Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400.
Things I learned to look out for:
- Locked BIOS
- Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research.
In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.
Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by just a few weeks).
They shipped a box and allowed me to swap out a hard drive for a spare (I had study data on there), I then used the box to ship the laptop to them. A few weeks later the laptop gets shipped back with a parts replacement list, which was essentially every single PCB in the laptop and I asked them to replace the keyboard too because one key was sticking. Brand new parts in a slightly cracked chassis.
If Dell still has customer service like that, it's double thumbs up from me.
I'm currently using a Lenovo laptop which has been solid so far. I do want my next laptop to be open to repairability (even if I have to create it myself).
Dell customer service is whatever someone wants to pay for.
I bought a new Dell laptop 20-ish years ago along with whatever the super-duper coverage was called at that time (Complete Care, maybe?). IIRC, it only excluded deliberate damage (and "hammer marks" was used as an example).
But they had no trouble sending me parts. Power brick soaked in a flood? No big deal; a new one is on the way. Dropped a screwdriver on the screen at work? They sent a whole person over to replace it.
It was very expensive coverage -- it cost more by itself than the used/refurb laptops we're discussing. It was sold separately. It did not, by my estimation around that time, ultimately pay for itself.
But if you score it for "free" with a used machine, then sure! Bargain!
It's probably worth it for university though. Back in the day working as a Student Employee for the CSE helpdesk, we ordered overnight replacements for so many laptops and servers an it was super slick and automated, replacement parts showed up and we swapped them in. Very little downtime.
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
Maybe what you are noticing is the "laptop on lap" detection? Check the bios, there was a "cool when on lap detected" mode on mine. Turn that off and re-test.
> there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
But such laptops don't work 100% with Asahi. Speakers and mic, external displays, fingerprint reader, suspend are the sore points I've read about, and shorter battery life compared to when they run Apple's SO.
In my experience Intel and AMD Thinkpads of that era are about the same for battery life but Intel always needs some kernel parameters set. Where I notice the biggest difference is Intel's integrated graphics gets you better battery life over anything AMD if your GPU needs are modest enough to be handled by Intel's integrated graphics
ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss.
People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.
Just note that listing is for an item from a third-party seller. Walmart's website includes listings from their third-party marketplace unless you explicitly filter them out.
That’s not particularly surprising to be honest. A lot of what makes Apple tech what it is is the concert between their hardware and software. Not trying to put it too poetically here, but that’s what it’s always seemed like to me.
In general when I install Linux on an Apple device I just assume there isn’t the same level of performance. I remember installing mint on a 2016 intel MBpro and the limitations/cons didn’t surprise me at all because I just kind of expected it to perform at 70% of what I expected from macOS but with far more free freedom/control. It ran very smoothly but you definitely lose a lot of functionality.
> The Cool and Quiet on lap feature helps cool down your computer when it becomes hot. Any extended contact with your body, even through clothing, could cause discomfort. If you prefer using your computer on the lap, it is recommended that you enable the Cool and Quiet on lap feature in UEFI BIOS:
Honestly, I wasn't to say this is ridiculous but I've got a i7 13" laptop which I bought to do practically everything (personal coding projects, a bit of gaming, video editing, 3d modeling etc). I do find the heat of it is quite uncomfortable after a short period of time on my lap. I was thinking about getting a M series MacBook for messing around on the couch and building a desktop for many of those other tasks.
My work MacBook Pro on the other hand could do with the opposite some times. Burn a bit of battery to heat up the aluminium case please!
My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with the hardware!
I have a MBA M1 and it is everything you would wish in an hardware feature wise (except the keyboard as I like lot of travel). But the OS is abysmal, unless you like to use your device with only apps. Anything else out of the straight path is a pain. And the last years, it seems that the allowed path is closer to mobile OS than a computer to do work.
So, my daily driver is an oldish dell latitude (8th gen intel) running openbsd. Not for the faint of heart, but for a tinkerer, it's a dream.
I keep hearing this thing about apps and I'm confused. I write code on my MBA M1, run orbital simulations, run a media server... All like I would on Linux. What am I missing on userland?
I understand there is low level system stuff I can't control, but I've made my peace with that. When using Linux I hadn't touched its internals for years.
I have made my peace with that as well, but the ground keep sifting under. There was the Music.app stuff, the System settings, Apple Intelligence, and now the whole UI of the OS. Those are the things that you would interact with daily.
It could be fine. I'm also OK with GNOME's strict approach to design. But with Apple, you wait the next release with dread because you never know what they will pull next.
I swapped the keyboard on my wife's X1 and man, they are so fiddly to get to these days. It used to be a 2 minute job but I think this took me nearly 2 hours! I had to remove practically everything to get to it.
Still happy with the result and I agree that 2nd hand business machines give great bang-for-buck. I adore my beater Dell Latitude for example.
