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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Linux Laptop?
Long-Time Slashdot reader sconeu is finally replacing his 10-year-old Toshiba Satellite laptop, and needs suggestions on the best current laptops for running Linux.
I'm looking to run some flavor of Linux (probably KDE-based UI, but not mandatory) while using a virtual machine to run Windows 7 (for stuff needed for work). For me personally, battery life and weight are more important than raw power. I'm not going to be running games on this.
I've been considering an XPS 13 Developer Edition, or something from System76, ZaReason or Emperor Linux. What laptop do you use? Do you have any suggestions?
It's your chance to share useful information, recommendations, and your own experiences with various brands of laptop. So leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best Linux laptop?
It's your chance to share useful information, recommendations, and your own experiences with various brands of laptop. So leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best Linux laptop?
wouldn't even boot and I can't get the wireless Ethernet to work. I don't think there are any of the garbage systems like the ones that Dells sells that will work.
Beautiful design, screen and battery life, plus it runs the latest Linux kernels without any issues whatsoever. I love mine.
Very happy with my bottom-of-the-line XPS 13 and Debian 8. Upgraded the SSD and Wifi card. Would buy another.
-kb
I use an old HP laptop (NC6400) to run Linux Mint. No problems at all.
Stay away from their consumer grade laptops. They're unreliable crap.
pick a thinkpad any thinkpad.
lose != loose
one that's 2 years old is 15% the cost of shiny new.
I got a cheap Toshiba Z20T (with a core-M 5Y31) and it works reasonably well with Linux (Mageia). (There are some issues with the sound after suspend/resume.)
SSD is upgradeable, RAM is soldered, large battery.
It came with Windows preinstalled, alas.
For compatibility, even laptops delivered with Windows are not always 100% compatible with Windows.
I know some HP pro laptops where the backlight controls don't always work.
(And new Apple laptops are not directly compatible anymore with Apple phones...)
I don't expect anymore that everything will work flawlessly, just that the issues are not too severe.
Remove systemd: make linux great again.
First,
1. The one you DID NOT BUY nor build.
2. The one everyone recommends until you get it in your hands and find out it is crap.
3. The one never made.
In general, choose a Thinkpad for great Linux support (BTW Avoid Ideapad, they are in a completely different class than Thinkpads).
For your specific personal needs (not games, light, battery-life), one of the Thinkpad X Series. So either the Thinkpad X1 Carbon or the Thinkpad X260.
Good one....best zinger today.
Asus F555UA-EB51 15.6-Inch Laptop (2.3 GHz Core i5-6198DU) ASUS F555LA-EH51 Similar. Try to get the Bluetooth onboard. Though that will have the Intel Wifi. The alternative is to go for the Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter. Which is favored by security students. Might need bluetooth dongle to get BT in this case. There may be Bluetooth RF on the chip, though last I emailed the AR9485-Linux-driver auth, BT had not been enabled. Not sure of recent updates. I have the Broadwell version. With Nvidea. Great value.
Running latest Ubuntu. Battery lasts forever, chroot running on Gentoo...
Check out Razor. They are the sexiest non-macs I know of, light, and powerful. I'm running Arch.
n/t
Tried it. It's huge.
Hard to believe but Linux on a 2015 retina MacBook pro is pretty awesome. Non Ubuntu installs will need a kernel patch for suspend to work, and the vid camera driver needs to be installed separately, but follow the arch wiki and everything works awesome.
Agreed, any comments about Trump are awesome.
Someone that needs/wants a 10" ultra portable isn't going to be happy with a 17" mobile workstation.
I like my Dell M6700 with a i7-3940XM. 32 GB of RAM, 4 hard drives and space for 2x wifi cards. 17" screen. Full keyboard, with number pad. Trackpad and clit mouse (if you're into that). I only wish I could get a higher resolution screen.
Not the late 2016 model unless you use the Mac OS as the main OS. Drivers for other platforms are not mature.
The 2015 can boot or virtualize almost any OS you might care to work under.
Max out the RAM and boot drive. RAM's soldered and the SSD is unique.
I bought a Hewlett Packard Spectre 13 Ultrabook (not to be confused with their other Spectre product) and was able to install Xubuntu Linux via a USB thumb-drive plugged into the USB-C AC power port. Beforehand I set-up Microsoft Windows 10, created recovery media for a complete re-install as a backup, and allocated a partition for Xubuntu Linux using Microsoft's Disk Management utility. Next, I booted from the USB thumb-drive - I forget whether I selected the boot device via the UEFI firmware or the standard key-press way - because I performed this procedure in August or early September. The installation went very smoothly; I kept a listing of all the steps during the actual installation process. All the features work including the Fn keys. I am easily getting 12+ hours on a single battery charge though I keep the screen brightness quite low to avoid eye strain and fatigue. I bought a separate Hewlett Packard Bluetooth Mouse which has been a little flaky in terms of maintinaing connectivity; likely a driver issue which will be resolved soon enough.
I got one of the newest w/ 7th gen i7 etc for work just a few weeks ago, and I love it. It comes with Ubuntu 16.04 pre-installed, and it's awesome to have everything working right out of the box with no fiddling. The display is wonderful, and the slim bezel gives you more actual screen real estate than other 13" laptops. The one oddity for me is the USB type C port for my external monitor, but there are lots of cheap adapters on Amazon that will do the job to get you over to HDMI/Displayport/etc. I'd definitely recommend it, though it's not cheap.
