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Ask Slashdot: Recommendations For a Reliable Linux Laptop?
An anonymous reader writes: I will be looking for a new laptop soon and I'm mostly interested in high reliability and Linux friendliness. I have been using an MSI laptop (with Windows 7) for the last five years as my main workhorse and did not have a single, even minor problem with the hardware nor the OS. It turned out to be a slam-dunk, although I didn't do any particular research before buying it, so I was just lucky. I would like to be more careful this time around, so this is a hardware question: What laptop do you recommend for high reliability with Linux? I will also appreciate any advice on what to avoid and any unfortunate horror stories; I guess we can all learn from those.
Anti-recommendations are probably just as valuable, a lesson I learned when an HP laptop I bought (low-end, I admit) turned out to be notoriously fickle when it comes to Linux support. Since our anonymous submitter doesn't specify his budget, it would be good if you specify the price for any specific laptops you recommend.
I still highly recommend the Thinkpad T-series line, now owned by Lenovo, for running Linux on a laptop. I've been running Linux on various generations of the T-series since when IBM introduced the line (T21 running Fedora Core 1-4, then Gentoo), and I've never had any significant or insurmountable problems. They use mostly Intel parts and Intel tends to be fairly open source friendly which leads to them being easy to support. My current laptop is a T430s running Gentoo, and my prior laptop was a T400 also running Gentoo. Sleep/hibernate both work as does all the other features (video camera, ultrabay, etc.). The build quality is quite solid too (I only replaced my T400 because I wanted more than 8GB of RAM).
I have less experience with the other Thinkpad lines, but I would imagine both the X-series & W-series would also work well. If you go with a different brand, I generally recommend going straight to the business line (i.e. Dell Latitues, etc.) of the laptops for better build quality.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Just not worth it...
Had one for a couple of years up until last year.
- Fan control was a problem, would get hot, then run fans on max.
- Wifi drivers were a pain, and didn't always recover from suspend reliably (needed reboots).
- Dealing with poorly documented Ubuntu PPAs to get drivers and docs for configuration is a chore.
- There are enough differences between model years that what once worked now doesn't. User's writing 'works for me' without specify which MacBook pro vintage they use is not helpful.
Replaced with an ASUS G550JK(https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/G550JK/) last year. Has same or better specs than a MacBook pro of the time, for a little over half the price, and the IPS display is beautiful. Everything just worked (Ubuntu 14.04). I almost miss messing about with drivers to make them work (not!).
Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Apple, Lenovo, Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, Foxcomm, Panasonic, Itronix, Sharp and you will be fine.
Every maker has issues. All of them. Some are purely design. Some are HW failures and some are driver related.
Only a specific model, for a specific version of Linux can be commented about.
For example, I have an Acer C720 chromebook - wiped chromeOS in the first 5 minutes and loaded Ubuntu. That was almost 2 yrs ago. Touchpad driver issues were the beginning and the lack of a delete key (common to all chromebooks). About 3 weeks ago, the 'n' key started getting picky. Last July, it was the '7' - a simple cleaning made it a little better, but the 'n' is just screwed.
Had an Asus before. Chicklet keyboards suck. 'nuff said.
Still have a Dell that I like. Good keyboard and it is about 5 yrs old. The wifi support was hard to get working - should have spent the $15 upgrade for a better wifi microPCI card (better linux support).
A friend picked up a new Dell XPS 13 about a month ago - WOW! That thing is sexy, but at $1600, it should be.
We had an installfest last week and saw a lot of new laptops. Avoid HP. They break the BIOS, badly. I'd say to avoid Apple HW too - there was always 5 special incantations to get those to work ... except for one MBP which we never got installed. That was with 3 Mac-lovers and linux 20+ yr experts helping.
Lenovo is known to HW lock addon cards, so you can only put in approved replacements. That means replacing a bad wifi card isn't $25 - it is $50 because only specific models are allowed to work. It is a BIOS thing, I hear.
So - the old rule of making a list of chips and verifying each has Linux support is the best advice. Buying anything less than 6 months old is asking for driver trouble.
TLDR; A 'Pro' product isn't defined by some arbitrary nonsense like the number of buttons it has. It's defined by how well it does the job it is set out to do. Use the tool that matches your needs.
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If you think the definition of "Pro" requires having a nasa-like control panel to manage the fiddly details of your equipment, then your not a professional... you're a child who only wants to impress his friends.
A professional-level device helps you get your work done with as minimal hassle as possible. A professional-level device is reliable, because the person using it is trying to get *real* work done, and doesn't want to waste time dicking around with inconsequential bullshit like whether the color of your window borders are exactly #FEFEB0, or if you can shut off the wifi using a physical toggle button.
It doesn't matter who makes the device, or . What matters is whether it does the job you need it to do, and that it does so reliably without getting in your way.
I switched to using Macs when I finally got fed up with Windows and it's utter inability to suspend/resume reliably (among other things). I had initially tried to switch to linux, multiple times, but I couldn't find a single distro that could handle suspending properly, not to mention there was no decent virtualization software to run non-linux applications on, and there were no decent alternatives on Linux that compared to stuff like Microsoft Office or Adobe products.
So I moved to using OSX and haven't looked back since. It's the perfect combination (for me) of all possible worlds. Major vendor support, good virtualization tools for when I am in a pinch and am forced to run something windows-based, but I still get all my unixy command-line goodness, etc. And everything for the most part works. I don't have this perpetual worry in the back of my head that I'm going to sit down in front of my computer one morning and my computer is completely fubared because of something I couldn't have anticipated (Like Microsoft botching yet another update).
Game support on Mac is more or less crap compared to Windows, but I'm not a big gamer so I don't really care that much.