Buying a Linux Laptop

Sunday, March 15, 2020

laptoplaptoplinux

Laptop death, what type of changes

Last December, I decided to change my day to day laptop. I have (like most people here) an intensive usage of my laptop and my previous Dell XPS for multiple reasons (dead battery and RAM limitation mainly).

So I started a quest to find a good laptop, sold with Linux out of the box (even if I would change the default distro) for 2 reasons:

  1. Help companies that sell Linux laptop, to help make it more “upstream” (Yes, I can dream :°))
  2. Being sure that all drivers are available, avoiding most surprises

The options

After some research on line, I end it up with this list of potential vendor:

  • Dell (XPS): “Safe choice”, same as the one I was using back then. Some stuff annoyed me a bit on it so I decided to look somewhere else.
  • LinuxShop: Only French vendor I saw but I was not convince by the laptop choices (I wanted 32GB of RAM…)
  • System76
  • Entroware

I found the System76 and Entroware pretty similar and wasn’t sure which one to choose. Both were as powerful as needed, both had qwerty keyboard only (even though I would have preferred an azerty layout) and both were quite similar in term of price…

My choice

Entroware has been my choice in the end… Mainly because of shipping :D One from the US, the other from the UK… I chose the closest to home for faster delivery^^.

I received it about 3 months ago and I am really happy about it so far :-). I didn’t struggle at all using the keyboard, even though I setup an azerty configuration even though a qwerty keyboard is shown. Good thing about being a nerd, I don’t need to look at it anyway so I don’t care about this small “issue”.

Otherwise, I think its a great laptop. I’m having some issue when having 2 external screen, one being plugged via an hdmi → Usb 3 connector, one directly in hdmi. The one connected through the USB 3 port works but shutdown when I put a video (player or screensharing/videoconference tool) on it… I didn’t take the time to investigate that point yet though…

Also, they did a mistake as I purchase an additional electric plug (one for @home, one in my backpack :-)), but after a few emails they sent me a new correct one right away, so great support as well :-).

Let’s hope it will be solid for a few years!


Contact

If you find any issue or have any question about this article, feel free to reach out to me via email, mastodon, matrix or even IRC, see the About Me page for details.

See Also

My Home Lab 2020, part 1: Context and Architecture choices

2020, Yet another attempt to resurrect this blog