I’m on the market to buy a new laptop, and Lemmy has successfully coaxed and goaded me to give Linux a serious try.

I’ve never used *nix as my personal OS.

Which hardware/laptop do you recommend? And which OS to pair it with for a Linux newbie?

I’m a software engineer, and quit my job to pursue an MSc in AI. So my uses will be:

  • programming
  • study
  • browsing lemmy
  • gaming
  • Noxy@yiffit.netEnglish
    42·
    10 months ago

    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…

    • 8tomat8@lemmy.world
      6·
      10 months ago

      I’ve never had better experience with Linux than on ThinkPad. It made me love distro hoping again.

    • nxdefiant@startrek.website
      2·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      2·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • drdnl@programming.dev
      1·
      10 months ago

      I have had a couple T14s without issue, did you remember to change the suspend mode in the bios to Linux?