> In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support.
I have tried just one cheap Dell laptop, Vostro 3515, which works mostly fine with Linux (it came with Ubuntu, I have installed Debian), but the touchpad becomes unreponsive sometimes (probably after a sleep), and at some point it refused to charge, which required an UEFI firmware update to fix, which in turn required Windows (I had to use Windows PE) to install, as the direct update (from the UEFI itself) was failing, and there is no Linux option.
Could have been worse, but now considering a Lenovo ThinkPad as a future replacement.
This is my go to way of buying a new laptop. I've gone through 2 machines in the last 8 years (Dell 7270 and 7330). Both bought for <$400. Linux works ootb, though I haven't tried any of the more obscure distros.
Though now manufacturers are doubling down on soldered components, so buying a cheap machine and upgrading the components yourself is not really possible :(
Yep, same experience here, very good results with DELL Latitude E7240, E7260 and similar. Very rugged and Linux works like a breeze - on eBay from $179 (just checked again).
One is well advised to upgrade them to 16 GB RAM and put in a 1 TB SSD, and possibly a new battery. My better half wanted one of those again after I gifted her a brand new MacBook Air, so used she got to the DELL and Ubuntu running on it.
I'm using Linux on some dell precision and camera just don't work. It's possible to install some custom kernel to make it work, but the pain of maintaining it by myself in comparison to IT department supported setup is a no go.
If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast.
Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboard, very nice battery life and an oled screen on top of it.
The problem I had with the oled screen is that I thought it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vib.... I am looking for a better solution because the filters get picked on screenshots and washes out the colours. I need to find an ICE profile or export one from Windows.
The camera also behaves a bit weirdly. It has noticeable quality difference when using chromium and other browsers, the latter with perceptible quality degradation.
Other than that, a very good mobile linux driver, snappy, cool, quiet, charges fast and a joy to use.
> it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade
Another option would be Redshift, which has a nice widget (Redshift Control plasmoid) for KDE Plasma. It doesn't affect grabbed screenshots or stuff like simplescreenrecorder, BTW
Do you know what the oled screen resolution is on your device? One of my family members has what I believe is the same laptop, and while I appreciate the build quality, the OLED clearly isn't RGB (in its subpixel arrangement - or some other such major aspect), because the 1080p screen looks so bad for text I initially thought it was broken.
Oled pc screens have a terrible reputation for text. Some more than others, but it seems it's better to stick to lcd if you happen to read or write a lot.
As an "ultrabook" it came with 16GB of fast SSD which could be used as a cache via some Windows-specific Intel feature, while main storage was a slower spinning disk.
As Linux did not support cache feature, I thought I can just format it as ext4 and use as a storage for things which can benefit from more iops, e.g. running DB tests. And as SSD technology was still rather new at that time, I started with running some IO benchmarks.
Well, it survived formatting into ext4 and few minutes of that IO benchmark, then it became permanently unresponsive.
My guess is that wear-leveling algorithm was designed specifically for the FS originally had (some version of FAT?), and different FS caused it to corrupt some internal data structure, so SSD's controller firmware went into panic on each boot.
Unfortunately, this added few minutes delay to boot as Linux tried to communicate with unresponsive SSD controller, but otherwise laptop worked fine...
This article just pushed me over to retry Linux on my laptop, and I've been spending the last 2 hours on a Linux desktop. I would love to use it as my main driver (will try the next week), but it still feels like a thousand paper cuts and realize why I was stuck on macOS for the last 10 years. Ugh :(
Curious what the cuts are? I'm forced to use MBP at $JOB and it sucks compared to Linux at home. Maybe I'm just used to Linux, don't know? But I love the fact that I can configure it the way I like, especially all the keyboard shortcuts. On MacOS this has proven to be difficult.
I'm down to ~10m of battery life on my i7 11" - any pointers on battery replacement? Laptop worked great otherwwise (retired it last year due to battery life)
I tried eBay like 4 times. But they were all fake or defective. At least one of them was dead on arrival.
I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple.
Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.
The last time I tried this in 2022, I encountered a bunch of rough edges. I tried Ubuntu or Mint on a MBA 11 (2013 or 2015 models). Maybe Linux has gotten better since then?
For example, the fan did not work out of the box. I had to install something called 'macfanctld'.
Sleep did not work, it would wake up as soon as it went to sleep. I had to install something called a 'suspend-fix.service' hack.
Brightness control was flaky. It would always wake up at the lowest brightness setting. Disabling auto-dimming caused it to wake up at the highest brightness.
Lenovo Z13 Gen 2 with 64GB RAM and AMD 7840u is what I daily drive. It's 13.3 Inch, premium build with glas and aluminum. It's my favorite laptop by a wide margin, and runs Linux perfectly. Unfortunately Lenovo stopped producing the Z13/Z16, no idea what I will do afterwards.
