[SunShiranui]

It's nice to see this - I'm definitely interested in seeing computers built and designed for Linux.

I must say, however, I don't see that need for desktops. Custom desktops are relatively easy to build, even for customers.

A well designed linux laptop, with no driver issues, good build quality, that doesn't sacrifice performance for thinness? That's what I'm missing.

[sniglom]

Well, I have no issues building a desktop, but if somebody asked me about what (modern) components to choose for no driver issues, I wouldn't know. Avoiding issues and getting support could certainly be worth something.

[noir_lord]

I find that buying 6mths behind just under the state of the art gets you 90% of the performance often for half the cost.

I've been custom building my desktops since the 90's and I can't remember the last time I had an issue with hardware, I think it was a Geforce MX440 so ~2003.

The driver story on desktop hardware for Linux is absolutely great (in my experience) if the hardware has been out 6mths or more or uses a core chipset/device that has.

[microtonal]

I have given this advise on Hacker News before: on eBay 2-3 year old workstations can be had for 300-400 Euro. Typically these are workstations from companies that replace machines every 2 years or so.

These are typically equipped with Xeon CPUs, plenty of memory, sometimes ECC etc. Moreover, since they are usually HP/Dell workstations, they are certified to be compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so all the hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work.

Just to give one random example:

http://www.ebay.de/itm/DELL-Precision-T1650-CPU-Intel-Xeon-E...

Xeon CPU, 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD for 425 euro.

[sireat]

I love buying old workstations, however power costs have to be considered.

For example my 2x Xeon 2670 (16 cores/32 threads) is quite the power hog.

Your example is pretty good since V2 Xeons are Ivy Bridge le vel and consume noticably less power than V1 equivalents.

However that particular CPU is basically i5 not i7 (just 4 cores/4 threads).

[egeozcan]

This is very cool. I wonder how much the electricity costs would be if I let that machine stay on 7/24 for a year. Power, in Germany, is a bit expensive (learned the hard way).

[ooqr]

Unless you want your PC to sleep and wake back up. That still takes a while to get resolved with every GPU apparently.

[nol13]

Such a simple thing, (as far as a user is concerned) yet also a complete show stopper when it doesn't work right.

[bitwize]

ACPI is a busted-ass standard. OEMs are free to, and do, do pretty much whatever. Again, the only relevant standard from an OEM's perspective is "does it work on Windows".

[speeder]

Last year I bought a i5-4690k, some slightly outdated but top of line mobo, 32gb DDR3 2400mhz and a bunch of 1tb WD Black... Total price was about 800USD yet it feels like I had bought something much more expensive, everything I throw on the machine runs fast, even the HDDs are fast enough that I don't feel need for SSD.

Only mistake was buying AMD 380x for GPU

[ufo]

What did you regret about the 380x?

I ask because I have been thinking about having my next card be an amd one because I'm tired of having to deal with proprietary drivers with my current nvidia card...

[speeder]

I was using only nVidia my whole life, and got tired of some of their business-related bullshit.

So I thought AMD was going to be better, because they try to be good and nice...

Well, AMD hardware is NOT good as nVidia (example: 380x in particular is really fast, but EXTREMELY power hungry, so much power hungry that AMD had to greatly cripple it, sometimes it starts stuttering heavily in games before it gets hot, and when I look at logs, the reason was it reaching power usage limits).

And they are bad at marketing, but also do the bad things that nVidia do at marketing, for example AMD shills do exist, I got banned from chat rooms after asking how to fix bugs (because they want to give the impression their drivers are bugless... but they are complete crap too, even their Open Source driver for Linux is so much crap it was entirely rejected by the kernel team), they deny their cards have physical bugs (RX480 has same issues as 380X, but ALSO has unbalanced power usage, drawing too much power from the mobo and damaging it), and so on...