I bought a Dell Latitude e7450, and quite happy with it. It does not come with Linux pre-installed, unfortunately, but other than that, it works great. (The only problem I've had was: the touchpad was detected as a mouse and therefore things like tap-to-click were not configurable. I'm now running a patched kernel - but looks like the patches went into 4.9, so it won't be a problem anymore.)
I bought a $250 Asus laptop a few years ago. At first, I tried Debian but wireless drivers didn't exist. Ubuntu worked well for a year or so, until I tried Debian again. It worked and I'm happy with my cheap 17" laptop. Good hardware isn't as important with Linux.
It was the first notebook I ever had where everything *just works* on Linux.
Even those fancy USB-C to DIsplayPort dongles
I was really surprised :)
didn't have a lot of money. Bought a Thinkpad T420i off of ebay for $180 (came with 4 gb ram and a 160 ssd). Swapped the ssd for an extra 240 I had laying around and spent another ~$21 on another 4gb stick (this model only takes 8 gb).
Runs quite well. Linux Mint 18 (using cinnamon), customized the UI a little, usually run 2 workspaces with a VM in the 2nd one. It's actually more responsive than the pirate copy of Windows 8.1 the vendor included lol.
+1 for that, the HP commercial laptops are very good.
I use to have an HP EliteBook Folio 9470m, I was quite happy with it running Debian. Everything worked as expected, after some tweaking with tlp and running a newer kernel from ubuntu.
I have now an HP EliteBook 1030 G1, Im happy with the built, display and the new CPU but the linux support for the Skylake is awfull. I have problems with bluetooth, power consumption and the graphics card. After some work I have a working Debian, but I could not fix a couple of annoying bugs . The machine hangs almost every time that I plug an external monitor or when the monitor enters sleep mode. I installed the latest X drivers from intel (www.01.org), the latest build of the Kernel 4.9rc and configure the "modesetting" X driver, but the issues remains, I got better power usage though.
I read in the intel site, that the fixes are planned to be integrated in the kernel 4.11, 4 months ahead.
For fist time in 15 years of running linux in my main machine, Im about to install windows 10, I need my machine to work, I can't keep spending my time rebooting or start compiling patched kernels.
My two cents, stay away from skylake and newer CPUs and get a good Haswell basd laptop.
I wished I asked the OP question before buying the newest and greatest, as I download the Win10 Recovery image....
My Dell Mini 10 struggles running Knoppix.
I set up Kubuntu on a Dell Inspiron and use it as a full time dev machine for work. It might be a little large for your needs at 17".
The biggest thing I can say is - make sure it has a solid state drive. This is the biggest factor in this day and age of computing. Nothing else is as important.
I'm thankful for sub 30sec boot times . You will be too.
If I was getting a linux book out of the box, I'd go with a Dell XPS 13 or 10".
Thinkpads used to be the thing, but I'm having issues staying in love with the brand since Lenovo split from IBM. I've had some decent hardware from them since then, but it's still not quite the same.
It's a good company that make a laptop work right with any of the variants of Ubuntu.
I run Linux, usually Debian or Ubuntu on Dell Precision or Latitude laptops. My current personal laptop is a Precision M4400, Core2Quad, 8GB ram, 500Gb SSD. I bought it originally with a 320GB hard drive and 4GB of ram for $200 from the Dell Offlease website. Admittedly, the M4400 is getting long in the tooth, but since I'm retired, don't have a lot of spare $$$ laying around to buy something newer. Since I supported/used Dell corporate systems in my last couple of jobs as a sysadmin, I'm kinda particular about them... Bottom line: If you buy a Dell *anywhere* but on a Dell website, you're getting one of the consumer-grade Dell systems, with less warantee, offshore scripted "support", lots of bloatware.. Just not a good quality product like the corporate systems... My .02
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I use Linux as my main OS since the late '90s, and I found that the best laptop for Linux is still the Thinkpad series. I have had 4 different Thinkpad, and a series of other laptop, such as HP, Dell, Sony, Asus, etc. But Thinkpad is the one with the least problems. I'm currently using a Thinkpad x250. Lightweight, good battery, everything works with Linux (screen resolution sucks though). The other really good laptops for travel were Asus Eee PC (the first generation) and the Sony Vaio 505 series (I bought the first generation in 1998), they all worked great with Linux. I really missed them, when backpacking.
Remove systemd: make linux great again.
I, Donald J. Trump, am calling for a total, complete shutdown of all systemd Linux systems.
My work just bought one for me recently. Installation of Kubuntu 16.04 was a breeze, it's worked nearly flawlessly ever since install. My only regret is that I did a HDD instead of SDD. It's light, good battery life, great display (when I'm on the road) and great docking station (when I'm not).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Very happy with the touch-screen XPS 13 and Ubuntu. Basically no trouble that I didn't create myself.
Specifically, I immediately tried to upgrade to 16.04 from the (working-fine) out-of-the-box 14.04, which failed, and then discovered that there was bug in the Ubuntu installer so it couldn't cope with the SSD.
But all work-roundable with pretty minimal googling. I might have been more worried if I wasn't used to setting up linuxes on laptops (first time I did it, I needed a framebuffer for the video. Tell that to 'the young people of today, they don't believe you.) But surely the same is true for pretty such anyone who would actually *want* linux on a laptop?
The only other real problem I had was video (working, but tearing), which all got better with xorg-edgers. Again, not difficult to solve with a bit of searching.
