Hey all.
I’ve booted Linux Mint Debian Edition and Arch on to a couple old machines including my old laptops. The performance is still rather brutal because these machines are so old and their battery lives are rough. They are also bulky and uncomfortable to carry around.
So, I’ve been thinking about getting a more modern laptop and putting Linux on it but I’ve been out of the laptop market for so long now I have no idea what’s good and what’s not anymore. Any recommendations?
I think I’ve heard decent things about Chromebooks but how’s the hardware of those? Are they relatively locked down and don’t play nice with Linux? I’m just looking for a machine for daily use (browser, light coding, remote connecting to my desktop for heavier stuff)
Thanks in advance
EDIT: Thank you to everyone for responding, I did not expect so much discussion! I’ve certainly changed my mind on Chromebooks and will look into the options recommended below in the coming months. Thanks!
How about a “native” Linux laptop such as the Tuxedo Infinity Book Pro 14, or a similar model? That should provide more than enough power for the tasks you mentioned. There is also Slimbook, who make different Linux laptops though they are a little lesser known I think.
Frameworks are the best modern laptop by far imo.
Stay away from Chromebooks. Even if you get a Chromebook that is reported to play well with Linux, there can be issues. I have/had two different Linux Chromebooks. They both had unique pitfalls.
I had an arm-based Chromebook that was actually the development target of a custom distro. At its best, it still required a fairly specific wifi dongle to work without kernel hacks. Even then, the processor was slooow and storage was a bit of a problem if I was using it for anything other than text editing.
I’m running an intel-based Chromebook these days with Arch. The biggest bottleneck is the built-in nonupgradeable storage (16gb). Most of my home folder is symlinked to an SD card that I keep in the slot at all times. It works well and has great battery life, but there are easier ways to play with linux on a laptop.
Loving my T480 I got recently. Performance is meh but upgraded the memory to 32g and works good enough. Plus it was cheap on craigslist so I don’t have to worry about it too much.
If you can wait just a little longer I would seriously consider the Framework 12 that is going for pre-order next month and being shipped “mid-2025”.
Of course, this isn’t an option if you need a laptop right now. In that case the current Framework 13 offerings are the best you can get but of course are not as affordable and possibly a bit overkill for a simple browsing machine.Any idea what the price point is going to be?
I just sold my Framework 13 after daily driving it for a year. The HiDPI display bugs and workarounds just got too annoying.
I went back to my old Dell XPS 13 9310 and I’m loving it.
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You have plenty GNU/Linux compatible OOTB laptop manufacturers like:
Also check this for buying preinstalled libreboot laptops (some of the upper ones already do) minifree.org and here how to do yourself if you feel confident libreboot.org
Also you can consider buying a Dell laptop or Lenovo Thinkpad
I strongly recommend buying a laptop with AMD graphics, either integrated or external, for getting the best compatible machine for GNU/Linux, and avoid Nvidia, and Intel too if possible
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have you even read my comment? dont listen to this guy OP. Get yourself an AMD graphics
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I don’t know where you live, but AMD is much cheaper than Nvidia, and everybody knows that. So maybe you’re the fanboy here. AMD is simply better on GNU/Linux because of open-source drivers. You’ll avoid many issues that, while easy to fix, someone getting a computer for GNU/Linux can easily avoid just by buying AMD graphics. I use two RTX 3090s on my main machine, btw
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I’ve shopped around for a 12+ hour Linux laptop, I think you should wait a little while to pull that trigger, Qualcomm isn’t exactly great /w Linux, RISC is currently tripping on its own laces and people just aren’t interested in making this kind of thing exactly, yet.
I’m guessing that in a few years a lot is going to change with low power laptops that can still compute efficiently.
I have a 5 year old laptop that when I set it to highest efficiency can get almost 4 hours as long as I’m not doing 200 things, which is fine most of the time.
Plus I’ve read in a bunch of places that putting standard Linux on Chromebooks is way more complicated than it ought to be, so I’m not sure I’d pull the trigger on that without first researching the specific laptop you’re looking into.
Not that I’ve tried personally, just the Internets.
Framework
I use Framework 13 with AMD for my Linux laptop, love it. I do not want to go back to any other brand.
My daily driver is a 10yo Dell business laptop. Before that I ran a similarly aged Lenovo. I run mint.
In my experience, the amount of ram and an SSD are the biggest contributors to how good the performance feels. Running mint on 4G is possible, but performance is comprised. 8G is perfectly fine most of the time. 16G (my current setup) is peachy keen. I’m astounded what I can do in blender on a 10yo machine.
That said, if you can afford one (and they operate in your country - they don’t here), then grab a framework, like others have said. If that’s not an option, then add some ram and an SSD.
My 2c.
I would go for Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 AMD or System76 Lemur Pro. Not a cheap option, but supports Linux well.
Only thing I dislike about the T14s is that you have to dissassemble everything to replace the keyboard. On the T14 it’s so much easier.
Not often mentioned, but Surface Laptops run Linux thanks to Linux Surface on Github. I’ve been running Mint on a Surface Laptop 4 13.5" for years with zero problems. Used and refurbished models are much cheaper than the other options mentioned here.
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Positives - Excellent display and keyboard, nice form factor, very light and thin, comfortable fabric cover on keyboard bezel.
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Negatives - Smaller SSD (256g), limited ports, larger display bezel, reportedly somewhat difficult to disassemble, initial Linux installation a bit of a pain.
13.5" models with I7, 16g and 256g ssd are going for around $300 on ebay.
What is the battery situation like?
The older, cheaper devices are obviously, well, older and thus the battery degraded a bit. Linux isn’t exactly optimized for these things either. I would expect less than great battery life.
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Old ThinkPads
My old Thinkpad from work runs Linux Mint like a charm. I tried dual-booting with Windows 10/11 for awhile and it was soooo sluggish. I deleted the windows partition entirely. Any use case I needed Windows for I’ve either run successfully on Linux or found a significantly better alternative.
Gonna have to anti-recommend tuxedo unfortunately. Never had a “Linux” laptop before and never had any issues, but two of the newest Infinitybooks have a number of issues with fan control, clock sometimes stuck at 800MHz, weird-ass Ethernet NIC with no upstreamed drivers and so on. It’s like a trip to 15 years ago in terms of weird little issues popping up every now and the .
The tuxedo kernel modules are a mess and not currently upstreamable, their interfaces are inconsistent across lineups/generations which they solve by building a unified Electron monstrosity “control center” on top.
The idea is nice but any mainstream manufacturer works pretty well these days, and the Schenker laptops with tuxedo software not up to par :/
Most laptops will be more or less fully compatible with linux I think. Though a few niche features like finger print or key card readers might be a hassle to get working. To me, the most important thing is the keyboard since some manufacturers forgo the end of/start of line buttons, for instance.