I tried asking for help with my card issues with both AMD, Sapphire (the manufacturer) official and non-official channels, and I was treated very badly, people would ignore tickets, give me non-sense information, and several times they told me to just return the card and buy another one (I can't do that because I purchased my computer in US, but I live in Brazil, if I could do that I would have switched my 380x for a nVidia GeForce 970, back when I bought the 380x they were in several countries the same price).

Also AMD drivers don't crash the OS like nVidia ones do, but they crash a lot more, in all OSes, AMD drivers restarting (And taking your game/software with them) is fairly common, also weird error messages (like updater crashing, control panel crashing, etc...)

[striking]

> their Open Source driver for Linux is so much crap it was entirely rejected by the kernel team

No, amdgpu was not rejected by the kernel team. A particular implementation of the driver was rejected because it implemented an abstraction layer, and that would make it nearly impossible for kernel devs to maintain.

> drawing too much power from the mobo and damaging it

If you could point to an example of this happening, I'd appreciate it. My knowledge of the situation is that some models of the RX 480 can run slightly out of spec, pulling a little too much power from the motherboard. Any motherboard I've heard of could withstand that. And if you really care you can enable an option in the driver that causes it to run strictly in PCI spec.

I'm not an AMD shill, I just think you've misrepresented some of the issues at hand. AMD make mistakes, for sure. But not every mistake is as crippling as you've implied.

[braveo]

for some reason I usually get downvoted when I bring this up, but I still believe NVidia is a better experience on Linux than AMD.

Like you, I always ran NVidia because of their support for Linux, but recently tried to use an AMD card for a Linux build. I ended up buying an NVidia instead, and all my problems have gone away.

[unsigner]

The 380x and 390x are HOT. Newer Radeons are much better in that regard, and generally very decent cards - 470/480 and the recent rebrands/reclocks 570/580.

[speeder]

MY 380x only get hot when using the default fan control, that is complete crap.

With my custom fan curve it starts to get limited in performance while still around 60c (and fan noise is still not 'perceptible' over the sound of a game for example), because it instead hit power limits.

The 380x has same power limit as 380, despite having more GPU power available and double the RAM, I have no idea why they made such crappy decision.

Is power problems are so severe, that undervolting the card make it MORE stable and faster, because it reduces total power usage, and triggers the power limits less often. (same thing apply to 480 by the way, people found out during the 'PCI slot melts' crisis that undervolting it made it behave much better).

[egeozcan]

I own a 380x but it's in the corner gathering dust because of buggy drivers and crashes. It doesn't keep running long enough to get hot in my case.

[baldfat]

When WiFi finally got to the point when 90% just works was huge. 2009?

[mijoharas]

Bluetooth can still be a PITA though...

[baldfat]

It has gotten really good in the last 5 years. I only have been using OpenSUSE with Bluetooth though.

[mijoharas]

I still hit bugs with Arch and I know they can hit Ubuntu as well[0], for instance, If anyone can connect to an amazon echo as an audio device I'd like to know what version of bluez and/or pulseaudio they are using, as it stopped working after an update a while ago...

[EDIT] Though to be fair, I think they did call out bluetooth as one of the things Ubuntu was going to focus on in their next release IIRC.

[0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/871630/cant-send-audio-to-am...

[yorwba]

I don't think WiFi is that common in desktop hardware.

[cmdrfred]

In business not really, the majority of home users are on WiFi though.

[jasminz]

Ok, I would assume this is something that might differ between countries. Here in Scandinavia I've met extremely few people running their desktops exclusively on WiFi since it's generally unreliable when having lot of devices talking to same AP/WiFi router in a noisy environment with lot of other networks taking up same frequencies. Actually, I would say running Powerline to desktops is more of a standard approach here.

[Majestic121]

On laptop, sure. But on desktop? I've never met anyone using something else than plain old RJ45

[Sir_Substance]

I agree, but this is more of a documentation issue than anything. I stopped bothering to look at the Ubuntu "supported hardware" page a few years ago because I could tell from the graphics card listed (and not listed) that it hadn't been updated since about 2011.