Since then, it All. Just. Works. So to speak. And it's very nice hardware.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
I am very happy with a Thinkpad X1 yoga and Fedora 25. The only issue is multi monitor support with Skylake. With recent Kernels most issues have disappeared for me, and using drm-intel-nightly kernels I don't see any problems at all. Also, I am not sure what exactly Intel screwed up, but when I initially got the machine most of the issues I was seeing (external screen randomly turning of, graphics driver crashing) where also present in Windows 10.
Check https://system76.com/
They make (some models are based on other brands) full compatible ubuntu laptops.
The high end laptops use desktop CPUs = more CPU power. They have cheaper models too.
Got a System76 Oryx Pro for work; it is a beast of a laptop/server /w i7, SSD and it can go up to 64G of RAM. Will never buy another non-linux laptop again for myself.
Since it will just be a steaming pile of shit anyway. Linux hasn't even figured out proper power management yet. Even as bad as Windows is it does a better job.
While we're on this subject, I'd love to hear people's recommendations for buying a laptop without windows in Australia
13" of screen space is 13" of screen space, regardless the bezel size.
For the past 10 + years, I have been using Linux exclusively as my desktop environment, and all on laptops. I use Kubuntu 14.04 at present, and have been on the LTS versions for many years.
I only buy laptops that are on sale, whatever is in the flyers the week I need to replace a laptop.
From a 'what works' point of view, most of the laptops I have used have fully worked with Linux. That includes Wifi and sound, the most pesky components. Years ago, one Dell laptop had an issue with Wifi and I had to download something or other to make it work. The last few releases did not need anything special for it to work.
I am writing this from a 2009 Toshiba that works well with Kubuntu 14.04. An older Toshiba (maybe 2006 or 2007) still works fine with the same Kubuntu version.
From a reliability point of view, avoid HP laptops. I had one where the screen hinge decided not to work, and broke, so it is now a special purpose server. Another HP was overheating and we got it exchanged under extended warranty and 3 strikes (sent for repair 3 times for the same issue).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Try https://www.reddit.com/r/linux.... This gets asked a lot
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
I just bought an HP Envy x360 15-series this past week.
Basic specs:
Intel 7th Gen i5-7200u
8GB DDR4 RAM
256GB NVMe SSD drive
15 inch 1920x1080 screen
Backlit Keyboard with number pad
No CD drive
Nice and light and thin.
I run Funtoo Linux on it. Install was the same as usual, except I forgot to include the NVMe drivers when I built the kernel, so I had to load up System Rescue CD, chroot in and build it again.
I have no use for the touch screen, or the fact I can fold it in half, it just met all of my requirements (no cd drive, backlit keyboard, 15-inch 1080p screen). Could certainly use more RAM, but that SSD certainly helps.
How's the stability? Do the drivers break often or when you do package updates?
Purism - laptops look pretty sleek.
AC comments get piped to
I have the 2015 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and I have been very happy with it. I was actually an HP employee when I purchased it and I would buy it again. I got the base model with a 1080p non-touch display for $950. It is incredibly small and light with amazing battery life. My touchpad sucks (I use a mouse), hopefully the new on is better.
I bought one four months ago. The reason was that the first series that come with Broadwell processors, present some peculiarities with Linux (sound and battery life related) This comes with Windows 10 preinstalled but i reformat the machine and Install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and ArchLinux later. No problems with both ones. I return tu Ubuntu 16.04 because I am more happy with Unity 7, but with Archlinux I used Plasma 5 (KDE) and no problems. Battery Life is good, I checked the last time 10 hours only with battery.
We need to service disable until $FIGURE_OUT_WHAT_THE_HELL_IS_GOING_ON is true.
Seriously I love linux, but dealing with hardware issues is a PITA.
This is why I use a MacBook Pro. Ok, not linux, but unix. But there isn't anything I can't do on it that I could do on linux. It "just works".
But if you must, I'd suggest getting something a bit older. Nothing too new and fancy so that folks have had time to develop drivers for the hardware.
I guess it's not what you're looking for, but I still believe it's totally worth it. I recently got an Asus UX501VW (15"), core i7 6700HQ, 16GB of DDR4 ram, 512gb m.2 SSD, hybrid intel (530) and nvidia gtx 960m, 4K monitor. It's running really great, no issues whatsoever with Fedora at least (running on 25) and some virtual machines I need for development. Performance is really nice, it's acceptably silent most of the time (unless it's compiling using all the cores etc, but even then it's not THAT bad). Also I'm really happy with the HiDPI situation in linux. I thought I was going to have many problems with it, but I really got none (at least with the apps I use). Something that also got me impressed, is the hybrid graphics situation. It's certainly not the best in linux, but it really works, I run whatever apps I need on the dGPU and use most of the time the eGPU which is giving me a very good performance for what it is. The battery life is not the best, I got around 5 something hours out of it, but I guess I can't have it all. Initially I was going for the Dell XPS 15 infinity 9550, but it was out of stock and I needed a laptop asap. Turns out, I got lucky. After seeing the problems the XPS had (needed lots of bios upgrades, but even then, meh - plus the keyboard space bar bug) and the lower price of the Asus ($1499 at the time), I consider it one of the best options. I actually wish there was a cheaper version with ONLY linux on it.
You can go this way: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
it's not linux.
TWM or MWM only.
pussies.
