Looking for laptop that will work with linux

hi all im new here:D

i know its software forum but didint see logical section to put that post in.

im looking for a laptop to install linux on for coding and work in general. ive been using dual boot most of the time on my desktop but it became annoying recently and its casusing to much trouble. my max budget is 500 british pounds which is about 780 dollars but i assume i wont need that much. im looking for screen 14-15,xx inch and hardware that will handle all coding needs of a student. dont know much about laptop hardware i always despised and avoided them.

thank you and sorry if this post will have to be moved,

Kamil

Hey Man,

Linux is pretty good at detecting hardware and being compatible.

If you're just coding, you don't need anything super powerful, you didn't mention a budget.

My experince with Laptops and various flavours of Linux is:

All IBM Thinkpads - No Issues (so far)

Some Asus Zenbook - Battery & Heat Issues

Some Dell Laptops - Sound Issues, sometimes needing to power up several times before fans kick in, I never could figure out why.

Flavours - Ubuntu, Zorin, Mint, Fedora

Hope this helps.

Ubuntu works great on Lenovo laptops. Used to be IBM thinkpads but they are just straight up lenovo now. I have owned three and had no problem dual booting them with ubuntu over the past 5 years.

thx for suggestons guys. im looking up lenovo and ibm laptops. on my desktop i got 16 gb of ram so i never bothered to make swap partition. if ill install ubuntu or fedora on 4 or 8 gb ram laptop would that be required? oh and i wont be dual booting itll be linux only. fedora is tempting but i remember i had problems updating firefox before XD but that was 2-3 years ago maybe it has channged. if not fedora ill simply go with ubuntu.

To be honest fedora rocks for coding, especially if you use eclipse with plugins, everything in latest version in in the standard repos, and the kernel is bleeding edge so you have access to all the latest and greatest features.

I swear by asus laptops, just because of the insides: no double sticky tape, no chaos, no crammed up parts, still very servicable and easy to disassemble because everything is fixed with screws, and both asus SHE and the asus laptop hotkeys have been supported by the linux kernel for a long time. There isn't a lot Asus has done right in recent times, especially in desktop parts, but in laptops they still rule in my opinion.

My Toshiba laptop is running Linux Xunbuntu perfectly.

everything dell has been tested with Ubuntu and dell is even considering putting linux only for their alienware line once steam and games are more supported

 

awesome info thx guys, ill have a look at asus laptops as well and ill try fedora at first:D how about that swap partition problem any suggestions?

Fedora installs on 2GB+ RAM systems with default LVM and a floating 2GB logical swap on LVM. Normally a linux system doesn't use swap if there is more than 2GB of physical memory, it will use about 1.5 GB as an application RAM pool and the rest as RAMdisk.

The exceptions are:

- hibernate: will store the RAM in swap, in that case up to 2 GB of swap can be used by the system.

- heavy virtual machines running with a lot of suspended executions on systems with only 4 GB RAM, typically these are rather small swap sizes.

- android development: this is the one thing that requires a big swap in linux, because of how ADT work. Usually, it's safe to use a 4 GB swap (that is what I use on my system and it has never been a problem. It's important to configure a swap when doing android development, because the android system image is built in swap, and when the swap is too small, the build will just crash and you'll have to redo it, which sucks. In Fedora, by default, swap is a 2GB logical volume in the LVM partition. LVM causes a small (almost negligeable) storage overhead, so I don't use it on my SSD, because that overhead, as small as it may be, is expensive in relation to the benefit (which is none in my case, because I don't have use flexible storage on my PC's, only on my servers), so I typically configure a home partition of 20 GB (more than enough even with system-wide games and eclipse with a bunch of plugins and a bunch of SDKs and VMs and full libreoffice and gimp and darktable and all the other stuff, I'm only at 44% occupation on / now in df, so still far from the 75% efficiency limit on an SSD), a 4 GB swap partition, and the rest as ext4 /home partition.

If your swap partition shows up in fstab after install, it will just work, swapon is comparable to automount internal drives in that. You can add noatime, but not discard as parameters for swap if you're using an SSD. On / and /home, you should manually add discard and noatime (and nodiratime if it's not included in noatime on some exotic distros, but that's very rare) in fstab, Anaconda/Gnome-disks doesn't offer an option to add it via the GUI like on the SuSE installer.

n1 Zoltan i know who to harass via pm in the future you completely lost me with that last paragraph:D thx for the rest though. youre doing very well as an advocate of fedora:D one would think you have fat margin waiting for you:D  thx again