For something portable with a dGPU, I recommend the Asus ProArt px13. Works very well with Linux, including NixOS with the right config, with the community asusctl and supergfxctl. AMD, OLED screen, nVidia 4070 (4060 in the US, maybe we'll get 50xx next year). Downsides: the keyboard is not amazing, it comes with MediaTek WiFi, but is replaceable, and the SSD is 2230, which limits capacity. I haven't been able to fine-tune touchpad sensitivity in Wayland and I do get some screen flickering despite fiddling with some boot params and being on 6.17.x. Fewer constraints if you're willing to go 14-inch with the Zephyrus.
A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect.
I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30 tok/sec with smaller Gemma models (had to install mesa vulkan drivers from debian-backports for GPU support in the VM).
If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:
"If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:"
"Installing ubuntu on arm laptops is usually not easy, and the GPU drivers are unavailable in most cases (so, the performance is not great unless you use XFCE/LXDE/LxQt)"
ChromeOS with the Linux VM is a surprisingly nice setup, I bought a Thinkpad Duet 3 so I could use Linux apps on a tablet and it seriously has me considering getting a Chromebook for my next laptop. Everything integrates so seamlessly and effortlessly that it does not even seem like a VM other than having to start up the VM. The Chrome keyboard has also really grown on me, even with the small and very cheap keyboard of the Duet 3. Battery life and performance is amazing and touch works completely as expected. Not sure if I can actually make the leap and give up Linux after 20 years of nothing but, but I am considering it.
The M1 Air display being 2560x1600, it isn't that high of a bar to cross.
Surface Pro are 2880x1920, Asus’ pz13 series will be in the same ballpark. Getting Linux on them will be a bit more of a PITA, but you get the touchscreen and form factor to balance. Build quality will be basically on par with Apple, battery life should be taking a more serious hit (linux + smaller battery from the start)
Have a look at X1E devicetree in Linux kernel source (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... all the way to the bottom). There are some models that have a very active development and an almost complete support by now, with Thinkpad T14s probably the most active.
I’d be interested in this as well. I want a quiet machine with a decent display and a long battery life. Right now the MacBook Air checks those boxes but I’d be very interested in an alternative that I can throw Linux / OpenBSD on.
While I personally want a fan and see it as price to pay for better thermals, the disadvantages aren't just noise.
The most critical issue would be the fans still spinning to cool down the machine when it was sent to sleep. That creates the vicious cycle when bagged right after sleep, where the fan try to lower the temp, but their running in a closed environment warms the confined air, which pushes the fan to run faster yet.
That's the recipe for a hot and dead battery when you take it out of the bag.
I had that with MacBooks and Windows laptops alike.
Apple doesn't sell one for any price, so if you want Apple hardware, that's what you get. They objectively make the best laptop hardware package unless you value upgradeability over performance or build quality, which most people also very objectively don't.
Removable SSDs aren't just for upgradability but for repairability. To ensure your shiny expensive laptop doesn't become e-waste the minute your SSD NAND (which is a wearable part) inevitably dies.
I agree 100%, I'm just saying if you want Apple, you can't have that regardless how much you're willing to pay (though if you paid them $10B they'd probably bend and design it this way, everybody has a number.)
There’s a guy who offers it for a very reasonable fee in USA. I’ve used his services a few times with great success! Email me, I wouldn’t want to post someone else’s contact info publicly.
> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.
The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
But what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?
I've seen laptops stuck in weird state. Most likely, Fujitsu didn't bother to test turning off secure boot once they received the BIOS they bought, and fixed the toggle in a firmware update.
Linux boots fine using standard secure boot, so if it refused it's either NixOS using an unsigned bootloader (which is surprising to me) or secure boot just being bugged to hell.
Another option is that NixOS uses secure boot but uses a signature that's too recent: one of the secure boot CAs is expiring soon, and an old BIOS may not carry the new key if NixOS opts to sign their bootloader with the latest key. This issue doesn't just affect Linux, certain Windows images won't boot on older devices either if this mismatch happens.
My bet is on NVRAM getting into a weird state or a buggy BIOS. That's the most obvious thing that would get fixed by updating the BIOS.
If the company fully managed the previous windows install, they'd have control on the upgrades to the BIOS as well and could just block them. These restrictions disappear with standard windows install.
The OA was describing the use of a refurbished laptop made by Fujitsu Japan (so 50% owned by Lenovo since 2017). No profit goes to Fujitsu UK (a subsidiary). And the Horizon system has a complex history [1].
I would say buying used Fujitsu from a third party seller is still better than letting it become e-waste. It's not like Fujitsu is getting any of that money.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? I have older laptops than the U729 that still see some use. If you're not locally compiling a big codebase, running some AI/LLM thing, playing GPU-intensive games, etc., you really don't need much.
