I've run openSUSE on several Lenovo laptops over the past ten or so years. Have never had any issue that was unresolvable.

JockTheKiwi: I just don't know enough about hardware, well I know enough to not buy anything with NVIDIA.

gzt:

JockTheKiwi: I just don't know enough about hardware, well I know enough to not buy anything with NVIDIA.

The NVidia Linux drivers are in pretty good shape these days.

I only know what I have read and watched and there is still a lot of F^&* NVIDIA re Linux I see. I suppose I could be looking in my own wee bubble

I recently bought a Lenovo L15 and am running Ubuntu on it. Was pretty easy to set up and configure. The only catch was I had to disable secure boot in the BIOS to have the Wifi card recognized/supported. This should improve with a later Ubuntu kernel. Other than that.... it does just work.

Ever so slightly off topic: I saw an earlier comment about someone using an E15. My son has the E15 (I went L15 for slightly better upgrade-ability with non soldered RAM). I would say the E15 is slightly nicer hardware. The screen is better and the fingerprint reader is combined with the power button. The only drawback it has is the soldered RAM - it does also have a single RAM expansion slot.  If I were buying again I'd probably get the E15.

JockTheKiwi:

gzt:
The NVidia Linux drivers are in pretty good shape these days.

I only know what I have read and watched and there is still a lot of F^&* NVIDIA re Linux I see. I suppose I could be looking in my own wee bubble

gzt:

JockTheKiwi: I just don't know enough about hardware, well I know enough to not buy anything with NVIDIA.

The NVidia Linux drivers are in pretty good shape these days.

i've got a 1080 TI and have a gsync monitor, it all works great with POP!_OS no issues at all, just download the nvidia .iso and you're away laughing.

for me, gaming on linux is a bit of a struggle sometimes but steam makes that super easy and i don't think it would make a difference if i had an AMD graphics card.

As much as I love linux and use it daily. Its inferior for gaming. I was doing this with emulators etc back in the early 2000's. 

It is getting better with tools like steam etc and Java games like minecraft are easy to run.. Windows is still the easiest, hassle free option to game on hands down.

gzt:

JockTheKiwi:

 

The NVidia Linux drivers are in pretty good shape these days.

 

I only know what I have read and watched and there is still a lot of F^&* NVIDIA re Linux I see. I suppose I could be looking in my own wee bubble

 

You are seeing what is normal on the Internet - the problems show up, but the happy users do not bother to post about it most of the time.  I have been using Nvidia GPUs with Linux for many years now, and for the most part they just work.  I use them with general purpose Ubuntu PCs and Ubuntu boxes dedicated to running MythTV.  I do not do anything that requires high end GPUs - no gaming or 3D, but I do want VDPAU/NVDEC support for flawless playing of video for MythTV.  Installing the Nvidia drivers now is just a matter of installing the Nvidia packages appropriate to your GPU.  In Ubuntu, there is a tool "ubuntu-drivers" which selects the correct third party drivers to match your hardware (for GPUs and other things), and it will install its default recommendations automatically if you tell it to.  Since it is a command line program, it can still easily be used if you have managed to completely screw up your video drivers and the system will only boot into text modes or very low graphics modes.  I have managed to do that a couple of times as I do play with things that are new and can cause breakages.  So all I had to do to get back to the right drivers was to purge the problem packages I had installed and then run ubuntu-drivers and reboot.

On my new Dell laptop, I was surprised and pleased to find that I was able to install Ubuntu 20.04 and the Nvidia drivers without having to switch off secure boot.  So things have come a long way since I first installed Nvidia drivers by using the download from the Nvidia site.  The laptop, like my previous one, has dual Intel and Nvidia GPUs, and this is handled fine now - you just have to run a command to switch between the to GPUs, then logout and login again.  When I got my previous laptop, the support for switching was only from third parties and only arrived in proper working form about a year after I bought it.  Which was not a problem as I almost never use my laptops except on mains, so I just used the Nvidia GPU all the time until switching was working.

