Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400.
Things I learned to look out for:
- Locked BIOS
- Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research.
In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
> The Cool and Quiet on lap feature helps cool down your computer when it becomes hot. Any extended contact with your body, even through clothing, could cause discomfort. If you prefer using your computer on the lap, it is recommended that you enable the Cool and Quiet on lap feature in UEFI BIOS:
Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by just a few weeks).
They shipped a box and allowed me to swap out a hard drive for a spare (I had study data on there), I then used the box to ship the laptop to them. A few weeks later the laptop gets shipped back with a parts replacement list, which was essentially every single PCB in the laptop and I asked them to replace the keyboard too because one key was sticking. Brand new parts in a slightly cracked chassis.
If Dell still has customer service like that, it's double thumbs up from me.
I'm currently using a Lenovo laptop which has been solid so far. I do want my next laptop to be open to repairability (even if I have to create it myself).
> In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support.
I have tried just one cheap Dell laptop, Vostro 3515, which works mostly fine with Linux (it came with Ubuntu, I have installed Debian), but the touchpad becomes unreponsive sometimes (probably after a sleep), and at some point it refused to charge, which required an UEFI firmware update to fix, which in turn required Windows (I had to use Windows PE) to install, as the direct update (from the UEFI itself) was failing, and there is no Linux option.
Could have been worse, but now considering a Lenovo ThinkPad as a future replacement.
I swapped the keyboard on my wife's X1 and man, they are so fiddly to get to these days. It used to be a 2 minute job but I think this took me nearly 2 hours! I had to remove practically everything to get to it.
Still happy with the result and I agree that 2nd hand business machines give great bang-for-buck. I adore my beater Dell Latitude for example.
This is my go to way of buying a new laptop. I've gone through 2 machines in the last 8 years (Dell 7270 and 7330). Both bought for <$400. Linux works ootb, though I haven't tried any of the more obscure distros.
Though now manufacturers are doubling down on soldered components, so buying a cheap machine and upgrading the components yourself is not really possible :(
My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with the hardware!
I'm using Linux on some dell precision and camera just don't work. It's possible to install some custom kernel to make it work, but the pain of maintaining it by myself in comparison to IT department supported setup is a no go.
For something portable with a dGPU, I recommend the Asus ProArt px13. Works very well with Linux, including NixOS with the right config, with the community asusctl and supergfxctl. AMD, OLED screen, nVidia 4070 (4060 in the US, maybe we'll get 50xx next year). Downsides: the keyboard is not amazing, it comes with MediaTek WiFi, but is replaceable, and the SSD is 2230, which limits capacity. I haven't been able to fine-tune touchpad sensitivity in Wayland and I do get some screen flickering despite fiddling with some boot params and being on 6.17.x. Fewer constraints if you're willing to go 14-inch with the Zephyrus.
If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast.
Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboard, very nice battery life and an oled screen on top of it.
The problem I had with the oled screen is that I thought it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vib.... I am looking for a better solution because the filters get picked on screenshots and washes out the colours. I need to find an ICE profile or export one from Windows.
The camera also behaves a bit weirdly. It has noticeable quality difference when using chromium and other browsers, the latter with perceptible quality degradation.
Other than that, a very good mobile linux driver, snappy, cool, quiet, charges fast and a joy to use.
Do you know what the oled screen resolution is on your device? One of my family members has what I believe is the same laptop, and while I appreciate the build quality, the OLED clearly isn't RGB (in its subpixel arrangement - or some other such major aspect), because the 1080p screen looks so bad for text I initially thought it was broken.
> it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade
Another option would be Redshift, which has a nice widget (Redshift Control plasmoid) for KDE Plasma. It doesn't affect grabbed screenshots or stuff like simplescreenrecorder, BTW
> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.
The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
But what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?
I've seen laptops stuck in weird state. Most likely, Fujitsu didn't bother to test turning off secure boot once they received the BIOS they bought, and fixed the toggle in a firmware update.
Linux boots fine using standard secure boot, so if it refused it's either NixOS using an unsigned bootloader (which is surprising to me) or secure boot just being bugged to hell.