I can not guarantee that this is the best fit for the original poster, as I did not personally try running a VM on those. But in general Chromebooks are great Linux laptops for those who value battery life/form factor/versatility over raw power. ChromeOS is great for web browsing, movie watching and, these days, Android apps/games. Then for everything else, you can run Crouton or dual boot Linux from USB. All in all, that's a lot of different uses from a single unit of hardware.
Just throwing in my vote for a Thinkpad. I personally won't even consider a laptop that doesn't have a Trackpoint. NVidia drivers should pretty much work no problem with Linux however there can be issues with certain apps running under Wine with NVidia drivers to to be completely safe you might want to stick with an Intel graphics chipset.
Stuff I run on Wine: Kindle for PC, Adobe Acrobat XI, and Adobe Photoshop that latter of which has an issue with NVidia.
As for models it seems like all the most recent ones are getting pretty light with amazing battery life, but if you want ultra-light and great battery then get the X1 Carbon. Personally I would love to get one of the new P series.
I would recommend HP ZBook 15u g3
FYI if you're really going for it and have $$$ and intend to use VR - which I would definitely want to do, then you should take this into consideration.
A MacBook Pro running Linux in a VM.
Would they provide systems preloaded w/ SteamOS?
The Trump firewall won't let me connect to USA from Tijuana.
All of the systems listed in the post are good choices. To those, I would add only the Librem laptops, which are designed specifically for Free Software:
https://puri.sm/products/
Like a camera - the best is the one you have when you want to use it.
Just go for something with the specs you want at the price you want, then do a quick google search to see if it's one of the rare things where the manufacturer has not supplied linux drivers or given the community enough info to write them.
The best choice IMHO for anything that doesn't have to do workstation computing is something that's now too slow to run Win8/10, shove a cheap SSD in it and it will just fly with 99% of linux applications. Remember that even Libreoffice runs fairly well on a Raspberry Pi and there is no recent laptop with specs that low.
If it's to run workstation software check with the software vendor about what OS they need - some laptops have problems with CentOS5 (2007) if the vendor doesn't like 6 (2010) or 7 (current).
I've never had a problem installing and running Linux on any of these brands of laptops. Out of these three brands I find Asus to be the most Linux friendly.
I have a Dell Chromebook 13 running GalliumOS. I could not be moe happy. Replaced the SSd with a 256GB one (really easy to do!) and the performance, battery life, keyboard etc are just great. I have the 8GB model, runs VirtualBox like a charm. Highly recoomended!
I got a precision with a touch screen and a Linux preinstall (No windows) a couple months ago and the thing works great. The default wireless doesn't connect so well, though. I found I get much faster wireless if I use wicd-gtk. Touch screen works with Ubuntu, as well!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Using a Levovo T420 (2010 vintage), 16 gig ram, 128 SSD; Still works great. Considering replacing the SSD with a newer one, but no problem with speed or drivers.
I'm quite surprised to see nobody has yet recommended an Acer Aspire One for this use case. I got my first AAO in 2008, when they were still little crappy 9", 1024x600 screens, and when the keys were actualy not at a standard distance. From the period when "Netbook" was being defined. It was far from perfect, but I loved it. Back then, I also had a 12" Dell XPS, wayyyyy heavier and bulkier, but of course, terribly more powerful. I took the AAO with me to way more places than the Dell.
Five years later, it was time for an upgrade. I got a new AAO; its models by 2013 had improved to a 10" 1366x768 screen, full-sized keyboard, but kept basically the same weight (the computers are quite thinner than the older generation).
I have recommended and bought seven such computers for friends and family. Never regretted it. As the original poster says, I'm after portability much more than power-- And having a US$300 computer that travels with me... Is just great.
Of course, I never had a hiccup recognizing all of its modest hardware with Linux.
HP, Dell Tosbibia, Apple, Sony, Lenovo are all doing stuff that's undermining support for GNU/Linux. These companies use digital restrictions on the wifi card slots (or, well, with Apple a proprietary connector on newer systems) so users can't replace the wifi cards when they don't work or stop working because of the poor support from most of the companies producing wifi chipsets. When they refuse to provide updates down the road you'll get bitten. The same applies to graphics chips.
System76 is notorious for providing systems that have poor support over time. They're literally paying for 'news' and one need only conduct searches to find tons of issues. The problem is they like most companies shipping with GNU/Linux don't understand that the community needs access to the source code for everything in order to provide proper long term support.
I remember Dell was even shipping systems that didn't work out of the box when they first started selling Ubuntu laptops. Then when customers would call they'd say "we don't support Ubuntu" and customers would be re-directed on hardware related support issues. Then finally they'd get told to go call Canonical for support. Canonical charged $200 at the time, wasn't open on the weekend, and the issue wasn't even with Ubuntu, but the hardware Dell was shipping.
I bought form Emperor Linux systems that weren't properly supported either. It was years before I could burn CD/DVDs with my Lenovo laptop. Supposedly the laptop was supported by Emperor Linux.
ZaReason was shipping laptops that had problems with the wifi on/off switches for a while. In order to resolve the issue you had to install MS Windows and a proprietary on/off program or ship the laptop back. It was insane. There never was a solution to the problem as far as I'm aware.
I did buy a system from Linux Certified that worked pretty good other than it was of pretty poor quality. I did love this laptop though. I think the main reason it worked so well was more a coincidence. The service was terrible. If you called them up you would get an Indian with a thick accent on the phone and it took them weeks to perform repairs. At which point the repairs were hacks that wouldn't last even a year (maybe it lasted 3-6 months at best). My next system ended up being from Emperor Penguin because I couldn't afford to buy a new laptop on a yearly basis.
