Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400.

Things I learned to look out for:

- Locked BIOS

- Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research.

In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.

If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast.

Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboard, very nice battery life and an oled screen on top of it.

The problem I had with the oled screen is that I thought it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vib.... I am looking for a better solution because the filters get picked on screenshots and washes out the colours. I need to find an ICE profile or export one from Windows.

The camera also behaves a bit weirdly. It has noticeable quality difference when using chromium and other browsers, the latter with perceptible quality degradation.

Other than that, a very good mobile linux driver, snappy, cool, quiet, charges fast and a joy to use.

If you have an old Intel MacBook Air, they work beautifully with Linux as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200

For something portable with a dGPU, I recommend the Asus ProArt px13. Works very well with Linux, including NixOS with the right config, with the community asusctl and supergfxctl. AMD, OLED screen, nVidia 4070 (4060 in the US, maybe we'll get 50xx next year). Downsides: the keyboard is not amazing, it comes with MediaTek WiFi, but is replaceable, and the SSD is 2230, which limits capacity. I haven't been able to fine-tune touchpad sensitivity in Wayland and I do get some screen flickering despite fiddling with some boot params and being on 6.17.x. Fewer constraints if you're willing to go 14-inch with the Zephyrus.

Is there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?

> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.

The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.

In my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

It's kinda old though

> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”.

It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.

I also went this route but was disappointed by: - bad speakers - poor battery life - inferior screen quality

Nowadays where you can get a MacBook Air 16gb m2 for around 600€ this would be my pick if I’d have to find a new machine for travel and casual use.

TL;DR: When in doubt, update the BIOS before doing anything else.

Whenever Microsoft makes me make an account and I cannot bypass it I just make an throwaway with not so pleasant words in the email. Followed by installing EndeavourOS.