What laptop/notebook for Opensuse leap OS?

English Hardware
1

Hi there,
So far I was using a desktop I assembled myself 8 years ago with Leap 15.2. It died, I need to replace it.
I’d like to buy a laptop/notebook to install Opensuse leap OS for a personal/home use, no game. I don’t even want to start it with Windows if pre-installed.
I can’t find a recent compatibility list from Opensuse.

By your experience/knowledge could you answer my questions;
1 - Should I buy a laptop with a) no OS b) Linux pre-install c) No problem to change from Win to Leap
2 - If I wipe the SSD to instal Leap, will I loose the warranty?
3 - Nowadays, what CPU is best for compatibility Intel or AMD. So far I had AMD, was good.
4 - What laptop brand do you advise? What you do not recommend?
5 - What GPU internal (iGPU) or dedicated (dGPU)
6 - What GPU manufacturer, AMD, NVIDIA, INTEL for best compatibility?
7 - I’ll take a 16" or 17". What is the best screen experience for pixel density, 125ppi > 300ppi. Is there a real picture difference, a best value/price?

Any other advices are welcome.
Thanks

2

Hi
What’s your budget? The laptops I have (well and my desktop) are all second hand ~5 years old, HP is my preference…

3

There’s a bare-bones Laptop builder located in southern Germany – <TUXEDO Computers.

4

I have seen than for the same tech specif, laptop are more expensive.
So between €900 and €1200.

5

In the next 12 months I’ll move in different countries/homes so I need a laptop as it is hard to move a screen, keyboard and box in a suitcase.
Thanks for the link

6

The bare-bones supplier I mentioned has AMD Ryzen laptops for less than that but, as soon as you begin adding more CPU/Memory/Disk the price rapidly rises to within your range.

  • Intel Laptops tend to be more expensive.
7

Hi
There are these ones, know a user running Tumbleweed on it…

https://frame.work/blog/linux-on-the-framework-laptop

Personally I would suggest looking at something that came out a few years ago…

8

Only 1 screen size 13.5" in there range. :frowning:

9

I like Dell 7490’s - they have m.2 (nvme) slot for really fast storage.
They can be had on eBay for under $500.
New Battery is about $30
32 gb of Ram is about $120
512 gb nvme can be had under $60. 1tb for under $120, 4 tb for under $400.

They have a 24" display - they have an HDMI port which I connected a 43" TV to watch (my eyes are not liking small print)

Avoid the 720P (1366) screen for the 1080P screen (1920).

All have 3 - USB3.0 ports , wifi, most have bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet.

I have 9 running 15.3 as VirtualBox hosts for a bunch of virtual machines. All mine are I5-8350U CPUs (only about 4% slower then the I7) I run many virtual machines like Windows (98, 2000, xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11) and 14 different Linux flavors and build all my bootable USB images in VirtualBox.

I like them (Dell Latitude 7490) as they are Business Class and many were used as “Desktops” and come off leases almost like new.

Do not be afraid of those without disk, ram, and battery. They are priced lower and many compaines require they be destroyed before selling their computers.

7 of mine were bought that way. (I have built machines for my neighbors and ex-coworkers from Dell 7490’s)

Avoid i3 CPU’s and 7th gen and earlier. They only have 2 CPU’s and 4 total threads. 8th gen have 4 CPU’s and 8 threads.

I dislike all the AMD and Nvidia graphics that are separate - Nvidia does not support linux well and you have to jump thru hoops to make them work every kernel upgrade - they are intended for gamers, the Internal to the CPU Intel Graphics are on par with 5 year old graphics cards for Desktops.

10

If you want a new laptop tailored to your needs, try https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk. You don’t have to be encumbered with anything you don’t want (like Windows) though it comes with a Windows test program which they use to check it before it leaves them. If you look at their Delivery Options you will see they have an option for Ireland.

11

That’s actually your personal choice. a) and b) will certainly narrow down the choice you have due to the omnipresence of win. I definitely didn’t want any money to go to Redmont for not using their stuff. b) Will at least make sure that some Linux works on it. I didn’t search for it but ended up with b) got an Aspire A517-51G in 2019 with some unknown preinstalled Linux. Wiped it away, leading to

2 - If I wipe the SSD to instal Leap, will I loose the warranty?

I can’t imagine how you could loose your warranty meaning the hardware. You will certainly loose any kind of “support” that is related to the preinstalled OS. The loss of support might be extended to hardware if that support requires some specific (but deleted) diagnostic software. Well, so what?

12

I can’t answer your specific questions - and further I think for anyone to answer your questions, they need to understand better what you mean by “personal/home use”. If that only means watching videos, surfing, writing documents and doing the occasional spreadsheet, then pretty much any laptop in the past 10 years should be able to do that. Even my old Toshiba Z930 ultrabook, that I bought in year 2013, can still do that (as long as one is happy watching only 720p resolution movies).

I recently ordered a new laptop, which should arrive in a week, which I posted about here: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/559085-Looking-to-buy-a-Lenovo-X1-Carbon-ultrabook-to-replace-my-old-Toshiba-Z930-ultrabook

I don’t, at this time, recommend you follow my approach. (1) the Lenova X1 carbon gen9 I ordered would massively exceed your budget, and (2) its far far too new.

