Love your fellow humans that just want a working computer.
For those who're currently looking for a nice new device: shown are (from Top Left to Right):
- NovaCustom (NL)
- Star Labs (UK)
- System76 (US)
- Juno Computers (US)
- UbuntuShop (BE)
- Slimbook (ES)
- Tuxedo Computers (DE)
- Entroware (UK)
- MiniFree (UK)
- Nitrokey (DE)
- Laptops with Linux (NL)
- Purism (US)
Not mentioned but also selling Ready-to-use Linux computer:
- Dell
- Lenovo
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Comments128
Came to evangelize about our lord and savior used thinkpads
I'm here to evangelize coreboot and Talos and Framework for those with more money than you and I
Talos... are you running kubernetes for your laptop you mad lad? Also, not aware that the coreboot is ready yet for any of the non-chromebook machines. (Edit: meant coreboot for Framework laptops)
Coreboot is for the thinkpads. Talos PPC stuff is just cool if impractical.
oh i use coreboot on an old thinkpad daily, it's completely fine
I have a framework, not that happy with it. It sometimes fails to find my encrypted partition (many times reinstalled different systems over the years), it heated up to 100°C so fast that it throttled down to 400 MHz all the time. The overheating is better since they sent me a new motherboard, but it still goes to 95 easily and heats up when doing the most basic stuff. I've also had some sound issues lately on Debian stable and testing, but not sure about that.
Repaste it and make sure the heatsink is evenly screwed down. If its still doing that warranty the board and heatsink. That's a hardware issue and they should fix it without issue.
I have already received a whole new Mainboard. It's not something that can be fixed like this apparently.
They told you that? i9?
They didn't tell me that. It's an i5 12th gen
Regrettable, my amd 7040 works fine since oct 2023, although i had to tinker in the beginning for power optimisation and to get suspension working properly
Same here. Running NixOS on mine, and despite not being officially supported they have pretty good channels on their forums and the staff are quite active on there too.
I had a thinkpad for YEARS running various flavours of Debian / Ubuntu. It never had an issue with drivers and even the fingerprint sensor worked out of the box.
The battery was shot to hell, the hinge was gone, it was time to upgrade. So I bought an ideapad. There’s something funky with the audio quality on Linux and the fingerprint scanner is now a face scanner camera. Howdy is not easy to configure and I’m pretty sure I can trick it with a photo.
That’s a long way of me saying I have buyers remorse and not all Lenovos are made equal :(
I still remember the good old IBM Thinkpads, most of them were indestructible tanks. But with Lenovo, those times are long over. My last machine was a TP L390 Yoga. It overheated frequently, the cooling system was inadequate for the 4.6GHz Intel CPU, one day the logo sticker came off because the glue turned into sticky liquid, the passive Micro-Ethernet dongle cost 50€ and the cable turned into glue after a few months...god, what a shit machine this was.
I was able to work with it for a while by limiting and undervolting the CPU, but one day a Windows update came out that disabled the functionality and it worked like crap on Linux for a long time due to bad drivers.
I switched to GPD now. Never going back, although I miss the Trackpoint a little bit.
Only get the business model. I've had T60, T61, T410, T460, X200, x220, X240, X250 and X260. They're all rock solid. At work we use the X1 Carbon all gen they're also damn good build quality.
Our experiences seem to differ. I currently have L390 Yoga and it's the best thing I ever used. The cooling isn't bad, just the feet are too thin to allow for flipping the screen over. Any cooling pad, or in my case an egg carton fixes this.
Mine has i5-8365U (4.1GHz).
The Ethernet is pretty stupid, but I've got the dongle from AliExpress for €9.31 and it's working fine.
I really love the touchscreen in combination with Arch, KDE Plasma and Wayland. It also has pretty great colors, but I am coming from TN, so the bar was laying on the ground.
Driver-wise, everything works OOB on Arch (at least since September 2024 which is when I got it).
Really, I only have 2 problems with it:
T and P series is aparently good, normal L is decent, but others are terrible (yoga, x, ideapad, etc.). But I haven't used TP-s myself. I did use an Ideapad and it's terrible (no upgradability, falling apart metal chassis (how the hell does metal break), no key-travel (feels like hitting a rock while typing) and it has a shitload of mediatek hardware which is a pain on linux (but I haven't tested it as it's my dad's).
What color are your knee socks?
Also Framework.
I think OP means "just work" as in the OS is preinstalled. Framework do support Linux but they don't preinstall a distro for you.
Having said that, I've got a Framework 16 and it's very nice.
Years ago it was literally impossible to get a laptop without OS. It's a good enough option compared to what we had to suffer before.
