forcing" devs to switch just because you think they'll be more productive on the shiny aluminum slab you prefer to use.
And... if people messing with their docks is actually causing a productivity issue, bring it up in performance review lol. Spend less time fiddling with your 2x4k monitor dock and more time just coding, on the laptop screen if necessary, oh woe. I'm guessing the true productivity issue is less that the hardware isn't working and more that the fiddling is fun! If I wasn't fiddling with my docks, I was fiddling with emacs, or, my personally built keyboard config, or, whatever else!
Rather then get their brew/GNU environments in order, I was constantly having to modify build scripts to try and detect and account for yet another dev who would complain "it's broken" because they weren't in a GNU environment, or what worked with BSD tools didn't work in the GNU environment.
Of course I simply ran a Linux desktop, so that worked great but it was very noticeable how much more reliable and how much quicker I could be interacting with our environment then the people living through multiple layers of indirection and abstraction or VMs.
It would have been much easier if they'd been locked into the corporate Windows environment, since then they would've been forced to actually run VMs in the platform they were targeting (but of course that environment was much worse for everyone).
When, then I certainly agree, presuming of course that the alternative is not worse in that regard
It's fatter than a carbon but more performant, has more ports, and is much more extendable / repairable in my opinion.
edit: I really hope framework comes out on top here though because I really hate that lenovo has started soldering RAM and the state of consumerism and e-waste in our industry is genuinely completely out of control at this point.
I really need to go ahead and pull the trigger on buying a framework laptop... it's just so very hard to give up that lenovo keyboard!!
<1.41> - (Fix) Fixed an issue that CPU is frequency stuck. - (Fix) Fixed out of order idle state under Linux. - (Fix) Fixed an issue that battery icon show yellow bang when system is waken up from Full Shutdown, which Wake On LAN is AC Only in BIOS Setup. - (Fix) Fixed an issue that "The connected AC adapter has a lower wattage than the recommended AC adapter which was shipped with the system..." pops up after press power button when Wake on LAN in system BIOS Setup is AC and Battery.
Ok now we're in fun linux world, make sure to do more research (sadly) before doing firmware updates, and choose your version carefully. See
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T14_(AMD)_G...
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/T14-AMD...
IMO this is not unique to lenovo, more just what we put up with for mushing software freedom onto hardware non-freedom. Repairable though lenovo is, the reality is there's no such thing as a GNU chip / board fabrication plant. Though maybe there should be, lol.
> In an ongoing Lenovo forums thread, there has been a discussion regarding battery drain issues in suspend/powered-off states. Presumably, laptops with AMD Renoir CPUs and relevant hardware are affected. As of now, BIOS firmware version 1.29 is suggested for use, as version 1.30 introduced significant battery drain; the battery loses up to 50% in 2-3 days while the laptop is in suspend mode.
I recently got a Gen 3 AMD T14s and I've been very happy with it. it's a bit thicker / heavier / wider than my old Carbons, but still a very comfortable size, and has much better specs (6c/12t Ryzen 5 6650U, 32gb RAM, 1TB NVMe, Radeon 680M GPU) than comparably-priced Carbons I looked at.
Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora and others are great if they work out of the box. As soon as some proprietary GPU or other driver gets involved it can get painful. I recently installed Fedora on latest Thinkpad with dedicated Nvidia GPU and could not get it to work properly on Fedora. Driver crashed and did not load during startup. After trying a bit I switched to Arch and while the initial setup took longer, everything works and I can actually update it without requiring to add some shady 3rd party repos or compiling essential packages after each update manually myself.
> uses fairly standard GNOME.
Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user
Which uses GNOME.
>Which uses GNOME.
Fedora's primary distribution may have Gnome, but there are many other desktop environments that are available "out of the box", as I'm sure you know. I've been running Fedora on dozens of systems over the last decade and I've never used Gnome -- because it's annoying and supremely unintuitive.
XFCE FTW.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...
And more context (I am not sure if it's accurate):
https://twitter.com/asahilinux/status/1553968394734813184
Driver support for bare metal use on the M2 Air was really, really poor at the time. Linus mentions Asahi Linux, so he probably wasn't running virtualized Linux under macOS. Maybe he SSHed into the box, or it wasn't an M2 model after all.
Are you comparing emulated x86 to native Windows ARM via dual-boot?
