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
For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480.

But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bit.

>>Loic+X7
same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.

>>a-dub+bj
HP Elitebooks and Thinkpads are designed and built with Linux in mind. I never came across an HP Elitebook or Thinkpad which failed to run Linux out of the box.

Dell XPS is the latest addition to this group.

Consumer laptops come with a lot of trickery analogous to WinModems of the era, which require Windows specifically. Hence these cost saving measurements create a lot of problems.

>>bayind+Ds
Disagree, used to use Dell Inspiron and some cheap HPs, found nothing extraordinary.

>>paulca+Kt
It's more of a chance than the norm, then.

My Dad's Lenovo Ideapad comes with a soft-raid of two SSDs for example, since a faster and twice bigger would be much more pricey.

Also, I've seen non-standard GPUs, tons of broken BIOS tables, vendor specific devices with weird quirks and whatnot over the years.

Maybe these things still happen but newer kernels know how to deal with this better, I don't know.