I believe this is the main reason that OSx and even Windows are much more prevalent in company laptops that any linux distro. And I don't see this changing anytime soon. If even Ubuntu didn't make that cut I don't see which (distro) will.

Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux TBH. Maybe there's some light there. Dunno. But my last experience with a Thinkpad 550 and latest ubuntu was bad. As in no proper keyboard, terrible screen issues, networking issues...

Seriously? Why do you think Linux should work perfectly on some random machine that you installed it on? MacOS sure as hell won’t. If you don’t like the experience of doing the work to find the right hardware, distro, and customizing the setup with your favourite software then just buy a prebuilt system with everything installed. Like others have pointed out, many Linux users prefer to fully customize their setup, doing this is easier on Linux because you don’t have to hack around all of the default choices that Apple or Microsoft provide.

For reasons, I ended up installing Arch on the same laptop. It was your typical Arch experience, but I was able to get everything working, including fiddly stuffy like keyboard backlights, and monitor backlighting. Keyboard hardware controls all function. And this was with existing Arch packages. I didn't have to go hacking anywhere.

If I had to levy criticism, I'd say the preinstalled Linux options are at the same price point as Apple, and no where near Microsoft. Yeah, it's going to be harder to find an off-the-shelf $300 laptop with Linux preinstalled. I can say the same about a Mac too.

I acknowledged as much. However, the OP's comparison is with a Mac so I don't think discussing the cheapest approach is in the scope of the discussion.

There are options if you really want them. Whether you like to use one is up to one's personal preference. Though, it doesn't help that way too many people who haven't used a linux laptop in recent times have strong opinions about them, as evident in this thread.

Think twice before upgrading your distro.

The problem is that they successfully (and for good reason) became the de facto Desktop Linux for users who wanted a desktop and not mess with it much.

They’ve cornered that market to the point there are very few alternatives (at least very few that will come preinstalled and supported) but because they want to IPO I guess, they’ve stopped focusing on the desktop at all and instead are concentrating on server uses primarily, which leads to significant issues.

For me (using linux for 15+ years as desktop) ubuntu tends to break after only a few months. Usually complex dependencies like steam, wine or video editing stuff break first. I rarely manage to get out of a update without some dependencies breaking...

Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, ... nothing like that. Just a major stable operating system

Edit:// to clearify. I do like and use ubuntu server because its simple and well supported. I just think its mediocre as desktop OS and would recommend anyone to check Manjaro or Fedora

No, that's simply because the desktop, after all these years, still brings in little or no money - whereas server builds are used in clouds (at one point they were the most popular "cloud distro") and do make significant money through revenue-sharing agreements.

Ubuntu desktop started going downhill the minute Shuttleworth decided he'd had enough with the "generous mecenate" thing and Ubuntu should make back its costs. Since then, it's been a series of steers towards anything that could make some cash.

No tinkering required, the only change required to make it useable was to set desktop scaling for HiDPI, accessible via Displays area if the settings app. No terminal commands required.

Our family Lenovo all-in-one windows machine with its preinstalled windows: Time synchronization doesn't work. Have to set the clock manually. When logging in and if another user is logged in the start bar freezes for up to 5 minutes before it lets me do anything. All sorts of things like this. Random problems like that.

My personal Windows machine upstairs loses sound output via my monitor every time the monitor goes to sleep and wakes up. Windows just forgets that the device exists. Sometimes plugging in a headphone and then unplugging it will "remind" Windows that there's an HDMI output device, other times not.

No issues with Linux on that machine at all. Everything just works, stock Debian install. No issues with sound, only issue being that the fan is a bit loud so I had to fiddle with bios settings to get it quieter.

Windows insists on the source port of NTP to be 123, and many ISPs (like ATT) block this port. No idea why MS hasn't fixed this issue.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e16117c3-0...

If we talk about tinkering for customizing your user experience then it's very empowering. You can get things to work exactly as you'd like and that is a productivity booster. (Even if it just removes frustration and friction.) Sometimes it means being able to undo the stupid decisions of the developers (e.g. GNOME) which may seem like the first category (i.e. you have to tinker just in order to get things work again as they used to), but if you are stuck on windows or osx you'd have a lot less chance to do so and you'd lot more likely just have to put up with it.

E.g. in the past 2+ decades I have to wrestle to get my desktop grid layout (3x3 desktops/workspaces) to work, because some idiot back around 2000 figured out that it's "not the right metaphor" or what not and they should not be geometrically related, yadda-yadda. Since then, every major upgrade of gnome breaks the external solution I use (which is different every time). Is it frustrating? Yes. At least I know not to upgrade until I know there is a workaround again. But I can keep using it nevertheless. (I used to have a utility that provided this feature on windows. The last version I've used it on was XP and even back then it wasn't available for download anymore. I'm not sure at all if I could still use it on win10 or even win7.)

[1] Yeah wayland is a protocol, and it already has some quite stable implementations like gnome and sway.

I'm using Debian and the only thing I had to do is enable non-free to get some firmwares.

