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
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
You even threw the word “wait” in there independently because of your preconceptions of customer support calls
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.
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.
Add Lenovo to the list.
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
Computers are fine yes, but I’m still waiting for a Linux phone with not-shit specs LMAO
More importantly good software, Mobile Linux still sucks
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.
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
some years ago it really was extremely hard. at least now there’s finally some solid shops.
Which would be considered a good gaming laptop?
Asus Zephyrus line are pretty good.
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?
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:
Get and set fingerprint LED brightness (–fp-brightness, --fp-led-level)
Missing Framework?
Not selling with Linux preinstalled.
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.
Came to evangelize about our lord and savior used thinkpads
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 :(
What color are your knee socks?
I’m here to evangelize coreboot and Talos and Framework for those with more money than you and I
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.
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.
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
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 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:
- The proprietary “Ethernet”
- USB-C doesn’t allow charging from C to A cable despite supporting [email protected] charging from any proper USB-C.
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).
Yes, literally all of them are a joke. Thankfully Lenovo now offers linux
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.
cries in southern hemisphere
Im with you there, half of the world where buying tech stuff sucks
System 76 ship to southern hemisphere
I eventually bought a kfocus laptop, but the shipping on both was horrendous. I think kfocus worked out ever so slightly cheaper for the laptop itself though.
Good to know, cheers
Add KFocus to the list: https://kfocus.org/
Seconded. I’ve got one and I’m pretty happy with it
