I volunteered at freegeek.org recycling computers and putting Linux on some of them which you could earn with 25 hours of work. I have tried many times to put Linux on laptops but always had trouble with the WiFi. HP has always had a Linux option on their custom built business laptops and they claim all of their business laptops are ccompatable with SUSE. But the price was a bit much for me seeing as how I have worn out 20 laptops. Other makers also claim to be joining the band wagon. I will keep you informed when I see them.
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I did not have this problem with any more or less mainstream distro in the last 10 years or so.
On the other hand i only buy used (~4 year old) professional business laptops…
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Just get a linux native driver USB wife adapter. There are a number of sites that have tested them.
(If it HAS to be ‘on board’ then this info may be of limited use to you. )
I got the info from this site.
Or just do a search using the bold statement above.
I’ve been using this one and gotten excellent results. With a downloadable Windows driver it will work fine on Win10/11 platform also. Inexpensive from Aliexpress.
[[ EDUP EP-AX1672 (WiFi 6E, AXE3000)
[[[The EDUP EP-AX1672 is a budget-friendly WiFi 6E adapter that punches above its weight. It uses the same MediaTek MT7921au chipset as the Brostrend AX9L with the standard device ID. Removable antennas are a nice touch for range optimization.
I have been running this adapter on kernel 6.12 and 6.14 for months. It is extremely stable. The Amazon reviews from Linux users are overwhelmingly positive. At around $25, it is the best value pick on this list.
- Chipset: MediaTek MT7921au
- WiFi Standard: WiFi 6E (802.11ax), Tri-band
- Kernel Support: 5.18+ (plug-and-play)
- Key Feature: Removable antennas, budget price
Pro Tip: If you want a WiFi 6E adapter that works out of the box on any modern Linux distro without fuss, pick one with the MediaTek MT7921au chipset. The standard Mediatek device ID (0e8d:7961) means no udev rules, no DKMS, no headaches. Just plug it in and it works.]]]
I’d avoid any rtl8812au adapter. I have one, worked great with Win10-simple plug-n-play.
Royal PITA to get it working on Linux. Then a kernel update killed it, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it again. At least I was unable to.
The linked site warns you away from them, with good reason.
If you HAVE one, there is recent info on how to get it working on current distros. I gave up before then.
Same here. I’ve purchased numerous laptops from Dell Refurbished Systems and converted them to Linux immediately. No problems.
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I swore off HP hardware decades ago. Has the quality of their machines gotten any better since taking over Compaq? Even then with their printer ink practices, I don’t think I could bring myself to buy from them. I’m just a grumpy old man I guess.
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WIfi cards are always hit and miss for support but Intel generally has the best Linux support. One wifi card was not connecting at, until I updated to kernel 6.8+ but it it still crashed occasionally. the problem was fully solved when I switch to an AXE3000 Intel wifi card, it works perfect as far I’m concerned. I daily drive Linux on all my machines and have older parent that switched it as well. I prefer old business class Lenova laptops, those also have the best Linux support by default.
I don’t know the exact models, but there were EliteBooks in the DDR3 era, right before they adopted the rounded MacBook Air design… Those were tanks. In my opinion, on par with or even better than the old X220 ThinkPads.
And HP offered them with a Full HD IPS screen…
But today I’m still on an EliteBook (830 G6), but they are no longer the same… Still way better than the new ThinkPads, but still.
I don’t know what else I would buy today. Maybe there are some good Dell XPS models? I heard Fujitsu has some professional models?
Sadly, Framework is crap. Many of my colleagues finally made the change from an old ThinkPad to a new fancy Framework laptop. And they all broke down within the first year. (Apparently, there was an Intel corrosion issue with this processor series, so it’s not all Framework’s fault.)
But there were also some display hinge problems, an expensive shiny toy with bad warranty and customer service, and it turns out the thing is less modular and repairable than an X230 ThinkPad, which most of them went back to after their Framework failed…
This seems to be true. I’ve never had a problem with an Intel card; they just work.
If you want to make sure, I wouldn’t buy a brand-new one, but maybe one that’s ~5 years old.
Enough time for a second-hand laptop to find its way to a kernel dev and annoy them enough to properly fix it, plus a year or so for it to get merged into the mainline kernel.
I usually just get a ThinkPad, because they have pretty reliably worked well with Linux for decades, and they also don’t tend to do dumb things like use an Apple-style butterfly keyboard.
A notebook is basically just a screen, some input devices, a battery, and a flattened brick of computronium… and it’s really embarrassing how often major companies mess up core components like the input devices. It’s like they don’t think anyone actually types any more.
