Linux Laptop

[BusyBee]

Hi everyone,

I am just picking brains in the loose sense here but I am thinking of buying  Linux based laptop as my old one is showing signs of age with noisy fan and poor battery plus slowing a little.

Over the past few months I have had an old desktop being used by a family member with Linux Mint without great issue (only problem needing a re-seating of memory modules [well it was Windows Vista so dated], but otherwise brilliant). From this Linux appears to be a good option.

This has lead me to look toward replacing my laptop, which is Windows 10, with a Linux based laptop. Most of my software is readily replaced and I think it would be little issue. I would be thinking of something up-spec (Intel I7 with perhaps 1TB disk or more etc). I would prefer to have something ready to go and have come across a couple of suppliers but, due to the 'non mainstream' market, these are not instantly a reputable buy.

To be straight, what I am asking is 'What are your thoughts?'. I was thinking Linux Ubutu, but suppliers? No recrimination, just thoughts.

Thank you

Tracy

[djrm]

Hi Tracy, Dell sell a range of laptops pre-configured with Ubuntu. I have a Lenovo Yoga 900 i7 which I dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu. hth David.

[BusyBee]

Thank you. I have seen the Dell offering. There appears to be only one now which is fairly low spec. I have looked at Lenovo but, although dual boot would probably work with most, I am looking at single system with possible Windows emulation. Thanks.

Tracy

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
I was thinking of replacing the laptop I'm using at this moment an Asus X553M. The internal camera had given up the ghost many years ago and the touch pad had failed after a certain person spilled water on it while it was powered up (not me I hasten to add).

I use Mint 20 on this one and a USB mouse so as we were going to use zoom I thought time to look at another. The choice was poor having just a £500 budget, 256gb SSD's smaller screen etc. So I took a gamble on a used keyboard and touchpad for £15. It came well packed and was in perfect order and cured the touch pad issue, I upped the RAM as well and I had already fitted an 500gb SSD which is quick.
This time I decided to go for dual Boot with Windows 10 and of course Mint 20. All I do is to copy the home folder onto a spare HDD and do a fresh install of Mint, delete everything from the new install home folder (except Desktop that cant be deleted) then copy from the backup and merge the desktop folder to the new install. Everything goes back in, including thunderbird mail, firefox, all your history etc.

I bought a decent webcam and its all fine, even Win 10 didn't need a key as it is digitally signed, no doubt as this laptop came with Win 10, five years ago.
The new Windows 10 20H2 has a much better feel than it did 5 years ago.
I have to say the laptop is running very nice now and I can use Win 10 with my SdrPlay Rsp1a indoors.

[Nick]

The raspberry pi 400 is interesting and very very cheap...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ras...rType=home

[Murphyv310]

I was seriously considering the Pi 400 and still may buy the full kit.

[BusyBee]

The raspberry pi looks interesting, not quite for what I am after at the moment but a nice little project for when there is time.

I investigated Dell further and found that, although there is only one Linux based laptop available, they say that others can be supplied but the option is not available on their website directly. It is something to enquire about but the contact was not very clear, just saying that the configuration is available on another model.

For myself, at the moment, I am investigating setting up the old desktop as a file server. I do have a couple of reasonable external drives and the desktop does have a 500GByte hard disk so the option of using it in this way seems worth investigation. It is also pushing me into learning how to use Linux lower level stuff. I had a bit of a look yesterday but little success although quite a bit of progress. I have now found a downloaded Linux book I have, which has a chapter on the subject, so a good read is in order. Whether I go this way or not it is useful to have a good feel for the system. As you would imagine, years of Windows use with some programming and other lower level things makes Windows less of a problem than Linux (not always lol). It is different but some of the things I do make it essential to have a feel for the system.

I was pushing things forward as some of the suppliers I found are in Europe and thinking that this Brexit thing might change things a bit. No point in rushing though. Most suppliers build up laptops so are a bit of a risk, particularly as they are small concerns. It's worth a bit of investigation.

Your dual boot system is interesting Trevor. Something I will look more into but, at the moment, I feel it useful to have a machine unencumbered with Windows.

Tracy

[Diabolical Artificer]

I don't know of any Linux laptop suppliers Tracey, sorry. In the past I've just got a laptop with windows installed, taken out the HDD and installed Linux Mint on another HDD after obviously checking specs etc. I have a carrier bag of laptop HDD's if you need any.

Linux is a little tricky to use after you've used W for years, but you soon get used to it then start to smile because your PC no longer throws hissy fits every five minutes when a daft update causes issues. So wave goodbye to Antivirus software and other W foppery, that said W is easier to install software on with exe. files and Linux is tricky sometimes as regards drivers for old printers etc, but all in all Linux is a breath of fresh air after W.

Andy.

[Nick]

I'm pretty agnostic about operating systems and use Linux and Windows extensively. Both have their place.

It's important to realise that Linux is not a panacea and Windows certainly does not "throw a hissy fit every five minutes" - hyperbole never helps an argument.

I've always simply regarded technology of whatever type as a tool - pick the best one you have for the job in hand - sometimes that's a linux-based application and sometimes it's Windows - WINE is also not a universal solution (either alcoholic or software) and Linux is certainly vulnerable to attack by malicious third parties. Some of the largest security breaches in recent years have been on Linux-based systems.

[ppppenguin]

Whatever OS you're running, virtual machines can solve all sorts of problems. If WINE can't cope with your Windows software under Linux then use actual Windows running as a VM in Virtualbox. For example I use Virtualbox to run XP on other OSs because I have some software that won't run on later versions of Windows.

The performance penalty for running a VM is now remarkably small. I've got one strange case where some Xilinx software runs a lot faster under some conditions in an XP VM than directly under W7 as the host OS. My only attempt at an explanation is that the Xilinx software was originally written for a 32 bit OS and suffers under a 64 bit OS.

I've not looked at "bare metal" (as against host/guest) hypervisors, attractive as they seem, because they look far too complicated for what I'm trying to do.