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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?
Beautiful design, screen and battery life, plus it runs the latest Linux kernels without any issues whatsoever. I love mine.
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
Sounds like the typical Linux WiFi experience, may have worked at some point but is randomly broken and never fixed but will still be listed as supported for years
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.
I'm typing this right now on a Dell laptop with Ubuntu 14.04 installed. I have never encountered a problem connecting to WiFi that was due to the software.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
I run Fedora 24 on a 2015 MBP Retina with 32 gigabytes and 1 TB ssd. There are a ton of issues. The webcam is propeitary and will not function, the BCM wifi might work and if it does it may cause hardware error or require you to run a proprietary BCM driver. i had so many issues i now run a wifi usb chip. You have to disable turbo on the discrete graphics card or it will oveheat your machine, kde doesnt scale well with retina i use cinnamon. If you put the machine to sleep it will never wake up again. When you shut down the machine it won't power off automatically. After you force the hardware power off and reconnect power the machine will annoying turn itself on. Things that do work include multiple monitors, thunderbolt Ethernet, dvi, hdmi, usb 3, touchpad, sound, qemu-kvm, vmware workstation 10.5. Love the hardware profile but you give up a lot to run linux on this device.
I run Ubuntu LTS 16.04 (and briefly 14.04) version; wireless & video are both quite stable. System76 actually recommend to install their own driver so maybe that helps. I haven't had any driver break during upgrade but I did mange to break lightdm with a manual kernel upgrade but I think that was more of a kernel or lightdm bug. Ubuntu also has a stupid wireless resume from suspend bug that requires me to hack a script to fix.
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.
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.