Can I plug System76 as an alternative? I feel like it's important to purchase Linux-native hardware. Microsoft has largely prevented competition in this market, and I think more viable options would benefit consumers. Also, S76 has pretty good hardware.
Thanks for the heads up (S76) but Linux runs on pretty much anything these days. This laptop is a Dell Inspiron with a 17" touch screen and lots of sensors. I'm running Arch Linux on it and everything is supported out of the box. The only tweak I have made towards hardware is changing the driver in use for the Synaptics mouse, which dmesg mentioned and will probably become the norm soon anyway.
There really is no such thing as MS native only anymore. I got Linux on here without accepting any obnoxious licenses and my laptop's price was partially subsidised by all the crap that I never even saw. To be honest, I'm not sure what the exact price breakdown really is on this thing but I do know that MS did not get in my way.
Dell are pretty Linux friendly, for example to update firmware I copy the new image to my /boot partition (EFI) and then use the built in option at boot to update the firmware - simples! No more farting around with turning swap into FAT32 for a while and a FreeDOS boot disc.
You can buy Dell laptops these days that ship directly with Ubuntu (such as XPS and Precision), and you explicitly see the Microsoft tax fall off when making the selection. It feels so good.
Intel's NUC bricks come in two varieties: prebuilt and bring your own memory, storage and OS. The latter does not impose a Windows license fee and as long as you're running kernel 4 all the hardware is generally supported, although I see running Ubuntu combined with a thunderbolt switch doesn't work.
Sporting laptop-class processors these are not powerhouse machines and fall below the latest Mac Minis in performance. But for a development platform they can be plenty, particularly the newer models that ditch classic SATA for two NVME slots.
Not too sure what the break down on my lappy is wrt bundles. As far as I can tell I paid a fair price for it and I did not accept any licenses that I did not want. When I say fair price, I think that it is pretty decent. I don't know what a 17" Apple laptop would cost with a touch screen but probably more than the £950ish I paid for this beast.
I'll plug the Librem 13/15. I have the 13 and I'm very happy with it (initially it had a bug in the firmware so my NVMe SSD that I bought separately wasn't bootable, but they fixed it very quickly).
I got a Galago Pro recently, because my previous netbook fell apart. The construction on the Galago Pro is quite solid, I believe; getting it apart was a bit more challenging than I am used to. However, the laptop is still being manufactured by CLEVO, and as one consequence of this, the battery life is pretty limited (I was aware of this drawback before purchase). I believe that, as the sibling poster mentions, they are bringing their design and manufacture in-house, and that subsequent revisions will be an improvement. I don't find the issue to be hugely limiting, and I am personally willing to forgive quite a lot to have (1) no Windows key, and (2) non-soldered RAM.
