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Comments
Dual boot, take out the optical bay and add a second HDD!
ThinkPad, they've always been Linux friendly.
Yep Thinkpad, my T61 is great with Debian
Linux, on a laptop? Is this a thing?
Short answer: "almost" any.
I have to agree, Most hardware will accept Linux just fine, drivers are going to be a pain if the standard ones do not play well or the device manufacturer does not have adequate support. I personally stick with the big boys like HP, Dell(grudgingly, i really only like their servers) and Sony. And as @Patrick said, dual boot. It is one of the best things you can do since it allows you to keep the original OS intact or to develop on multiple platforms.
Most work these days, but I have had good luck with thinkpads(t series and later edge models) - the function keys all work correctly, hibernates correctly, battery usage. I can also say that I have used toshiba with good results, but have not had great luck with low end business dell laptops, as they seem to not have as good of support for the above listed items.
Dual boot is garbage from my experience and depending on your experience.
If you need Windows while inside of Linux, fire up VirtualBox and a XP guest.
I dual booted a while ago but then I realized Windows is useless.
Dual boot is just annoying IMO, considering that you have to get these working:
Kernel stable
Sensors working
Hibernate/Sleep working
Reboot working
Graphics working
Brightness control
Fan control
DVD drive working
SSD support (TRIM)
Harddrive (ACHI/IDE)
Bluetooth
Keyboard functions
Webcam
Wifi
Microphone
@Chan plus also the folks who mess up the MBR and have to install a Windows boot loader to get Linux back up as a choice, then resolve the Linux bootloader issue.
They just don't play nice, in my opinion considering how valuable my time is, on a dual boot. Now if you have all the time in the world, knock yourself out and tell the world how it's done.
I wouldn't dual boot a macbook but any cheap laptop, aside from Toshiba, should work fine. Find a laptop you like and google around about the Linux support but most I've tried (mostly dells) work just fine. Power management/battery life is usually worse than Win blows.
If you're looking for a development laptop, Intel graphics support is nearly flawless. Nvidia and ATI/AMD vary in quality drivers, and Optimus (Nvidia+Intel) can be particularly troublesome in some kernel configurations.
Most notebooks should work fine. If you get a notebook from a larger brand, it's probably been tested by major desktop distros.
Speaking from my own experience, I've used HP notebooks with Ubuntu LTS with good results.
Meh, no need to buy a "real" laptop for a Linux distro, get some junk off CraigsList. You probably have family members that will pay you to take some of their old stuff away.
Personally, I'd just download VirtualBox+Vagrant and be perfectly happy spinning VMs up and down 3 minutes from now.
It's a Linux! It needs a minimum of 32mb RAM and PC compatible computer. :P
thinkpads have worked well for me T61 series and X61 series. Dell vostro 1500 also worked fine with ubuntu, mint, was a bit weird with bodhi linux. Bodhi is meant to be be a lean version of ubuntu, but bodhi and lubuntu would not work well on my crappy advent 1.5GHz Celeron with 256MB RAM. The browser was taking ages to load, HDD was continuously 'swapping'. I deleted them and put MicroXP [a slipstreamed version of XP] on it and it flies. So much for linux being a light weight OS. M$ beats it everytime. I even run MicroXP on a Celeron 700MHz which had around 256MB and it worked fine on that also. Lubuntu would not work well on it. Tried all the lightweight distro's slitaz, puppy, peppermint, prefer XP to all of them.
I recently was given a new system from a neighbor and it came with Windows 8 pre-installed. I quickly removed Windows 8 and formatted the HDD to Debian 7.