I have been looking for a laptop for a while now as my previous one broke. I want to install NixOS on it (obviously), but have been having trouble picking a brand. My field of work is graphics programming and I will need an Nvidia graphics card, simply because of cuda, but have had previous bad experiences with a Gigabyte laptop simply due to the fact of the dumb proprietary software that requires windows to set up fan control and update the bios. I know that linux does take a bunch of tinkering, especially on laptops, but I want to avoid as many issues as possible.
So far I have found a Thinkpad P1 gen 5 with a A1000 gpu, which is around the power I need for my work, however had heard some things about it throttling at high loads and its cooling system not being up to the task for high gpu usage, which I will be operating at.
Any suggestions for alternate brands? I have liked asus laptops for a long time but am not sure how nice they play with linux. Any suggestions would be very helpful.
My old laptop, a Dell XPS 15 9560 has been excellent. Linux support is quite good. I haven’t had the pleasure to try the newer models so I cannot say it is the same.
A friend of mine really likes his SCHENKER laptop (German brand, I guess they also ship), and says they have really awesome/helpful customer support, and the laptop itself is great. But he uses Windows, so I’m not sure about the Linux compatibility.
You’ve mentioned it, but thinkpads have an excellent history with Linux support, and in my circles look to be the brand to go for software developers, especially those running Linux.
Outside of that, check this page, it effectively lists vendors and devices that meaningfully support Linux - if they’re not on the list, firmware updates are too painful to do since you’ll need to boot Windows, so you’re not getting support from your vendor: LVFS: Device List
I would absolutely love a framework laptop, however there are no nvidia modules available for them as of yet and I am not sure how long it will be before they are available, as I need nvidia as I use CUDA, and the AMD solutions are nowhere near good enough yet.
As for BIOS updates, some manufacturers either support FreeDOS boot-USB BIOS updaters, or have the firmware include a self-update utility that doesn’t care about OS as long as the update is on a FAT32 USB drive.
My experience with Asus was great, getting a Thinkpad in the name of the external (there are two removable batteries connected at once… well, were, until the extra one degraded after years of use) battery felt like a downgrade in terms of UEFI setup, and how the GPU is connected (with Asus you can have the good Xrandr support of Intel with the main external output, and do whatever with the Nvidia either for offload or for CUDA — with Thinkpad I need to actually run video output through Nvidia).
I’ve been extremely happy with my framework laptop and wholeheartedly recommend picking one up. The ability to upgrade it easily or repair it over time is a huge boon. NixOS support has been good so far, but the official partnership gives me more confidence in its longevity.
…until recently when it broke and i found out on their forums that their support staff is completely overwhelmed and won’t even reply to a number of customers request for support via email after days of waiting for a reply
on the plus side i found out that running NixOS on a steam deck is every bit as awesome as they said it would be and it makes a perfectly productive machine
My strategy for picking a laptop has served me well for many years. It’s: buy a used/refurbished ThinkPad off eBay. They are relatively cheap, which takes some pressure off.
I can’t comment on the P1 or P-series, other than I considered getting on, but didn’t because I wasn’t confident that its hardware would run perfectly on Linux.
Other than that, my only advice is to buy a P1 from a business with a lenient return policy and install NixOS. If it doesn’t work, return it. If it does work, now you have the information you are seeking and may still return it.
Here’s my n=1: absolutely do not get an Asus TUF (in my case the FA507R) gaming laptop. It has the weirdest shenanigans: in Windows they have totally disabled suspend in the firmware meaning: you close the laptop, it shuts down, there is just no suspend at all. I’ve lost a lot of work because closing a laptop can be a habit. In Linux you do get suspend back, but it has erratic crashes in recent kernels - good luck getting that sorted out with the toxic behavior in the Linux kernel development community and their ivory tower unwillingness to help normal users reporting problems. One upside though is that they do support battery charging to arbitrary percentage - I usually keep them at 60% for max battery lifetime and only charge them to 100% when I know I’ll need it.
I do really like Lenovo (Legion) laptops. Just always high quality, decent fan control. No battery control, but their batteries are of such high quality that it doesn’t really matter. I have two Lenovo Legions and they just always perform so well.
What about a laptop with no dGPU and using an eGPU via Thunderbolt? If you’re a graphics programmer, this would let you test different GPUs without replacing the laptop? the eGPU enclosures are pretty big though and definitely not portable…
Laptops with the new AMD Strix Point APUs will be launching July 31st. If it’s not urgent it’s probably worthwhile to wait for reviews, as the performance and battery life boosts are expected to be quite large.
I’ve been using Asus G14 with RTX 2060 for 4 years, 1+ year of that on NixOS. No repairs, CUDA works, external display can be connected directly to dGPU, there are open source fan/etc control utilities for Linux. But I use it as a desktop, so can’t comment on battery life/etc.
Of course, there are gotchas:
After 1 year one of the fans started to make weird noise: it helped to punch the laptop when it happened and after half a year the noise was completely gone I could have replaced the fan manually, though. And there was an official repair option (ASUS provided 2 year guarantee IIRC), but I didn’t want to lose my laptop for X days.
AMD iGPU drivers have problems both on Windows and Linux: had black screens every 1-2 weeks, especially after waking up from suspend. IIRC switching to Nvidia dGPU as primary remedied the issue: at some point I stopped using suspend at all for unrelated reasons, so not 100% sure on what fixed it.
I never got X11 to work with Nvidia, which means be ready for dealing with Wayland compatibility issues with X11 apps: Electron apps had annoying input lag until I got proper Wayland configuration. I believe that issue was specific to Nvidia+Wayland setup.
i have a conclusion to my story which i thought important to point out here given what i said before
after following a number of instructions from customer support testing different components of my laptop they deduced that it must be a faulty motherboard so they sent me a new one at no cost and my laptop is now back up and running
i really love how easy it was to put the laptop together, upgrade it, replace a motherboard, etc… i love how well the framework works, especially with NixOS… i can’t say anything bad about the laptop
the support was actually good… just very slow to respond. after searching around the internet i’m left believing that they really were just overloaded recently and this wasn’t the norm
overall… i guess i would go back to recommending framework laptops
I could have replaced the fan manually, though. And there was an official repair option (ASUS provided 2 year guarantee IIRC), but I didn’t want to lose my laptop for X days.