Linux Laptop Compatibility

>Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to "just work out of the box".Google the laptop model + Linux before you buy it. That increases the odds of getting a "it works out of the box" experience.You'll also usually find pretty straightforward instructions how to get things going quickly if they do not work out of the box, or the simple fact that the machine is not well supported.Also, if you had done enough Wind

"not supported by the vendor"I'd say you probably should think about it the other way -- you only get decent Linux desktop experience if everything is supported by the vendor. Just look up on HN what kind of trouble people run into when installing a Linux distro on their laptop. People go as far as recommending very specific models from certain brands because everything works as expected on those laptops.

There are laptops that work with Linux and ones that don't. Nobody is forcing you to use it on a device that isn't supported

Linux support on consumer hardware depends on community contribution generally. So it will take time generally to have good support. However in 2021 it’s no longer necessary to buy a good laptop and struggle to put linux on it. There are some great linux options like the xps developer edition or system76 and i know thinkpads also have a lineup now of linux. These generally should have good linux drivers for hardware (though for certain oems it’s not necessarily the case the drivers will be open

Please stop the FUD. My experience has been that Linux support for most laptops by Lenovo, Dell, HP etc is pretty good. There are couple specific technologies that dont work well with Linux - Nvidia Optimus, any graphics hardware from Imagination Technologies (hardware is good but their driver story is unbelievably convoluted). If you buy a thinkpad and hold it for five years your chances of it being able to competently run the latest and greatest version of linux are far greater than your chanc

It might be worth using hardware that is more adapted and tested for use with Linux such as Framework, System76, Starlabs, Tuxedo etc. Typically these computers have better HW driver support than some others and also a HW company with an interest to have their laptops work with Linux backing it up a bit.After all Mac OS only runs on a few dedicated Apple computers and that's partly why it is a smoother experience overall. If Linux only had to support a few Laptop models it would have bee

It's long established that Linux will lag eg. Windows in terms of driver and hardware support. It's been that way since the 1990's. This is one of the few downsides and not news. You can always run a mainstream desktop OS on the shiny laptop and run Linux in a VM (eg. WSL2) until your hardware is supported by a stable distro.

Most likely. I think laptops are particularly gnarly, especially when they have both an apu and a discrete gpu. While manufacturers use windows' amenities for adding their own drivers and modifications so that they ensure that the OS understands the topology of the hardware (so that the product doesn't get mass RMA'd), there's no such incentive to go out of your way to make Linux support it.

Linux hardware support, particularly on laptops, has come a long way in recent years. You should give it a go. Start with Ubuntu or Mint.

This is highly hardware dependent. Modern hardware is complex enough that it pretty much has to explicitly support Linux or it won't work well.I have been buying System76 for about twenty years now, and this is has not been an issue for me either.