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Buying a Linux Laptop

Posted on 2020-03-15

Laptop death, what type of changes

Last December, I decided to change my day to day laptop. I have (like most people here) an intensive usage of my laptop and my previous Dell XPS for multiple reasons (dead battery and RAM limitation mainly).

So I started a quest to find a good laptop, sold with Linux out of the box (even if I would change the default distro) for 2 reasons:

1. Help companies that sell Linux laptop, to help make it more "upstream" (Yes, I can dream :°))

2. Being sure that all drivers are available, avoiding most surprises

The options

After some research on line, I end it up with this list of potential vendor:

• Dell (XPS)[1]: "Safe choice", same as the one I was using back then. Some stuff annoyed me a bit on it so I decided to look somewhere else.
• LinuxShop[2]: Only French vendor I saw but I was not convince by the laptop choices (I wanted 32GB of RAM…)
• System76[3]
• Entroware[4]

I found the System76 and Entroware pretty similar and wasn't sure which one to choose. Both were as powerful as needed, both had qwerty keyboard only (even though I would have preferred an azerty layout) and both were quite similar in term of price…

=> 1: https://www.dell.com/ | 2: https://www.linuxshop.fr/ | 3: https://system76.com/ | 4: https://www.entroware.com/

My choice

Entroware has been my choice in the end… Mainly because of shipping :D One from the US, the other from the UK… I chose the closest to home for faster delivery^^.

I received it about 3 months ago and I am really happy about it so far :-). I didn't struggle at all using the keyboard, even though I setup an azerty configuration even though a qwerty keyboard is shown. Good thing about being a nerd, I don't need to look at it anyway so I don't care about this small "issue".

Otherwise, I think its a great laptop. I'm having some issue when having 2 external screen, one being plugged via an hdmi → Usb 3 connector, one directly in hdmi. The one connected through the USB 3 port works but shutdown when I put a video (player or screensharing/videoconference tool) on it… I didn't take the time to investigate that point yet though…

Also, they did a mistake as I purchase an additional electric plug (one for @home, one in my backpack :-)), but after a few emails they sent me a new correct one right away, so great support as well :-).

Let's hope it will be solid for a few years!

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