Comment by nickjj
5 hours ago
What kind of research did you do?
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
The review's purpose wouldn't be to provide you an in-depth guide to walk you through installing some distro. It's more like probing for high level details around hardware compatibility.
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.