zlacker

>>tonyst+(OP)
Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.

Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.

>>mid-ki+H5
I tend to agree. If you pick a random new laptop, you will probably have a bad time running Linux.

When I decided to switch to Linux as my main OS, I researched well supported models and settled on the X1 Carbon. I bought it a large discount right after a new generation was released and the Linux support has been near perfect. Really only one or two minor issues in the past ~3 years, which is similar to what I have experienced with most Windows and macOS devices.

>>pxeboo+Tl
yeah seconding the X1 thing. The battery life is a bit wanting but I have more issues on my desktop than on my laptop at this point

>>rtpg+On
I had a X1C bought early 2018 and it had great battery life. And I generally was happy with it. Unfortunately it got stolen (luckily I had full disk encryption). Without much investigation I took a X1C again. This time it was a 7th gen. It had HiDPi display which was a bit of pain to have all apps working with a satisfactory resolution and the battery life is much poorer than before. I would take my older one back right away if I could.

Edit: The author uses an 11 year old machine. Not a surprise it works well. With all the new stuff the vendors introduce difficulties are much more common. I hear a lot of complaints from colleagues with Thunderbolt docks, the newest Intel camera generation has no Linux support, not that much has changed. Whether it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back or the other way round is debatable.