For those who’re currently looking for a nice new device: shown are (from Top Left to Right):
- NovaCustom (NL)
- Star Labs (UK)
- System76 (US)
- Juno Computers (US)
- UbuntuShop (BE)
- Slimbook (ES)
- Tuxedo Computers (DE)
- Entroware (UK)
- MiniFree (UK)
- Nitrokey (DE)
- Laptops with Linux (NL)
- Purism (US)
Not mentioned but also selling Ready-to-use Linux computer:
- Dell
- Lenovo
Framework deserves a spot in that meme
They ship with Linux?
Yes?
No
My SOs system76 had intermittent graphics issues and their tech support had hour-long calls with me over several weeks and additional emails correspondence where we did some very in-depth testing and monitoring of the machine. I think most of the testing was that their team genuinely wanted to know if it was a hardware or software issue and fix it right.
In the end they replaced the entire motherboard under warranty because they pointed out in another month and it wouldn’t be covered and it might fix it. It did.
I suspect it was just a bad Nvidia GPU. It sucks that it had the problem and that it was difficult to track down but all laptops break.
I challenge anyone to find that level of support from a Windows manufacturer without having a corporate account.
Its kinda funny that when I read “hour-long wait calls” I initially thought you were complaining about being on hold for too long. I just couldn’t imagine a scenario where they were helping you the entire time and it was positive lol
Nope, no waiting, sitting on the call with me while we try multiple things and waiting through reboots while he bounced ideas off I believe an internal slack discussion or something. no trying to get off the call or hand me off to meet some arbitrary call time quota.
You even threw the word “wait” in there independently because of your preconceptions of customer support calls
Dell’s accidental warranty used to be solid AF. I installed Eve OL beta and my graphics card cooked. (even had stripes in the bios) They replaced the entire laptop with a late model P4 of equivalent value to what I paid.
Those days are long gone, though.
Framework:
Came to evangelize about our lord and savior used thinkpads
What color are your knee socks?
I’m here to evangelize coreboot and Talos and Framework for those with more money than you and I
I have a framework, not that happy with it. It sometimes fails to find my encrypted partition (many times reinstalled different systems over the years), it heated up to 100°C so fast that it throttled down to 400 MHz all the time. The overheating is better since they sent me a new motherboard, but it still goes to 95 easily and heats up when doing the most basic stuff. I’ve also had some sound issues lately on Debian stable and testing, but not sure about that.
Repaste it and make sure the heatsink is evenly screwed down. If its still doing that warranty the board and heatsink. That’s a hardware issue and they should fix it without issue.
Regrettable, my amd 7040 works fine since oct 2023, although i had to tinker in the beginning for power optimisation and to get suspension working properly
Same here. Running NixOS on mine, and despite not being officially supported they have pretty good channels on their forums and the staff are quite active on there too.
Talos… are you running kubernetes for your laptop you mad lad? Also, not aware that the coreboot is ready yet for any of the non-chromebook machines. (Edit: meant coreboot for Framework laptops)
oh i use coreboot on an old thinkpad daily, it’s completely fine
Coreboot is for the thinkpads. Talos PPC stuff is just cool if impractical.
I still remember the good old IBM Thinkpads, most of them were indestructible tanks. But with Lenovo, those times are long over. My last machine was a TP L390 Yoga. It overheated frequently, the cooling system was inadequate for the 4.6GHz Intel CPU, one day the logo sticker came off because the glue turned into sticky liquid, the passive Micro-Ethernet dongle cost 50€ and the cable turned into glue after a few months…god, what a shit machine this was.
I was able to work with it for a while by limiting and undervolting the CPU, but one day a Windows update came out that disabled the functionality and it worked like crap on Linux for a long time due to bad drivers.
I switched to GPD now. Never going back, although I miss the Trackpoint a little bit.
Only get the business model. I’ve had T60, T61, T410, T460, X200, x220, X240, X250 and X260. They’re all rock solid. At work we use the X1 Carbon all gen they’re also damn good build quality.
Our experiences seem to differ. I currently have L390 Yoga and it’s the best thing I ever used. The cooling isn’t bad, just the feet are too thin to allow for flipping the screen over. Any cooling pad, or in my case an egg carton fixes this.
