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Also very anecdotal, but I've been running Linux on laptops for ~15 years, and have had many issues and difficulties. My first mistake was trying to run Linux on Mac laptops for the first 10 of those years. (To be fair, my first Mac+Linux experience was on a PowerBook, which surprisingly worked rather well, though power management was terrible so battery life suffered. Once the Intel train started, it was... not great.) In 2016 I bought a Razer Blade Stealth, and Linux ran perfectly on it; there was even 3rd-party support for custom things like the tweakable RGB keyboard backlight. Like a fool, I didn't learn from my mistakes, and in 2018 I installed Linux on an employer-provided 2016 MacBook Pro. At the time, the keyboard and trackpad required an out-of-tree kernel driver (so I needed a USB keyboard and mouse to install), and audio and suspend-to-RAM didn't work (well, suspend was fine, but the disk drive wouldn't wake up on resume). My timing here was actually good, as not long before this, the NVMe drive itself didn't even work. In 2019 I bought a Dell XPS 13, and aside from the fingerprint sensor, Linux again runs perfectly on it. So, if you get yourself a laptop that is either specifically made to support Linux, or you've determined via research works well with Linux on it, then you should be fine. Otherwise, you'll probably have issues, unless you're lucky. (Avoiding laptops with certain things, like Nvidia video and Broadcom WiFi, helps a lot.) |
- Support for Optimus laptops with on-demand rendering offload, if one does the research and uses the correct env variables or tries the "Launch using Dedicated Graphics Card" menu item in GNOME.
- Some whispers of Nvidia finally using dmabuf in the next version of its drivers. With appropriate code/kernel module restructuring for GPL compatibility, I guess.