Pantherina, 1 year ago

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.

And… maybe dont get an M1 Macbook ;D