Hi guys,
Been a while since I’ve been here but still using OpenSuse every day.
I’m looking to purchase a new laptop in the £400-500 price bracket and would ideally like one with a very seamless, easy OpenSuse installation with no hardware compatibility issues as I’ve had with a few laptops in the past. For example, I can’t be bothered to deal with broadcom wifi drivers, or graphics card issues. My current laptop is getting on a bit (HP Compaq 6720s) but installation was so easy and everything worked straight from the box unlike a few others I’ve done in the past and ideally I’d like the same…any recommendations would be appreciated massively!!
I’ve been looking at this as it seems pretty good value?
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-netbooks/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-15-n278sa-15-6-laptop-silver-21862507-pdt.html?sPageInfo=1_40&sSortInfo=price-desc
I would like quad core and at least 8GB RAM, HDMI is a must as is USB 3.0 compatibility. I use my laptop for a lot of dvd copying, video encoding etc so need something with half decent performance.
Secondly, can one dual boot with the latest windows 8.1? Or have they been a bunch of tw*ts again and prevented you from doing that?
Many, many thanks in advance
Ross
While I can’t point out precisely that you will NOT have any compatibility issues, I can certainly recommend that you pay attention to the video card situation. If it has the dual card configuration that many laptops are now including I would look to another.
[QUOTE=thestig; 2641240]
Secondly, can one dual boot with the latest windows 8.1? Or have they been a bunch of tw*ts again and prevented you from doing that? [/QUOTE]
Dual booting is still quite straightforward. I would suggest confirming if the laptop you are looking at is using solid state drives and EFI booting or the older style bios. In the case of the former, install windows 8.1 as normal then when installing linux mount the efi partition as /boot/efi but do not format it. after that add the typical partitions you would normally for installing linux. When the system reboots you will have linux and windows as options for grub2.
any questions let me know.
DH
I am dual booting with Win 8.1.
The problems with dual booting today are mostly related to the way that UEFI is implemented. That is, they are BIOS problems rather than Windows-caused problems. As far as I know, the HP has at least a usable UEFI implementation for this. That is to say, there might be some brokenness but it doesn’t cause serious problems.
The suggested computer that you linked to has AMD radeon graphics. I do not know whether that will cause problems. You might want to check that.
ebuyer have just pushed out a entry level ubuntu laptop, it’s a shame they didn’t consider something a little more out there…
you could consider pcspecialist.co.uk who offer a self configure > they may even advise you too
did you check if dell or hp have any business end linux laptops?
Hi
And the apu mentioned in that laptop is only recommended for light video editing…
AMD A8-4555M
Thanks for the comments so far guys, any more greatly appreciated
Cheers for this, based on that which processor am I better off going for? an intel? To be fair, that one is certainly going to be better than the one I have currently but extra performance would never go amiss! £500 is my limit really 
Many thanks.
My daughter’s HP Pavilion 14 “Ultrabook” - it’s a dual core i3 with Intel HD video only - dualbooted very nicely with the preinstalled W8, with grub2 menu securebooting, opensuse/windows booting option, persistent (not changed by Windows), etc., but only after some tinkering and the big help of nickert’s howto on dualbooting.
Then I decided to upgrade to W8.1 thinking it would solve an installation issue of a CAD software that won’t do 3D render on linux with Intel video (only NVIDIA/ATI). It didn’t , and I couldn’t go back to the nice grub menu, with the laptop booting directly to W8.1.
No biggie, as using ESC and F9 let me choose witch entry in the boot/efi partition to use, and W8 is used so rarely that the laptop is usually suspended, so no reboot required.
Summing up, at least with HP I have had a few issues but could get everything to work eventually, including HDMI out and ATI video with proprietary driver. I have yet to try one of those dual video jobs that require bumblebee or whatever.
In this Pavilion 14 everything works, except the wireless state indicator light, that’s always red (in windows it becomes blue when wifi is on).
And I reconfigured the 32GB SSD from caching the 500 GB HD to a separate drive with openSUSE’s root folder minus /log and /var. Booting openSUSE/opening programs is very fast, however windows got recognizably (vista-like) slow.