I got a Dell XPS 13 when I was working at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu Linux). There was a promotion between the two companies where Dell would ship notebooks with Ubuntu Linux, and the companies would work together to ensure Ubuntu worked on the hardware. I needed a new notebook at the time, and I wanted to support the effort, so I bought one.
I was in Ubuntu QA at the time, and nobody in the QA dept did any testing on that notebook. Nobody even had access to one until after they were commercially available. Not sure who was supposed to be involved in that project, but it did NOT work. What they shipped me (as a regular customer) could not really be described as “functional”.
I tried reinstalling it, giving it the latest Ubuntu, even beta versions with more fixes… and it continued to not work. So eventually I gave up and tried my preferred distro, Debian… and everything was immediately fixed. It all “just worked”. And Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it should work too… but it didn’t. Whatever Dell and Canonical did to “support” that notebook… just made it worse.
So when a manufacturer announces they support Linux, I’m wary.
As for that Dell XPS, it didn’t survive long. The keyboard was the second-worst I’ve ever used (with only Apple’s notoriously bad one being worse), and it soon became pretty much unusable. Like, it would take ~10 kg of force to press some of the keys. And then one day, the RAM spontaneously failed, rendering it unbootable. And the RAM was soldered on, so it couldn’t really be replaced.
I can’t really disagree. Framework talks big about people having the right to repair and upgrade and modify their devices… but it seems like it’s just for show. They don’t support actual Right To Repair efforts. Because actually solving the problem would eliminate their niche and put them out of business. Rather than supporting the right to repair, their business model is more like…“if you have enough money, you can buy the privilege of repairability”.
… and they also choose to associate themselves with some very problematic people politically. But that’s a topic for a different forum.
… but speaking of being kind of off-topic… I had to laugh about this. The post has been edited 3 times, and yet, the bold-font obvious typo in the first sentence remains: 
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This is one of the main reasons I reject most laptops. If the keyboard is crap, and sadly most are, that’s a dealbreaker for me.
At home I type on a Model M 
HP EliteBook keyboards are “OK” for me. I would say they’re at least as good as ThinkPads. But this is a sensitive and subjective topic.
I must admit Apple makes kind of “nice”-feeling hardware.
Especially the displays are on another level.
I’m kind of a display snob and reject looking at any TN or VA panel.
And (old) ThinkPad displays are especially bad.
But I recently got an HP with a “Sure View” display. It seemed to be a good deal, but the display was an instant dealbreaker and I had to send it back.
And this is what makes me so furious about them. The greenwashing wa**ery.
No schematics, no open hardware, no Coreboot or Libreboot, bad customer service. You can replace parts that should not break in the first place if they were engineered properly, but now you can pay for an upgrade instead of getting it fixed under warranty…
They pretend they have invented a laptop with modules… I remember PCMCIA and even removable optical drives. Modular Wi-Fi, GSM, RAM, and CPUs and GPUs used to be normal.
With a Framework you can change the SSD and RAM, and their laptop has only USB-C I/O… wow
And now they make a desktop PC where the CPU and RAM are soldered. LOL, the irony.
Same here. I have been using old ThinkPads with Linux for a long long time. For example, I am currently on a T480 (running Ubuntu), which is a well-known model when it comes to refurbished and serviceable notebooks, although by now, it is probably a little outdated. Anyway, I have never even had to think about WiFi support with theses ones; they have all just worked, and kept on working and working.
Seconded. And thanks for providing all these details. As a ThinkPad and Ubuntu user, that was an interesting read to me.
More recent Thinkpads are a mixed bag, and you have to be careful when shopping if you care about display quality. For example, in the T14 Gen3, there were four different displays that were 1920x1200 IPS. Two of them had terrible color gamuts, and there is zero chance of an Ebay seller knowing which they have.
Fortunately, the PSREF website will let you check the model number printed on the bottom of most of them against all 4008 possible configurations.
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As a datapoint, my work XPS 17 9720 is now 4 years old and still works, it’s definitely getting a bit long in the tooth though. I’ve had some slight weirdness with it (drivers, maybe) but put that down to it being a Dell. My colleague had an identical machine purchased ~6mo later which had to be returned when it was about a year old, due to a motherboard issue.
My biggest issue has always been the thermals; the i9-12900HK has absolutely no chance of running at it’s potential, I appreciate this is more of an “on me” issue, but I got what I was given rather than being allowed to spec perhaps an i7 which I’d have preferred.
