best / good laptop recommendations?

[Michael L]

Hello NLUG,

Got a former Windows user, 47 year old friend looking to get a laptop to run Linux on, mainly for internet browsing, not gaming.  I'll be glad to get some of (southern) y'alls suggestions to advise him better.

Leaning towards i7 (or AMD equivalent) with a minimum of 16GB RAM, but I'll save my own input for last.

Thank y'all

  M

[Michael L]

and also where to buy

[Jackie Moore]

I have several System76 Galago Pro laptops available is used is acceptable.

Jackie Moore

On Feb 4, 2026, at 4:53 PM, Michael L <helpwit...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Michael Butler]

Man, I would love to get a System 76 one day.  SoonTM
Been a while since I put Linux on a "Windows" laptop too.

[Holland Griffis]

I use an AMD Framework 13 and it runs Linux really really well. 

On Wed, Feb 4, 2026 at 4:53 PM Michael L <helpwit...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Kent Perrier]

For maximum compatibility, any 100% intel (graphics and networking) will be the best. My work laptop is a Lenovo, with a Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics. There are .... issues with it. Firmware, drivers sometimes makes it worse, then better. It goes back and forth a bit.

On Wed, Feb 4, 2026 at 4:53 PM Michael L <helpwit...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Holland Griffis]

You can stick with intel if it makes you feel better but Framework officially supports multiple Linux distros on their hardware. They choose hardware for compatibility. As for firmware, I even update mine with fwupdmgr and everything down to the system bios updates fine. Even the freaking fingerprint reader has gotten firmware updates with it. At the moment mine is running Debian Trixie, even though that’s not one of the officially supported distros, with no issues at all.

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[Blake McBride]

Just my two cents. I have a Dell Latitude 5500. It works perfectly. With an SSD and 32 GB, it's a fine machine.

--blake

[Tommy Kelly]

Any Lenovo Thinkpad that meets your specs should be good. I just got a Thinkpad P14 with an AMD processor and it runs fedora, garuda, mint etc with no issues whatsoever. I've never had problems with Intel Lenovos either, so I suspect you'd be fine there as well.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/search?fq=&text=P14&rows=20&sort=relevance

In the past, I've heard great things about putting linux on Dell XPS, and I did 6 or so years ago with no issues, but I have no idea if they are still good laptops at this point (I was really disappointed with mine and its magnetic keyboard). I've heard that Dell's are still very linux friendly though, for what that's worth.

System76 or Framework are also both options, but I've never used them.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 11:39 AM 'Blake McBride' via NLUG <nlug...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Just my two cents. I have a Dell Latitude 5500. It works perfectly. With an SSD and 32 GB, it's a fine machine.

--blake

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