For me, I have three different brands for my Linux systems and I used to have another:
Lenovo: at least on their mid to upper range units, Lenovo in their Thinkpad and Thinkbook brands retain a LOT of the characteristics that they aquired when they purchased the lines and systems from IBM’s Personal Systems Division long ago. These are still good, at least if you spend money on a good one. If you lack big bucks, wait 1 to 3 generations; for instance I have a Gen 3 Thinkpad T14 and it’s great but they have newer ones that cost a LOT more!
Dell has always been a solid alternative to Lenovo (and IBM in days distant past). Their mid to high end models are pretty good too. The last one I got in the Inspiron series is a monster compared to my Thinkpad T14, but I suspect that I could get a leaner, lighter, newer model here too; their old Dimension desktops were excellent; their Inspiron laptop series matches in the laptop department; they probably have other models, but responders can probably be more informative than me on these.
Hewlett-Packard: not necessarily the choice for high end stuff, but if you want a device that is likely to work and have decent support, HP does fine; I own an HP-14 from a few years ago that is still solid; I’ve used numerous HP laptops in the past with great success.
Acer is NOT a good brand in my experience for Linux laptops mostly because of their inferior BIOS/system consoles; they’re among the best in price/performance, so the best place to use them is for a Chromebook, as long as you don’t have anything AGAINST buying stuff that runs a Google-based OS!
ASUS has a good reputation; I’ve not had a lot of experience, specifically personal experience; what I see is only what I’ve READ, so again others would have to make any pro or con statements about them.
How about other brands and other experiences, as well as comments on the ones I’ve mentioned?
Lenovo Think Pad is a great choice. HP doesn’t last as long and lacks the performance that you would get from a Lenovo Think Pad, every HP I have owned has fallen apart quite easily.
For me, Lenovo Thinkpad FTW. The build quality and all is great, but best is its use of plain old Ubuntu LTS: all its devices work, install and run, no messing around needed.
I’m using a Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with Radeon Graphics. As a retired person I can’t justify buying a brand new one, but these are still my favorite laptops.
Yeah, I’m retired too, and not spending unless you need to is a reality. I can tell you’ve got the skills to dig into device/software problems and win the battle. Me, that’s not my skill set, so I like that Lenovo + Ubuntu is plug and play. We’re fortunate that we’ve got good choices. Win win.
I had a pretty good experience when I took my MSI summit and wiped windows off and first started running cinnamon, then I set it up to dual boot tuxOS/cinnamon, and again, no issues really. the battery was pretty dissappointing, but the performance and build quality were good, just those sharp corners digging in when you play SuperTuxKart for two hours straight did get to be a bother. lol
I have bought various refurbished IBM and Lenovo ThinkPads over the years, and they have been solid. I loved their keyboards. These were older units that were thick enough to have nicely sculpted keys that were a joy to type on. Even though it did not impact the ThinkPad line, I fired Lenovo when they betrayed their customers with the Superfish malware.
My latest laptop is an aging System76 Lemur (LEMU6) (rebranded Clevo) I bought new. Out of the box, the wired NIC would only reliably connect at 10 Mb/s. I tried different distros, drivers, firmware, and kernels with no improvement. I added a USB 3.0 gigabit NIC and settled instead of returning the laptop. Certain keys repeatedly miss keystrokes until the keyboard has been typed on for a few minutes. Passwords and dmcrypt/LUKS passphrases are a chore with this keyboard. Unless I saw glowing reviews of their new products, I am not certain I would buy anything else from them.
Work has provided a couple of Dell Latitudes, and typing on these things is like closing your eyes and hoping that your fingers find the keys on the flat slab of plastic keyboard. These things are awful.
Does anyone make a good sculpted laptop keyboard any more? Preferably full-size with all the keys? Full-size arrow keys for navigating through those text editors?
I can relate on both points here. I ran Cinnamon for a while, smooth enough overall, but battery life was definitely its weak spot. But it think TLP and now GNOME 48+ really has come a long way with extending battery life and longevity.