I've been buying "Linux laptops" and supporting others on GNU/Linux for years so I have a lot of experience with the different companies selling "Linux laptops" and there are few companies that know what they are doing. ThinkPenguin's systems are good. My only complaint is in the selection of models. It can be slim, but they do have a good explanation. They refuse to ship garbage that can't be properly supported by the community and there aren't that many configurations which work flawlessly/are properly supported. They do however offer a lot of different hard drive/CPU/etc options and the turn around time for repairs/shipping is pretty good. 2-3 business days.
I could mention some other companies I've done business with although most will never have heard of them. I pretty much have similar complaints against all of them. It takes more than slapping GNU/Linux on a system to ensure that it can be properly supported. Not just when you get it- but over the long haul. Just because something does continue working mostly for you over time also doesn't mean that the company which sold it is competent. You can by happen stance get systems that work well over the long haul too. It's just pretty rare.
If you definitely want Linux, I would stay away from DELL. From my experience their support is broken. I ended up not buying one from them: their sales support is so broken that I could not get through to them to get an answer to some fairly simple questions. I have also seen numerous online posts from angry customers that are not satisfied with technical support.
I would have bought System76 and the only reason I didn't is because I'm not living in the USA. There was no other disadvantage from what I saw about 6 months ago when I was looking into this brand. If you're in the USA, this is probably your best Linux option.
The MacBook Pro is the best option overall if you don't like to do much tweaking and have the money to spend. You will also get excellent technical support and a world-wide warranty. Make sure you get the apple care plan to extend your warranty and support coverage. Less tweaking and better support mean getting more done, so assuming you're using it for work, it will be much cheaper than other systems in the long run.
On the other hand I tried a CentOS install, but the kernel was so old (3.10 for crying out loud) that it didn't recognize several recent hardware. I saw that and installed kubuntu over it.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I purchased on if the original serval pro laptops about 8-10 years ago (serp1 or serp2 don't recall). The laptop still runs great just a bit old for today's standards.
It had a loud fan at times.. and the keyboard felt cheap, but nothing ever broke and I updated the CPU HDD and memory once each.. with system 76s blessing. (They sent me a PDF how to replace any component).
Their current line of laptops look swanky and lighter and stuff..
I came across a MacBook late 2011 for free about a year ago and have been using that with fedora no issues except screen dims sometime randomly. I've seen that be an issue for macbooks running Mac OS too :/
Honestly, I think the days of "will it work?" if the laptop has quality components and you trust the company who built it to do a solid build.
Exception: latest macbook with that super bar thingy (see photonic review)
I've the same priorities than you, and am happily using a 3rd gen Thinkpad Carbon X1 with Debian and KDE. A lot of other hardware will be ok too nowadays.
To minimize the laptop power consumption, be sure to install and configure either the old "laptop mode" package, or the more recent "tlp" package (The Laptop Project, a successor to the laptop mode). With a SSD, you can aggressively turn off the disk as there's no spin up wear issue. With TLP installed I'm typically idling below 5W and often below 4. The battery life is so good that I don't charge the battery to 100%, but only 85% and rarely go below 45%. This is a good way to increase the battery life of a Li-ion battery, and a nice touch of all Thinkpads is that you can configure an upper bound for charging. At 85% the ACPI BIOS returns a battery life over 10h30.
It even has three mouse buttons. Anti-glare FHD should be enough. 16GB RAM if you plan to run IDEs like eclipse or need some VMs on it. It can take several M.2 sticks. Not sure whether it can fit the Samsung 950 pro M.2 stick though, but it would be a nice touch!
I am still using a 3y old clevo laptop which is still going strong with 16G ram and 2 ssd. Sold in .de by tuxedo.
First generation you mean the EEE 701? I still have one of those and it's unusable. Once the fan came on it would NEVER turn off. Also the keyboard is useless. Less because it's too small as because keys miss or bounce all the time. The Psion 5 PDA keyboard was much smaller and worked a lot better. Despite that I like the form factor. It's mostly the damn fan and the lousy battery life that kill it.
Thinkpads are still the best Linux laptops on the market.
Typing this on a T440s (2014-era Haswell based i7-4600u, FullHD screen, 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, extended battery) and looking forward to a T470s in Q1 2017 (with Kaby Lake i7, >1TB SSD).
I'm running Debian Stable (3.16 kernel) with some backports (4.7 kernel works fine), the KDE (4.14.2) experience is flawless and I'm normally using a 3 display setup (internal + 2 large externals).
Have never had an issue with the Intel wifi (or integrated HSPDA Sierra-wireless modem I'm sometimes using), RAM-based suspend/resume, the screen is very nice and bright (a bit too glossy in full direct-light though). I'm using the full memory of the machine for VMs (16GB+ would be nice but not must) and almost the full SSD (which is very fast). The keyboard is the best I've typed on, quiet-ish, soft, and with a lot of travel (don't get me started on the 2016 MB 'Pro's). The trackpad is idiotic though because they tried to copy the one on the 2013 Macs, but they re-worked it since 2015's T450s.
In the business world Thinkpads are gold and you see people using them in a very care-free manner and in extreme environments without problems.
I have a Dell XPS 13" and its one of the best laptops I've ever had.
Linux only, and I've used both Debian and gentoo on it, and it works brilliantly.