I wouldn't expect folks working on Linux to be discouraged by the sweat equity of something as small as running the installer for an OS. I definitely read "just work" to mean having all components supported by the OS, regular updates available, etc.
When I checked out during purchasing my 16 I seem to remember the options being "no OS (bring your own), Fedora, Ubuntu, and Windows." I chose no OS because I was planning on installing FedoraKDE with FDE which wasn't an option, but, I assumed that by choosing Fedora as my option it would come preinstalled, or does it come with an install USB to do it yourself?
Bought one very recently, the options are
Damn, I preordered mine, and definitely remember the option despite not choosing it. I wonder why they took it off. If I had a guess it's because anyone ordering a framework probably wanted to install the OS themselves for encryption like me or whatever other reason, so almost nobody chose that probably lol.
Came here to say this. I really like mine.
Computers are fine yes, but I'm still waiting for a Linux phone with not-shit specs LMAO
Every 6 months I check to see if they’ve figured out VOLTE on PostmarketOS, or Sailfish (my dream OS tbh) on community ports. And then I cry and angrily tell people how Microsoft destroyed Meego until I’m told to hush
The Software isn't fully there yet for mass adoption (Your mileage may vary, but the general expectations for a modern daily driver are pretty high), at least not for anyone but enthusiasts and developers. If there's something like a PinePhone 2 it will probably yet again designed to be relatively cheap despite low production volume, so as many potential developers as possible can afford one.
If it can handle my banking app (local credit union) and occasionally play YouTube I'm good tbh
A lot of financial apps require Play Protect and attestation. I had to fight for months to figure out how to spoof the integrity check so I could deposit some stupid checks.
I have so much shit in place because of my root its ridiculous, Magisk + Modules, LSPosed, Shizuku (for those apps that detect if devtools is enabled), HideMyApplist and probably at least 2 more im forgetting
It honestly might be cheaper to get a piece of shit phone and keep it squeaky clean for our overlords
I was surprised that BlissOS (fork of Android x86) worked just fine with my bank's app. But it still refuses to work when running it in VirtualBox. It has to be booted directly on the hardware.
I get by pretty well just using my bank's website. If you need the bank's app for something like occasionally depositing checks, maybe you could keep your old phone in a drawer with your checkbook.
More importantly good software, Mobile Linux still sucks
My SOs system76 had intermittent graphics issues and their tech support had hour-long calls with me over several weeks and additional emails correspondence where we did some very in-depth testing and monitoring of the machine. I think most of the testing was that their team genuinely wanted to know if it was a hardware or software issue and fix it right.
In the end they replaced the entire motherboard under warranty because they pointed out in another month and it wouldn't be covered and it might fix it. It did.
I suspect it was just a bad Nvidia GPU. It sucks that it had the problem and that it was difficult to track down but all laptops break.
I challenge anyone to find that level of support from a Windows manufacturer without having a corporate account.
Its kinda funny that when I read "hour-long wait calls" I initially thought you were complaining about being on hold for too long. I just couldn't imagine a scenario where they were helping you the entire time and it was positive lol
Nope, no waiting, sitting on the call with me while we try multiple things and waiting through reboots while he bounced ideas off I believe an internal slack discussion or something. no trying to get off the call or hand me off to meet some arbitrary call time quota.
You even threw the word "wait" in there independently because of your preconceptions of customer support calls
Dell's accidental warranty used to be solid AF. I installed Eve OL beta and my graphics card cooked. (even had stripes in the bios) They replaced the entire laptop with a late model P4 of equivalent value to what I paid.
Those days are long gone, though.
As much as I like my Tuxedo, I probably would not have bought it if I had known that the ethernet card and some laptop essentials dont work without their drivers, which have not been upstreamed. Due to this, I can't use my distro of choice (Bluefin) OR run with secure boot and LUKS with tpm unlock even on regular Fedora
What Ethernet chip do they use?
I've got a Framework 16 and all components work on both Fedora and Debian without installing custom drivers, so I'm surprised it's still an issue for some laptops.
The model that I have uses the motorcomm yt6801 chip. There is apparently some work going on to upstream the driver by the OEM, but it largely stalled with the last comment being from a kernel maintainer 7 months ago
https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/11/23/33
I wonder why they didn't go with something more supported, like a Realtek chip. They're not the best (I'd prefer Intel or Aquantia), but they're cheap and widely supported. The Framework's Ethernet expansion card uses a RTL8156 which is supported practically everywhere.
They don't design all of their laptops, so it's not always up to them. They order off-the-shelf designs with their logo from Clevo or some other ODM and tweak the firmware.