Whenever Microsoft makes me make an account and I cannot bypass it I just make an throwaway with not so pleasant words in the email. Followed by installing EndeavourOS.
I really hope this still works forever. Unfortunately I suspect, that one day they'll require a phone verification or similar, like many services do nowadays.
Not sure, but I just install Linux on any system that comes with Windows these days, I just don't have any software that's Windows specific that I can't run on Linux.
Unless there is some vulnerability in the current version that you want to take advantage of. See e.g. mediatek exploit to unlock bootloaders without authorization by OEM or hacking PS4.
> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”.
It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.
Gibson knew dick about computers in 1984, which makes his early cyberpunk works more interesting because so much of the technical stuff is pure imagination and guesswork. He peppered his 1980s prose with Japanese-sounding brand names because he assumed that the Japanese would dominate computing the way they dominated electronics for things people like William Gibson do—things like listening to music. And it didn't quite work out that way, because Japanese computer manufacturers tailored their output to peculiar Japanese needs (specifically, needing high resolution displays and lots of memory in order to draw kanji well and needing Japanese language support in the OS) rather than hewing to emerging industry standards. This kept prices of NEC, Epson, and Sharp gear high, and allowed American manufacturers like IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Apple to get a significant foothold in the emerging industry worldwide. Toshiba emerged as an early leader in laptops, but laptops wouldn't really find their market niche until the mid-90s or so. So these days, you go to like Den-Den Town in Osaka, and you will find Dells and HPs for sale, and of course all the pretty Japanese girls are all about their Apple gear, just like here. Even so, Japanese buyers tend to prefer Japanese brands, followed by other Asian brands, and Western brands (except for Apple) third. So I can totally see a Japanese executive rocking a Fujitsu laptop, but I haven't seen Westerners in possession of one.
Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400.
Things I learned to look out for:
- Locked BIOS
- Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research.
In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.
Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by just a few weeks).
They shipped a box and allowed me to swap out a hard drive for a spare (I had study data on there), I then used the box to ship the laptop to them. A few weeks later the laptop gets shipped back with a parts replacement list, which was essentially every single PCB in the laptop and I asked them to replace the keyboard too because one key was sticking. Brand new parts in a slightly cracked chassis.
If Dell still has customer service like that, it's double thumbs up from me.
I'm currently using a Lenovo laptop which has been solid so far. I do want my next laptop to be open to repairability (even if I have to create it myself).
Dell customer service is whatever someone wants to pay for.
I bought a new Dell laptop 20-ish years ago along with whatever the super-duper coverage was called at that time (Complete Care, maybe?). IIRC, it only excluded deliberate damage (and "hammer marks" was used as an example).
But they had no trouble sending me parts. Power brick soaked in a flood? No big deal; a new one is on the way. Dropped a screwdriver on the screen at work? They sent a whole person over to replace it.
It was very expensive coverage -- it cost more by itself than the used/refurb laptops we're discussing. It was sold separately. It did not, by my estimation around that time, ultimately pay for itself.
But if you score it for "free" with a used machine, then sure! Bargain!
(A person can check the warranty/service status of an unmolested Dell machine here: https://www.dell.com/support/contractservices/en-us )
It's probably worth it for university though. Back in the day working as a Student Employee for the CSE helpdesk, we ordered overnight replacements for so many laptops and servers an it was super slick and automated, replacement parts showed up and we swapped them in. Very little downtime.
I really don't care for repairability as I average maybe 2 years before getting a new laptop.
In terms of strain on natural resources, that's insane.
This is how people get their used laptops
Only if they throw it away. If someone else uses it, what's the issue?
Or do you not want people of less means, having used laptops?
> Things I learned to look out for:
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
Maybe what you are noticing is the "laptop on lap" detection? Check the bios, there was a "cool when on lap detected" mode on mine. Turn that off and re-test.
> there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
But such laptops don't work 100% with Asahi. Speakers and mic, external displays, fingerprint reader, suspend are the sore points I've read about, and shorter battery life compared to when they run Apple's SO.
In my experience Intel and AMD Thinkpads of that era are about the same for battery life but Intel always needs some kernel parameters set. Where I notice the biggest difference is Intel's integrated graphics gets you better battery life over anything AMD if your GPU needs are modest enough to be handled by Intel's integrated graphics
ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss.
People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.
That’s horrifying.
Look, my setup works for me.
ISWYDT https://xkcd.com/1172/
i think these also existed for macs with HDDs, i recall seeing some very fun demos on youtube
HDAPs
Hard drive active protection system parked the heads in Ms, fast enough to handle a hard drop off a desk
M1 and M2. But those are in an entirely different price bracket. I’d go so far as to say those are not comparable.
You can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.
M1 mac minis or macbooks?
