Except for Apple (and maybe Framework), all laptops are designed by contract original design manufacturers (ODMs) Taiwan, Korea and China. Your usual Linux laptop OEMs like System76 and Tuxedo just buy better combinations of the whitelabel stuff. They are inferior to actual big OEMs designs which contain more sophisticated sensors and power management and extra UEFI features. This includes business laptops Dell Latitudes, HP Elitebooks and Lenovo Thinkpads. None of those manufacturers actually do Linux-based driver development. All the device development, manufacturing and testing is done under Windows and only for Windows. The laptops are booted with Windows to do functional tests at factory not Linux.
Linux is an afterthought for all OEMs. After Windows parts are released and tested, the kernel changes to Linux is added. They are rudimentary support which doesn't include 100% of the featureset. Many drivers today have quite proprietary user-space side. You'll get none of that from any laptop manufacturer. You may say you don't care about those and you're okay with 10 - 20% power loss. That's not the definition of out-of-the box for me.
That is not what that means. At all.
> Your usual Linux laptop OEMs like System76 and Tuxedo just buy better combinations of the whitelabel stuff.
This is not what System76 do, actually.
> Many drivers today have quite proprietary user-space side. You'll get none of that from any laptop manufacturer.
Not with System76
> You may say you don't care about those and you're okay with 10 - 20% power loss.
I'm not. That's why I stopped buying Windows hardware and started buying Linux hardware!
Note that NVIDIA drivers didn't get better since they are more open source now. They are not. GPUs are now entire independent computers with their own little operating system. Some significant parts of the driver now runs under that computer.
Yes the manufacturers may allocate some people to deal with it and the corrosiveness of the kernel community. But why? Intel and AMD uses that as a marketing and sales stragtegy. If the hardware manufacturer is the best one there is, where is the profit for supporting Linux? Even Thinkpads don't have 100% support of all the little sensors and PMICs.
HiDPI issue hasn't been solved yet completely. Bluetooth is still quite unreliable. MIPI support should be the best due to the number of devices, until you realize everybody did their own shitty external driver and there are no common good drivers for MIPI cameras so your webcam doesn't work. USB stack is still dodgy. Microsoft in 90s had a cart of random hardware populating the USB tree completely and they just fucked with the NT kernel plugging and unplugging until it didn't break anymore for love's sake. Who did that level of testing with Linux?