I appreciate that hardware testing is complex and expensive, but I'd love to see an annual "high spec" and "low spec" Ubuntu reference build, with a price tag of maybe $1500 and $600 respectively, that have been tested and confirmed working with the current LTS.

That having been said, I wouldn't pay system76 a premium for it. I'd do what I've done every year so far, which is search a bit and then ultimately buy what I want and cross my fingers.

[ihaveajob]

Someone could do the legwork of selecting one such system each year, put it up somewhere and collect referral commissions. Much like voter guides help those interested to gain political clout just by doing their own research and publishing it.

[Sir_Substance]

That wouldn't represent a support commitment from Canonical. I'm hoping for less of "this worked last time I tried it" and more "We've found this hardware fairly easy to support, and we're willing to commit to making sure that this specific combo works flawlessly in all cases, and will have functional upgrade paths".

[s_kilk]

> A well designed linux laptop, with no driver issues, good build quality, that doesn't sacrifice performance for thinness? That's what I'm missing.

It exists, it's the Thinkpad T-series.

I don't get all this hand-wringing over the need for hypothetical great Linux machines when we have Thinkpads available right now.

[Lio]

Thinkpads are great but if I buy a Thinkpad T-series laptop I'm forced to buy Windows with it.

Also it's not supported by the manufacturer. Thinkpads have great support from the Linux community but Lenovo doesn't officially guarantee its use (I would be happy to hear if I'm wrong on that).

[ekianjo]

Dont they have a contract with RedHat to ensure compatibility?

[Hydraulix989]

Yes, in my experience, the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader:

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Discussion/Validity-Finge...

[cacarr]

Indeed. Everything works on my X1 Carbon running Arch (via Antergos), except the fingerprint reader.

[johndotsun]

Thinkpads are great if your standards for screen quality are incredibly low. I can't speak for the ones released in the last couple years but seemingly all of the older ones have garbage tier screens. My T430 has a screen that is at best about as good as the screen that came with my 2009 Asus netbook.

[clarry]

My T460s definitely has a garbage tier screen. And garbage tier trackpad. The trackpoint feels like garbage too. And I had to replace the keyboard once because it was garbage and broke.

[kuschku]

You can buy Thinkpads also preloaded with free DOS. (Usually a lot cheaper)

[ac29]

How? Hasn't been an option on the last 2 thinkpads I bought. Just went and tried to customize a T470 and nope, still have to get Windows.

[kuschku]

If you're a student, you can sometimes still get it.

[vertex-four]

You probably can as a business customer? Not sure.

[bluehazed]

You used to be able to, I don't think you can any longer.

[gamache]

T450 owner here, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop. My machine hangs when I unplug it from the Thinkpad dock. X rendering glitches are an hourly occurrence and X crashes weekly. In laptop mode, the trackpad handling is not up to snuff either. (I guess if I wanted all those features, I could just install Windows.)

[haspok]

You will most definitely want a recent kernel (16.04 ships with 4.4 - you want 4.8 or later). Also check the Arch wiki about Intel video to see if you can fix your problems with X (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics), eg. switching from SNA to UXA.

[gamache]

Thanks for the link -- I'm still hanging when unplugging from the dock, but switching to UXA and disabling 3D accel seems to have quieted the glitches down.

I did try some newer kernels a few months ago, but then my wifi stopped working. But this should not be necessary when running a flagship LTS desktop Linux on extremely common hardware from two years ago! I expected more.

[ac29]

Linux hardware support often takes years to mature -- for example, the graphics hardware on my Haswell laptop has seen steady improvements despite being years old. I would strongly recommend against using a LTS linux release from around the time your computer was released. Its just going to be too old. Try Ubuntu 17.04, or take the jump and just use Arch. I use Arch on all my work and home machines, without issue. Maybe twice a year requires 5-10 minutes of extra work during an upgrade to ensure a package update works.