Mine has i5-8365U (4.1GHz).The Ethernet is pretty stupid, but I’ve got the dongle from AliExpress for €9.31 and it’s working fine.
I really love the touchscreen in combination with Arch, KDE Plasma and Wayland. It also has pretty great colors, but I am coming from TN, so the bar was laying on the ground.
Driver-wise, everything works OOB on Arch (at least since September 2024 which is when I got it).Really, I only have 2 problems with it:
- The proprietary “Ethernet”
- USB-C doesn’t allow charging from C to A cable despite supporting 5V@2.1A charging from any proper USB-C.
T and P series is aparently good, normal L is decent, but others are terrible (yoga, x, ideapad, etc.). But I haven’t used TP-s myself. I did use an Ideapad and it’s terrible (no upgradability, falling apart metal chassis (how the hell does metal break), no key-travel (feels like hitting a rock while typing) and it has a shitload of mediatek hardware which is a pain on linux (but I haven’t tested it as it’s my dad’s).
I had a thinkpad for YEARS running various flavours of Debian / Ubuntu. It never had an issue with drivers and even the fingerprint sensor worked out of the box.
The battery was shot to hell, the hinge was gone, it was time to upgrade. So I bought an ideapad. There’s something funky with the audio quality on Linux and the fingerprint scanner is now a face scanner camera. Howdy is not easy to configure and I’m pretty sure I can trick it with a photo.
That’s a long way of me saying I have buyers remorse and not all Lenovos are made equal :(
Also Framework.
I think OP means “just work” as in the OS is preinstalled. Framework do support Linux but they don’t preinstall a distro for you.
Having said that, I’ve got a Framework 16 and it’s very nice.
Years ago it was literally impossible to get a laptop without OS. It’s a good enough option compared to what we had to suffer before.
I wouldn’t expect folks working on Linux to be discouraged by the sweat equity of something as small as running the installer for an OS. I definitely read “just work” to mean having all components supported by the OS, regular updates available, etc.
When I checked out during purchasing my 16 I seem to remember the options being “no OS (bring your own), Fedora, Ubuntu, and Windows.” I chose no OS because I was planning on installing FedoraKDE with FDE which wasn’t an option, but, I assumed that by choosing Fedora as my option it would come preinstalled, or does it come with an install USB to do it yourself?
Bought one very recently, the options are
- buy a prebuilt and it will come with windows pre-installed
- buy a DIY edition and the SSD will be new in box with nothing installed on it
- you can opt for a windows license, but it is just a digital download for the installer
Damn, I preordered mine, and definitely remember the option despite not choosing it. I wonder why they took it off. If I had a guess it’s because anyone ordering a framework probably wanted to install the OS themselves for encryption like me or whatever other reason, so almost nobody chose that probably lol.
Came here to say this. I really like mine.
Missing Framework?
Not selling with Linux preinstalled.
Running Debian 12 on a $300 no-name chinese laptop from before the tariffs. Formatted over Windows ofc.
It rules!
Minifree! ❤
Lenovo allows now. U can opt out of windows 11 and save money. I believe they installed Ubuntu. U can reinstall with Linux mint or Pop OS if u like the feel of windows.
You also can deselect the os overall, you save even some more bucks doing this.
Apparently either Ubuntu or Fedora. Given you even save money it’s quite a good offering; although you may get better repairability or hotline support with one of the others.
Computers are fine yes, but I’m still waiting for a Linux phone with not-shit specs LMAO
Every 6 months I check to see if they’ve figured out VOLTE on PostmarketOS, or Sailfish (my dream OS tbh) on community ports. And then I cry and angrily tell people how Microsoft destroyed Meego until I’m told to hush
The Software isn’t fully there yet for mass adoption (Your mileage may vary, but the general expectations for a modern daily driver are pretty high), at least not for anyone but enthusiasts and developers. If there’s something like a PinePhone 2 it will probably yet again designed to be relatively cheap despite low production volume, so as many potential developers as possible can afford one.
If it can handle my banking app (local credit union) and occasionally play YouTube I’m good tbh
A lot of financial apps require Play Protect and attestation. I had to fight for months to figure out how to spoof the integrity check so I could deposit some stupid checks.