Everything works 100% hassle free.

My experiences with macos were quite frustrating, specially around package management (or the lack of it), poor quality of brew packages (too many dependencies breaking stuff), constant slowdown and crashes with mildly median workload, screen artifacts around the desktop time to time, having to disable stuff to be able to change things in /usr or /etc, too many stuff eating up ram by default, etc.

Honestly don't know how people can use that and be happy.

I got the Asus 1215B with Linux, then Ubuntu decided to replace the perfectly working wlan driver with a FOSS one, except it took half an year to reach parity with the proprietary one.

Likewise, they decided to replace AMD driver with the open source one, goodbye OpenGL 4.1 now it doesn't do more than OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video decoding is still not a thing.

At the same time, the Windows DX 11 drivers shipped with the same hardware (it was Windows 7 back then), still work on Windows 10.

This kind of settled Linux on desktop for me, now it belongs to VMs, and on ChromeOS/WebOS/Android it is anyway just an implementation detail.

You don’t have to be the guinea pig, let others do it if it’s not your thing (many programmers do seem to enjoy it, and see it as a challenge).

Proprietary software for 1215B, e.g. Windows, is working just fine with Windows 10, even though it was originally released with Windows 7.

So we are talking about Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and several Windows 10 releases, all supporting the original Windows 7 drivers for Asus 1215B.

I have been a Linux guinea pig since Slackware 2.0 came on Linux Unleashed book, eventually one gets tired of the Linux Desktop meme.

Linux was anyway just the way I got cheap UNIX clone at home during my degree, professionally I have spent more years using commercial UNIXes.

Nowadays any POSIX clone will do the job, or as alternative we stuck the Linux kernel into a VM.

Did you installed the firmware for your WiFi card?

By the way you complain about Linux seems that you really don't like it and that nobody can convince you te opposite, but I believe that if you manage to learn the basics around it it pay off in the long run :)

> There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support.

My dear, my first UNIX experience was with Xenix back in 1993, I also used DG/UX, Tru64, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, Slackware, Red-Hat, Yasdril, Mandranke, SuSE, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, OS, Scientific Linux.

Back in 2002 - 2003, I wrote cluster simulation software while at CERN running on Linux, followed by other examples of deployment of Linux based software into production, like Nokia's NetAct cluster monitoring platform.

I think I can manage with the basics.

I just think that those issues are relatively easy to fix and that you can still have the proprietary gpu modules to get OpenGL 4.1 back.

For the wifi to work well with the open module you could have installed the firmwares.

That's what I mean by basics, I didn't meant to put down your credentials :)

Sorry again for my poor writing

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD

That hardware always felt like a throw away when it came out during the netbook boom from a decade ago.

For me Debian Testing with Gnome is being a very nice experience (enjoyable ride).

Try to not see everything as an attack against your identity, detach yourself from it and don't take yourself too seriously. Been there, done that.

Now I have a way more pleasant life experience and people takes me seriously without having me needing to assert who I am. Life is lighter now and I have more friends, people few more comfortable around me.

I'm giving this feedback because I think it will make your life better too.

Was nice to chat with you, now I'll go out for a bike ride while I still a bit of sun over here.

Happy Easter!

Giving back to the community for something you get for _free_ is nice.

That is where I can gladly give my skills and money.

Fixing code on Internet for free ain't it.

Maybe I'm very lucky with Linux, but I don't agree that it is as bad as you are saying.

I'm sorry for you, maybe you should stay with windows indeed. :/

What I mean is more like "I would have a bad experience if I put my hand in the fire".

I edit my post to be more clear

From your friend over the wire.

Intel has a random lock up in the Mesa. It had this lock up for several years. It has not been fixed. I have a 4k laptop with it, it is incredibly frustrating that I cannot use kitty or alacritty on it because of that crash.

AMD driver crashes on modern cards every few weeks.

If you want to have a "What are you talking about, it just works?" experience, you buy an NVidia card with proprietary drivers, slap X11 on it and you are off to the races. It just works (currently driving 4x 4k monitors). Last crash was about 11 months ago. The crash manifested in a freeze for about 20 seconds, followed by it recovering by itself.

OSS graphics drivers are just not as good as people claim.

For now fedora is on an old desktop machine with an ancient i3-2100 processor and I just ssh into it.

Of course, Linux doesn't quite have the mass market consumer experience you get with MacOS or Windows, but it's not exactly hard to find laptops pre-installed with Linux.

Laptops supported by Linux provides neither.

>Best Linux Laptops

>

> Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (8th Generation) Last year,

>Lenovo shocked the Linux community by announcing Linux

>laptops. ...

> Tuxedo Pulse 14 Gen 1. ...

> System76 Serval WS. ...

> Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition 2020. ...

> Purism Librem 14. ...

> System76 Galago Pro. ...

> Lenovo ThinkPad P53 Mobile Workstation. ...

> DELL Inspiron 15 3000.

>

>More items...

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Laptops+s...