Mostly use it in desktop mode, aluminium folding laptop stand and external keyboard. In a hot climate without AC, it’s unpleasant to type on for extended periods whole just on a table, due to the heat.
I generally don’t like dell laptops, but this one has been okay, the fact my colleague’s was repaired under warranty doesn’t fill me with enormous amounts of confidence in the XPS series.
I would imagine those probably had Intel WiFi, which definitely works better on Linux compared to other chipsets. I’m not sure if Intel actually officially supports and maintains the drivers, or if they just make the specs available for facilitating open source driver creators, but at any rate Intel WiFi is a hard requirement for me.
WiFi chipsets that are known to be difficult and/or problematic on Linux (and honestly on Windows too in some cases) are Broadcom and Realtek.
That makes two of us. 
Me too. Currently you can find some really decent deals on lightly-used almost-pristine 14" T490 or T14 Thinkpads, and T-series is arguably one of the premium lines that Thinkpad offers. That being said, I did have a T490 just sitting in storage for a month or two that simply stopped working, some kind of massive motherboard failure, and the T440 that one replaced also suffered multiple critical failures, so nothing is guaranteed with today’s downward spiral in general quality and product longevity. Another annoyance for me is that I strongly prefer a 15" laptop for my main workstation, but I HATE the offset keyboard relative to the trackpad that comes with 99% of 15" laptops that include a numpad. But for somebody who doesn’t have that particular idiosyncrasy they would probably find the Thinkpad T-series keyboard to be superb, they’re widely regarded as having the best feel/action/accuracy of all laptop keyboards.
Thanks to everyone for the warnings about the XPS series, I have considered them multiple times due to the thing I mentioned about my search for 15" laptops without a numpad, but I’ve never made the jump yet.
Exactly. Some people may be more indifferent than others to the color gamuts and viewing angles and brightness, but at the very least the “HD” (incredibly misleading marketing term) 1366x768 base screen should be absolutely avoided. Fortunately it’s not very common, but do check the specs very carefully, especially if comparing between a bunch of similar options, it’s easy to miss that detail in the product description.
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That makes two of us. Apple seems to be the only major brand that believes most people don’t want numpads on bigger laptops. Given how configurable Thinkpads are, you’d think it would be optional.
at the very least the “HD” (incredibly misleading marketing term) 1366x768 base screen should be absolutely avoided.
It looks like that was an option as late as the first generation T14. The T14.2 is always at least 1920x1080 (five options at that resolution), and the T14.3 went to 16:10 with 1920x1200 as the minimum.
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T14.1 here. 1920x1080 screen. It has been a nice notebook in the years I’ve had it.
I sure do like 16:10 screens more though… Ideally I’d like to have a golden ratio screen, 1.618:1, but it’s tricky to make the numbers work out nicely in power-of-2 friendly units. The closest I think we can realistically get is 13:8, or 1.625:1. That provides some interesting resolutions like…
- 416x256
- 624x384
- 1040x640
- 1248x768
- 1664x1024
- 2080x1280
- 2496x1536
- 3120x1920
- 3328x2048
- 4160x2560
- 4992x3072
- 6240x3840
- 6656x4096
- 9360x5760
- 9984x6144
Are you sure? In the 15" size format, the majority of machines I looked at for my personal laptop were missing a numpad, I struggled to find something suitable, went with a ThinkPad in the end.
Edit: had a quick look on the Lenovo website, wow lots of options now, I could have sworn in c.2022 there was very little in the way of “workstation” type laptops with number pads!?
The only fairly recent mainstream 15" laptops without a numpad that I can think of off the top of my head are the Thinkpad X1 Extreme (maybe only certain generations?) and the XPS 15.
The best laptop with the best keyboard I’ve ever owned was a 15" Thinkpad T530 from somewhere around 2012. Unfortunately there’s nothing like that on the market anymore.
Running ubuntu on laptop now, no wifi issues. One update however killed audio driver, but later updates fixed it, otherwise, no issues.
For math nerd reasons? I imagine it would be hard to notice the difference between 16.18:10 and 16.0:10 in practice.
My favorite size for a laptop is 15" 4:3. Sadly, the only modern 4:3 devices I know of are iPads, and I have no use for an iPad.
That reminds me…
My older sister, who doesn’t live with me, wanted a new laptop.
She asked for my advice, and after doing some research, I recommended one with a 16:10 screen ratio.
Personally, I didn’t care about the ratio that much–that laptop just looked like the best fit for my sister. 