Do you know if that's still the case on their new systems?
I'm currently waiting for next gen GPUs to become available and have been leaning towards Tuxedo
I'm using an Infinitybook Pro 14 gen 9. It came out last year.
You will most likely need the "tuxedo-drivers" package, but whether you'll need an ethernet driver too depends on the hardware they choose.
At least they publish their drivers for both RPM and DEB systems, so that makes it a bit less painful.
Of course, none of this applies if you use their distro. There, everything is pre-installed and configured for their laptops
True enough. I likely will just stick with the stock system.
Framework deserves a spot in that meme
They ship with Linux?
Yes?
No
Why would you want that? Honestly?
Framework as well—everything just works. I recently discovered
framework-tool, which is a mindblowing level of integration with Linux.Thank you! This is awesome:
I think what people mean when they say this is that they are looking for the same price point as the equivalent Windows device... I don't know all these companies but every time I looked for a Linux PC/laptop it was 25-30% more expensive than the equivalent Windows thing.
all of them are a joke in canada
edit: in case this rubs someone the wrong way its a joke to my wallet/my wallet is the joke
Just got a HP pavilion for free. On the other side of everything here. Fucking want to go postal on them. Bios so fucked up I can't get Linux to run with full disk encryption. Buggy, acpi errors. Support"not our problem it works with windows" ..
HP has been awful about that forever. I slapped Linux on one maybe 15 years ago and it was a nightmare
Hm, I had a 250 g5 and it ran linux instantly after install (in ~2018-19).
Had a elitebook for a while missing that one , would still be alive if it wasn't because I spilled wine on it
Well, mine just fell apart. Now I have an old Latitude. As far as I know the business HP-s are decent, but consumer ones are already a rotting corpse when you buy them.
Framework:
Does Framework sell a laptop with Linux pre-installed or do they only have officially supported distros?
Ships with windows or blank disk (selectable). Ubuntu/mint/fedora are officially supported but you could install other distros like arch
Still not shipping with something.
I'd only wipe it anyway.
Me too, and have done it in the past on one laptop that I did get with Linux when there was no bring-your-own option, but I suppose that OP's got a point --- there are people out there for whom installing the OS on a blank laptop is going to be intimidating.
If you've installed an OS a zillion times, this is all old hat. If you never have before, probably feels kind of scary.
For those people, having a preinstalled OS can be a significant value-add.
You can buy no OS. Or even no included drive. You'll save on having to pay the Windows license.
Missing Framework?
Not selling with Linux preinstalled.
That's not true! Some of them are Tongfang devices. 🥴
It's true those companies have to overwhelmingly work with ODMs, doesn't necessarily make the devices shitty though.
I beg to differ, i have bought clevo w650sj back in the day when it was produced, it works great to this day, just added ssd and ram and it works great with opensuse tumbleweed and windows 11 dualboot, i use windows in dual boot because i need adobe and flashing software for obscure chinese phones and flashing software to revive bricked usb sticks
Starlabs design their own.
They're also insanely expensive
Because they design their own, yes. That's how economy of scale works.
To benefit from it you either need to sell an absurd amount of stuff or buy from those who do.
Obviously they have their reasons but few people are willing to pay a ton of money for a laptop with designs that while custom arent groundbreaking or particularly unique
They're a nice design. I bought one.
Well, the quality of most laptops fell enough in the last decade, that the clevos are decent now. Also, fuck thinkpad part rejection, I'm definitely not buying a (edit: new) TP.
would you mind elaborating on the part rejection? i am not sure what is meant by that
ThinkPads refuse to work with non-Lenovo batteries.
And different wwan cards. How are you supposed to add mobile broadband? Buy the same as OEM card?
i wasn't aware of that. thank you! is this a recent development?
I can't find an exact date, but there is a YouTube tutorial from 2018 on removing the battery whitelist, so it's been at least 7 years.
Even t430 from 2014 has a battery whitelist.
It's important to note that if you don't already have a computer, ordering one without an os installed is a problem.
So some people gotta have something, if only to download and install their distro of choice. So, even a bad distro is better than nothing occasionally
System 76 ship to southern hemisphere
Good to know, cheers
Im with you there, half of the world where buying tech stuff sucks
Lenovo allows now. U can opt out of windows 11 and save money. I believe they installed Ubuntu. U can reinstall with Linux mint or Pop OS if u like the feel of windows.
Apparently either Ubuntu or Fedora. Given you even save money it's quite a good offering; although you may get better repairability or hotline support with one of the others.
