I've never had a laptop and am pondering whether my next pc should be a laptop or not. Does Linux work as good on laptops as on a desktop computer? Are all those exotic laptop components supported by Linux? How well do laptops support something like totally erasing your HD, partitioning it and installing Linux on it? Is it even possible to buy a laptop with no Windows on it (don't want to waste money on that)? Thanks!

Ibm had a good track record with linux support, so buying a thinkpad will give you a linux capable system. On the other hand sony is well known from the fact that even the boxed windows version won't run on their systems, just the one they ship with the laptop. Your best bet is to check the linux compatibility list of your choosen distro.

Yes, check the compatibility lists or ask around on the forum of your distro's choosing.

FWIW I personally have good experience with Ubuntu 6.06 on Dell laptops. I've also heared that Mandriva 2007 works well on a wide range of laptops as well. You could also try to buy a preinstalled system. Check LXer's database of Linux vendors. It has a laptop section too.

I have a Dell XPS and installed Ubuntu 6.06 and it works flawlessly. It found every single driver and installed everything with the exception of the 7800GTX video card, but that was a simple download and install.

If your distro of choice is Ubuntu, there is a list on the wiki. I'm not sure how up to date it is, but it might be of use.

HardwareSupportMachinesLaptops

How is Linux power management on laptops? Last I heard, Windows had Linux completely beaten in this aspect, though that was more than a year ago.

Make sure to check the Linux on Laptops site for any guides to the machine you have purchased. Different machines have better APM/ACPI support than others.

Quote: Original post by Ravuya
Make sure to check the Linux on Laptops site for any guides to the machine you have purchased. Different machines have better APM/ACPI support than others.

Yup that's the site I used when I had a pc laptop to try to find a distro that would run on it.
Your best bet would be to look at that site and find out which laptops/distros are actually up and running before you buy one.
If you buy a laptop and then try to get a distro to run smoothly on it you are going to be in world of pain.

p.s. One sure bet is to get nvidia graphics on laptop since that's worked for years.

my advice is to avoid Toshibas if you're looking to install linux, or at least make sure that it is fully supported through Toshiba's linux website. I am using a Toshiba a55s(who knows exactly what model though...there's about 4 different a55s's, and I have no way of knowing which I'm using) and the only linux that is supposed to be fully supported is Slackware linux, and it's supposed to be a pain in the butt to get everything working fully. maybe someone else on here has a Toshiba running linux fairly nicely though. personally, I'd love to buy a newer laptop that actually has Shader 2.0, or even 1.1 support, and maybe more than 40gb of disk space, but alas, I'm broke, and have no job, and can't find a job I like that will accept me since I'm still in high-school.

Also, a friend of mine purchased a very nice HP for about a $1200, and I think I've seen him use about three different linux distros, along with Windows Vista and XP, and all of them seem to run quite nicely.

so, just some advice.

-Wynter Woods(aka Zerotri)

Quote: Original post by Valderman
How is Linux power management on laptops? Last I heard, Windows had Linux completely beaten in this aspect, though that was more than a year ago.

Windows still does better, but the difference is not so great nowadays. It will depend on the laptop and how well Linux (and Windows) supports the particular hardware configuration. Linux will do a lot better on modern machines than on older machines with buggy power management hardware (where Windows still does fairly well, because they've found workarounds for the bugs or whatever).

Len Brown, et al., wrote a paper for the 2006 Ottawa Linux Symposium on the topic. In summary, on a Dell Inspiron 6400, Windows had around 15% better battery life.