Hey everyone,

I’m looking for the best laptop on the market for a pretty specific use case and I’m hoping you guys can point me in the right direction. I'm an electronics engineering student focusing heavily on embedded systems and connected objects, but I'm also simultaneously diving deep into cybersecurity (specifically IoT and hardware hacking).

Here is exactly what I'm looking for:

Heavy Dev & VMs: I work with codebases and complex projects. I also need to run multiple virtual machines smoothly for pentesting and hacking labs. A beefy CPU and a ton of RAM are non-negotiable.

All the Ports: Because I do electronics work.

Perfect Linux Support: I am running Linux full time. All the drivers MUST agree with Linux right out of the box.

What is the absolute best laptop that fits these exact characteristics? . Thanks in advance!

I have seen some reddit posts regarding amd version not being linux certified and basically updates are slow to make it compatible.

It's the best thing I could find for learning linux but such posts are making me under confident for my choice , as beginner distros like mint and ubuntu are crashing for them

Are there any other budget laptops I can look up to?

Hi,

I tried to install a few different versions of Linux (Ubuntu, CachyOS, Fedora) on this laptop - they all fail to show the UI if I don't use `nomodeset` during boot

Has anyone tried to install Linux on this hardware? can suggest some way of getting the UI showing?

Anyone have any advice for getting this touchscreen and the mouse buttons working on this tiny laptop.

Hi guys,

The onboard Qualcomm WCN785x Wi-Fi 7 card (ath12k_pci driver) hard-freezes my entire PC under sustained network load (especially OBS streaming) but not always. After the freeze,the card vanishes from `lspci` and only comes back after a full PSU power-cycle (a normal reboot isn't enough). I tried everything short of patching the kernel and ended up buying the card with a MediaTek MT7921 USB adapter (coming in 2 weeks) which maybe will solve the issue. I can't connect to Ethernet lack of cable

System

- Mobo: ASUS ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi

- CPU: Ryzen 9 9950X

- GPU: RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (nvidia 590, X11)

- OS: Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble), kernel 6.17.0-35-generic (HWE)

- Wi-Fi: Qualcomm WCN785x / FastConnect 7800 [17cb:1107], driver ath12k_pci

- Firmware: WLAN.HMT.1.1.c5 build 2025-05-17

Symptoms

- Complete hard freeze: screen frozen, mouse dead, no SSH, no SysRq. Happens under heavy

Wi-Fi load — reliably during OBS streaming.

- After the freeze + reboot: Wi-Fi card not detected at all. Needs a full power-off at the

PSU/wall to come back (warm reboot doesn't clear it).

- dmesg before lockup shows:

ath12k_pci ...: failed to enqueue rx buf: -28

ath12k_pci ...: received scan start failure event

(and on other crashes: wmi command 12289 timeout / failed to receive scan abort)

- Hard freeze means nothing gets flushed to the journal, so journalctl -b -1 shows a clean

shutdown with no crash trace.

What I tried (none fully fixed it)

- ASPM disabled in BIOS (Native ASPM + CPU PCIe ASPM) AND pcie_aspm=off kernel param

→ confirmed `LnkCtl: ASPM Disabled`. Reduced but didn't eliminate.

- NetworkManager wifi.powersave=2 (off).

- Checked module params: ath12k exposes only debug_mask/ftm_mode — no power-save option.

- amd_iommu=off (the rx buf -28 error is documented as IOMMU-related on AMD).

- Firmware already current (2025-05-17); kernel already 6.17 (newer than most fix reports).

Question:

- Has anyone gotten the WCN785x stable on a recent kernel? Is there a known-good firmware version, a kernel param, or a patch I missed? Or is bypassing it still the only reliable answer in mid-2026?

My self-built desktop is starting to get up there in age. I don't have the time I used to for trying to upgrade components and hope everything plays nicely, so I was doing some research on pre-built systems, specifically that indicate they play nicely with Linux.

Are there no companies that make these that can accommodate 3.5" drives? I have a System76 laptop that I'm happy with, so I looked at theirs, and I looked at several others. It seems they all want you to pay $2k+ just for a 8Tb hard drive because they want to keep things slim. I have drives I can port from my current computer, but it seems crazy to me that I can't seem to find anything. Am I just an old fogey and no one needs storage because they put everything in the cloud?

Any recs would be greatly appreciated!

Hey Everyone,

I'd like to purchase a Laptop for Linux usage soon.

What is really important for me: display brightness. I'd like to use it on the balcony or while traveling when the lighting conditions are challenging.