Asahi Linux has modified kernel where is M1/M2 drivers, and remaining of Asahi is from Arch Linux. Asahi is installed like new version of macOS, notification about it goes to Apple, Apple just does not know it's actually Asahi Linux install. M1/M2 hardware has possibility for Linux by design, Apple most likely had some minimal Linux running on it for test purposes. There are also other FOSS distros for M1/M2, they use partially same packages and ways to make installing dual boot OS possible.
It's also possible to install macOS and Asahi Linux to external SSD drive and boot from there. But part of boot is still at internal drive, so it's not like boot at any computer yet.
I thought you were saying that you found a way to run Windows on bare metal and were comparing bare metal vs Parallels
https://www.uubyte.com/blog/how-to-install-macos-ventura-on-...
Internal 256 GB disk has dual boot macOS and Asahi Linux.
There's no qemu equivalent on mac I don't think.
UTM is Qemu.
Qemu can be compiled for macOS and Linux. I just today figured out how to compile Qemu on arm64 (actually using OrangePi that has 16 GB RAM and is arm64, similar like Linux on M1) so that it can run ReactOS. OrangePi has 8 cores (shown with "nproc"), so I used "make -j8" to make compiling use all cores, compiling faster:
Networking examples for various OS: https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Networking
Slirp required to be included when compiling, to have user networking: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1917161
sudo apt -y install git libglib2.0-dev libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev ninja-build git-email libaio-dev libbluetooth-dev libcapstone-dev libbrlapi-dev libbz2-dev libcap-ng-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgtk-3-dev libibverbs-dev libjpeg8-dev libncurses5-dev libnuma-dev librbd-dev librdmacm-dev libsasl2-dev libsdl2-dev libseccomp-dev libsnappy-dev libssh-dev libvde-dev libvdeplug-dev libvte-2.91-dev libxen-dev liblzo2-dev valgrind xfslibs-dev libnfs-dev libiscsi-dev meson
git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git
cd qemu
git submodule init
git submodule update
git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp
cd libslirp
meson build
ninja -C build install
cd ..
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --enable-slirp
make -j8
sudo make install
sudo apt install qemu-utils
wget reactos-32bit-bootcd-nightly.7z
7z x reactos-32bit-bootcd-nightly.7z
mv reactos*.iso ReactOS.iso
qemu-img create -f qcow2 ReactOS.qcow2 20G
qemu-system-i386 -m 3G -drive if=ide,index=0,media=disk,file=ReactOS.qcow2 -drive if=ide,index=2,media=cdrom,file=ReactOS.iso -boot order=d -serial stdio -netdev user,id=n0 -device rtl8139,netdev=n0
https://github.com/evansm7/vftool
my command: vftool -k vmlinuz -i initrd -d disk.img -p 4 -m 2048 -a "console=hvc0 irqaffinity=0 root=/dev/vda"
But if Linux is a tool for your job I wouldn’t daily drive it yet.
Best Linux laptop I ever had, using ThinkPads and Dell for many many years (14 years in total now)
I still have not ported some of those to macOS M1 and Asahi Linux arm64. And I still have not leaned Mac keyboard layout, I have trouble finding keys how to type, and trouble to find settings how to fix layout.
https://hpdevone.com/
As time has gone on, the experience has degraded substantially. Bluetooth audio has degraded substantially as I've kept up with updates. It basically doesn't have a battery.
Its really felt like PopOS! has gone from an 'it just works' version of linux, to yet-another-power-users-only version of linux.
I have serious hesitance about endorsing either at this point.
The corner cases of M1 support have mostly disappeared. I left a review here several months ago that was edging towards negative, but I have to admit, the ecosystem has matured substantially. Even pytorch has a native M1 mode now.
The best part is, when something does require a recompile, it zips by — compiling is almost fun again just for the sheer joy of watching a big build finish in ~30 minutes when it used to take hours.
The OP asked about a laptop to run Linux, and you suggest running MacOS? Or did you forget mentioning the part about running Linux on it?!
I respect you, but weird post tbh.
I didn’t know an M1 could even run Linux. Does anyone use it that way? I’d be curious to know if it works well.