Only advice I would give is make sure you get the Intel wireless card, as the broadcom card sucks!
Have you considered WSL?
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
I'm finding it has possibilities but I mostly work on the command line and do web development so only need chrome other than that.
It's good that Windows ensures everything works and I just leave it alone and work in bash and chrome.
It's still beta but I find it already largely works.
Max.
So good that it is almost impossible to buy. None available on Ebay or Amazon.
I'm using a Ideapad U430p since nearly 2 years.
Mostly at home, so battery life not the big issue. It's between 4 to 7 hours and the battery indicator is a RNG,
VMs with 8GB are a bit slow, starts swapping. so windows vm form modern.ie and the laptop only crawls.
Can't use bluetooth and wlan at the same time, It's a hardware problem, the Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 73) seems to suck. Not only in this laptop.
i5 CPU, Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 73), NVIDIA Corporation GK208M [GeForce GT 730M] (rev a1) (http://bumblebee-project.org/ needed some work, but minecraft runs...), One RAM slot (now with 8GB) and a 500GB rotating metal disk for about 700€.
The ethernetport is a bit funny as the laptop is thinner thna the port, so the port "folds" out if used. (I don't use cable)
Good keyboard, non touch, matte, low res display (1366x768) (Good enough for me) and one HDMI port.
Runs Ubuntu Gnome since 15.x. ;)
And looks good (red metal...
Quite happy with it. :)
I have just (end September) switched to a Lenovo T460p (i7-6820HQ, HD530/940MX Optimus, 14" 2560x1440) running openSUSE Tumbleweed. The only thing I'm not sure if it runs is the fingerprint reader, as I don't care about it and never checked. Everything else (including the M2 WAN adapter, 9h battery life, HW keys, suspend....) works absolutely smooth.
Just use wifi or satellite... The firewall only blocks wired connections which hardly anyone uses.
It's "yuge" not huge.
If price is any bit of a concern then I recommend installing GalliumOS (an xubuntu based Linux distro made for Chromebooks) onto a Toshiba CB35 2015 edition. It has a 1080p display, weighs less than 3 pounds and is plenty fast for development work. The best part about it is it only costs $350 with a 128GB SSD modification. If you're interested I have a full write up and review on it here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog...
I have had very good luck with Apple hardware (intel) and have 3 macbooks vintage 07-09 running fedora 24.. macbooks of this vintage are cheap and you can work on them easily. p.s. you can look cool at starbucks for less $$.
What's the Best Linux Laptop?
I don't bother with that anymore. I rather just run a Linux VM as a guest on a Windows 7 host with some type of X client on the later. I have a dedicated RH box with all the bells and whistles, but I typically just xterm or vnc to it to build, deploy, run services, etc. My main workhorse is Windows 7 (with Cygwin), however.
I just got tired of having to deal with wifi issues. I'm sure shit is better now, but for what I do, why bother changing. For back-end shit, serious work, Linux always. For working with a UI or in a laptop, nope.
Now, I'm seriously considering a Mac which gives me the bulk of Unix tools I come to depend on.
I put Ubuntu on an XPS13 Win10 model, so it was not quite the same as Dell's XPS13 DE. A BIOS setting has to be changed. The Broadcom WiFi chip required the very latest Ubuntu kernel available to work (4.7 I think), but then it did. The UI required some tweaks for the high-DPI display. Most apps understand this DPI but not all (tiny buttons!). And even now the touchscreen doesn't wake from sleep quite right (there's a trick).
But I think it's great. Linus bought one!
Written from Toshiba Satellite A-100 circa 2004, Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 Jessie
ASUS UX - better choice but TOOOOO......OOO expensive
Do not even try Dell or Lenovo.
Avoid systems with dual Intel/Nvidia graphics. Support for that combination is not fully there yet and while it works, the Nvidia card subjects you to bad video tearing.
Perhaps, partially off-topic, but I would like to commend the user "sconeu" for sticking to what works for the last 10 years.
I wish I kept my blue Toshiba A35-S159 from 2004 (with XP Home on it), instead of willfully going through painful upgrade/migration cycles with Vaio Vista (ugh) Laptop (in 2007), then MacBook Air in 2010 and, eventually, getting the refurb ~2009 Latitude laptop very recently, with dual-boot Win 7 and Ubuntu (under XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox) 14.04 on it, that I happily use today.
Commercial hypes and peer-pressure from unwitting colleagues and friends are evil. Most of us remain the proverbial bonobos, under thin layer of bathed and groomed "modern" human.
Hillary stop pretending to be Trump. Real Donald does use Linux for his servers. Hill used Windows.
Probably not the *best* but lightweight,sturdy enough for me, cheap and with a great battery life. I never used it more than 6 hours off the wall but I never experienced a dead battery. At start the WiFi was bad and the trackpad nonfunctional but with Ubuntu 16.10 the WiFi is usable and the trackpad working. It's the basic model with the FullHD display.
Purism is a relatively new company that builds Linux-centric hardware with an emphasis on open hardware. They have a small but nice lineup.
As far as modern Linux laptops go, I'd suspect you can't do any better.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Dell precision m3800 laptop. I ordered mine with Ubuntu preloaded, but I'm not sure if they still do that...
However Dell has more than the XPS13 developer edition for Ubuntu laptops, including a number of 15" variants that may be cheaper. The m3800 has less battery life than the XPS13 though (I get 3 hours max when doing dev work), but I needed horsepower (running multiple VMs, number crunching etc.).
