this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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In general you should be fine. Might have some issues if you want 32 bit.
Most likely difficulty is if you get something with "weird" peripherals that has gone from support.
A laptop with touch sensitive buttons that was only made by Dell for one model in 2008 is something where you might have difficulty finding support.
Old laptops can often be a pain if they don't have mainstream hardware.
I have a laptop with a touchpad made by Elan. I couldn't even find a website for them, but the laptop's support page has a Windows driver that works well.
I put Linux on there maybe 5 years ago, and there just is no driver for this touchpad on Linux, so it works in PS2 mouse modus and nothing else. No multitouch, no gestures, no way to change any slightly more advanced settings like sensitivity.
Ha I had this issue once upon a time too! And the one above with the wifi driver b43-fwcutter. Apparently not great laptop choices. The touchpad situation was awful, because the sensitivity was always insane. IIRC I had a way to slow it down, but then it was so so slow that I had to go over it like 30 times to get across the diagonal. Good times.
I vividly remember that time when I tried to get Linux running on my old laptop in the mid-2000s. There was no wifi driver for that card in the repo, but the manufacturer provided a driver to download. But it was in C++ source code that failed to compile because it was so outdated.
So there I was as a teenager who barely knew a little C at that time, porting the driver from outdated C++ to the then-modern version. It wasn't easy but I managed to.
I am so happy it's not 2005 anymore, when it comes to Linux.
Yeah kind of a similar story but on my iBook G4 I had trouble getting wireless internet working with modern distros because b43-fwcutter (I think) was unavailable. I ended up installing Yellow Dog Linux to get around it
So I really only care about the RAM for speed. dont care about ssd size, dont care about fingerprint readers, I just want a solid machine that makes it easy to run linux and also easy to fix; something sturdy. there's nothing "special" i should be noting while shopping? is it just all personal preference with the specs and such?
For the most part, yeah. If you're looking for a laptop the older you go, the more "boring" you'll want.
Plain form factors and the like.
Sometimes, very rarely, weird laptop keyboards need special drivers that don't always get baked into Linux, so it can be a pain. Same for older "premium" sound stuff in an older laptop.
Doesn't mean that it will have problems, just that you're more likely to.
Old midrange Lenovo or Dell laptops tend to be a staple for Linux. They also contribute to Linux, so their stuff tends to just work. Contrast with apple, where getting it to work with Linux is a hard-mode hobby for some people.
Base hardware stuff is essentially all compatible.
https://a.co/d/1exYlgM
That's basically an example of a standard laptop you might try to put Linux on and expect effortless success. (It's newer because that's what came up, but it's an example of the trend).
Note the lack of anything that makes you go "ah, a marketable feature to highlight or differentiate".
https://a.co/d/iRv02YV
This one probably works fine, but I'd have some concerns about that touch screen and things not playing well with any sensors that make the folding action turn off the screen.
It might work fine, but it's the type of thing that can take a bit of fiddling to get working, or just doesn't because people don't care to port the functionality over.