I run a small business, but I’m also I’m an embedded systems developer on ARM processors for my products. Our toolchain is Windows-specific. That and the Adobe suite which I also need for my business keep my primary work machine Windows.
My laptop is Linux but even that creates occasional hassles with my work flow and presentations.
In general its not about the CPU or GPU. Even Nvidia works kinda okay on some Devices, at least according to Nick from TheLinuxExperiment. Some apps like Davinciresolve require it, and cuda is also only supported on Nvidia. Mobile AMD graphics are kinda underpowered for some tasks.
Its more about weird hardware that isnt supported, Fingerprint readers, even keyboards going into some weird hibernation and you need to hard reset the PC as you cant control it anymore (Acer swift). Some devices like Microsoft Surfaces need a custom kernel.
Lots ot refurbished business laptops like the Lenovo T series, HP or Dell business series works well, as they also dont have weird components.
Check linux-hardware.org and if you have a running laptop, install their HWprobe and run it, to share that your laptop is working. With comments you can add what is really working etc.
Personally I would also care about Coreboot. Checkout Novacuston (EU) or System76 or Starlabs, they have Coreboot laptops. I mean, installing Linux on some laptop with a proprietary garbage Bios that doesnt get updates (!!!) anymore is pretty hypocritical. Coreboot is awesome but rare, its awesome that there are some companies and people making it run on new hardware, so I would check those out.
good advice, thank you! oh ok, so since im on a budget and i’ll likely be buying refurbed or used, it’ll likely be an older machine. would older computers but from the good companies mentioned still be capable of running newer versions/kernels of distros?
Welcome to Linux! Every hardware runs everything. Its not Mac or Android. Old Devices work always, as the drivers already exist. Only reeeally old stuff gets thrown out of the kernel.
Thinkpad T430’s have a pretty high price on Ebay currently, I have one and its a great laptop, nice keyboard, Coreboot/Heads/Libreboot/1vyrain custom BIOS all run. But it is a really old Laptop.
Bought a Clevo MZ41 on Ebay, will attempt to flash coreboot. Was not pricey too.
Try Thinkpads, Dell, Hp. Normally older Acer or Asus too. If you find a laptop with
good 1080p display
good keyboard in your language/ you dont care about stickers
good battery life
everything normal broken, not completely old
Just search for “Linux MODEL” and you will probably find some reports.
For new hardware you want a recent Distro, Fedora (try Kinoite! ublue.it), OpenSuse Tumbleweed (try Kalpa) or EndeavorOS for easy Arch, are all good. Maybe avoid ubuntu, or use something like PopOS or TuxedoOS, which are better versions of Ubuntu, with newer packages and less annoying crap like Snap.
I am not sure if you already use Linux, but some general tips:
try to use Flatpaks from Flathub as much as possible. They are already often officially supported and have less bugs. Also the apps are isolated from your system, so they are more up to date, dont break your system, keep system upgrades small, and they have privacy advantages
use a Distro that supports Wayland very well. X11 is stupidly old and will be completely unsupported in a few years. Its already dead since a few years, as nothing changes.
try an “immutable”, image based Distribution like Fedora Atomic (Kinoite (KDE), Silverblue (Gnome)) or Opensuse Kalpa (KDE) or Aeon (Gnome). They are simply modern, stable, resettable and your changes are transparent.
if you want to do any crazy stuff like code, install apps with many dependencies, do it in a Distrobox. You can install apps normally, but they are still not bloating your system. If you dont need them, delete the Distrobox and your system is clean again. This goes especially for strange University etc. software that needs to be installed with some script or something.
use a root Distrobox if you need things like USB
use fish as your normal shell, simply by editing the Terminals “open command”. That way your shell in the Distroboxes has a different configuration, fish looks nice and colorful and has stuff like autocompletion.
do backups of your system and your data. Just do that always, on an extra drive. It saves so much horror of losing everything, if a drive breaks or your laptop gets stolen or whatever. If you want Cloud backups, use Cryptomator and any cloud you want.
use Syncthing, maybe disable global discovery for LAN only, for syncing your data between two or more specific devices.
use soundbound, SoundCloud Downloader (Firefox Addon) and youtube downloaders as long as they work. Download all of your music to not be dependend on those companies
try waydroid for Android apps on Linux. Use F-Droid basic as the application store, and check for “list of f-droid repositories” and add some.
Wow, I truly appreciate this response. So i’ve been using Linux for a decade and know a “fair” amount, never made it a goal to learn the ins and outs, though I am now. So I hear business laptops make great linux machines. My main question is, most of the computers within my budget that are “known” to be decent linux machines are very old. Are they capable of still keeping up with all the newest and latest versions of distros? or are you stuck on older models just because the nature of the device being older?
Rule of thumb, avoid intel generations younger than 7-8 and avoid i3, on AMD I am not sure but probably the same. Avoid weird cheap brands you never heard, chances are huge that nobody cared to support every hardware piece of them.
Best are noname OEMs like Tongfang and Clevo, if you get those, chances are very good and they are cheaper.
Also a little reminder from debloating a Windows “Gaming laptop” today. Windows doesnt support shit, its the manufacturers making the hardware work by bloating the system with horrible software.
No, these OEMs are noname but not cheap. They are noname because they produce PCs sold under different Brand names. Many Linux Laptops use Tongfang or Clevo hardware, put some branding on there and custom parts and thats it.
Aha I see! thanks for the info. I think i’m going thinkpad though, just gotta decide which model. they are incredibly cheap! especially for what you get
You basically already know the drill; buy it from a Linux-first vendor that offers devices that you can afford. A list of vendors can be found here. Personally, I’m quite fond of NovaCustom and Star Labs. Fortunately, both have ‘cheaper’ offerings with their NJ50 Series and StarLite respectively.
