As you said, finding any laptop with linux is near impossible. Coincidentally I have become friends with a guy at a large reseller near me, so every time I want a new laptop, I call him up, tell him which ones I've set my eyes on, then I go with a live USB to see which one works out of the box.
Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.
What really rises my eyebrow is the "fedora" part here. I haven't used Fedora since 2015 and for the time being I don't intend to switch to anything new/old. I can't recall a single time I've seen a linux-out-of-the-box laptop that has anything other than Ubuntu(which I truly hate). It would be nice to see someone putting something else and shipping it like that for a change.
> As you said, finding any laptop with linux is near impossible.
For you, maybe?
I can go on Dell's website and buy a laptop with Ubuntu on it right now. I'm looking at it in my cart as we speak.
System76 is a reputable company that _only_ ships systems (including laptops) with Linux on them. I don't own one but most reviews that I've read are quite positive. (Both regarding the hardware and the System76 Ubuntu-based OS.)
System76 does exist and they're laptops are good (I'm using one as my personal/development machine). I used there tech support for a desktop and they're quite responsive.
They're at little pricey (they're oem laptops with linux) but I would buy another, because I know the OS will work with the hardware with no fiddling. (They sell ubuntu but I'm using their POP-OS. ubuntu variant).
One of the Reasons I got it was because it wouldn't have games, but Black Mesa runs well on this notebook as it has a nvidia graphics.
I've had very bad experiences with Dell's in the past so I'm staying away from them. My previous laptop was a Dell and it caused me more problems than all other laptops I've owned combined. And they are a tad... Overpriced imo. I mean an xps is around 25-30% more expensive than an equivalent zenbook for instance as a direct competitor. Currently I'm on a zenbook and it's been incredibly reliable. I intend to switch laptop soon and I'm between one of the newer zenbooks(yes, I'm aware of the bullcrap that is the screenpad, though apparently now it even works on linux out of the box) or an hp envy x360 which also apparently works out of the box.
I'm aware of System76 but I want to avoid buying a product that isn't that mainstream outside the US market. I can't recall even seeing one out in the wild anywhere. If something goes wrong with it, I'd need to ship it half way across the world to get it fixed. Not a very solid plan on my end.
I generally need a smaller form-factor laptop, otherwise I'd even consider something like cadnetwork because they too claim to have full linux support and even though they are a small manufacturer, in normal conditions(covid-19 aside), Cologne is a 3 hour, 40-50 euro flight away from me.
It sounds like our experiences and locations are very different.
In the US, it's very hard to beat Dell on price. The only ones who can are budget manufacturers and rebadged Chinese products, which usually gets you underwhelming design and longevity.
Dell's lower-end consumer line products can be just as bad. I bought a cheap Inspiron once that was the bane of my existence. But my last two business-class laptops (a Latitude and now a Precision) have been pretty much flawless despite heavy use and rough handling. I run Ubuntu on them both.
In the US, when you buy a business or enterprise product, my understanding is that Dell will send a repair technician to your location. Sometimes you can get them to just send you a replacement part, if you are very persistent.
I have a 2019 xps 13 that was delivered with ubuntu which worked well. Recently I've switched to Arch and everything has worked as expected.
Not sure what specific problems you had, but installing the base, sway and firefox had touch scrolling, webcam, mic, hdpi and everything else I expect working, which seems like a win to me.
I'd prefer a librem with the same form factor and specs, but this is working without issues and that's a lot more than I can say for the HP elitebook I had to use at the last job.
I'm in Europe and didn't want to go with a US company so I bought a laptop from https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ which is a German company which in theory does the same as System76 by shipping OEM laptops with Linux but the one I got was such low quality it basically broke down after only one year even if it cost around $1000. I even sent it in 2 times for repairs. I lost a couple of the screws at the bottom and the glue for the plastic around the border of the screen went bad and the plastic was only half glued and was hanging down. After a year it started to hang in both Windows and Linux so you would need to do a hard reboot every hour so I gave up on it.
At work I got a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu (switched it to Arch) and have no problems at all, everything works even now after two years of heavy usage.
My work got me a system76 gazelle that was fully loaded and I love it. popOS is a great distro as well, plus they already think about problems that eat up devs time like managing tensorflow, cuda, and cudnn versions. They also provide a utility tool for using tensorflow docker images.
I use Fedora as my daily driver, since I primarily work with RHEL/CentOS at my job. The main problem I have with Fedora is their 6-month release cycle, without having periodic LTS versions. The support a version for 1 year, so that means once a year I have to go through the dance of upgrading, and seeing what is different. Fortunately the differences that cause a learning curve are getting fewer with each update.
Of course, since RHEL / CentOS is derived from a frozen version of a given release of Fedora, then CentOS can count as an "LTS" release -- it just goes too long between releases (but is great when a new one comes out).
No -- lack of Fedora LTS is because doing LTS with actual _S_ is a huge amount of work, and our volunteer community is not super-excited about doing that work.
I've done a lot of Fedora upgrades, and only a couple have failed.
I have been amazed by how stable Fedora manages to be. I think I had a problem maybe once every couple of releases that needed a fix, and the community is always there to help. The Fedora bug-reporting process is terrific. There's a lot of engagement with the users and a genuine desire to help.
As a longtime Fedora user, I agree that upgrading every six months is more painful than it needs to be. It's generally a LOT of packages — in the thousands — and takes a VERY long time.
The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.
I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.
If you can find Flatpacks for most of your software, or if you don't often install new packages, silverblue is truly awesome. If you are installing an RPM tho you have to reboot to use it. If you are like me and have long-lived tmux sessions that you hate starting over with, the reboot is super annoying.
That said I may switch to Silverblue anyway at some point, because it really is amazing in many ways.
I have a laptop with an encrypted LVM drive that has a separate /home partition with very little space left for user files. I installed some Flatpaks and got a disk-space warning.
I'm not surprised, but Flatpaks install everything in the user's home directory. So if you know you're going to be using Flatpak apps, make /home bigger.
The system upgrade download for 30->31 was around 5GB if I remember. Which wasn't too bad. I throttled to 300KB/s. And then the reboot/install took maybe an hour. I don't think that's too bad for such a smooth process.
The worse part is, what feels like the daily 30 or so packages that need updates. They should really separate the critical security ones out, and batch the normal updates on a two week schedule.
I've been using silverblue as my daily driver for the past few months, installing rpm's into the 'toolbox' is the recommended way, I have a few rpms related to power management that I layer onto the ostree, but other than that everything runs in a container. It's a wonderful OS.
> Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.
Tell me about it, I just fought a whole afternoon against Dell EFI/Legacy BIOS's take on nvme drive management and... well... anything standard I can read on EFI or BIOS is useless because each hardware vendor seems to add special cases.
I have Fedora on my small-and-light laptop (100% boring low-end Intel stuff) and it works perfectly. My daughter is using it now for homeschooling right now. I'd even go as far as arguing it's easier to keep happy than my Ubuntu one.
Manufacturers are obsessed with shoving some half-baked proprietary hardware on their higher end laptops, rendering them unusable for anyone but Windows users.
What really rises my eyebrow is the "fedora" part here. I haven't used Fedora since 2015 and for the time being I don't intend to switch to anything new/old. I can't recall a single time I've seen a linux-out-of-the-box laptop that has anything other than Ubuntu(which I truly hate). It would be nice to see someone putting something else and shipping it like that for a change.