MacBook Air, though the $379 price does seem to be a Black Friday deal: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Restored-Apple-MacBook-Air-13-Lap...
Just note that listing is for an item from a third-party seller. Walmart's website includes listings from their third-party marketplace unless you explicitly filter them out.
Has a proprietary bootloader that Apple can lock in an OTA update. Also doesn't support Linux as well as Intel or AMD chipsets, unfortunately.
i don't think either of those is really true?
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/open-os-interop/
Literally the first step of the boot overview depends on a proprietary and irreplaceable Apple-controlled blob:
Apple decides whether or not m1n1 ever loads.Last I heard asahi ran pretty well on M1/M2. Is that not the case?
It runs well but battery life is quite a bit worse than on macos.
That’s not particularly surprising to be honest. A lot of what makes Apple tech what it is is the concert between their hardware and software. Not trying to put it too poetically here, but that’s what it’s always seemed like to me.
In general when I install Linux on an Apple device I just assume there isn’t the same level of performance. I remember installing mint on a 2016 intel MBpro and the limitations/cons didn’t surprise me at all because I just kind of expected it to perform at 70% of what I expected from macOS but with far more free freedom/control. It ran very smoothly but you definitely lose a lot of functionality.
> Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves
Wtf? That sounds crazy, any sources?
This used to be a feature to protect spinning hard drives. Why this would exist today and why it would throttle anything is bizarre.
They don't want you to burn your testicles when keeping it in your lap.
https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/pubs/x1e_p1_gen5/html/htm...
> The Cool and Quiet on lap feature helps cool down your computer when it becomes hot. Any extended contact with your body, even through clothing, could cause discomfort. If you prefer using your computer on the lap, it is recommended that you enable the Cool and Quiet on lap feature in UEFI BIOS:
(it can be disabled on this laptop)
more: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1416567/disable-lap-mode-on-...
Honestly, I wasn't to say this is ridiculous but I've got a i7 13" laptop which I bought to do practically everything (personal coding projects, a bit of gaming, video editing, 3d modeling etc). I do find the heat of it is quite uncomfortable after a short period of time on my lap. I was thinking about getting a M series MacBook for messing around on the couch and building a desktop for many of those other tasks.
My work MacBook Pro on the other hand could do with the opposite some times. Burn a bit of battery to heat up the aluminium case please!
My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with the hardware!
I have a MBA M1 and it is everything you would wish in an hardware feature wise (except the keyboard as I like lot of travel). But the OS is abysmal, unless you like to use your device with only apps. Anything else out of the straight path is a pain. And the last years, it seems that the allowed path is closer to mobile OS than a computer to do work.
So, my daily driver is an oldish dell latitude (8th gen intel) running openbsd. Not for the faint of heart, but for a tinkerer, it's a dream.
I keep hearing this thing about apps and I'm confused. I write code on my MBA M1, run orbital simulations, run a media server... All like I would on Linux. What am I missing on userland?
I understand there is low level system stuff I can't control, but I've made my peace with that. When using Linux I hadn't touched its internals for years.
I have made my peace with that as well, but the ground keep sifting under. There was the Music.app stuff, the System settings, Apple Intelligence, and now the whole UI of the OS. Those are the things that you would interact with daily.
It could be fine. I'm also OK with GNOME's strict approach to design. But with Apple, you wait the next release with dread because you never know what they will pull next.
You can install Linux on an M1/M2. It's not perfect, but it does work pretty well.
Possibly 40gb, but not 64gb. The T495 has 8gb soldered and one DDR4 slot. Concur great hardware, particularly the keyboard.
I swapped the keyboard on my wife's X1 and man, they are so fiddly to get to these days. It used to be a 2 minute job but I think this took me nearly 2 hours! I had to remove practically everything to get to it.
Still happy with the result and I agree that 2nd hand business machines give great bang-for-buck. I adore my beater Dell Latitude for example.
> In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support.
I have tried just one cheap Dell laptop, Vostro 3515, which works mostly fine with Linux (it came with Ubuntu, I have installed Debian), but the touchpad becomes unreponsive sometimes (probably after a sleep), and at some point it refused to charge, which required an UEFI firmware update to fix, which in turn required Windows (I had to use Windows PE) to install, as the direct update (from the UEFI itself) was failing, and there is no Linux option.
Could have been worse, but now considering a Lenovo ThinkPad as a future replacement.
+1
This is my go to way of buying a new laptop. I've gone through 2 machines in the last 8 years (Dell 7270 and 7330). Both bought for <$400. Linux works ootb, though I haven't tried any of the more obscure distros.
Though now manufacturers are doubling down on soldered components, so buying a cheap machine and upgrading the components yourself is not really possible :(
Yep, same experience here, very good results with DELL Latitude E7240, E7260 and similar. Very rugged and Linux works like a breeze - on eBay from $179 (just checked again).
