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?
Buy an old Thinkpad that’s been refurbished. Something like an x250. It’ll cost you less than $200. Pick your favourite Linux distro and install it. Everything will just work. You can configure keyboard settings and shortcuts as you wish.
Battery performance will be fine but you can replace the battery if needed. Other parts are also user replacable. The one I’m typing this on has a 2TB SSD and 16GB RAM that I put in. You can also replace the keyboard if needed.
I have five of them. They’re real workhorses.
Even if they go with a new Thinkpad Lenovo (if you trust them) is working towards offering Thinkpads with your choice of either Ubuntu, RHEL, or Fedora preinstalled as well as upstreaming any driver modifications to the Linux kernel which is great if you ever need to reinstall the OS or decide to install a different distro on the machine 1.
I have a P50 myself and love it, even though it’s a few years old now it is still running strong. Other than that I have a couple of friends that purchased a Dell that came with Ubuntu preinstalled and they seem like great machines. Due to their bulk I’m usually hesitant to recommend System76 machines unless you know what you are getting into.
Do you have somewhere you recommend to source parts like the SSD and RAM?
In which country are you?
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.