Thanks! but when it comes to linux hardware vendors like those, for me at least, it’s hard to know which ones are good and which ones are bad or unknowns. also, i did look into the lower grade star labs and there was something about the processors they used… i did a little reading and they got poor marks for being uber slow or something. i could have misinterpreted things though.
but when it comes to linux hardware vendors like those, for me at least, it’s hard to know which ones are good and which ones are bad or unknowns.
You hit the nail on the head with that remark. Because, quite frankly, it’s hard for all of us; I would love to read reviews done by Notebookcheck (or similarly high-profile reviewers), unfortunately that’s simply not the case. In this case, you would have to scrape whatever knowledge you can find about these specific devices (and their vendors) before judging for yourself if it’s worth taking the risk.
The reason, why I’m personally fond of NovaCustom and Star Labs, is because they’re known to contribute back significantly to the open-source community; same applies to System76, Purism and Tuxedo. I didn’t name any these in my previous post, because none of them seemed to be sufficiently affordable.
i did look into the lower grade star labs and there was something about the processors they used… i did a little reading and they got poor marks for being uber slow or something. i could have misinterpreted things though.
If it’s about the processor being slow, then I’m not surprised. It’s from Intel’s N-series, which is somewhat of a spiritual successor to Intel’s Celeron and Pentium lines. Both of which are known to be not powerful. And for that price you shouldn’t expect a lot more, but I agree that an i3 (or something else with similar processing power) should have been possible at that price-range.
Begin small, end big. That works for everything when learning something new. So, with that said, go for Linux Mint Cinnamon.
I begun my Linux journey with elementary OS which is more for macOS users. I was a Windows user so I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon. After a few years of exploring and learning, I am now using EndeavourOS.
Gotcha! I browsed their site a bit. I’d have to check ebay because I cannot afford the prices on their new stuff lol. I have a question that maybe you can answer. alot of folks recommend older laptops or whatever for linux. Does age of the computer matter much? I know you can always make upgrades to the internals and such, but say I got an old thinkpad for example maybe from 2010… and it’s certified linux compatible and all that… would i be able to run the latest versions of distros or would i be limited to older kernels due to the system being old? or is all of that determined by the hardware specs?
You don’t need certified Linux hardware to use Linux, and hardware is supported for a really long time once it’s there.
So you don’t have to worry about using latest distros, you should always welcome every update, they fix and add new things (unless it’s Ubuntu, screw them). And if you have new unsupported hardware, it will usually be supported in the next kernel release.
Meaning if you go with usual x86 CPU, Linux won’t have issues with almost anything that comes with it.
So, gnome is an alternative desktop environment and it’s great that they exist. If they inspired Apple’s UI or the other way around, doesn’t matter but they are the Apple UI of Linux. Mac users switching to Linux can have a somewhat familiar experience.
That said, their “we know better than you what you want, luser” attitude makes it hard for me not to grin when someone rants about their stuff. It shouldn’t, because they are probably mostly unpaid contributors and their work should be valued, but once in a while…
Flatpaks saved my bacon when I borked my Linux work computer and didn’t have time to fix it. Spent 2 months with half my apps on Flatpak because the native ones weren’t working.
It’s also great as a developer. While I do provide x86 and arm binaries, I don’t bother distributing them in 20 different formats. The website links to Flathub, and the number of distro/Mesa specific issues has dropped to 0.
I used it once, as a last resort when I wanted to try some program that had a ridiculous set of build dependencies that was just too much. It was okay, I guess.
Aside from philosophical issues my experience with Flatpak has been excellent. There’s some theming steps you need to do to make them feel like regular apps, which I feel is clunky design. No Flatpak-induced instability from what I can tell. Setting up directory permissions is sometimes slightly annoying but Flatseal makes it trivial, and most Flatpak permissions are set up properly out of the box these days.
I haven’t noticed any start-time delays when launching Flatpaks as opposed to regular apps - I don’t know if they’ve fixed that or if my system is just too powerful. The only app that I’ve personally noticed is weird is VSCodium, which has trouble escalating to admin permissions when you’re trying to edit privileged files. I still use the regular version for that reason.
I wasn’t able to get the gsettings method to work (I’m on Wayland KDE), and that article doesn’t say anything about theming QT Flatpaks. Also, after “installing” my GTK theme as a flatpak via the method described, it still wasn’t available to my GTK Flatpaks via the GTK_THEME method. The steps in the itsfoss.com article do work, though there’s been a lot of squabbles about the “proper” way to expose themes to Flatpaks. Regardless, this all goes back to my point that theming Flatpak is clunky and should be much smoother.
GTK_THEME is a development env var, it’s not expected to work in many cases. For example GtkSettings:gtk-theme won’t even contain it so apps can be confused.
The post details exactly how it works but yes it’s only about GTK.
Right, I understand it’s not supposed to be used in “proper” usage, but it does work for all my GTK apps and the gsettings method does not work for me. Unless I’m supposed to store it somewhere else because I’m on KDE.
I do have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk on Debian Stable, which is currently at 1.14.1-1. I’ll look around to see if there’s more documentation on this method, because I would prefer to not use the debug variables if possible.
Edit: I launched with GTK_DEBUG=interactive and I can see the theme inside the Flatpak gets set to Adwaita-empty instead of my actual theme, which does get properly returned via gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme
That gets my normal GTK theme properly. I found a little more discussion on this here. Nothing very actionable but I did also confirm that my xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is running. It seems like this is supposed to be working, but I have a mostly stock Debian 12.1 KDE install and something seems to be wrong somewhere in the chain. I’ve also tried multiple GTK Flatpaks with the same results.
Edit: Also, I have both my themes folder exposed and the theme installed as a Flatpak via the linked script.
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