You also can deselect the os overall, you save even some more bucks doing this.
I got a client to buy me a System76 (Pangolin), never would have bought one otherwise. Everything is great about it, very powerful and as expected, except for the BT/WiFi module. It's kinda dogshit.
Besides that, IO is plentiful, it's a good size/weight, user upgradable/serviceable, has a hardware camera killswitch, and a built-in RJ45 to fix the WiFi issue. When I got mine, they were doing a special, and I also got a neat backpack with it for free!
You can get external USB ones of those, which opens things up. Downside is that it's another thing to carry, and you gotta plug it in when you sit down. Upside is that it lets you put the antenna wherever you want (which doesn't matter much for Bluetooth, but can be nice for WiFi). Desktops these days with integrated BT/WiFi tend to have external antennas that you can place where you want, but laptops don't have that option outside of USB.
That being said, I've gotten several exotic USB WiFi adapters for which I needed to compile in support; support wasn't packaged and in the base kernel. So given the context of the "just works" standpoint, that could be a tripping spot.
Indeed, I got myself a mid-grade Netgear USB antenna. It works much better than on-board, but like you said it's an extra thing with a wire. Doesn't help with BT, but at least my mouse has an RF dongle for that.
It's just a bit of a bummer that the price is what it is and the BT/WiFi is one of the cheap components.
Tbh I would rather a desktop and build that myself. If I wanted a laptop I would most likely be looking for very low specs and cheap, so second hand. Got a laptop with a 2011 pentium CPU somewhere and it works perfectly fine on Linux, even got a few games on it.
Drox Operative 2 runs at 60FPS, kinda makes me wish we had more 2D games these days as they can run on pretty much anything.
I've got a cheap refurbished ThinkPad L390 Yoga. (€180) It's plenty powerful and the touchscreen is awesome with KDE Plasma (but only with Wayland - X11 is not built for touchscreens, it only does mouse emulation).
Just confirming the point about Lenovo. Bought a brand new Lenovo Legion last fall, and I didn't even bother booting Windows once before I started from a Linux Mint install USB.
After wrapping up the install, everything worked out of the box, including Lenovos hotkey for toggling the keyboard LEDs.
I found out Lenovo has a copilot key (keycode 201). Yesterday I remapped it to running a shell script that toggles some keyboard parameters.
Same for Dell; moreover, KDE actually features the respective indicators, so the laptop feels completely Linux-native
I have a GPD Win Max 2 2024 and it's such an amazing device. Everything works ootb on Fedora, except the FP reader (but that's already being worked on). Raytracing on a 10" device, what a time to be alive.
It's also very easy to disassemble, clean and repair.
So GPD definitely wins in my book.
Running Debian 12 on a $300 no-name chinese laptop from before the tariffs. Formatted over Windows ofc.
It rules!
some years ago it really was extremely hard. at least now there's finally some solid shops.
I currently have a system76 (not happy, story for another time) and am in the market for a new gaming laptop this time specifically looking for amd cpu / gpu - any recommendations? I prefer Kubuntu should drivers be an issue.
Bit pricey but the Framework 16 is always a great option for the more tech inclined.
Doesn't come with Linux by default but they support it very well and have people on staff for Linux support. You will have to install it yourself though
Thanks this looks like a great option and actually cheaper than my system76 for similar specs
If you are in the US, I'm very happy with the ROG G-series. The cooling is overengineered, they have a good community built around them (see https://gitlab.com/asus-linux/asusctl), and now they're even offering some Strix Halo stuff, which is really awesome.
Framework is great, but I wouldn't buy one for heavy dGPU use since the cooling is... not the best. At least not until they offer Strix Halo laptops too.
Unfortunately I'm only seeing nvidia gpu's on those (or at least that's only option on the US eshop filters)
Oof you are right. They used to carry AMD versions (other than the pricey/small Z13), somehow I thought they still did.
Honestly this is kinda a terrible time to buy AMD gaming laptops unless you get an older one, as the 7000 series was pretty limited (with the higher end ones being MCM designs laptop makers don't want), and I can't even find any 9000 series in laptops. There might be more in a few months, assuming tarrifs don't obliterate that...
Add Lenovo to the list.
Also Pine64
I think the issue is that this is the first I've heard of any of these companies besides dell and lenovo.
Are the companies that sell these reaching their customer base?
:::spoiler These are great for certain use cases, but there are areas where volume is critical for economy of scale and we have no equivalent.
Like with my disability and ergonomic needs I went looking for a laptop with an AI capable GPU. Also because building hardware is such a garbage marketing scam to navigate. I got a late- 16GB GPU model for $2k when all I could buy was a 12GB S76 for $3k5 or 16GB for $4k5+ and it had a 14k9 Intel with C4-roulette bomb built in.