EDIT: Looks like Asahi Linux is designed for it: https://asahilinux.org/about/
System 76 Oryx Pro; 29 points
Framework; 111 points
Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition; 44 points
2019 Intel MacBook Pro; 4 points
M1 MacBook Pro; 54 points
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10; 119 points
Star Labs Starfighter; 7 points
HP Dev One; 7 points
Lenovo T14 Lenovo T480/490; 27 points
If anyone has theories about why the M1 is polling so well, I’d be curious to hear. It seems unlikely that the M1 is a popular choice for Linux, yet that’s what the polls seem to indicate.
"Just build a retaining wall" my wife said. 13,000 lb of concrete block and 10,000 of dirt later, we had a retaining wall.
"Just buy a laptop which is known not to deviate from reference designs" ... how does one do that?
Between the sleep, the bad mic, fan noise, I think my next one will be a ThinkPad (my 10 year old ThinkPad is still rocking, gave it to other family who just needed a browser).
I had to replace the Killer wifi card with an Intel card, as the OEM one was flaky and this seemed to be a known issue that wasn't acknowledged by Dell.
The battery failed on me 3 times, and I eventually gave up on the warranty and bought a third party battery which I installed myself.
The power connector got loose, which required replacing the motherboard.
The case itself is not very stiff, so putting it over the edge of a knee or table means the touch pad won't click due to the flex.
Perhaps newer models have addressed these sorts of issues, but I'd be wary of buying another considering the Thinkpad I got for work has been very solid.
BUT I also had to replace the battery after a year or two (it was swollen to the point that I couldn't close the laptop anymore).
And finally the rubbery coating of the case degraded badly and turned into a gooey, sticky mess (apparently a known issue with this kind of material, for those living in tropical weather).
So I'm done with Dell for a while.
That happened to me too with the first one, but they actually on their own initiative sent me a new battery. I've had no problems with the second laptop.
If you want a larger screened Dell for Linux you should definitely go with the Precision line that you mentioned as you can order them with Linux out of the box.
You might be OK with an XPS 15 or 17 but I've heard of issues with the GPU on the XPS 15 so might be a bit of a crap shoot. So personally I would avoid them.
My advice for buying any Linux laptop would be always get one that comes with Linux out of the box even if you're going to replace it.
They won't refuse to repair it. It's identical in all ways except for the screen size, so. If something really weird happens, they might kick it back to you, but nothing really weird is going to happen.
> My advice for buying any Linux laptop would be always get one that comes with Linux out of the box even if you're going to replace it.
Or get a Dell XPS 17 and install your own ;)
All the parts of the XPS 13 are expected to work well with Linux. They've been selected specifically for that and they’ll receive firmware updates to improve that situation.
That’s not the same on the XPS17. On an XPS 17 the parts just have to work with Windows. They might work or they might not.
If something doesn’t work with Linux on the XPS 13 or Precision model it’s someone at Dell’s paid job to fix it. On an XPS 15 or XPS 17 it’s your job.
Get an XPS 17 if you want one obviously but you're not buying the same experience.
If I could get the G14 with OLED screen it would be perfect.
It's been a while since I've been able to tolerate dealing with working on a laptop screen.
I've been considering the Framework quite a bit, but reports of the experience are pretty inconsistent (which suggests, there's annoying issues still).
EDIT: Oh and the other problem - all laptop keyboards suck nowadays. Apple has ruined the entire market with it's flat, no definition keys that everyone (including framework) are emulating (or cramming a numpad onto 15" models, meaning you have to type off-center).
the wifi didn't work on the 5.15 LTS kernel that NixOS defaults to, so I had to upgrade to 6.0. and there's some wonkiness with suspend, where the system will sometimes re-suspend itself a moment after opening the lid. a minor annoyance that I haven't taken the time to debug yet.
my previous Lenovos, I've always bought used ~3 year old models from eBay and local refurbishers. these slightly outdated models would always work perfectly with LTS kernels, no fiddling needed.
so if Linux compatibility is a higher priority than having the absolute newest hardware, I can definitely recommend looking at used Lenovos.
in particular, I recommend buying a model with no SSD whenever possible, and ordering a brand-new SSD separately. this way you know you're not getting an elderly drive, or one that was used for Chia mining, or whatever.
The good thing is that with Linux you don’t need the latest hardware to have a snappy system.
The bad thing is that not having the latest hardware is required if you don’t want to tinker.
If you work with compiled languages, having good hardware is a real quality of life improvement.
I haven't tried C++.