[pedrocr]

>I would strongly recommend against using a LTS linux release from around the time your computer was released. Its just going to be too old. Try Ubuntu 17.04

No point in doing that. Just use the hardware enablement stack. It gets you the 17.04 kernel/X/etc over the LTS base. Best of both worlds.

[gamache]

For what it's worth, I tried a few different OSes, including Ubuntu 16.10 (which was the latest at the time), before settling on 16.04 LTS (which was released a year after the laptop came out). I plan to try 17.04 when I get some time, but I also expect to be disappointed. I got about 10min into an Arch install before laughing myself into a coma -- I've seen smoother Unix installs from the 1990s.

But I will reiterate: this is clown shoes. Expecting this kind of effort from desktop users is hostile.

[ac29]

Re: the X issues... dump the Intel X driver for the modesetting driver (you will want a recent kernel for this). Made a world of difference on my Intel laptop.

[sidm83]

That's not the case always. My first cheap thinkpad worked great, but the 2nd expensive one (T440p) has bad driver support for Wifi (on current and last Ubuntu LTS). Connections are unstable and throughput is ~0.3x of the dongle I use (both 2.4Ghz 802.11n). Hardware - Realtek RTL8192EE PCIe.

[nissimk]

Always opt for Intel hardware. They have Linux device driver developers on staff. Sometimes the newest chips are not supported, but they always release something within a few months.

[sidm83]

Yeah that's what I wanted too but unfortunately the supplier for my company did not have one.

[bdavisx]

What dongle do you use? I've got a Clevo laptop that otherwise works great w/ Ubuntu, but the wifi is pretty bad.

[bdavisx]

In case anyone is reading this from a search, I thought I should clarify, the wifi sucks in Ubuntu or Win10, so it doesn't appear related to linux.

[sidm83]

Oh OK. My setup is dual boot but I've never had patience enough to spend enough time to test on Win. Just crappy hardware/drivers from Realtek then!

[sidm83]

I use a TP-Link TL-WN823N. Did not require any 3rd party driver installs, just plug and play.

[Arnt]

Which T is closest to a Macbook Air 11"?

There are many fine linux laptops in the desk-home type, 14"-17". The selection isn't so fine if you're looking for something that'll fit in your lap on the plane or train, and have 8G of RAM. Or at least 4.

[haspok]

You want an XPS 13 then.

I just used mine on a Ryanair flight a few days ago, cramped in the middle seat for 3 hours. The XPS 13 fit perfectly on the very small folding table, the top of the screen just sticking under the bottom of the pocket-thing that is always full of useless flyers.

I believe it has the same footprint as a MBA 11. And of course, I'm running Linux on it :)

[mmrezaie]

XPS 13 is amazing and with Linux support it is fine, but that keyboard though. You need to test it to see if it fits for you.

[signal11]

I use a Thinkpad X230 - it has a 12.5" display with 8 or 16GB RAM. The latest model appears to be X270 -- same size display.

http://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/Thi...

[jeremyjh]

X1 Carbon series works great with Linux. Its a little bigger than 11", but still very light and slim and a nice display. I use a Gen 1 (2012) with 8GB ram. Installed originally Ubuntu 12.04, upgraded to 14.04 and 16.04. All worked great. I presently run Arch on it which was also easy to install and works great.

[restalis]

You just trampled over "doesn't sacrifice performance for thinness". And using on my lap in a plane or whatever, like maybe I would when laying on my couch, was never even considered. Are you sure it's a practical measure to judge by a product and isn't just an Apple-tailored one?

[Arnt]

No I didn't, I'm saying that if a laptop doesn't have an acceptable form factor, its performance (or even existence) doesn't matter. I'm also saying that models in the T series do not offer form factors suitable for everyone, contrary to the GP's claim, and offering the Macbook Air 11" as an example of the kind of form factor not offered.

[tonyedgecombe]

My wife has an X240, something in that series is equivalent to the Air. To be honest I would just go for the Apple, we have had quite a few problems with the Lenovo.

[ac29]

What problems? I have the same computer and love it.

[tonyedgecombe]

The worst one is if I pick it up by the left side it crashes.