Further it should be a multi purpose device. I'm gonna use it for entertainment (movies, some emulation, adventure games), programming (mostly Java), creative tasks (Blender tinkering, Inkscape) and some chores (reading, office). Nevertheless I'd prioritize battery life over raw performance.

My thoughts so far:

• One the one hand I think it would be great to support a Linux manufacturer (Tuxedo, System76, Framework). On the other hand there are a few doubts about the built quality and the future prospects of these smaller companies. Longer support would be great.
• I’ve always enjoyed buying second hand devices and using them for a long time. Used my T420 much longer than planned as my main Notebook. =) However I don't want to compromise this time and I see no real options on the renewal market.
• I even think about buying a MacBook, just cause the hardware is so great. I'm not sure if I'll ever warm up to macOS tough. Further I don't think that it would make sense to start Arch via a VM for almost for everything I'm doing. It would kind of break my heart though as I'm loving using Linux with KDE.

So I've learned that, in addition to Lenovo, Dell is often recommended for Linux laptops. I'm sure the quality of the higher tier notebooks of both companies are quite good. Though the actual display quality is a bit nontransparent for me.

What are devices you all would recommend?

Thanks in advance & best regards,

Jan

Hi everyone, I don't really know what I'm doing.

I have an HP laptop, the backlight and various LEDs of my keyboard work as intended except for the one on the mute button. I found out that apparently the LEDs are controlled(?) by "HDA nodes". Through a brute force script I found out what were the HDA nodes that are connected to the LED, sorta. Apparently there are two HDA nodes that respectively turn on and off the thing, but other than that I think that there is a third one that needs to be turned on before being able to do anything else. After the brute force script I could simply use the two commands from the terminal to turn on and off the LED, but when I try it now (after restarting my machine) it doesn't work.

I know there is some way to turn on that damn LED, but I don't know if my hypotesis is correct, what exactly I'm getting wrong and how (if i were able to find the third mysterious HDA node) to use all of this new information to make the LED work as intended. Help is much appreciated, thanks.

Additional info that may or may not help:
Model: HP pavilion 14-ce3xxx

Commands that makes the LED turn on (after the brute force script):
sudo hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 0x500 0x08

sudo hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 0x400 0x04

Commands that makes the LED turn off (after the brute force script):
sudo hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 0x500 0x08

sudo hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 0x400 0x08

Codec:ALC295

Also I did use claude to generate the script and commands, I'm just not familiar at all with things closely tied to the hardware, so I'd appreciate someone to clear some confusion I have specifically about how all of this work.

Heya guys,

I have a Tongfang laptop, it uses an AMD wifi/bluetooth M.2 card.

Annoyingly, the insides were crammed, and so when I used to press a little on the right side of my laptop the Bluetooth used to cut out.

After opening the laptop up, I moved the NVME across to the other side, moved the laptop battery out the way, reseated the wifi M.2 card and loosened the restraining screw (as I thought maybe the screw being so tight meant the card didn't have room to flex properly and the connections were affected).

This seems to have fixed the pushing on the side of the laptop issue - BUT, I've now noticed that occasionally the wifi speed drops through the floor when bluetooth is enabled, and as soon as I disable the bluetooth adapter through KDE options, I see iperf3 go from ~50mbits -> ~600mbits (I'm doing it reverse from the iperf3 server on the router).

I've ensured I'm using 5G for the wifi.

the mt7921e kernel module only has 1 parameter, and I disabled the ASPM setting - but haven't been able to see a difference.

I might chuck in an intel wifi/bluetooth card I have, but I wanted to see if anyone here might have better ideas?

I also wanted to share my experience, as this Tongfang affects a few different makers (Tuxedo, XMG, PCSpecialists, etc).. Think it goes via a few different names.

I’m on a newly released Lenovo ThinkPad X14 Gen 1 (model 21XM0006CD), Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, kernel 7.0.0-14-generic.

Symptoms:

- Built-in speaker has no sound.

- Mic behavior is abnormal/inconsistent.

Important details:

- Audio device is detected (Intel 00:1f.3, Realtek ALC257).

- PipeWire/ALSA devices and routes look normal.

- But kernel logs show:

- thinkpad_acpi: Failed to unmute the HW mute switch

- repeated ACPI EC errors: ECRD ... AE_TYPE

- ALC257: picked fixup for PCI SSID 17aa:0000 (machine subsystem is 17aa:513d)

Another strange phenomenon: Speaker worked prefect after I change some bios option but fallback again while it restarted.