I was surprised that BlissOS (fork of Android x86) worked just fine with my bank’s app. But it still refuses to work when running it in VirtualBox. It has to be booted directly on the hardware.
I have so much shit in place because of my root its ridiculous, Magisk + Modules, LSPosed, Shizuku (for those apps that detect if devtools is enabled), HideMyApplist and probably at least 2 more im forgetting
It honestly might be cheaper to get a piece of shit phone and keep it squeaky clean for our overlords
I get by pretty well just using my bank’s website. If you need the bank’s app for something like occasionally depositing checks, maybe you could keep your old phone in a drawer with your checkbook.
More importantly good software, Mobile Linux still sucks
As much as I like my Tuxedo, I probably would not have bought it if I had known that the ethernet card and some laptop essentials dont work without their drivers, which have not been upstreamed. Due to this, I can’t use my distro of choice (Bluefin) OR run with secure boot and LUKS with tpm unlock even on regular Fedora
What Ethernet chip do they use?
I’ve got a Framework 16 and all components work on both Fedora and Debian without installing custom drivers, so I’m surprised it’s still an issue for some laptops.
The model that I have uses the motorcomm yt6801 chip. There is apparently some work going on to upstream the driver by the OEM, but it largely stalled with the last comment being from a kernel maintainer 7 months ago
I wonder why they didn’t go with something more supported, like a Realtek chip. They’re not the best (I’d prefer Intel or Aquantia), but they’re cheap and widely supported. The Framework’s Ethernet expansion card uses a RTL8156 which is supported practically everywhere.
They don’t design all of their laptops, so it’s not always up to them. They order off-the-shelf designs with their logo from Clevo or some other ODM and tweak the firmware.
Do you know if that’s still the case on their new systems?
I’m currently waiting for next gen GPUs to become available and have been leaning towards Tuxedo
I’m using an Infinitybook Pro 14 gen 9. It came out last year.
You will most likely need the “tuxedo-drivers” package, but whether you’ll need an ethernet driver too depends on the hardware they choose.
At least they publish their drivers for both RPM and DEB systems, so that makes it a bit less painful.
Of course, none of this applies if you use their distro. There, everything is pre-installed and configured for their laptops
True enough. I likely will just stick with the stock system.
They’re all shitty clevo laptops
That’s not true! Some of them are Tongfang devices. 🥴
It’s true those companies have to overwhelmingly work with ODMs, doesn’t necessarily make the devices shitty though.
Starlabs design their own.
They’re also insanely expensive
Because they design their own, yes. That’s how economy of scale works.
To benefit from it you either need to sell an absurd amount of stuff or buy from those who do.
Obviously they have their reasons but few people are willing to pay a ton of money for a laptop with designs that while custom arent groundbreaking or particularly unique
They’re a nice design. I bought one.
I beg to differ, i have bought clevo w650sj back in the day when it was produced, it works great to this day, just added ssd and ram and it works great with opensuse tumbleweed and windows 11 dualboot, i use windows in dual boot because i need adobe and flashing software for obscure chinese phones and flashing software to revive bricked usb sticks
Well, the quality of most laptops fell enough in the last decade, that the clevos are decent now. Also, fuck thinkpad part rejection, I’m definitely not buying a (edit: new) TP.
would you mind elaborating on the part rejection? i am not sure what is meant by that
ThinkPads refuse to work with non-Lenovo batteries.
And different wwan cards. How are you supposed to add mobile broadband? Buy the same as OEM card?
i wasn’t aware of that. thank you! is this a recent development?
I can’t find an exact date, but there is a YouTube tutorial from 2018 on removing the battery whitelist, so it’s been at least 7 years.
PSA: My Starbook MK V has great specs but feels cheap and loses charge when closed, so it’s always empty when I need it.
(Tried all firmware updates and different distros, without success and their support isn’t of any help either. Won’t be ordering from them again.)
I think what people mean when they say this is that they are looking for the same price point as the equivalent Windows device… I don’t know all these companies but every time I looked for a Linux PC/laptop it was 25-30% more expensive than the equivalent Windows thing.
Framework as well—everything just works. I recently discovered
framework-tool, which is a mindblowing level of integration with Linux.Thank you! This is awesome:
Get and set fingerprint LED brightness (–fp-brightness, --fp-led-level)
