Been considering getting into Linux for years, but been busy with my medical career and haven’t found the time. Now as EU laws and regulations are clamping down hard on privacy and anonymity online I feel the time is now, if ever.
Rob Braxman recommended a Intel 7000- or 8000-series Dell XPS 13, for Linux.
I watched the video of Wendel (been a huge fan, all since TekSyndicate days) reviewing the System 76 Pangolin.
Maybe other worthy contestants?
I can buy a second hand Intel i7 10510U Dell XPS 13, for 424 USD.
The System 76 Pangolin goes for 999 USD.
Grateful for any help on this matter.
Writing this first Level1Techs forum post on a Macbook Pro Late-2013 model laptop. Loving the keyboard (pre-butterfly switch nonsense) and trackpad. Don’t love Apple and Google (YouTube) owning my data…
While I really like System76 and want them to succeed, I’d trust Dell more just because you have the ability to properly have good hardware security your Linux install.
I bought an xps 13 off ebay for around $400 listed as refurbished about a year ago and when it arrived the webcam would not work and didn’t even show up in device manager, I thought about keeping it any way since I don’t have much use for a webcam but the next day the speakers stopped working. I returned it and while it may have been just bad luck, once I thought about it, if you have the extra money it makes sense to me to buy the newer system.
I know synthetic benchmarks don’t always line up with real world results but when the difference is so massive it’s going to be faster. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+7840U&id=5322
I bought a System 76 Pangolin in November 2021 and I’m very happy with it. The battery died on me once but I got great service from System 76 to order a replacement battery and they had a good visual guide on how to replace it myself.
I’ve been running Pop!_OS even since I bought the device and I love it. Ask me anything about it if you need more info.
I would avoid the XPS series. I do not understand why they keep getting good reviews. I’ve had two personal ones with battery life issues in Linux. The second one had constant thermal throttling issues and the battery eventually swelled up and popped out the trackpad. I have a photo in this post I wrote here:
I use to really be behind Dell, but I just had an Inspirton die after 1 month short of two years. So I dunno.
My work laptop is the 13 in Framework and it works well (only on month two), but if you check the other Framework thread, there seem to be QA issues with the 16 inch models.
Lenovos are still really solid I think, but more of them are coming with soldered on RAM, which I’m really not in support of. I worked next to a guy in Seattle who really loved System 76, but I don’t have any experiences with their laptops.
Be careful following Braxman. He is not an expert and gets things wrong. For example he has an email service which was improperly secured, and he has a brand of LineageOS phones which while okay for privacy, are bad for security. There are options now that are much better security wise and have privacy benefits, with similar app compatibility. This is a little off topic from what laptop he recommends for Linux, but given I’ve seen problems elsewhere, I recommend you make sure as you are doing now to trust but verify what he recommends.
I did not know these things about Braxman and his products. You make an important point, as to not trust blindly in singular “gurus”. I have learned to know this, in all my other interests over the years. Experience creates nuance, where there before was mostly black/white/confusing.
As a tadpole privacy and security enthusiast, I am eager to draw on the knowledge and even more so the experience of others that have been doing this for longer.
level_double_o_null, I appreciate your remark about Braxman and would love for you to point me in the right direction as to where I may find more practical teachings on the subjects discussed
I’ve had 3 Thinkpads running Linux (13, T480, T14).
I’ve also had a Dell workstationish laptop (quite pricy!), and I think an XPS 15, also running Linux.
They all worked fine, some ran Debian some ran Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a nice certified hardware list - https://ubuntu.com/certified - that’s worth a check. Though Linux on laptops is much less of a gamble these days than it used to be!
Thinkpad’s are an interesting brand, they aren’t the legendary build quality anymore, my T14 had a small number of screws and a large number of plastic tabs holding the bottom on which I imagine would start snapping off the 10th time you took it part. That wasn’t great, but it was still a pretty solid machine. It’s a business brand, the screens and materials aren’t the best but good enough. I like the keyboards, and I really like the 3 physical mouse buttons. I middle click a lot in Linux (to paste).
Thinkpad’s also have pretty good parts availability and manuals/documentation too.
The Dell felt like they were trying to compete with Apple, nicer screen, much more high end finishes. But for at least some of the XPS series went too thin - pairing nice hot Intel CPUs with not enough cooling.
Given a choice between a Dell and a Thinkpad I’d pick a Thinkpad.
But I’d rather a Framework. I’m tired of laptops being so time limited and disposable.
Frankly I am new here and don’t know much, but here is where I am at so far. For Linux I followed this guy blindly as he has the only guide with btrfs, timeshift, and luks that I could find Pop!_OS 22.04: installation guide with btrfs, luks encryption and auto snapshots with timeshift | mutschler.dev with adding two commands from the comments (that the creator on the youtube video liked) (and from stack overflow since the comment only explicitly gave one of two commands it said to do) since I was getting efi variable errors once I chrooted (did the commands right before). I ignored a couple things in the chroot about possibly missing firmware/efi variable problems and it worked great. I actually did reck my system later, but was able to easily restore it with the way he sets up timeshift. It’s amazing.
For phones I like GrapheneOS which has all sorts of great features like the ability to download a sketchy app and remove its internet permission (with the abiltity to stop apps from communicating with each other in the same profile I believe coming soon, though you can always throw them in a separate profile with no communication). The creator is paranoid and has developed such a great OS that it, running on a Google Pixel, has not been able to be hacked by Cellebrite since 2022, while all other phones/OS options are hackable, sometimes with a month or two or lag (maybe also not a couple tiny projects that are modifications of GrapheneOS but which have no significant following). The problem is he is uncompromising and isn’t willing to hack around blocks for things like safetynet, so as that gets more implemented it may have less app compatibility and you may need to have a backup iPhone or smartwatch or something for things like Google Pay/Apple Pay, some authenticator apps, etc if you require them. He also is pretty disagreeable with anyone not up to his standards of privacy, and will protest publicly, so it can make partnerships difficult. But I’ve been happy with the product.
I really don’t have the experience to recommend much more (currently starting on a networking and TrueNAS journey, and don’t forget ECC when you eventually settup a server). I just know I used to follow that guy but have since moved on. I am currently watching a lot of Lawrence Systems for networking, reading the truecable.com articles for understanding proper networking cable termination etc (I almost was going to crimp a bunch of RJ45 connectors on solid cable before reading a reddit comment and going to that site, and it turns out this forum warned of that last year Independent reviews of ethernet cable - #9 by thro), following the TrueNAS forum resource list (Resources List including Detailed Hardware and System Build Notes (plus new user advice / help) - Resources - TrueNAS Community Forums), looking at the GrapheneOS forum for learning about new exploits, and of course Level1Techs is great for settup inspiration/troubleshooting, and the forum here gave me a lot of advice on picking up a new router and more, but I don’t have the experience to confidently recommend anything. As with me almost making and running a bunch of cables with the wrong connector/cable type combination, I don’t know what I don’t know. I mostly just go through forum posts/Reddit/AI and try to figure things out.
I wanted a somewhat portable laptop with good graphics and it felt like the Pangolin was the right one in that category at that time.
What are your concerns about anonymity? Are you concerned someone at System 76 will leak your personal information? It’s always possible and not only from them which is why I try to secure my personal information assuming that every company I give it to will eventually leak it.