A. But are they supported and is that a meaningful question? B. I am not bashing anything Linux because I don't hate it in the slightest. C. Did you read the parent I responded to? That comment makes two claims and tries to establish an analogous relation and that does not work the way the author wanted. That was also my reply.

So you missed the point of that post, you missed the point of mine and you strawmanned me :)

I don’t have to double check Apple machines. And anything with a Windows sticker works with Windows.

Some Linux distro should explicitly support some line of laptops. Literally “buy these models because we will 100% support them”.

Like PopOS from System 76?

Dell or Lenovo has international presence and if something goes wrong with the hardware, support exists.

You hold a gun in one way. If you mess that up in any fashion, you probably won't hit what you're trying to, and, worse, might shoot yourself.

Saying things like "There is no official site" is holding Linux wrong. Linux isn't an operating system. Linux is just a kernel.

So phrase your search the right way:

"laptops that support GNU/Linux installation"

You'll be surprised to find, immediately it lists a whole bunch of laptops sold with a Linux kernel on them! I don't normally use Google, but just for you, I checked on it: It even has an easy-answers page.

If you want the whole package, look up an operating system, not a kernel.

But that’s not what a newbie or outsider sees. And until there is the kind of assurance from some Linux distribution or whatever, all criticisms of the difficulty of getting a Linux machine running are valid.

Great, they're invalid! Off the top of my head, System76 and KDE both sell laptops running it. As both of them have distributions, and selling something is more or less as close to assurance as you can get, by your own logic here the criticisms are worthless.

I don't even care about "le Linux on the desktop meme", personally, I just find these criticisms incredibly lazy and transparently without merit.

It was at this point that this troll immediately turned tasteless like chewed up sugarcane.

No offense but seems like even if you did find laptops with linux and pick the best one, you probably won't like it because you have already made up your mind.

System76.

Librem. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

I run a recent XPS Developer Edition (my second) and I've had so few issues over years. It's always seemed like a different world all users with constant issues.

Would absolutey recommend Elementary OS for Mac users switching to Linux. I moved to Arch a couple of weeks ago, but only because of combination of wanting to try Gnome 40 and wanting to run various cutting edge mobile Linux deps.

No problems with Arch either so far.

This is Lenovo's list of laptops with the minimum versions of Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu they support.

Sure, these are two devices I have recently used with Linux that work out of the box:

Dell XPS 13

ThinkPad T14s

Or more generally, you can extend that to any ThinkPad or Dell device without a dedicated graphics card and you will have a good Linux experience. OP somehow has issues on XPS 13, probably due to meddling with too many things. My XPS 13 (9360) has everything working out of the box with Ubuntu 20.04

A very good idea if you want to confirm just before placing an order is to google "<laptop name> Arch Linux wiki" which will take you to the Arch wiki page for that device. There you can see if there are any known compatibility issues.

The Ubuntu certified devices page is pretty good as well.

> Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it.

For Linux Dell and Lenovo do that too (in most regions these days).

From what I understand from the blog post, the author is expecting Linux and the software to behave the same as macOS. That is just comparing apples and oranges. If you want a system that you are used to, you should probably stick to that. As in, if macOS works for you, I see no reason you should switch to Linux. I used a Mac for ~5 years before finally giving up because I just hated the window management (among other things). But hey, that does not need to apply to everyone.

- when using external display, video tearing would be visible either on internal or external display

- Xorg doesn't really support different scaling for different displays, and Wayland has other issues

- battery life is shorter than on Windows

- graphics performance is worse, at least in Firefox/Chrome (smooth animations on Windows would be choppy on Linux)

- touchpad is not great on Windows, but it's even worse on Linux (even after fiddling with settings, and trying many solutions, using it on Windows feels better)

Battery life was stupid on Windows (~3-4 hours max, while Linux did 7-8 with moderate load). Somehow on Windows the fan would always be running even without any significant activity in Resource Monitor.

I remember playing 4K videos on Linux (Firefox though, and I only tested YouTube) without any trouble (with monitor disconnected though, due to what you described earlier).

Touchpad would work sweet on Linux but needed some tweaking on Windows (otherwise it'd 2-finger scroll too fast sometimes).

My experience is different from yours. With Wayland I had smoother graphics than xorg.

That isn't true. The X1 Carbon from 2019 didn't have a working microphone driver for over a year.

If you care about Linux you should only buy a machine with Linux preinstalled and officially supported.

https://linux-on-laptops.com/ has been around for a long time and it looks like it's still being updated. Though the official Linux-Laptop-HOWTO does need a lot of work to make it current.

What you're looking for is hardware vendors who support a Linux desktop environment on their laptops, which are not too difficult to find.

I prefer to take a hardware vendor's opinion as to whether that hardware is supported by Linux. They have some skin in the game, and have the resources to test the hardware, whereas many Linux distros will rely on user reports.

I imagine Ubuntu and Redhat have more resources to validate hardware and so those sites are likely more reliable, but once you get to niche distros YMMV on their compatibility matrices.