[ac29]

Ack. That's roughly where the CPU is, I wonder if some of the solder balls are cracking and it needs a reflow. I've never had to deal with Lenovo service, but it might be worth contacting them -- that is definitely a hardware issue.

[mciancia]

Maybe x260?

[dagw]

It exists, it's the Thinkpad T-series.

Does Optimus work the way I'd expect it to these days?

[leggomylibro]

Ehhhh....

Bumblebee has kind of fallen into a 'not officially supported' state as of xenial, but it will work if you are willing to spend a bit of time cajoling it by messing with drivers and blacklists and config files.

Nvidia also has an official solution now called 'nvidia-prime,' but it's awful. You have to log out and back in to change which card you're using, so you can't just spin up the discrete card for one or two taxing programs in your workflow.

But it can work the way you'd expect it to, if that's what you're asking.

[mmrezaie]

I had bumblebee on my precision 5520, and it works fine. You need to meddle with it a little bit, but after that everything works fine. Actually, I loved it since I could have my X11 memory space controlled by Intel and my Cuda application development wouldn't have messed up the X11 while running. Something you expect to not happen, but happens all the time.

Bumblebee and optirun can be better, but it is usable right now.

[pkolaczk]

Does it allow to connect external displays? Last time I checked bumblebee worked almost fine, but it didn't notice I connected an external display to DP hardwired to dGPU, and dGPU stayed powered-off. I got through a few workarounds for that, and even managed to get something incorrectly displayed, but nothing really worked like it should, so I gave up and I'm using this ugly nvidia-prime thing and just remember to set it in "performance mode" before using my laptop with external displays.

[mmrezaie]

Well, it works fine when I use HDMI for the external display. I have not tested the DisplayPort.

[adamc]

Don't they have poor touchpads?

[s_kilk]

Nah, they're really good I find, maybe not as good as the apple glass trackpad, but certainly not bad. Plus, they have the awesome physical buttons along the top, combined with the trackpoint.

[aortega]

Pretty much all lenovo Thinkpad laptops works perfectly fine with Linux. Source: I have about 5, different models.

[crazy2be]

By perfectly fine, do you mean:

- Wifi is flaky (ier than on windows)

- Battery life is shit (ier than on windows)

- Sleep mode has one of the following problems

* Does not properly suspend (i.e. wakes up immediately when suspending, shuts down instead of suspending)

* Does not properly resume (i.e. kernel crash on resume)

* Sometimes does not properly resume (even more annoying to debug)

* Resumes randomly, when you don't want, often turning your backpack into a forge.

- Hibernate mode doesn't work (at all, your hardware has been blacklisted).

- Plugging in an external monitor occasionally causes everything to crash (but sometimes just compiz).

These are the most annoying problems I have on my Linux laptop. Admittedly, mine is not Thinkpad, but looking at reviews on the latest Thinkpad, at least the battery life issue seems to be ever present. These are pretty much the same problems I've had for the 10 or so years I've been running Linux on laptops. I would have thought they'd been fixed by now. 10 years ago, Windows had a bunch of these problems too, so it was excusable. Now, it's just embarrassing.

I still run Linux on my laptop because I like the dev environment and tools so very very much, but I would pay serious money for hardware that was guaranteed to just work (tm) with Linux, with all of the above solved by the vendor rather than by me. I used to enjoy these little problems, but now they just annoy.

The sleep mode problems are the most annoying to me, the most elusive to solve, and the most impossible to predict from reviews :/

[terminalcommand]

Proud x201 user here.

Wifi works perfectly, suspend/resume, docking/undocking too.

As for battery life, it was around 19W/h when I first switched to linux after FreeBSD. After installing tld and powertop it is stable around 10.8-12W with wifi enabled.

Maybe you might want to try a recent distro, I'm using Fedora and I really like it.

Even my 3G usb dongle worked flawlessly with zero config.