On the keyboard side, I miss the sculpted ThinkPad keys as well. My newer Lenovo feel just a tad shallow and less precise, especially for longer typing sessions. Haven’t found anything quite like the older ThinkPads in a modern laptop yet.
I have an old classic Thinkpad X201. Long throw keystrokes but very accurate.
Newer Thinkpad T14 is better than most recent vintage keyboards; you’re right, Dell Latitude keyboard is mushy. The really old IBM Thinkpad (T40 series) was one of the best.
Expensive mechanical keyboards are the only way to go for a super good keyboard; otherwise get a decent desktop keyboard.
I am not so Laptop expert, neither on Linux compatibility.. I just own an Acer (inherited from my papa since he bought one new last year ) but a friend of mine was saying me Dell is one of best Laptop and Desktop brand.
Speaking of laptops, I picked up yet another HP laptop over the weekend to use for extra testing. It’s an old HP ENVY x360. Works well for testing purposes. I put a test antiX image on it.
My laptop is an MSI Raider gaming system (a “Costco special”) that I purchased to replace two ancient Toshiba laptops. It came with Windows 11 Home and I initially installed Fedora 40 alongside Windows.
Unfortunately, something broke between Fedora 40 and Fedora 42 on this system - I was getting a series of random crashes after upgrading to Fedora 42 - and I ended up wiping the Linux partition (after backing up my files!) and installing Kubuntu.
The Raider series is Intel-based. This computer has an Intel graphics chip for the laptop display and an nVidia chip for the external (HDMI) connection. When new, the Nouveau drivers threw up error messages about the nVidia chip regularly; those issues have gone away with Nouveau updates. Wish I could just disable the nVidia chip, as I never use an external monitor.
There is a known BIOS bug on this machine (and certain other Intel-based laptops) that affects certain power management functions - power management still works, it’s just not optimal, if my understanding is correct. MSI has refused to update the AMI BIOS on their laptops - in their words, they don’t support Linux. I think I saw this in a posting on one of their support forums shortly after the bug first appeared.
Battery life isn’t a problem with this machine, because the battery is large and HEAVY. If I need the battery to last a long time, I can use a low-power mode and get at least 2 hours of runtime - I haven’t actually run the battery down to zero.
And - although this system has close to a full-sized keyboard - I haven’t ever found a laptop keyboard that I like. At least - not since the original Compaq “luggable”.
Both Hayden and Eric are right on when it comes to hardware brands. Sure, a few of them are rock solid and work, but even then it still depends on specific needs and personal use cases.
I shared one of my own experiences elsewhere concerning Manjaro Linux. A few years ago I was able to use it for a while, then some poor package updates were not properly verified and when applied to my system it broke. I gave it another chance some time later and had a similar experience in even a shorter period of time.
THEN, not long ago, when we were talking about software, I tried it a third time and couldn’t even get it to operate at all — and yet most other Arch Linux versions work fine, including Endeavour OS and Cachy OS.
Move over to the hardware side and it’s much the same. I picked up a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5i a little while ago. I’ve had great overall experiences with Lenovo and had high expectations. The hardware ran okay but the keyboard was poor and USB ports were so tight that inserting the correct plug was possible but difficult! Imagine such things with a brand that has in the past given me great results.
So I looked for a Thinkpad, but I couldn’t pay $3000 for a really nice one; got lucky watching sales and refurb units and found a Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 that I’m using now. Even here, I’ve learned that if you go with a backlit keyboard you sacrifice some of that nice touch and feel, so this one is good but still a bit disappointing with the keyboard.
The twenty year old versions don’t have backlit keys and the keystrokes are longer, but they are infinitely superior.
So there you go, SOFTWARE and HARDWARE examples of things that ought to be right and are - for some people - but not for others. I have plenty of very positive use cases - the vast majority of mine are positive, BUT to these ones that mess up, I’ll try again, but at some point I stick with what always seems to work for my use cases.
and now that Ubuntu allows up to 5 ESMs free, it’s hard to beat. You have support on 24.04 LTS until 2034! 
) but a friend of mine was saying me Dell is one of best Laptop and Desktop brand.