I have a 2021 M1 and a Linux laptop with a i7-11700 desktop CPU.
And compiling takes shorter on my computers than a lot of other computers.
Mine too! I would say it all depends on use case. If OP has certain tasks in mind they should maybe invest in something more powerful/newer. Having said that the t430s is a solid machine.
To anyone considering going back this far in hardware gen, my T420s (i7, 16GB memory, LUKS-encrypted SSD needed for work) on Mint + MATE DE could flat-out _not_ handle work video calls unless it was the _only_ thing that was running with everything else closed down. Even then, it was watching slideshows.
It was the sole reason I needed to buy a new (as in a secondhand T480s on eBay last year) machine.
Ubuntu, Xfce, can't recall the specs right now but definitely not top of the line.
As soon as I unplug the wireless headset from its USB charging cable, smooths right out.
I’m not saying you hit the same bug I’m saying software is hard.
I had to tweak something to make Zoom and Youtube see the GPU better (for Youtube, something in the Firefox about:config), and it lowered CPU load on my i5 CPU quite a bit, down to things becoming pretty fluid (T470, currently at 6.0.12 but it worked with 5.x, too).
While I fondly remember my T420 from 2011, its CPU was sort of... underpowered by today's standards.
The X13s is nearly there in terms of Linux support, better in some regards than the M1. Next generation will be hopefully closer to the M1 in terms of performance.
However, pricing is weird in some markets. Here in EU/UK, the X13s is really expensive and makes no sense to purchase.
> and there's some wonkiness with suspend
Check their UEFI, I think they started adding an option for Linux there specifically to handle suspend better. Set it to Linux instead of Windows.
There have been zero issues with Linux compatibility, just install and good to go.
I only recommend and would buy thinkpads. Also because as you said you get them very affordable after they spend 2 years in a office.
So maybe getting brand new on day 1 can give some issues or it's related to NixOS (I have no experience with it)
heh, I have a similar issue on my T470 in xfce. And in my case it can sometimes even hang in this state: you see your desktop, but can't interact with it. So you have to go the terminal and kill screensaver service.
The small issues like these are the reason why I still prefer to use macbook for work: its not perfect and might be too opinionated, but at least it is predictable.
Framework is the only other tempting choice, but some people voiced concerns about Linux compability with the latest revision. Might be worth messing around with it though.
1. https://ruscur.au/framework/
I've owned two of their units (both Dells), and will doubtless be a repeat offender again at some point.
The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U processor (Ryzen 5 PRO 6650U also available) is performant and the battery life is _much_ better than the current 12th gen Intel processors. The experience with Linux has generally been great. I had a sleep issue initially but it's been resolved. I ordered it with only a 256GB SSD then swapped that out with a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro before installing Ubuntu. If you want at 1TB or 2TB ssd, it's significantly cheaper to do it like this vs getting a bigger one with your order, and you will have a a faster SSD too.
What make and model SSD did it come with?
You can replace it with something better like SSK Hynix Platinum P41 or Samsung SSDs.
https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Chromebook
The Framework laptop may end up replacing my MacBook Pro 16, the last one before they came out with Apple Silicon.
What features are you looking for in a Linux laptop?
The process should be to first identify what hardware features you want, and then identify Linux support for those features. Support varies from distro to distro; they all have warty bits, and you can spend a lot of time picking a Linux.
Meanwhile, it should be the case that lots of laptops run desktop Linux pretty darn well. The typical exceptions today are graphics drivers (damn you, nvidia!) and touchpads when the vendor decides to manufacture something new. Most other stuff should work with minimal effort.
I'm typing this from the LG 17Z990 that has been running Debian (and only Debian) for over 5 years now. (Not an endorsement of that particular laptop; the keyboard is SO FRAGILE!) Before that, I had a big honkin' Dell that worked flawlessly with Debian for at least 7 years. So that's 12 years of daily-driving Linux. It hasn't been without its nuisances, but neither are Windows or MacOS. Unlike Windows or MacOS, when something does annoy me in Linux, it is -- generally -- fixable.
I really don't think you need to buy a laptop for Linux support, at this point. Like, sure, double-check that it doesn't have a known problem. You might have to pick your Linux according to the laptop, though.
Everything works, including nvidia proprietary driver and mode switching.
It's honestly the best linux laptop since I got my XPS 13