PS: I remember having a flaky wifi under Debian 8, but that was due to an old version of wifi driver. It has since long been fixed in every distro I tried -including Debian-.

PS 2: My laptop is pretty old (x201), so your mileage may vary. You might want to check out thinkwikis for further info.

[ajford]

Partly, that's because the x201 is so old. It's had about 7 years to mature support.

I had an x201 new, and I ran into all those problems listed above for the first two years. Hell, I had to use a USB WIFI dongle for the first year or so because the drivers hadn't stablized.

[H1Supreme]

Yeah, I'm so tired of hearing this come up when people are looking for Linux laptops. It's very old, and VERY ugly. Most of us want something modern that runs Linux well.

[plouc]

I can only speak about myself of course but running Ubuntu 16.04 on a thinkpad x250 I have absolutely none of the issues you have listed above. Maybe you hear more about people having bad experiences than good ones?

[catmanjan]

I remember having these issues on an x60 series maybe 8 years ago, but my friends who have thinkpads are all running them fine, even on the jankiest distros with a bit of careful driver picking

[yaantc]

Owner of a Thinkpad X1 3rd gen running Debian (started with Jessie, now Stretch), and my experience is quite different but there are some things to know. Let's trade anecdotes:

> - Wifi is flaky (ier than on windows)

No problem there, always been rock solid. The chipset is likely to matter, my laptop uses an Intel chipset. Performance wise Intel may not be the best, but the Linux support has always been good in my experience.

> - Battery life is shit (ier than on windows)

A very common misunderstanding, and very easy to solve. The thing is, a stock Linux distro is made independently of the PC hardware that will run it. There's no integration like any PC vendor does when installing Windows, making sure the Windows configuration is well tuned. In order to be functional on most devices, a Linux distro is typically conservative, and will typically stay away from enabling low-power modes that are flaky on some crappy PC models.

But for most tier 1 PC brands, the hardware is fine and it's perfectly safe to enable aggressive low-power. So just install a package like The Laptop Project (tlp), or the older laptop-mode, and you're good to go. You can even tune the configuration, it's simple and well commented. For example, with a fast SSD (no spin up/down), one can be very aggressive on putting the drive into low-power.

With this done, taking about 10 mn tops, I have a longer battery life on Linux as on the stock Windows8.1. And this is as reported by the firmware through ACPI, so same estimator on both sides.

> [Various sleep mode issues]

There was a very nasty bug in Linux MMU set-up that's been solved in 4.8. Before this, it could trigger some random and sometimes hard to reproduce bugs on some models, leading to crashes on resume. I've been affected, and it was a pain. The bug was there for a long time apparently.

Since 4.8, it's been rock solid. Zero issues. And it's really night and day in term of user experience. In case some of your issues were related, you may want to make sure you're running a recent enough kernel.

As for the unwanted wake-ups in a bag turned into an oven? Only ever happened to me on my work TP running Win7. From experience, sleep is not perfect there too.

No experience on using an external monitor with my Linux laptop.

One of the main weakness is that there's no ODM integration if you install Linux yourself. With big brands like TP, it's still mostly been smooth in my experience, except for the nasty resume bug fixed in 4.8. If that's a problem for you, there are now vendors with pre-installed Linux. Then it's a similar situation to Windows.

[criddell]

> A very common misunderstanding, and very easy to solve.

If it were that easy to solve, I would think Linux installers would take care of this.

[sz4kerto]

> The thing is, a stock Linux distro is made independently of the PC hardware that will run it. There's no integration like any PC vendor does when installing Windows, making sure the Windows configuration is well tuned.

You make it sound like Windows needs to be fine-tuned (by the vendor) to provide good battery life. This is absolutely not the case. You install a bare Windows 10 on a random laptop, and battery performance will likely be much better than on Linux.

Anecdata, but my desktop Lenovo workstation's suspend function worked well with Linux, but after an update (few months ago) it never resumes successfully. Nothing in logs -- just simply doesn't wake up properly. (4.10 kernel.) These are painful things.