I fully anticipate to encounter some issues with my Lenovo X1 Carbon gen 9 that I ordered - but fortunately I have no national nor international travels planned for at least 4 months, and more likely not for at least 10-months or longer (due to this global pandemic). That should give the GNU/Linux community time to sort the issues. In the mean time, at home, I have my old Toshiba Ultrabook, and I have a couple of desktop PCs. So I have time to sort any Lenovo X1 Carbon gen-9 issues

Excellent advice was given in this thread, and one of the good recommendations was to "look… at something that came out a few years ago " . The reason for this is computer hardware developers, and laptop manufacturers either do not support GNU/Linux, or if they do (support GNU/Linux) their GNU/Linux support is relatively feeble compared to their Windows support. Hence GNU/Linux users need to rely on ‘hackers’ to produce the hardware support/drivers, and on communities/free-software-developers/packagers to provide the software. This all takes time for good new hardware support, to be available. Hence laptops that are 2 years old or so, tend to have much better support than brand new laptops.

In my case, for travel I have a MASSIVE preference for a VERY light laptop. If you truly plan to cart this around to different countries/homes with lots and lots of frequent travel, then give serious thought to how much weight you want to put up with. If every couple of weeks you are moving, then I would recommend an ultrabook, and try to stay 1.3kg or less (which significantly reduces the market to consider). If you plan only to move every 6-months or longer, then up to 2x that weight in a laptop might be acceptable.

Also, think of your peripheral requirements. I hate using the laptop’s track-pads. I always use an external mouse, which means I tie up a USB port. I might eventually switch to using a bluetooth mouse, but I have not done so yet. I keep lots of home images/videos on external hard drives, and on occasion I need to shuffle videos back and forth between external drives (to reorganize). This means I need to be able to simultaneous plug in 3 devices (1 mouse and 2 hard drives) at the same time. This means more interfaces needed and for me, that (together with my less weight demands) significantly reduces the laptops available (as I do NOT want to cart around an external USB hub).

So give thought IN DETAIL as to how you plan to use this and consider your peripherals in your thinking as to the laptop brand you want to use.

Good luck.

13

If lots of interfaces is not a criteria, I have heard from an acquaintance that the Acer Swift 3 is a nice ultrabook, and gives decent bang for the buck. Purportedly GNU/Linux runs on it ok, although I can NOT confirm this. It does not meet my ‘interface’ criteria, which is why I did not go that route of going for that ultrabook. However its screen size may be much too small for you.
.

14

Thank you all, I’ll think again. I found that a laptop is very expensive compare to a small desktop with same specifications.
I own a tablet that I could use when travelling and for short stay (hotel/B&B), when I’ll move in new house for longueur stay I could take a small desktop (IPX, barebone), shoebox size not too hard to fit in a suitcase and use a local TV. I guess now all TV have HDMI connector.

I think I will go in this way and buy a very small desktop.
If you have some idea, advice about that, let me know.

15

I spent weeks trying to get openSuse 15.2 onto an Asus notebook (from Costco) with an AMD RYzen CPU and AMD graphics (not nvidia). Sound never worked and I couldn’t find a solution on the forums or via web search. I anticipated that an AMD product would be easier, but alas… Too late to return the notebook–not sure what I’ll do with it.

16

Hi
You don’t have long until Leap 15.2 is end of life… I suggest trying a Tumbleweed (or Leap 15.3) Live USB desktop to boot from and see how it goes.

If either works, can you post some info on the graphics/cpu etc?


/sbin/lspci -nnk | egrep -A3 "VGA|Display|3D"

or

inxi -Fxxz
17

The suggestion to try LEAP-15.3 and/or Tumbleweed is IMHO a very good suggestion. You could first try a live USB boot of those, and if one works, go for the full install.

As for the web search, I always try to search for GNU/Linux compatibility BEFORE I buy the hardware. For me, searching after having bought the hardware, is like “closing the barn door after the horse has gone”. … Still, great compatibility advances have been made in GNU/Linux the past couple of decades, and I think if you try out some live USBs, you will eventually have success.

In particular for sound, on openSUSE we are lucky we have an alsa sound driver developer who is an openSUSE sound packager. Typically writing a bug report will get that developer’s attention, and a sound driver fix (if needed). My suspicion is you did not go that route (write a bug report) so to get the best support wrt the sound. Maybe keep that in mind for the future. By writing a bug report, getting a sound driver fix, you help the entire GNU/Linux community (and not just openSUSE) as the openSUSE packager (an alsa sound driver developer) sends the bug fixes upstream and all GNU/Linux distros benefit by any fix he will implement for you.

Good luck now on your next approach.

18

The Asus machine is not set up as I reverted to factory defaults before I tried to return it (Costco give you 60 or 90 days for returns.) Have to get back the results from a Live Disk. Thanks for these commands (very useful–I am compiling a list of commands I’ve not seen before).

On an HP Omen “inxi -Fxxz” showed a mix of nouveau and nvidia drivers. I’ll start a new thread for the problem of having only 800x600 resolution there.

19

Will try again, but I started with 15.3. It produced odd results such as not booting into X11, only the CLI. Will look at the BIOS settings to minimize the “modern” features. Thanks to all for the feedback. If anything changes I’ll report back.

20

Right you are. Didn’t file a bug report because I thought it was a hardware problem. When I try the Live Disk next on the Asus I’ll take notes and report a problem as a bug. Glad you mentioned it.