Another option is that NixOS uses secure boot but uses a signature that's too recent: one of the secure boot CAs is expiring soon, and an old BIOS may not carry the new key if NixOS opts to sign their bootloader with the latest key. This issue doesn't just affect Linux, certain Windows images won't boot on older devices either if this mismatch happens.
My bet is on NVRAM getting into a weird state or a buggy BIOS. That's the most obvious thing that would get fixed by updating the BIOS.
If the company fully managed the previous windows install, they'd have control on the upgrades to the BIOS as well and could just block them. These restrictions disappear with standard windows install.
> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”.
It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.
The M1 Air display being 2560x1600, it isn't that high of a bar to cross.
Surface Pro are 2880x1920, Asus’ pz13 series will be in the same ballpark. Getting Linux on them will be a bit more of a PITA, but you get the touchscreen and form factor to balance. Build quality will be basically on par with Apple, battery life should be taking a more serious hit (linux + smaller battery from the start)
A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect.
I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30 tok/sec with smaller Gemma models (had to install mesa vulkan drivers from debian-backports for GPU support in the VM).
If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:
Have a look at X1E devicetree in Linux kernel source (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... all the way to the bottom). There are some models that have a very active development and an almost complete support by now, with Thinkpad T14s probably the most active.
I’d be interested in this as well. I want a quiet machine with a decent display and a long battery life. Right now the MacBook Air checks those boxes but I’d be very interested in an alternative that I can throw Linux / OpenBSD on.
While I personally want a fan and see it as price to pay for better thermals, the disadvantages aren't just noise.
The most critical issue would be the fans still spinning to cool down the machine when it was sent to sleep. That creates the vicious cycle when bagged right after sleep, where the fan try to lower the temp, but their running in a closed environment warms the confined air, which pushes the fan to run faster yet.
That's the recipe for a hot and dead battery when you take it out of the bag.
I had that with MacBooks and Windows laptops alike.
Apple doesn't sell one for any price, so if you want Apple hardware, that's what you get. They objectively make the best laptop hardware package unless you value upgradeability over performance or build quality, which most people also very objectively don't.
Removable SSDs aren't just for upgradability but for repairability. To ensure your shiny expensive laptop doesn't become e-waste the minute your SSD NAND (which is a wearable part) inevitably dies.
I agree 100%, I'm just saying if you want Apple, you can't have that regardless how much you're willing to pay (though if you paid them $10B they'd probably bend and design it this way, everybody has a number.)
The OA was describing the use of a refurbished laptop made by Fujitsu Japan (so 50% owned by Lenovo since 2017). No profit goes to Fujitsu UK (a subsidiary). And the Horizon system has a complex history [1].
Unless there is some vulnerability in the current version that you want to take advantage of. See e.g. mediatek exploit to unlock bootloaders without authorization by OEM or hacking PS4.
Whenever Microsoft makes me make an account and I cannot bypass it I just make an throwaway with not so pleasant words in the email. Followed by installing EndeavourOS.
I really hope this still works forever. Unfortunately I suspect, that one day they'll require a phone verification or similar, like many services do nowadays.
Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400.
Things I learned to look out for:
- Locked BIOS
- Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research.
In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.
> Things I learned to look out for:
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
M1 and M2. But those are in an entirely different price bracket. I’d go so far as to say those are not comparable.
You can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.
> Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves
Wtf? That sounds crazy, any sources?
This used to be a feature to protect spinning hard drives. Why this would exist today and why it would throttle anything is bizarre.
They don't want you to burn your testicles when keeping it in your lap.
https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/pubs/x1e_p1_gen5/html/htm...
> The Cool and Quiet on lap feature helps cool down your computer when it becomes hot. Any extended contact with your body, even through clothing, could cause discomfort. If you prefer using your computer on the lap, it is recommended that you enable the Cool and Quiet on lap feature in UEFI BIOS:
(it can be disabled on this laptop)
more: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1416567/disable-lap-mode-on-...
Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by just a few weeks).