My 2015 version has USB3, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, but you'll need a USB-ethernet dongle.
Whatever you do, steer well clear of the HP Envy series. I have tried pretty much everything I could but hibernation under Linux just doesn't work on this thing. Pity really, everything else works really well (from suspend to the temperature sensors to the fingerprint reader, even the Fn function keys such as the volume rocker, screen brightness, media controls etc have worked out of the box since at least Kubuntu 14.04 which is the oldest distro I've tried on this laptop) and overall it's a pretty decent machine.
I have an XPS 13 dev edition, loaded. It's a nice puter, but it's a laptop.
I have a big clicky keyboard for it when it's at home and a wireless mouse. Hate the keypad.
It locks up from time to time from running Steam. I assume that is the video driver.
I just got a ZaReason Strata 8110 laptop with Mint 18. It is a nice system. Works really well. Quad-core i7 processor, 8GB (now 16GB) of RAM, DVD recorder. I'm using it right now to post this comment. I only wish they had 9 cell batteries available - the 6 cell on only lasts for about 1.5 hours. That is my major complaint. Otherwise, it is a really nice machine. It has replaced my 10 year old Dell D630 laptop quite nicely, which was running CentOS 6.8.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I'm on my third Acer. The previous two I gave away after reinstalling Windows. This one is 15", has VGA and HDMI video ports. Both work well. I've yet to have a version of Fedora that did not load well. They usually come with DVD drive which is easy to upgrade to Bluray. The current models are a bit difficult to take apart to add a better drive or more memory, but it came with 1 terabyte harddrive and 4gbytes of RAM.
Tech support I haven't needed but when I decided to replace the drive with an SSD. Then, as I was out of warranty they got rather rude as in unable to even give me the name of a local company to handle the update.
Then I went on line and saw a video at YouTube showing the process of taking the laptop apart. It's pretty easy. I would have wasted my money.
OH, I will never by an HP laptop again. First the video didn't work. XWindows could never load. I had to use linux under Windows/VirtualBox. Annoying and the damn thing's harddrive failed after one drop from the kitchen counter. A replacement drive, even under warranty was only twenty dollars less than buying a new HP laptop and would only take ten working days. That's when I returned to Acer. I did get to a sledge hammer to the piece of excreta.
Linux Mint running in a VM on a Surface Book. Not a purist solution but performant and a good middle-ground between OS flavours.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I've had a ton of Thinkpad laptops, but my current favorite is the T450s with intel graphics. The batteries last forever on this thing under linux (with tlp installed) and you can change the battery. It has a built-in battery, and I have one normal battery and one big battery that I can switch between. Between the two external batteries I can swap, I easily get 20 hours of battery life from my laptop. (I can basically book any airline flight without regard to whether my seat will have a power port.)
The only thing that doesn't work on the laptop is hybernating to disk. (~20% of resumes hang.) But the battery life is so incredible that I just suspend to RAM. With recent kernels, I also had to enable CSM in the kernel or the laptop would freeze up occasionally, but it's never happened with CSM. I also enabled UXA rather than SNA in xorg.conf because otherwise okular was slow. Other than that, everything works flawlessly.
I would generally be wary of posts on here that recommend a laptop without mentioning little tweaks like that, because in my experience you always have to fiddle with something. Also, stay clear of recommendations for laptops with NVIDIA graphics (even if they also have intel graphics), because often even disabled the discrete NVIDIA graphics logic, it still draws a significant amount of power.
The other thing I'd consider, if I wanted absolutely everything to work, is libreboot-based laptops, endorsed by the FSF. Haven't tried them myself, but will if thinkpad ever stops being an option: https://minifree.org/
system76... everything just, simply works,
Lenovo Yoga 14 - 14" touch screen with a STYLUS for precise drawing in tablet mode. Everything works perfectly with Xubuntu 16.04.
We are going to do it, and we are going to get Pottering to pay for it! - Donald "Bozo Orangutan Hitler Wannabe" Drumph
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
XPS12 flip top here, i7 core, 500GB SSD, 6GB, solid frame, good graphics. It's my main dev laptop.
If you want CAD/Maya/games, a laptop is NOT a good choice.
Only if Linux had a good touchscreen interface this would be the perfect laptop. The flip screen and touchscreen are excellent in windows.
I see some mentioned Syst76 (whose machines aren't delivered to Europe), but missing here I think are Zareason, ThinkPenguin and more prominently Tuxedo indeed. All of them sell you configuration with Linux pre-installed and working out of the box.
Starting there for instance: www.tuxedocomputers.com/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks/10-14-Zoll/TUXEDO-Book-BU1406-14-matt-Full-HD-IPS-bis-Intel-Core-i7-Energiespar-CPU-zwei-HDD/SSD-bis-32GB-RAM-bis-12h-Akku-Slim-Book-LTE-opt..geek
One can check spec-for-spec against the latest Apple gear (and easily can overpass all of them)
This is basically what I intend to switch to, in January...
Herve S.
