[jarcane]

That's because it's a Thinkpad. The T-series had been the Red Hat company issue laptop for years, and has had boatloads of internal support as a result.

You're right in that a Thinkpad will mostly work out of the box long as you don't want that Nvidia GPU to work, but everyone else? Good luck. My XPS 15 was a lost cause, losing three quarters of it's battery life under Linux and with countless video problems.

And on a desktop? Hah! Roll the dice baby, and keep rolling them with every update, because sooner or later something's going to break. It always does.

[bgrohman]

I have a Dell XPS 15 running Pop!_OS, and it’s great[1]. No issues. It’s a much better experience compared to setting up Kubuntu[2].

[1] http://bryangrohman.com/pop-os-dell-xps-15/

[2] http://bryangrohman.com/kubuntu-dell-xps-15/

[xorcist]

That XPS laptop of yours probably isn't great with OS X either. Yet nobody blames Apple for that.

It's a bit of a double standard. If you want a pain free workhorse, go with something that's supported out of the box. Don't buy that Nvidia GPU if you intend to use it for a Linux desktop, where it is unlikely to be of much use anyway (unless you are one of those CAD people in which case you use what your vendor supports).

Personally I settled for Thinkpads many years ago (the T- and X-series, not non-Thinkpads that Lenovo tries to peddle under that brand name) and they haven't given me any trouble yet. Seeing how Windows laptops sometimes doesn't wake from sleep properly makes me suspect that that's not much better tested either. If it boots, ship it.

[michaelmrose]

Nvidia is more trouble only that you need to install the proprietary driver rather than using what comes with the kernel. You also need vdpau if you want hardware decoding of video.