One is well advised to upgrade them to 16 GB RAM and put in a 1 TB SSD, and possibly a new battery. My better half wanted one of those again after I gifted her a brand new MacBook Air, so used she got to the DELL and Ubuntu running on it.
With the recent Intel layoffs many Linux drivers are no longer maintained and as a consequence some older laptops don't boot anymore.
Did upstream disable hardware.. I didnt see the memo for disabling anything boot related.
Can you tell me what you found breaking as I will have to deal with that.
I'm using Linux on some dell precision and camera just don't work. It's possible to install some custom kernel to make it work, but the pain of maintaining it by myself in comparison to IT department supported setup is a no go.
If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast.
Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboard, very nice battery life and an oled screen on top of it.
The problem I had with the oled screen is that I thought it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vib.... I am looking for a better solution because the filters get picked on screenshots and washes out the colours. I need to find an ICE profile or export one from Windows.
The camera also behaves a bit weirdly. It has noticeable quality difference when using chromium and other browsers, the latter with perceptible quality degradation.
Other than that, a very good mobile linux driver, snappy, cool, quiet, charges fast and a joy to use.
> it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade
Another option would be Redshift, which has a nice widget (Redshift Control plasmoid) for KDE Plasma. It doesn't affect grabbed screenshots or stuff like simplescreenrecorder, BTW
Will give it a try, thanks!
Do you know what the oled screen resolution is on your device? One of my family members has what I believe is the same laptop, and while I appreciate the build quality, the OLED clearly isn't RGB (in its subpixel arrangement - or some other such major aspect), because the 1080p screen looks so bad for text I initially thought it was broken.
Oled pc screens have a terrible reputation for text. Some more than others, but it seems it's better to stick to lcd if you happen to read or write a lot.
1920x1200
It's awesome for text though. The only issue I found was the overblown reds.
I have an old Yoga that I've considered throwing Linux onto... are there any particular distros you've used that play nice with the touchscreen?
The one I have doesn't have a touchscreen and I don't have any workflow that would benefit from it, so I can't help you there, sorry
Default Ubuntu seems pretty touch-friendly these days with large icons etc.
16gigs soldered seems like obsolete on arrival for a windows PC.
I briefly owned a Slim 7 32gigs but sold it because it felt too heavy for a 14incher. Got an M1 instead.
Windows itself is obsolete. My yoga is pretty slick and light.
~12 years ago I installed Linux on Fujitsu UH572.
As an "ultrabook" it came with 16GB of fast SSD which could be used as a cache via some Windows-specific Intel feature, while main storage was a slower spinning disk.
As Linux did not support cache feature, I thought I can just format it as ext4 and use as a storage for things which can benefit from more iops, e.g. running DB tests. And as SSD technology was still rather new at that time, I started with running some IO benchmarks.
Well, it survived formatting into ext4 and few minutes of that IO benchmark, then it became permanently unresponsive.
My guess is that wear-leveling algorithm was designed specifically for the FS originally had (some version of FAT?), and different FS caused it to corrupt some internal data structure, so SSD's controller firmware went into panic on each boot.
Unfortunately, this added few minutes delay to boot as Linux tried to communicate with unresponsive SSD controller, but otherwise laptop worked fine...
This article just pushed me over to retry Linux on my laptop, and I've been spending the last 2 hours on a Linux desktop. I would love to use it as my main driver (will try the next week), but it still feels like a thousand paper cuts and realize why I was stuck on macOS for the last 10 years. Ugh :(
Curious what the cuts are? I'm forced to use MBP at $JOB and it sucks compared to Linux at home. Maybe I'm just used to Linux, don't know? But I love the fact that I can configure it the way I like, especially all the keyboard shortcuts. On MacOS this has proven to be difficult.
What kind of hardware did you install it on? And what hardware wasn’t supported? Or was it the software that caused the papercuts?
If you have an old Intel MacBook Air, they work beautifully with Linux as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200
I did this with the 11”, which was one of the greatest sized laptops for travel IMO, just had to replace the explody looking battery!
I'm down to ~10m of battery life on my i7 11" - any pointers on battery replacement? Laptop worked great otherwwise (retired it last year due to battery life)
I used iFixit. I haven’t been tracking battery life really, but after a couple of years it’s still going strong
I tried eBay like 4 times. But they were all fake or defective. At least one of them was dead on arrival.
I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple.
Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.
This is what I want to do as well but the 8GB RAM version was CTO, eveywhere I look people are only selling the 4GB models
11" is a great size - especiall if one has to work on a plane occasionally (economy class - not your own jet).
Same, I have a 2013. It’s such a good size.
The last time I tried this in 2022, I encountered a bunch of rough edges. I tried Ubuntu or Mint on a MBA 11 (2013 or 2015 models). Maybe Linux has gotten better since then?
