I've been pondering on a small, at least fairly light weight, laptop to turn into a somewhat secure linux laptop. I have my desktop at home for power. So I've been looking towards getting a moderately powered laptop I can upgrade the RAM on, toss an SSD in, and install linux on for developing/coding while learning about linux in general.
The problem is the fact that it's been years for me since I've fiddled with Linux, and it seems like the driver support is hit-and-miss still today. I don't want to buy a laptop just to find out Linux doesn't have full support on it Dx
So does anyone have any suggestions about supported hardware or a moderately powered (like an i5 driven) laptop for Linux?
Any laptop you want. Just try to avoid nVidia graphics, because they suck in linux. Intel graphics are easiest in linux. I definitely prefer Intel laptops with iGPU for low power long battery life in laptops, but if you want a gaming system, AMD is also a valid option.
Those companies use re-branded clevo labtops with a few minor alterations, they also wrote a few drives so that you don't have to fiddleas much to get everything working in linux.
i have bought a few tuxedos and they have good keyboards (although not quite as good as thinkpads, ) and sturdy cases (although not quite as stiff as an apple unibody). They are not noisy but if you tax the processor they do "shhhhhh" noticeably but there's zero whining. Battery life is descent as long as you stay away from gaming gpu's & processors with > 37watt tdp. Also they are the easiest serviceable laptops i have ever seen.
You can select what hardware you like.
Also stay away from thinkpads there were recently quite a few models that had a uefi bug that destroyed the machines if you tried to install linux or replace the diskdrive with an ssd. If you want a Thinkpad wait a few months to avoid buying from the bad badge.
Also Asus laptops have a reputation to be very Linux compatible.
Also as a general advice, don't buy thin dual gpu laptops, or gaming laptops. The price performance is just abysmal. And allot of gaming laptops are really loud if you game.