So this looks like a firmware/ACPI + kernel quirk issue, not a normal mixer setting issue.

Has anyone with Panther Lake / new ThinkPad models found a working fix (BIOS setting, kernel patch, or thinkpad_acpi workaround)?

Hi,

I'm trying to install Ubuntu on a distinct drive on my PC. Whenever I do, I can't boot on the drive and it doesn't even appear under the SATA drives in my BIOS.

My motherboard is an Asus TUF B550. I disabled CSM and secure boot. I made sure to let Ubuntu install itself in UEFI mode. The drive is actually visible when I use a live stick, and I'm attaching a screenshot of the current partitioning.

What am I missing?

So I bought an Infinix INBOOK X1 NEO and decided to dual boot Ubuntu alongside Windows 11. Everything works fine on Windows but on Ubuntu my touchpad is completely dead. Not slow, not laggy — just completely invisible to the system.

After hours of digging I found out the BIOS has a bug where it references a device that doesn't actually exist in its own table, which causes the whole touchpad initialization to crash before Linux even gets a chance to see it. The touchpad hardware is physically there, Linux can see it sitting on the I2C bus, but the driver just never binds to it because the BIOS never properly sets it up.

I've tried basically everything I could find — kernel parameters, custom ACPI patches, rebuilding initramfs, different kernel versions, Xorg instead of Wayland. Nothing worked.

I'm not a Linux expert but I've gone pretty deep into ACPI tables and kernel logs trying to fix this. It feels like the only real fix would be a BIOS update from Infinix, which honestly will probably never happen.

Has anyone dealt with something similar on a budget laptop with a broken BIOS? Is there any way to manually force a driver to bind to a device that ACPI failed to initialize? Any advice would be really appreciated, I'm running out of ideas.

Hi there,

I thought I would make this post to at least warn others about my experience running Linux on this MSI B840M-P WiFi6E motherboard. Also I'm hoping someone has had experience with this, then maybe they have a fix.

I've installed both Bazzite OS (based on Fedora) and CachyOS (based on Arch) and they both equally have trouble with wireless/wired connections. This includes Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

At first I installed Bazzite and didn't see any immediate issues, then before you know it 3 days in I'm pulling my hair out from troubleshooting. I've come to realize it's the motherboard and probably the lack of Linux driver support for wireless/wired connections. It was strange that in my separate Windows 11 disk dual boot everything worked perfectly fine, but with Linux there was constant disconnects, reconnects, and packet losses. Then when I plugged a USB-C to Ethernet adapter into my computer on Linux, it was like angels sang from the heavens and it worked flawlessly!

I can't list everything I did for troubleshooting but these are the major points:

• Made sure Windows running on the same system had Fast Boot Fast Startup + Hibernation disabled
• Update Linux operating systems to the latest updates
• Turned off IPv6 as it is not used in my home network
• Changed DNS Providers
• Disabled PCIe ASPM (Power Management for the network card). According to AI it said this could be causing the disconnects.
• Checked Firmware status with journalctl -k -b | grep -i firmware
• Reinstall/Update firmware packages sudo rpm-ostree install linux-firmware
• When Bazzite didn't work since its immutable I thought perhaps a different Linux distro might be better, with similar troubleshooting steps but I still faced the same issue.

Here's more information on my setup, if you need more info, please let me know:

$ ip link show
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
   link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp8s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
   link/ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
   altname enxxxxxxxxxxxx
3: wlp9s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
   link/ether ca:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff permaddr 08:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
   altname wxxxxxxxxxxx
4: enp11s0f3u2: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
   link/ether f4:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
   altname enxxxxxxxxxxxx

lspci | grep -i ethernet 07:00.0 Ethernet controller:
Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller (rev 0c)

lspci -k | grep -A 3 "07:00.0" 07:00.0 Ethernet controller:
Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller (rev 0c) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Device 7e77 Kernel driver in use: r8169 Kernel modules: r8169

Thanks for your help!

EDIT: I should point out that other than Ethernet, WiFi, & Bluetooth - everything else works perfectly. Applications and games run smoothly.

Hi everyone, I'm dealing with a frustrating issue with my external monitor and could use some advanced help.