For example, the fan did not work out of the box. I had to install something called 'macfanctld'.
Sleep did not work, it would wake up as soon as it went to sleep. I had to install something called a 'suspend-fix.service' hack.
Brightness control was flaky. It would always wake up at the lowest brightness setting. Disabling auto-dimming caused it to wake up at the highest brightness.
I've got one of these but it can't handle google meet these days.
Lenovo Z13 Gen 2 with 64GB RAM and AMD 7840u is what I daily drive. It's 13.3 Inch, premium build with glas and aluminum. It's my favorite laptop by a wide margin, and runs Linux perfectly. Unfortunately Lenovo stopped producing the Z13/Z16, no idea what I will do afterwards.
I run T14s Gen 3 AMD, it's a perfect laptop and it got an update this year.
For something portable with a dGPU, I recommend the Asus ProArt px13. Works very well with Linux, including NixOS with the right config, with the community asusctl and supergfxctl. AMD, OLED screen, nVidia 4070 (4060 in the US, maybe we'll get 50xx next year). Downsides: the keyboard is not amazing, it comes with MediaTek WiFi, but is replaceable, and the SSD is 2230, which limits capacity. I haven't been able to fine-tune touchpad sensitivity in Wayland and I do get some screen flickering despite fiddling with some boot params and being on 6.17.x. Fewer constraints if you're willing to go 14-inch with the Zephyrus.
Is there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?
A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect.
I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30 tok/sec with smaller Gemma models (had to install mesa vulkan drivers from debian-backports for GPU support in the VM).
If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1506894/how-to-install-ubunt...
Another Chromebook with the same setup is the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514.
"If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:"
"Installing ubuntu on arm laptops is usually not easy, and the GPU drivers are unavailable in most cases (so, the performance is not great unless you use XFCE/LXDE/LxQt)"
I do like to use the GPU, though.
The built-in Linux VM supports the GPU (you can enable it in chrome:flags), and Linux GUI apps work fine.
ChromeOS with the Linux VM is a surprisingly nice setup, I bought a Thinkpad Duet 3 so I could use Linux apps on a tablet and it seriously has me considering getting a Chromebook for my next laptop. Everything integrates so seamlessly and effortlessly that it does not even seem like a VM other than having to start up the VM. The Chrome keyboard has also really grown on me, even with the small and very cheap keyboard of the Duet 3. Battery life and performance is amazing and touch works completely as expected. Not sure if I can actually make the leap and give up Linux after 20 years of nothing but, but I am considering it.
You won't find anything like the Macbook Air M1 in build quality, display, and battery life
Thinkpad X13s and T14s (both with Snapdragon) are the best closest alternative.
The M1 Air display being 2560x1600, it isn't that high of a bar to cross.
Surface Pro are 2880x1920, Asus’ pz13 series will be in the same ballpark. Getting Linux on them will be a bit more of a PITA, but you get the touchscreen and form factor to balance. Build quality will be basically on par with Apple, battery life should be taking a more serious hit (linux + smaller battery from the start)
Have a look at X1E devicetree in Linux kernel source (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... all the way to the bottom). There are some models that have a very active development and an almost complete support by now, with Thinkpad T14s probably the most active.
I’d be interested in this as well. I want a quiet machine with a decent display and a long battery life. Right now the MacBook Air checks those boxes but I’d be very interested in an alternative that I can throw Linux / OpenBSD on.
My Ryzen framework 13 is silent almost all the times, except gaming and processing map tiles.
While I personally want a fan and see it as price to pay for better thermals, the disadvantages aren't just noise.
The most critical issue would be the fans still spinning to cool down the machine when it was sent to sleep. That creates the vicious cycle when bagged right after sleep, where the fan try to lower the temp, but their running in a closed environment warms the confined air, which pushes the fan to run faster yet.
That's the recipe for a hot and dead battery when you take it out of the bag.
I had that with MacBooks and Windows laptops alike.
MacBook Air M1. Find one with max ram (Facebook marketplace, $400), have storage upgraded to 2TB (IYKYK), Linux support is good.
Sorry, but no: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#tab...
Can't even drive an external display over the DP.
Linux support on Apple hardware is subpar compared to ARM Thinkpads.
I guess it's the physical HDMI port that's needed, as Minis and the Pro laptops have working monitor HDMI monitor support?
How did you upgrade the soldered storage?
Take it to a shop which cnc mills the original one off and solders a compatible new one on. Maybe you can desolder the old one, but why bother.
Sounds easy. Why bother getting a laptop with replaceable storage anyway?
Apple doesn't sell one for any price, so if you want Apple hardware, that's what you get. They objectively make the best laptop hardware package unless you value upgradeability over performance or build quality, which most people also very objectively don't.