This precise topic comes up so often that it might be worthwhile just re-starting the thread every month or two and archiving the previous version so people can go back to old commments relatively easily (if there's any relevance to that).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Our household has been running versions of Ubuntu on our laptops for the last decade. My son, who is nine, has never known had another OS (other than Ubuntu). My wife (a writer) wrote and formatted her book. My personal laptops all have been running versions of Ubuntu. I think we represent a fair distribution of users. Disclosure: we are still running 14.04 LTS. The 16.04 LTS upgrade has been problematic for our current hardware. Now, we have had a few issues. And mostly surrounding upgrades. The only truly serious one was a graphics driver on an older HP POS Desktop I was attempting to use as an experimental server. There have been a few issues with finding the right drivers/codex for foreign DVDs, but we did find them. Best of luck.
I know that your issue is weight. .. ...it'll run fluid. ...in this situation it makes it unnecessary ...
And since you use a toshiba satellite
I would suggest the toshiba portege m780 i7
it is everything in an affordable package.
convertible tablet / laptop
8gb ram
touch and stylus input..
optical drive (personally I can't stand separate docks they seem to always end up causing probs)
and runs just about any linux distro thrown at it...
I have only found a couple distros I couldn't run (never bothered to troubleshoot to get those couple working I just moved on and played with even more..)
Anything beastly like kde won't have a prob
One thing I enjoy doing with mine (I have 2 m780's)
is I have secondary hard drive caddies ( bought for $10 ) and I have about 10 hard drives with everything from antix to plasma to windows xp, 7 and 10 on them...and simply pop them in and out as desired...
and the 1 tb internal hard drive I leave in and utilize as storage for the os drives I have.
I love the m780.
I would suggest this as an affordable (between $180 - $300 mark on ebay) catchall alternative instead of running windows in a virtual enviro. and leaning on ram and hard drive space when
Got it second-hand a year or two back, running Arch (4.7.6-1). Never had any problems, wi-fi always worked perfectly. Never bothered to try getting the fingerprint reader to work, though I believe it can be done.
Core i5, Nvidia something
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I've been using Thinkpads: T41, T400, ... Just upgraded to a Thinkpad Carbon X1 for the battery life, weight, and I'm very happily running Ubuntu 16.04LTS. The only incompatibility I've found thus far has been the fingerprint sensor, don't care. Fast, light, no issues.
Coming from a software engineer, I've had about 6 different flavors of Linux on this laptop with multiple desktop environments. I've never had a problem I couldn't fix, though I will say sometimes it is a bit of a pain to get the proprietary Nvidia drivers to act correctly.
The X230 is my third Linux Thinkpad. First was an R40 years ago. Later an X201 which had a superb keyboard. The X230 is better than the X201 with the exception of the keyboard. IMO the chicklet keyboard on the X230 is a step down. But it's a step up from almost every other notebook computer keyboard I've had my hands on.
My X230 has i7, Intel graphics, Intel wifi, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB Samsung EVO SSD. Some observations after over a year of daily use as my primary computer for embedded software development:
* Portable, sturdy, good battery life, decent performance. .vmx file setting for the VM).
* 12.5" 1280x800 LCD panel is bright and easy to read. DPI is good. Screen real estate is a bit low for being work productive.
* Dock and undock operations work correctly.
* Dual monitors attached to a dock work well. I dock at 2 different locations: one has dual 1920x1200 monitors, the other a 2560x1440 and a 1600x1200.
* Flawless with Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. A couple minor problems with Ubuntu 16.04 that don't prevent me from using it.
* Intel graphics are good enough for light 3D work, such as Altium Designer PCB visualization from within a Windows VM.
* SSD affords very fast booting and good performance of hardware virtualization, such as Windows on VMware.
* Replaceable battery, hard drive, mini-PCIe, RAM and wifi card (only certain wifi cards are supported -- I like Intel)
* No problems with wifi or gigabit Ethernet. Ethernet with no dongle is a win.
* Love the trackpoint. Mouse use and scrolling without moving fingers off the home row.
* Dislike the trackpad. I disable it. Frequent false clicks, too small, not as efficient IMO as the trackpoint.
* Runs VMs (Windows 7 etc) under VMware very well. Best VM performance with an SSD. Windows 7 gets 3D support on VMware under Ubuntu 16.04 (have to allow Intel Graphics with a
* USB3 hardware works well. Fast IO for portable hard drives. supports full speed captures using the Saleae Logic 8 USB logic analyzer.
* No issues with JTAG and other debug tools for various microprocessor architectures.
* I run a pretty large number of complex development tools natively on Linux, including monstrosities like the Xilinx ISE for FPGA development. No problems.
The X series is a nice spot in the Thinkpad line. Sturdy, portable, lots of RAM, decent CPU, good expandability, good keyboard and good screen. I'd prefer more pixels in the LCD panel at the same DPI -- maybe 13.3" or 14". The Thinkpad line has the X1 Carbon and the T series, but there are tradeoffs with both of these platforms in comparison to the X series. If like me you need a portable system and use your laptop docked most of the time, then the lower resolution LCD isn't a deal breaker.
To give you another alternative to consider: TUXEDO Computers from Germany is producing Linux-tailored notebooks and PCs. We have around 20 different noteboook models from ultrabook-type 13" devices up to 17,3" desktop replacement monsters. Have a look here if your're interested: https://www.tuxedocomputers.co... Currently our shop unfortunately only offers German language, but we're working on that and in the meantime I'm happy to answer questions here (or via email if you prefer.)
I added a usb bluetooth and a usb 5 g wifi stick.
Linux Mint 18.1 Outstanding.
200.00 into the whole thing It is a bitch but you can swap the 4 ram for 8.
Video on youtube.
I prepared the ext4 partition before installing the linux OS from Windows replaced hard drive with SSD.