We are at a stage where it is insane that gaming is even relevant to GPU specs. The die used in almost all of these GPUs are not only capable of handing a lot more RAM, but the support for more RAM is actually already in the firmware and only configured by soldering the correct chips and changing a configuration resistor on the PCB. Most chips are more than capable of addressing the maximum memory that was available in the series. There are people posting on YT demonstrating this swap on multiple Nvidia cards. So either we must be able to buy a GPU with replaceable memory or hardware should be sold with the option for maximum. Gamers have no use for this, but it is super important for AI stuff. Like I was looking at getting some old P40 Tesla GPUs just because they have 24GB of ram but it would take 8 of them to have as much compute as my current single 16GB GPU on a laptop! I would love to buy a similar machine with something like a 48GB GPU in a 3090 or 4090 like class and with Tesla hardware that cannot be used for gaming. That absolutely cannot be some super rich, I-made-up-a-price boutique retailer bullshit. The existing hardware already supports this where something like a 5070 and 5060 are more than capable of shipping with 32GB of RAM attached. It is not super niche or stupid expensive to use chips that are a few dollars more each when the bulk of the cost is the same and already being spent. Sure my Tesla GPU laptop dream is edgy, but shipping a 32GB 5060 at economy of scale ~$2k is not. Even Nvidia should start classing dice and putting out AI specific specs if the bad blocks in a die permit just killing the ray tracing junk but can still do tensor math. These kinds of things are in the near future of possibility, but I don't see anyone in the Linux space being particularly edgy and leading by offering something great. They are acting like boutique retail and charging premiums or offering mundane hardware for tried and true use cases.
Anyways, I wanted to support S76 but paying twice as much, and when they do not open source their bootloader, it was a solid no for me. Fortunately https://linux-hardware.org/ exists and shows the kernel log and what works and does not work for almost all hardware that exists. Do a scan of your stuff to help others too, especially if you use esoteric stuff, unusual distros, or find some workaround to get hardware working when it did not work before. We don't have very good economy of scale with edge case and enthusiast hardware, but this is a way around that. :::
So apparently it's for the Western people then. (Or I could be wrong)
I simply don't know any vendors in Japan, Australia, India etc., but feel free to provide some!
I can't find any, hence my comment
I don't think there are any, atleast in india. Except maybe dell and lenovo but idk if they would be any cheaper than windows ones. So I still bought cheap hp with windows
I just got a Zenbook Duo for work because I haul around a second monitor all the time. Debian 12 is not happy, feels like the early 2Ks as I try out mainline and other methods to get the wifi card and displays recognized. Every laptop I've used up to this one worked out of the box. That being said, Ubuntu may, but I'm trying to avoid the snap machine.
Why! (CH)
I mean, I have a Thinkpad and an HP Elitebook. So... what's the problem?
From other comments, I think that OP is after something where they don't have to install the OS on, from a "just works" standpoint.
I don't want an OEM-installed OS, since I very much don't want any OEM customization and the easiest way to ensure that it's not there is to install a vanilla copy of the OS myself, but some people do want an "unbox it, open the lid, OS is there" experience.
Some Thinkpads have had a Linux option, but I don't think that Elitebooks have shipped with a pre-installed Linux distro.
goes to look at HP's site
They don't seem to currently be shipping any models that do this, based on the "Operating System" election in the left-hand bar.
Which would be considered a good gaming laptop?
System76 laptops are built for gaming.
They also created their own Linux distro called Pop! Os, which is designed around gaming, and fairly popular within the community. All their laptops come with Pop! os preinstalled
Lol, no? System76 does have gaming-capable devices and Pop!_OS will absolutely get you there, but neither was designed "around gaming".
To answer the original question: System76, Tuxedo and Slimbook do sell gaming-capable devices. Others might do as well, this isn't a complete list.
They literally advertise it on their website. They definitely have gaming in mind.
Sure, they're not designed solely for gaming. But they're focused on graphical performance which is what makes them suited for gamers.
Pop! Os has a focus on graphical performance, with versions containing preconfigured AMD/nvidia drivers depending on the users build. To claim that gaming hasn't factored into the decision to focus on graphics would just be silly.
Doesn't really feel as though that pedantry has added anything to the conversation if I'm honest, as the question was what would be suitable for gaming, and you yourself also recommend 76?
Asus Zephyrus line are pretty good.
Yes, literally all of them are a joke. Thankfully Lenovo now offers linux