Removable SSDs aren't just for upgradability but for repairability. To ensure your shiny expensive laptop doesn't become e-waste the minute your SSD NAND (which is a wearable part) inevitably dies.
I agree 100%, I'm just saying if you want Apple, you can't have that regardless how much you're willing to pay (though if you paid them $10B they'd probably bend and design it this way, everybody has a number.)
There’s a guy who offers it for a very reasonable fee in USA. I’ve used his services a few times with great success! Email me, I wouldn’t want to post someone else’s contact info publicly.
This is exhibit A in why Apple needs to adopt 2230 NVMe drives and stop this ridiculous soldered flash storage scam.
Apple doesn't need that. Apple is very happy selling storage for 2-4x market rates.
> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.
The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
But what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?
I've seen laptops stuck in weird state. Most likely, Fujitsu didn't bother to test turning off secure boot once they received the BIOS they bought, and fixed the toggle in a firmware update.
Linux boots fine using standard secure boot, so if it refused it's either NixOS using an unsigned bootloader (which is surprising to me) or secure boot just being bugged to hell.
Another option is that NixOS uses secure boot but uses a signature that's too recent: one of the secure boot CAs is expiring soon, and an old BIOS may not carry the new key if NixOS opts to sign their bootloader with the latest key. This issue doesn't just affect Linux, certain Windows images won't boot on older devices either if this mismatch happens.
My bet is on NVRAM getting into a weird state or a buggy BIOS. That's the most obvious thing that would get fixed by updating the BIOS.
If the company fully managed the previous windows install, they'd have control on the upgrades to the BIOS as well and could just block them. These restrictions disappear with standard windows install.
In my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
The OA was describing the use of a refurbished laptop made by Fujitsu Japan (so 50% owned by Lenovo since 2017). No profit goes to Fujitsu UK (a subsidiary). And the Horizon system has a complex history [1].
But still, perhaps no, simply in solidarity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_accounting_system
Yes, Fujitsu did some nasty things, but half the world would have reasons not to do business with the UK.
Plus, the Post Office Scandal had a lot of input from the PO itself and the British legal system.
It was a very British failure overall.
I would say buying used Fujitsu from a third party seller is still better than letting it become e-waste. It's not like Fujitsu is getting any of that money.
This was my first thought as well.
It's kinda old though
Is that necessarily a bad thing? I have older laptops than the U729 that still see some use. If you're not locally compiling a big codebase, running some AI/LLM thing, playing GPU-intensive games, etc., you really don't need much.
Dear god its ugly.
Whenever Microsoft makes me make an account and I cannot bypass it I just make an throwaway with not so pleasant words in the email. Followed by installing EndeavourOS.
I really hope this still works forever. Unfortunately I suspect, that one day they'll require a phone verification or similar, like many services do nowadays.
Not sure, but I just install Linux on any system that comes with Windows these days, I just don't have any software that's Windows specific that I can't run on Linux.
I also went this route but was disappointed by: - bad speakers - poor battery life - inferior screen quality
Nowadays where you can get a MacBook Air 16gb m2 for around 600€ this would be my pick if I’d have to find a new machine for travel and casual use.
TL;DR: When in doubt, update the BIOS before doing anything else.
Unless there is some vulnerability in the current version that you want to take advantage of. See e.g. mediatek exploit to unlock bootloaders without authorization by OEM or hacking PS4.
> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”.
It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.
This website is called Hacker News.
Suit yourself. I think a little whimsy is refreshing.
I actually find this rather interesting.
Gibson knew dick about computers in 1984, which makes his early cyberpunk works more interesting because so much of the technical stuff is pure imagination and guesswork. He peppered his 1980s prose with Japanese-sounding brand names because he assumed that the Japanese would dominate computing the way they dominated electronics for things people like William Gibson do—things like listening to music. And it didn't quite work out that way, because Japanese computer manufacturers tailored their output to peculiar Japanese needs (specifically, needing high resolution displays and lots of memory in order to draw kanji well and needing Japanese language support in the OS) rather than hewing to emerging industry standards. This kept prices of NEC, Epson, and Sharp gear high, and allowed American manufacturers like IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Apple to get a significant foothold in the emerging industry worldwide. Toshiba emerged as an early leader in laptops, but laptops wouldn't really find their market niche until the mid-90s or so. So these days, you go to like Den-Den Town in Osaka, and you will find Dells and HPs for sale, and of course all the pretty Japanese girls are all about their Apple gear, just like here. Even so, Japanese buyers tend to prefer Japanese brands, followed by other Asian brands, and Western brands (except for Apple) third. So I can totally see a Japanese executive rocking a Fujitsu laptop, but I haven't seen Westerners in possession of one.
I came here to quote that section for the opposite reason, what a lovely, romantic reason to be drawn to a laptop; made me smile :)