Ask HN: What laptop are you using to daily drive Linux?
I am an idiot, and bought a Dell XPS 15 with an Nvidia graphics card, and getting the graphics card to work without excessive patching is not worth it to me. I'd rather just get an AMD laptop instead for daily driving Linux.
What laptop are you using for Linux?
91 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI believe I got it in 2018, I've swapped out the disk for an SSD and upgraded it to 24GB of ram, it runs Ubuntu perfectly.
this last time (2 weeks ago) i bought an hp envy 16" with nvidia gpu. things appear to work fine on arch but i have no audio and have no idea why.
The only annoyance is that some programs (Gimp, libreoffice) have really tiny text in menus and such.
I also run a Ryzen 4000 HP Envy 13" (ca. 2022) 2-in-1 with Debian Bookworm. It works somewhat fine in laptop mode but is crap otherwise. I seriously consider reinstalling MS Windows on that one.
I'm sure I messed something up when I installed everything and probably added a workaround that isn't meant for my driver version (systemd/persistenced scripts)
Switching from Intel to AMD will also require new RAM and a new wi-fi module:
https://frame.work/products/mainboard-kit-amd-ryzen-7040-ser...
Initial issues with the iGPU seem to have gone away with software updates. The one chore you will have is finding a fractional scaling setup that works for you. I went with turning Gnome's experimental fractional scaling feature on. (See 1.1.1.1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI) Some people just use a font size multiplier.
Everything else works great.
Alas, I scrapped mine after the logic board quit.
Love the computer. Can't stand a laptop without a pointing stick. :)
I do have to enable power management on the nvidia GPU to prevent it from eating my battery in 45 minutes or less, but that’s my only issue.
My current is a Tuxedo Computers Pulse 15 II, with an AMD card. I love this laptop. I mainly bought to have something portable, more memory (64 GB) and quiet. The sold me on the quiet and battery life and it's fantastic.
Early on I had a couple of issues with the hardware suspend but they solved it through their tomte system. (I had an oddball setup I configured with two different drive manufacturers and it was messing with suspend. I found and applied config for my Samsung.)
The only issue I've had with the AMD card is that running Immersed to create virtual desktops for VR using inactive display imports crashes amdgpu. Pretty niche :). Apparently that's something you can do with Nvidia. I worked around it with an HDMI dongle.
Edit: most responses here seem to be the big manufacturers but you really avoid a lot of problems by buying from a Linux vendor. If you're busy, this is a real lifesaver.
Tuxedo’s Pulse 14 looks interesting but I wish its screen were a bit brighter. Also no ANSI keyboard layout option which is a bummer.
My daily driver is a desktop because I'm an old fart that likes to build computers (with optical disc drives!), but I have a truly ancient HP Elitebook refurb with a dented lid that still takes care of me on vacation. Neither of us do anything fancier than use an HDMI projector with them so we're not asking for much. It really stung to be compiling Realtek modules for the HP only for it to crash every week and the Latitude to have a disappearing sound card, even for budget refurbs.
Only complaint is that its screen, while otherwise being excellent, requires 150% UI scaling and the only DE I’ve found that handles fractional scaling under Wayland almost fully competently is KDE, which isn’t quite my style. Have read that several Wayland tiling WMs handle fractional scaling well too but those are even less my thing.
I have to compile my Emacs from source with the flag --with-pgtk and I have to arrange for the command-line arguments -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform and -ozone-platform=wayland to be passed to the Chrome binary when the application opens to prevent Emacs and Chrome from being blurry.
It's the lightest laptop I've ever used, yet still has good build quality and great battery life.
Everything worked out of the box with NixOS, Sway, and suspend-to-disk with full home directory and swap encryption.
Not many major issues, on the 5550 everything worked pretty great except using VMs slowed everything to a crawl and some weird networking issues where the connection would randomly drop to 2mb/s.
Just started with he 5680, and had to do some back and forth with the graphics driver to get it to work and am now running into a weird issue where an electron app will open and display blank for several minutes before loading and working fine. Still investigating.
Still not worth going to Windows even with the challenges.
Pro: * The warranty service is wonderful. Both online-scheduled mail-in service and in-person service. Calls are answered by real people quickly. Fan broke, but it was quickly replaced. Some electrical noise coming out of the motherboard -- Lenovo is willing to replace the motherboard, but so far no catastrophic failure.
Con: * Poor QC with thermals. I had to repaste myself after both factory and service center couldn't get it right. * Fan and motherboard issues (as mentioned above) but fixable/fixed by Lenovo under warranty. * Small things are broken all the time with Ubuntu: speakers, microphone, screen sheering etc. With the lastest Ubuntu, it is marginally better.
I still would not recommend this model unless one is an advanced user willing to debug these things (I still haven't figured out what's wrong with the headphone jack noise). But once the bugs/defects are fixed, this machine is a dream to use.
Thinkpad fans spin up quite aggressively in my experience. You can use thinkfan to set higher threshold temperatures.
Screen tearing has been solved for me after switching to Wayland.
A very handwavy final remark: some problems might vanish on their own by using a recent kernel, e.g. on Fedora instead of the Ubuntu LTS release.
1. I tried every power saving option available at every layer (snd_hda_intel, pulseaudio, TLP). None of that eliminated the problem. 2. ThinkPad fans are aggressive indeed, and I did use thinkfan to reduce the noise, but it turns out the physical fan was just terribly pasted. Re-pasting with a higher quality paste helped immensely. 3. I did try Wayland, but I am told it has its own issues. In the end, I put up with shearing under X as it didn't bother me that much. The most recent kernel mitigates shearing. 4. Indeed, a recent kernel automatically solves many issues that I had previously solved manually (mic, speakers, etc)
I had thought LTS with its continual updates should address these problems as well as a more recently released distro should. It seems that I was mistaken.