Comment by gerdesj
7 years ago
Thanks for the heads up (S76) but Linux runs on pretty much anything these days. This laptop is a Dell Inspiron with a 17" touch screen and lots of sensors. I'm running Arch Linux on it and everything is supported out of the box. The only tweak I have made towards hardware is changing the driver in use for the Synaptics mouse, which dmesg mentioned and will probably become the norm soon anyway.
There really is no such thing as MS native only anymore. I got Linux on here without accepting any obnoxious licenses and my laptop's price was partially subsidised by all the crap that I never even saw. To be honest, I'm not sure what the exact price breakdown really is on this thing but I do know that MS did not get in my way.
Dell are pretty Linux friendly, for example to update firmware I copy the new image to my /boot partition (EFI) and then use the built in option at boot to update the firmware - simples! No more farting around with turning swap into FAT32 for a while and a FreeDOS boot disc.
The issue is not whether Linux can be made to run, the issue is whether you are subsidizing Microsoft for that privilege.
You can buy Dell laptops these days that ship directly with Ubuntu (such as XPS and Precision), and you explicitly see the Microsoft tax fall off when making the selection. It feels so good.
Intel's NUC bricks come in two varieties: prebuilt and bring your own memory, storage and OS. The latter does not impose a Windows license fee and as long as you're running kernel 4 all the hardware is generally supported, although I see running Ubuntu combined with a thunderbolt switch doesn't work.
Sporting laptop-class processors these are not powerhouse machines and fall below the latest Mac Minis in performance. But for a development platform they can be plenty, particularly the newer models that ditch classic SATA for two NVME slots.
Not too sure what the break down on my lappy is wrt bundles. As far as I can tell I paid a fair price for it and I did not accept any licenses that I did not want. When I say fair price, I think that it is pretty decent. I don't know what a 17" Apple laptop would cost with a touch screen but probably more than the £950ish I paid for this beast.