I’ve had laptops with linux before, but linux was never the original laptop OS and modifying the configuration was always necessary. It used to be fun to hack and modify an OS on an old laptop but I guess if I’m going to spend 600 or 700 bucks (or more!) I’d rather not have to worry about modifications.
One of my worries is that in the past I’ve experienced bad or terrible changes to battery life/performance after installing linux. I’m guessing that that won’t be the case with a linux native laptop? Any experience… (dell, system76,…)? I remember trying to fix this in various ways that the internet had suggested but it never came out as I wanted.
My other worry is the keyboard and shortcuts. I’ve been using a mac at work which in my experience has a fairly different keyboard short cuts, is that still the case? (is this distro dependent?) I remember always having to modify cut and paste for terminals to match the browser’s cut and paste short cuts in ubuntu. This always seemed silly. Again not sure if I want to do this if I’m shelling out a significant amount of money.
Any advice or stories about going from a mac-unix-ish setup to a pure linux setup?
Should I stop trying and stick with macs?
You can say the same for Dell Latitude laptops. Being retired, I buy recent off-lease Dell Latitude laptops and wipe Windows off of them and put Linux (specifically KUbuntu 20.04) in my latest case. Late last month, I bought a Latitude 5480, i5 quad-core, 8Gb of ram, 500Gb spinning rust drive with Windows 10 from the Dellfinancialservices offlease sales site. The original price was $545, but I found a coupon that brought that price down by nearly $200. The 500Gb spinning rust drive was retired, and a 500Gb SSD, with Kubuntu 20.04 already installed/configured to my liking was installed. Will be pulling the one 8Gb DDR4 stick and replacing it with 2 16Gb sticks. Need the ram as I run quite a few other distros as KVM vms… Bottom line: EVERYTHING worked right the first time I booted it up under Linux.