The latest real problems have come from Nvidia dropping support for old hardware (on all platforms), so I now have several old fanless Nvidia cards that are still working but there are no compatible Nvidia drivers for them on current kernels or in Windows.  They do work with the open source Nouveau drivers, but the support Nouveau has for the Nvidia hardware features is often pretty lacking and sometimes buggy, so there is no real point in using an Nvidia card over something else in that situation.  I replaced all my Nvidia cards with more modern fanless Nvidia GT1030 cards over the last two years, and they work fine and will support modest 4K video when I eventually get a 4K monitor or TV.  But it is a pain to have a decent card like a GT220 sitting around unused, simply because Nvidia could not be bothered to support older cards.

So Nvidia drivers on Linux are now no more problematical than they are on Windows.

For MythTV I've recently been trying out VAAPI using AMD or Intel integrated graphics.

From a laptop perspective I've been using Intel graphics with VAAPI for some time, and I'm pleased to see browser based accelerated playback is working now with Firefox and Fedora.

fe31nz:

 

So Nvidia drivers on Linux are now no more problematical than they are on Windows.

 

Good to know and thanks for the reminder on bias when reviewing feedback, I can now broaden my options. I am now thinking of a Chromebook for daughter and laptop for me.

From my understanding and as others have mentioned, Lenovo Thinkpads seem to work quite well these days and Dell have done some work to get their hardware working better, although a lot of this work has been focused on special developer editions and servers.

I recently put Debian on a Dell XPS 13 9350 and while the install was smooth, the non-open source driver for the Broadcom wireless chip was problematic. Everyone seems to suggest swapping it out for the Intel wireless chip (comes on it's own little module) and ditch anything Broadcom wherever possible.

Edit: from my understanding the developer edition got the Intel chip by default and the peasants got Broadcom.

The other problem was the HIDPI 3200x1800 monitor - can't remember all the tricks needed, but the Grub menu was unreadable - edit /etc/default/grub uncomment GRUB_GFXMODE and change to something reasonable, in my case 800x600, then run 'sudo update-grub'. Then during boot, the console messages were unreadable, so change the fontface and fontsize in /etc/default/console-setup and my console fonts are now readable. I'm using Mate Desktop and the default login window/display manager was LightDM which was almost unusable/unreadable, so I installed GDM and made that default and the login experience is fine now.

Once I login most of the default Mate applications are great, but other applications are unscaled and unusable, so to make Xterm readable I had to create a new ~/.Xresources with Monospace 18 font for Xterm and UXterm. For Spotify, update /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop for Exec=spotify --force-device-scale-factor=2.0 %U and the user can also zoom the screen scaling using Ctrl+/-

For some applications there appears to be no fix.

In any case, avoid Broadcom and Nvidia where possible and get the 1080p display option instead of HIDPI screens, unless you really need them.

Using macOS for a Unix like command line experience is an option for some and I love my pre-2015 Macbook Pro which is now out of support with the latest macOS. Meanwhile a windows laptop of similar age can run Windows 10 or the latest Linux distributions.

If you have a need to use Microsoft desktop applications for business, but program in a Linux environment, you might want to consider Windows 10 with WSL and with WSL2 you get a real Linux kernel without the overhead of a traditional hypervisor.

Edit: There are a lot more Microsoft applications available in Linux there days, e.g. Teams, Edge Browser and Visual Studio Code .

alexx:

 

In any case, avoid Broadcom and Nvidia where possible and get the 1080p display option instead of HIDPI screens, unless you really need them.

 

There is no need to avoid Nvidia - the Linux support there is good and has been for some time.

I have run across mention of problems with Broadcom WiFi devices, but have not met it myself.

High DPI screens are also yet to come for me, but I would hope that adjusting the DPI setting in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (in Ubuntu) would produce usable display for the GUI.  I have this in mine for my Nvidia GT1030 working with a 1080p screen:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Nvidia GT1030"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "DPI"           "100x100"
        Option          "NoLogo"        "1"
EndSection

Without that DPI option, the text was too small in a number of programs.

And as you have discovered, changing the grub settings usually fixes the boot messages and terminal screens.  With grub, there is also the option of manually adding kernel settings at boot time to test things, but that would require that the grub menu was at least minimally readable.  What I do with all Linuxes is to enable SSH logins as soon as I install them.  That way, if I have video settings problems, I can just log in over the network and fix them, which is much more convenient that battling with unreadable text.

alexx:

Using macOS for a Unix like command line experience is an option for some...

alexx:

If you have a need to use Microsoft desktop applications ... WSL2...