On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 07:00:05PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote: > I find this to be highly optimistic.
Maybe slighly. > Common problematic areas for Linux on laptops continue to be things like > wifi/bluetooth support This is true, sometimes WiFi does not work, even today, but: Often you can swap out the built in M.2 card, or use a tiny USB dongle that can be kept in the USB port all the time. > and ability to successfully suspend and/or > hibernate. Yes, if suspend does not work, this is a problem. In my experience this is much much rarer than WiFi problems (these happen occasionally, I agree with you). > Problems I've seen: > > - wifi just doesn't work > > - wifi works but continually drops out > > - laptop can't suspend while that wifi driver module is in the kernel > > - laptop suspends but is never able to wake up > > - laptop suspends but wakes up without wifi/bluetooth and nothing gets > it back > > - laptop suspends but wakes up without wifi/bluetooth and only > removal/re-add of wifi module gets it back > > …and so on. Most of these are WiFi/BT related, for myself a USB dongle is good enough if the builtin WiFi does not work. I had a laptop like this, with some sort of Realtek WiFi, it was not a huge problem. It had more than one USB port and the dongle was cheap and tiny. And worked well. > While I can list off plenty of laptops that work fine in all respects, > IMHO it is still a bit of a lottery to buy blindly unless the vendor > advertises Linux support explicitly on that model (e.g. some will offer > pre-installed Ubuntu or Fedora, which indicates that most other Linux > can be made to work too.) And this is not a thing related to "old" or > "new" or "cheap" or "expensive". Problems crop up across all dimensions. In my experience brand new makes more problems, because drivers are not yet upstreamed. YMMV. /ralph