[morganvachon]

> Anecdata, but my desktop Lenovo workstation's suspend function worked well with Linux, but after an update (few months ago) it never resumes successfully. Nothing in logs -- just simply doesn't wake up properly. (4.10 kernel.) These are painful things.

That sounds like my experience with Windows 10 on my gaming PC. I only use that machine when gaming, and while it has a <10 second cold boot time (god I love NVMe), I prefer to leave it running and let it fall asleep after a few minutes of inactivity. Some time last week or so, I noticed it never cycles fully to sleep; it will fall asleep and almost immediately wake up. I'm positive this was due to a Windows update, as I haven't changed any settings on it before or after the incident first occurred.

Now, this is on a PC I built, but I used a common motherboard (Gigabyte Z170M) and never had this issue on my previous build, also based on a Gigabyte Z series board. My wife's computer is a mini-PC made by HP, and it started having the same sleep/wake issues during the same week. Something in a recent Windows update has affected sleep states.

[The_DaveG]

I had similar, terrible issues with my gaming rig when I let Windows auto-update from 7 to 10. I found that there is an option in system update to "restore" or "auto-fix" the OS. You might start by trying that.

I found that I needed to let the entire thing be wiped (including all software) and re-installed in order to get it working. A long time and complete pain in the ass, but it's much better now.

Just as a piece of warning if you go that route: MS decided that my legit MS office keys were "Pirated" because they were old and wanted me to upgrade (after telling me that it was a valid key 3 hours before) so I told them to pound sand and I was going to buy MAC's from now on, and I'm not a fan of Apple at all. They offered me nothing, but the chance to give them more money.

[yorwba]

I only boot into Windows once a month or so. This Monday, when I had my laptop sitting idle for a bit, I noticed the sound of the hard drive settling down and spinning up again in a regular pattern. At the time, I thought it was the Antivirus deciding to do an idle scan just when the OS put the drive to sleep, but now I think I might be affected by the same bug you mention.

[snvzz]

That got an NVidia GPU?

Not much can be done with vendors that are actively hostile.

[vertebrate]

> Admittedly, mine is not Thinkpad

nuff said

[ruben_varnish]

I have been on the X2XX series for over 10 years, counting 5 laptops.

EVERY single thing has worked with Ubuntu (every single six months release, since 12.04 only used LTS releases) and required little to no effort.

As for a "Desktop" I haven't touched one at work since 2004. TBH I believe only gamers care. And gamers like to build/adapt their own hardware. Unless you can differentiate heavily and have something unique (something like building a RED camera or a super fast Electrical car) how is that going to fly in a marked that is in decline?

Keep yourselves to building a super high end laptop that can rival a Lenovo X series model and we will look into that.

[Nullabillity]

Pretty much all laptops work perfectly fine with Linux. The only real reason to look for one with it preinstalled would be to avoid the MS tax.

[dagw]

They may work "perfectly fine", but they rarely work perfectly. There always seems to be some thing that doesn't quite work (function keys, HDMI output, card reader, graphics card switching etc.).

[mrits]

I haven't enjoyed building computers since I was a teenager. I'd much rather pay for someone else to do it. I pay for several people to come around my house and do things I know how to do but would rather spend my time elsewhere. This is no different.

[Angostura]

> Custom desktops are relatively easy to build, even for customers.

My mum would disagree.

[utexaspunk]

>Custom desktops are relatively easy to build, even for customers.

An ordinary desktop, perhaps, but a truly innovative product not so much. Consider something like Microsoft's Surface Studio and Surface Dial:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/accessories/surface-...

A Linux desktop with similarly novel modes of interaction would be awesome, and might be just the thing to bring the masses to Linux.

[H1Supreme]

Exactly this. If you're a typical Linux user, you've probably already built computers from scratch. A MBP/MBA laptop aimed at Linux is where the need actually lies.

[lallysingh]

As they're already tested and setup for Linux, I'd probably just go with one of their systems. It's just one less thing to worry about.