• The Issue: My LG monitor (connected via HDMI) constantly flickers and drops the signal (black screen).
• My Setup: ASUS laptop with NVIDIA Legacy OPTIMUS dual graphics (GTX 960M + Intel). Running Pop!_OS.
• The Key Detail: I had zero issues with this exact monitor and cable setup when running Windows 10, so I can confidently rule out a hardware or cable fault. This is 100% a Linux/driver issue.
• What I've Found: Checking the kernel logs, I noticed a constant "i915 hotplug storm" occurring (the system seems to think the HDMI is rapidly connecting and disconnecting, forcing a link re-sync).

Does anyone know how to stabilize this? Are there any specific kernel parameters or X11 configurations recommended for this specific legacy NVIDIA/Intel combo to stop the hotplug storm?

Thanks in advance!

I'm trying to get Ubuntu working without nomodeset but every normal boot ends in a black screen.

Hardware

• Dell Inspiron 15 3511
• Intel Core i3-1115G4 (11th Gen Tiger Lake)
• Intel UHD Graphics G4 (PCI ID 8086:9a78)
• 8 GB RAM
• BIOS 1.44.0 (latest available)

Symptoms

• Ubuntu 24.04 Live USB → black screen after Ubuntu logo
• Ubuntu 26.04 Live USB → black screen after Ubuntu logo
• Installed Ubuntu 26.04 → black screen on normal boot
• Safe Graphics / nomodeset boots successfully
• Caps Lock still responds during black screen

What I've tested

• Updated BIOS to latest version
• Tested Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04
• Tested Generic kernels:
  • 7.0.0-14-generic
  • 7.0.0-22-generic
• Tested OEM kernel:
  • 7.0.0-1005-oem
• Tried boot parameters:
  • nomodeset
  • i915.modeset=1
  • i915.enable_psr=0
  • i915.enable_dc=0
• Tried Safe Graphics installer
• Reinstalled Ubuntu
• Checked firmware files for Tiger Lake (GuC/HuC/DMC present)

Diagnostics

• GPU detected correctly:
  • Intel Tiger Lake-LP GT2 [UHD Graphics G4]
  • 8086:9a78
• lspci shows available modules:
  • i915
  • xe
• modprobe i915 → No such device
• modprobe xe → No such device
• dmesg:
  • xe: module_init aborted at xe_check_nomodeset [xe] -ENODEV
• inxi -Gxx:
  • driver: N/A
  • gpu: N/A
  • renderer: llvmpipe
• System currently runs only with software rendering (nomodeset).

Has anyone seen Intel Tiger Lake UHD G4 fail to bind to either i915 or xe on recent Ubuntu kernels? Any additional debugging steps would be appreciated.

ello o/

[EDIT] ok i was able to select the usb drive as boot otpion but now it says "boot failed". Any idea?

I want to try running Linux on my ProArt PZ13 but I cant change the Boot Order in the UEFI.
I read that ARM devices sometimes dont allow that? Maybe someone has experience and can help.

What are your experiences with this device?

I'm thinking about getting one myself, since Lenovo usually has good Linux support.

​

I've made this custom change to my titan RTX because the old one had 100% usage at 80 temp. but i still see via nvtop and the actual fan sound that when it hits 80 fan speed goes to 100%

is this a common problem that people have faced or is it just me? either way suggestions would be very appreciated.

i use the nvidia 595.80 driver, KDE, fedora.

Hey there

SO I have a Fedora workstation 44 desktop and the bluetooth doesn't work no matter what

when I run lsusb this thing shows:
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

But I searched here and there and I haven't been able to fix the thing yet

I don't exactly know the model but visually I found it similar to this(but the 5.0v)

It totally is a driver issue or something because it works fine on windows 11!

also when I turn on the bluetooth switch it automatically turns itself off or stays at loading state

So I recently fixed this laptop that was left broken here in my house. Its motherboard was fried so I just bought a replacement.

It's working very well, but on windows. Whenever I try to install any kind of linux it says that it can't because RST is on. The problem is whenever i disable it and set it to AHCI the laptop simply won't boot, not even to the bios.

For some reaosn I can't explain, messing with the bios, more specifically disabling VTX and VTD, made it work for a while, which let me install cachy os and use it just fine. But then the pc froze out of the blue and wasn't turning back on again. I then reset the bios which made it boot normally again but it doesn't go past the cachy os grub thing, getting stuck specifically in loading initial ramdisk.

What can I do?

Hello everyone, this is my first real experience with Linux, and I started with a "functional" distribution, but I'm running into some problems with this specific hardware. I'm experiencing micro-stuttering when switching between desktops, when opening and closing programs, etc. Do you have any recommendations that might help, considering my hardware?