In addition to all the sound advice you’ve been give so far, you should have a support contract in case you run into problems and ideally, contract someone to set up your laptop so you have proper encryption, backup etc. You have to consider both meeting the business deadlines, and ensuring the confidentiality and availability of the data. If you want to do this yourself, contract someone to validate your configuration.
It’s about being in the free software ecosystem, which is really a licensing issue.
Forcing people to contribute their modifications to software when they are editing free software ensures we’re never dependent on the decisions of one entity. This is what the GNU General Public License (GPL) is all about.
If we don’t like what someone did, we can take that part out and redistribute a better version that we can continue to modify. This might not matter to someone who doesn’t program, but it should.
You don’t have to be the one to get your hands dirty with code. Just being a user in the ecosystem opens you up to these benefits. Other people are going to take advantage of them, and you can just piggyback on their work.
I, personally, think it’s always just a matter of time before businesses make products worse by charging more/giving less. Look at Adobe. Look at Microsoft. Look at Apple. All of them want to lock people into endless subscriptions because they’re dependent on their ecosystem. What happens when Adobe decides they’re not charging enough for photoshop? They charge more, and everyone just has to deal with it. Same goes for Office. Same goes for Apple, they just do it the old-fashioned way by charging for the latest versions and making you buy new hardware.
As others have stated, as long as you are using a distribution with reasonably modern (and maybe frequent) updates of the kernel and mesa stack, it doesn’t matter much. The updates of these two packages are what will provide updated hardware support and performance improvements.
Steer clear of Nvidia. It can work on linux, but is a pain due to Nvidia not providing proper open-source driver support. I also highly recommend ensuring you have an intel chip if you need wifi, as realtek and broadcom can be a bit variable in terms of support and stability for wifi.
Wayland is also preferable in my view, due to its significant benefits over X11 - it is more secure, makes your computer much smoother, and supports modern niceties like better multi-monitor support, gestures, lack of tearing, HDR (in the future), etc.
This segues into my next point. It makes more difference what DE you use when gaming - GNOME currently doesn’t support VRR on Wayland (appears to be coming in next release at least experimentally), while KDE does. So that is something to think about. I would stick to either of these two DEs as these are the only two that are both user friendly for beginners, and have excellent wayland support. Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE all do not yet support Wayland.
I would steer clear of distributions that are not established, and/or only have very small or single person teams (as this has potential security, stability and support implications) and would recommend Fedora. Fedora has a bleeding edge mesa and kernel (that roll between releases), but stability elsewhere with a solid community behind it and a dedicated security team, built on cutting edge technologies throughout. If you need VRR I would use the Fedora KDE spin. OpenSUSE tumbleweed is also a great choice.
Many users will recommend Arch Linux systems, as this is the hotness, particularly as this is what SteamOS is based on. I wouldn’t recommend this even as a very happy Gentoo user, however, as relatively “pure” Arch Linux distributions (and Gentoo), will require you to follow notices on the website, and will require your knowledge and intervention at some point based on this notice; without your intervention, it will likely break your system. So as a beginner I would avoid Arch Linux and Endeavour OS.
Manjaro has had many too issues with the security and stability of their distribution to allow me to comfortably recommend it, and the Nobara and Garuda Linux teams are both too small for me to be comfortable recommending them. Zorin OS, Pop_OS and Linux Mint are all excellent workstation distributions, but their outdated kernels and software (they are based on a long-term support base) mean you may be either giving up some performance or hardware compatibility.
Having an Nvidia-card, should I be worried about this? So far I’ve read so many “Nvidia bad, Wayland no work” posts that I have just stayed clear waiting for a final confirmation that everything is smooth sailing.
I’ve been using Wayland on Nvidia with plasma for about a year and it’s been mostly fine. Only a few minor issues like night color not working or some Xwayland apps flickering, but the system feels far more responsive on Wayland so it’s well worth it to me
On much more recent driver versions Wayland support has been further improved. I suggest going with Fedora Silverblue since RPM Fusion is pretty quick to roll out new driver versions.
Having swapped to Linux on Pop OS and later onto Nobara recently, I strongly disagree.
As my personal experience on 525, 535 and even beta 545 with a 3080, so much as swapping onto a Wayland session implied lag, screen tearing issues, and stability issues / crashes on KDE and GNOME, to the point that I ended up selling the 3080 for a 7900 XTX because of how everyone said the AMD experience is so much better and it is.
True that I havent tested it on a laptop so maybe Optimus support from Nvidia or the latest drivers have added stability overall, but this was definitely a problem in desktop for the last months to me.
before anyone gets too excited, this doesn’t seem like it applies to DG2 gaming cards, ATSM and PVC are compute cards
<span style="color:#323232;">+SR-IOV Capability
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+=================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Due to SR-IOV complexity and required co-operation between hardware, firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+and kernel drivers, not all Xe architecture platforms might have SR-IOV enabled
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+or fully functional.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+To control at the driver level which platform will provide support for SR-IOV,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+as we can't just rely on the PCI configuration data exposed by the hardware,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+we will introduce "has_sriov" flag to the struct xe_device_desc that describes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+a device capabilities that driver checks during the probe.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Initially this flag will be set to disabled even on platforms that we plan to
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+support. We will enable this flag only once we finish merging all required
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+changes to the driver and related validated firmwares are also made available.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+SR-IOV Platforms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Initially we plan to add SR-IOV functionality to the following SDV platforms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+already supported by the Xe driver:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - TGL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - ADL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - MTL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - ATSM (up to 31 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - PVC (up to 63 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Newer platforms will be supported later, but we hope that enabling will be
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+much faster, as majority of the driver changes are either platform agnostic
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+or are similar between earlier platforms (hence we start with SDVs).
</span>
AppStream makes machine-readable software metadata easily accessible. It is a foundational block for modern Linux software centers, offering a seamless way to retrieve information about available software, no matter the repository it is contained in. It can provide data about available applications as well as available firmware, drivers, fonts and other components. This project it part of freedesktop.org.
Get the list of programs you commonly use and figure out if they’re on Linux or have alternatives. Libreoffice, VLC and Okular are good for your case. If you find it limiting and need MS features then browser Office 365 is very good.
The best option would be to buy a used laptop and install Linux, Linux works great on old hardware so you could find something 3-7y old and it’ll run very well.
If you’re coming from Apple try anything with Gnome that’s popular (Ubuntu, Fedora).
If you’re coming from windows try anything that uses KDE (Kubuntu, Fedora w KDE, KDE neon).
If you don’t tinker with things under the hood generally you’ll have a painless polished experience.
Being able to get a modern OS that runs smoothly on a 200$ used laptop is the major selling point for you, rest is extra.
We use browser office 365 at work. It’s on a Windows computer. I gotta say it sucks ass if your stuff doesn’t all live in an associated onedrive. We have a shared drive that common files live in and accessing them from the browser office is a mess.
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