Nobody else that you know of is recommending them, but their might be somebody else that you DON’T know of that might be recommending HP. Might point is that you should just say something like “From my experience with the HP products that I’ve used I’ve had problems with, so I just want you to know that you may have some problems too.”
Depending on what you’re looking to do, don’t forget about business surplus/refurbished laptops for more general use. The Lenovo Thinkpads and Dells are often great choices after a lease ends. One thing that you may have to do is replace the battery, so ensure that is possible on the model you’re looking at. Also make sure the bios isn’t locked. You can occasionally get them cheaper with no OS installed (often “NO OS” on Ebay). Some even allow an upgrade or two.
Picked up a T430 last year for about $200 and it runs Kubuntu great. I am debating if I want to give it to my parents and upgrade to something a bit more fancy or buy them something similar. I use it as a secondary laptop though, not a main. Found a dock for it for like $20 and can dock it up to two monitors and a keyboard and mouse if I want to.
2 Likes
What you are saying is you basically need it for surfing the web, so any laptop is probably okay. Since you don’t need very high specs. I would focus on a great screen and good keyboard. I recently bought a used Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 4th gen. with a 14" 1080p IPS screen and fantastic keyboard for 300 euro roughly 300 USD and love it. Ryan / DasGeek has a video on this particular model on his YouTube channel. I also own a Dell XPS 13 and it’s great, but 14" is a better fit for the resolution imho. I also own other (older) ThinkPad with TN panels, so no IPS and would not recommend those, although fun to upgrade and play with.
1 Like
I bought a used Lenovo x220 Thinkpad off eBay and it has worked perfectly for me.
I run Ubuntu Mate 18.04 and everything works.
You can check out a blog post I wrote about this here:
http://eduardosanchez.me/2016/06/26/review-lenovo-thinkpad-x220/
2 Likes
That is one great machine. Here in this household there is still an X200. It runs just fine. It has the same form factor even though only dual core and the battery life is exceptional even with wear-out.
Those keyboards are still the best! No other keyboard feels that comfortable to me as the old Thinkpad series.
In case anyone is still following this, I have two recommendations from my personal experience - the Dell Inspiron 7373 2-in-1, and the System76 Gazelle. The Dell ran every Linux I could throw at it with no trouble. The System76 (surprisingly) has taken some finessing to get anything other than Pop_OS working on it, due to its hybrid graphics setup and a few other bells and whistles (RGB keyboard).
1 Like
I’m still following 
I’m planning to ditch the iPad to a linux laptop and the 2 in 1 are appealing as I could keep some touch oriented habits. How was the Dell about that ? What distros did you use ?
I was pleasantly surprised to find that 99% of the distros I tried worked just fine with the touchscreen on the 7373. Fedora 31, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 19.10 (but not 19.04 - had an issue with the Intel graphics), openSuSE Leap, Solus (3?), Mint 18.3 all worked well out of the box. Most booted just fine with UEFI and SecureBoot turned on as well.
1 Like
Wow, you used two HP laptops ! Guess what, HP MAKES MORE THAN 2 LAPTOPS !
I love my Zenbook ( also a ux330u ) and would search to the ends of the earth for a replacement should the inevitable occur.
It’s only a 2-core i5 with 8GBs of RAM, but for general light-duty work it is an awesome ultrabook. Weighs less than 2lbs. I’ve run MX Linux, Manjaro, and, currently, Solus on it.
Everything works, including the keyboard fn keys ( display brightness, keyboard backlight, volume, etc.
I also have a Thinkpad ( AMD-based ), which is also Linux friendly.
You might be able to find a used ( eBay ) Dell XPS for under $1,000. That would be a great Linux laptop.
Yeah, and they both went to crap before their expected lifespan. Meanwhile I still have Dell and Toshiba laptops in excess of 10 years of age which I still use.
Same here, I’m using a HP laptop that I’ve used since around 2015. It originally ran Windows Vista !
In my experience, the only laptops that have lasted me 10 years or more have all been Apple.
I’m gonna go hide now.
Same here - had a first generation Core 2 Duo MacBook that lasted me around a decade. First six years on OS X, last 4 on Linux. Back then their hardware was rock solid.
1 Like