They have a point. I’m in the market for a new laptop and I have, so far, returned two of them.
First, I tried a Huawei Matebook 16. I was foolish, but I thought it was “easy”. No NVidia, no dGPU at all - just part that looked very standard. It was based on the info I had gathered from a few years of Linux usage: “Basically avoid NVidia and you’re good”. It was anything but. Broken suspend, WiFi was horrible, random deadlocks, extreme slowness at times (as if the RYZEN 7 wasn’t Ryzen 7-ing) to become less smooth than my 5 year old Intel laptop, and broken audio codec (Senary Audio) that didn’t work at all on the live, and worked erratically on the installed system using generic hd-audio drivers.
I had a ~€1500 budget, but I raised it to buy a €1700 ThinkPad P16s AMD. No dGPU to speak of, sold with pre loaded Linux, boasting Canonical and Red Hat hardware certifications.
I had:
Broken standby on Linux
GPU bugs and screen flickering on Linux
Various hangs and crashed
Malfunctioning wifi and non working 6e mode. I dug, and apparently the soldered Wi-Fi adapter does not have any kind of Linux support at all, but the kernel uses a quirk to load the firmware of an older Qualcomm card that’s kinda similar on it and get it to work in Wi-Fi 6 compatibility mode.
Boggles my mind that the 2 biggest enterprise Linux vendors took this laptop, ran a “thorough hardware certification process” on it and let it pass. Is this a pass? How long have they tried it? Have they even tried suspending?
Of course, that was a return. But when I think about new laptops and Windows 11, basically anything works. You don’t have to pay attention to anything: suspend will work, WiFi will work, audio and speakers as well, if you need fractional scaling you aren’t in for a world of pain, and if you want an NVidia dGPU, it does work.
Furthermore, the Windows 11 compatible CPU list is completely unofficial arbitrary, since you can still sideload Windows 11 on “unsupported” hardware and it will run with a far higher success rate than Linux on a random laptop you buy in store now. Like, it has been confirmed to run well on ancient Intel CPUs with screens below the minimum resolution. It’s basically a skin over 10 and there are no significant kernel modifications.
To be clear: I don’t like Windows, but I hate this post as a consumer of bleeding edge hardware because it hides the problem under the rug - most new hardware is Windows-centric, and Linux supported options are few and far between. Nowdays not even the manufacturer declaring Linux support is enough. This friend of mine got a Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition, and if he uses ANY ISO except the default Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 audio doesn’t work at all! And my other friend with a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has various GPU artifacts on the screen on anything except the relative Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 image. It’s such a minefield.
I have effectively added €500 to my budget, to now reach an outrageous €2000 for a premium Linux laptop with no significant trade-offs (mostly, I want a good screen and good performance). I am considering taking a shot in the dark and pre ordering the Framework 16, effectively swaying from traditional laptop makers entirely and hoping a fully customized laptop by a company that has been long committed to Linux support will be different.