They shipped a box and allowed me to swap out a hard drive for a spare (I had study data on there), I then used the box to ship the laptop to them. A few weeks later the laptop gets shipped back with a parts replacement list, which was essentially every single PCB in the laptop and I asked them to replace the keyboard too because one key was sticking. Brand new parts in a slightly cracked chassis.
If Dell still has customer service like that, it's double thumbs up from me.
I'm currently using a Lenovo laptop which has been solid so far. I do want my next laptop to be open to repairability (even if I have to create it myself).
> In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support.
I have tried just one cheap Dell laptop, Vostro 3515, which works mostly fine with Linux (it came with Ubuntu, I have installed Debian), but the touchpad becomes unreponsive sometimes (probably after a sleep), and at some point it refused to charge, which required an UEFI firmware update to fix, which in turn required Windows (I had to use Windows PE) to install, as the direct update (from the UEFI itself) was failing, and there is no Linux option.
Could have been worse, but now considering a Lenovo ThinkPad as a future replacement.
I swapped the keyboard on my wife's X1 and man, they are so fiddly to get to these days. It used to be a 2 minute job but I think this took me nearly 2 hours! I had to remove practically everything to get to it.
Still happy with the result and I agree that 2nd hand business machines give great bang-for-buck. I adore my beater Dell Latitude for example.
+1
This is my go to way of buying a new laptop. I've gone through 2 machines in the last 8 years (Dell 7270 and 7330). Both bought for <$400. Linux works ootb, though I haven't tried any of the more obscure distros.
Though now manufacturers are doubling down on soldered components, so buying a cheap machine and upgrading the components yourself is not really possible :(
My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with the hardware!
I'm using Linux on some dell precision and camera just don't work. It's possible to install some custom kernel to make it work, but the pain of maintaining it by myself in comparison to IT department supported setup is a no go.
For something portable with a dGPU, I recommend the Asus ProArt px13. Works very well with Linux, including NixOS with the right config, with the community asusctl and supergfxctl. AMD, OLED screen, nVidia 4070 (4060 in the US, maybe we'll get 50xx next year). Downsides: the keyboard is not amazing, it comes with MediaTek WiFi, but is replaceable, and the SSD is 2230, which limits capacity. I haven't been able to fine-tune touchpad sensitivity in Wayland and I do get some screen flickering despite fiddling with some boot params and being on 6.17.x. Fewer constraints if you're willing to go 14-inch with the Zephyrus.
If you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast.
Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboard, very nice battery life and an oled screen on top of it.
The problem I had with the oled screen is that I thought it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vib.... I am looking for a better solution because the filters get picked on screenshots and washes out the colours. I need to find an ICE profile or export one from Windows.
The camera also behaves a bit weirdly. It has noticeable quality difference when using chromium and other browsers, the latter with perceptible quality degradation.
Other than that, a very good mobile linux driver, snappy, cool, quiet, charges fast and a joy to use.
Do you know what the oled screen resolution is on your device? One of my family members has what I believe is the same laptop, and while I appreciate the build quality, the OLED clearly isn't RGB (in its subpixel arrangement - or some other such major aspect), because the 1080p screen looks so bad for text I initially thought it was broken.
> it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade
Another option would be Redshift, which has a nice widget (Redshift Control plasmoid) for KDE Plasma. It doesn't affect grabbed screenshots or stuff like simplescreenrecorder, BTW
Will give it a try, thanks!
If you have an old Intel MacBook Air, they work beautifully with Linux as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200
I did this with the 11”, which was one of the greatest sized laptops for travel IMO, just had to replace the explody looking battery!
Same, I have a 2013. It’s such a good size.
> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.
The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
But what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?
I've seen laptops stuck in weird state. Most likely, Fujitsu didn't bother to test turning off secure boot once they received the BIOS they bought, and fixed the toggle in a firmware update.
Linux boots fine using standard secure boot, so if it refused it's either NixOS using an unsigned bootloader (which is surprising to me) or secure boot just being bugged to hell.
Another option is that NixOS uses secure boot but uses a signature that's too recent: one of the secure boot CAs is expiring soon, and an old BIOS may not carry the new key if NixOS opts to sign their bootloader with the latest key. This issue doesn't just affect Linux, certain Windows images won't boot on older devices either if this mismatch happens.
