Thinkpads (p14s are a good example) are really great with everything except probably gaming. Having a good GPU usually just comes at the cost of battery life.
Fedora or Nobara for OS
If you reaaaaaally want gaming, you could look at external GPU via thunderbolt or USB 4
If you want something even lighter, Samsung makes some decent laptops with insane battery life and really thin metal casing. Only issue is they’re usually expensive and don’t drop in price like Thinkpads sometimes do.
Just gonna throw in a recommendation for Nobara as a distro. Based on Fedora, maintained by Glorious egroll who makes great versions of proton. Distro is tuned for gaming but is great for regular use too. Used it for over a year and set my GF up with it as her first Linux desktop.
+1 for Nobara. I never could stand the farting around it took to get Fedora to use codecs and non-free software, so I was a little off-put trying Nobara, but it’s been a pleasure to use. I still miss the AUR but not as much as the last time I left the Arch ecosystem. And it comes out of the box ready to game, with everything you are going to need to have the best experience you’ll find on Linux without having to beat your head against all weird things you have to do to configure properly.
And KDE is a first-class citizen instead of sitting on the backburner waiting for a chance. I liked that change in the last release even though it was working well enough despite being non-default.
As someone who’s only ever used GNOME and has a Nobara install, what would the transition be like and is it worth it to reimage my machine with a KDE N39 install?
You could just add the plasma-full package or the more minimal group and log out, it’ll be a choice in the display manager login screen. I’d go with the Wayland session. If you can’t run Wayland because of GPU issues, you’re probably better off with Gnome.
I don’t know if I can recommend framework. I’ve been having lots of reliability issues with their hardware.
I had massive issues a few months in. Lots of weird issues such as SSD randomly disconnects, screen flicker & system crashes, and issues with powering on after leaving the laptop overnight.
Been emailing back and forth with them since October trying out different fixes. All this time I haven’t really been able to use my laptop reliably. It should be getting sorted eventually. Their warrenty is pretty good and they finally agreed to replace the whole thing.
The laptop was nice. The modular ports was kinda cool because you can choose your io. The nice part was being able to open the laptop and upgrade parts without voiding warrenty. I think this is hardware issues rather than linux compatibility issues.
Maybe a Thinkpad would be more reliable for uni work
Any modern Thinkpad will run any Linux distro easy, from bios updates up to gaming with Proton. Dell laptops also have a good linux support. Try to avoid laptops with Nvidia cards though, AMD driver installation is way easier if not completely invisible/painless.
I have a framework. The smaller one. I think they have two now. One of the older CPUs. Got it now than a year ago and it’s been solid. Disclaimer: I don’t run Linux on it, so IDK what that’s like at the moment.
I’ve used most makes and models of laptops and desktops at some point for some duration… The hazards of being in IT… I can’t recommend anything from Microsoft. Simply too hard to do anything with when anything goes wrong and you’re entirely at the mercy of MS for everything. I personally don’t like Lenovo, I’ve had a few Lenovo’s that have their PCIe slots locked to only accept specific device I.D.s in the firmware. I had to flash a hacked firmware to upgrade the wifi in one. It was an unpleasant experience. It did eventually work, but it was not fun. I also don’t care for their keyboard layouts. That’s been improved recently from what I’ve heard, I’m still equally not a fan of their systems.
I’ve had the most experience with HP and Dell, and for the most part they’re very similar. Anything from their business lines will perform quite well though graphics may only be whatever comes integrated with the CPU.
I always push towards business systems because from what I’ve seen, they’re more robust and usually don’t break nearly as fast.
I’d think about getting an eGPU for gaming since no matter how powerful the system or it’s GPU is, it will be massively outdated long before the system fails or becomes inoperable from age. With an eGPU external enclosure, you can upgrade any time you like to a desktop card for much cheaper than replacing the system. Most eGPU enclosures can also act as docking stations, providing power and even network and other things along with the graphics connection.
That’s a lot of hardware talk though. I’m not going to tell you what to pick, I’m just making the best recommendations I can given the information available to me.
If you just want stuff to work with minimal hassle, Linux Mint is an excellent choice. PopOS is also often recommended, especially for laptops. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, something Arch based might fit the bill.
I see a lot of Framework recommendations, and I had the 12th gen Framework for around a year running Fedora. I faced a bunch of excessive power use issues, and had to add some kernel flags just to get maybe 4 hours of battery life. The device is notoriously repairable, but the one thing that conked out on me was actually the mainboard, which was like the price of a new device. Support spent two weeks trying to find out if it was anything else before sending me a replacement mainboard.
My friend recently got a Zenbook 14 OLED with the same processor. The entire device was $200 cheaper lightly used than the Frameworks mainboard alone, and the only issue is the speakers don’t work. That being said, he gets almost double my battery life, and a 90hz OLED screen on top of it all. Plus more ports; even with Framework’s modular add-in cards I don’t feel it is as flexible a system as having >4 useful ports.
My time with the Framework was great, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Getting something secondhand is an environmentally conscious option, and you can get great stuff secondhand.
A couple mentions in here of Linux Mint, I also recommend it having tried out a few distros before landing here. Especially if you go with an external GPU laptop, which might be a good choice for gaming needs, then Linux Mint has been really good about solving all of the annoying driver problems that could come up.
I have a Dell G15 Ryzen (AMD with nvidia GPU), it’s been pretty good but there’s always a trade-off between bulkiness and gaming needs. It’s just a little awkward to lug around to coffee shops, but it’s certainly got enough processing power for me.
System76 was a contender too, I think I just went with whichever was on sale!
I have never had an issue on Linux mint that was not me fucking with the comabd line doing things it warned me I should not, or that wasn’t outright a hardware failure
Avoid Lenovo. At least, I have not had great experiences with the ThinkPad T14s AMD, both gen 1 and gen 2.
Gen 2 came with an Aetheros (sp?) bt/wifi card that would never wake up after suspend, had to get an Intel replacement, thankfully the bad one wasn’t soldered in and I could replace it.
Trackpad has glitches that had to be mitigated in the kernel - mitigated well enough that it doesn’t bother me but it’s still silly
And both gen 1 and 2 still cannot reliably wake from suspend, and experience unreasonably high battery drain while suspended
Then again that could be a problem with all modern laptops…
I’m a fan of the old IBM ThinkPads. Not sure about the recent ones.
I’ve had huge problems with one of Lenovo’s Legion laptops. Awful support too, they did everything they could to not have to fix it. It took a licensed third party to finally take us seriously and fix the dang thing.
So I wouldn’t recommend Lenovo unless the only alternative was Dell.
I’ve run Linux on the T410, T520, P50, P51, X1g2, X1g5, X1 Yoga, and p16s, all when those laptops were new. Sometimes the wifi was hard to configure, or the fingerprint scanner didn’t work, or the wwan card wasn’t supported, or the power states where fucky and drained the battery, but that was in it’s way all part of the fun.
It’s definitely gotten easier over time to run Linux on new hardware and I’ll pick a Thinkpad for the job every time. I use a modern Thinkpad with linux for work every day.
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