My bet is on NVRAM getting into a weird state or a buggy BIOS. That's the most obvious thing that would get fixed by updating the BIOS.
If the company fully managed the previous windows install, they'd have control on the upgrades to the BIOS as well and could just block them. These restrictions disappear with standard windows install.
> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”.
It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.
This website is called Hacker News.
Suit yourself. I think a little whimsy is refreshing.
It's kinda old though
Is there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?
You won't find anything like the Macbook Air M1 in build quality, display, and battery life
Thinkpad X13s and T14s (both with Snapdragon) are the best closest alternative.
The M1 Air display being 2560x1600, it isn't that high of a bar to cross.
Surface Pro are 2880x1920, Asus’ pz13 series will be in the same ballpark. Getting Linux on them will be a bit more of a PITA, but you get the touchscreen and form factor to balance. Build quality will be basically on par with Apple, battery life should be taking a more serious hit (linux + smaller battery from the start)
A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect.
I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30 tok/sec with smaller Gemma models (had to install mesa vulkan drivers from debian-backports for GPU support in the VM).
If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1506894/how-to-install-ubunt...
Another Chromebook with the same setup is the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514.
Have a look at X1E devicetree in Linux kernel source (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... all the way to the bottom). There are some models that have a very active development and an almost complete support by now, with Thinkpad T14s probably the most active.
I’d be interested in this as well. I want a quiet machine with a decent display and a long battery life. Right now the MacBook Air checks those boxes but I’d be very interested in an alternative that I can throw Linux / OpenBSD on.
My Ryzen framework 13 is silent almost all the times, except gaming and processing map tiles.
While I personally want a fan and see it as price to pay for better thermals, the disadvantages aren't just noise.
The most critical issue would be the fans still spinning to cool down the machine when it was sent to sleep. That creates the vicious cycle when bagged right after sleep, where the fan try to lower the temp, but their running in a closed environment warms the confined air, which pushes the fan to run faster yet.
That's the recipe for a hot and dead battery when you take it out of the bag.
I had that with MacBooks and Windows laptops alike.
MacBook Air M1. Find one with max ram (Facebook marketplace, $400), have storage upgraded to 2TB (IYKYK), Linux support is good.
Sorry, but no: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#tab...
Can't even drive an external display over the DP.
Linux support on Apple hardware is subpar compared to ARM Thinkpads.
I guess it's the physical HDMI port that's needed, as Minis and the Pro laptops have working monitor HDMI monitor support?
How did you upgrade the soldered storage?
Take it to a shop which cnc mills the original one off and solders a compatible new one on. Maybe you can desolder the old one, but why bother.
Sounds easy. Why bother getting a laptop with replaceable storage anyway?
Apple doesn't sell one for any price, so if you want Apple hardware, that's what you get. They objectively make the best laptop hardware package unless you value upgradeability over performance or build quality, which most people also very objectively don't.
Removable SSDs aren't just for upgradability but for repairability. To ensure your shiny expensive laptop doesn't become e-waste the minute your SSD NAND (which is a wearable part) inevitably dies.
I agree 100%, I'm just saying if you want Apple, you can't have that regardless how much you're willing to pay (though if you paid them $10B they'd probably bend and design it this way, everybody has a number.)
In my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
The OA was describing the use of a refurbished laptop made by Fujitsu Japan (so 50% owned by Lenovo since 2017). No profit goes to Fujitsu UK (a subsidiary). And the Horizon system has a complex history [1].
But still, perhaps no, simply in solidarity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_accounting_system
This was my first thought as well.
TL;DR: When in doubt, update the BIOS before doing anything else.
Unless there is some vulnerability in the current version that you want to take advantage of. See e.g. mediatek exploit to unlock bootloaders without authorization by OEM or hacking PS4.
Whenever Microsoft makes me make an account and I cannot bypass it I just make an throwaway with not so pleasant words in the email. Followed by installing EndeavourOS.
I really hope this still works forever. Unfortunately I suspect, that one day they'll require a phone verification or similar, like many services do nowadays.