My old HP laptop bit the dust, so I'm in search of something new. Do Asus and MSI laptops play well with Linux? I want to boot UEFI to elilo with none of the 'secure boot' crap.

Thoughts?

If your budget isn't constrained, consider Apple m1/m2, as they blow away both your choices in terms of battery life and cpu performance Asus & MSI. Linux support with Asahi Linux.

I sprung for a business MSI laptop. I'll see how it does.

I've an MSI motherboard myself, chosen over Gigabyte. I'm glad I did.

I have an MSI laptop. KUbuntu 22.04 installed just fine over the M$ OS that was on it. Have not encountered any problems. Well, thinking back I may have had to get into the BIOS to allow booting from USB before install. Seems like there was a hiccup there. But once installed, everything that I wanted to work worked. That's been months ago now and all is running just fine. What sold me on the laptop was it had two memory slots and two PCIe M2 slots. I upgraded to 32GB of RAM and added a 1TB SSD (so 512GB OS SSD , 1TB data SSD). Was easy as I think only six back screws to remove, and after removing the back plate, you are looking at the slots. Easy Peasy to extend (my) MSI laptop (powered by AMD Ryzen 5700U).

Never buy Apple. To proprietary, to expensive, can't swap OS to say Linux on a whim, and from what I understand not upgrade-able. I really don't see what people like in an Apple computer. You have vendor lock-in.

All my current motherboards are Gigabyte for server, and desktops. Work well for me. I think probably all motherboard vendors have good boards and not so good boards . More of user preference here.

The reason I have MSI over Gigabyte was that I read the reviews!

. Yeah ... if reading customer reviews ... You'd almost NOT want to buy 'any' boards no matter what the brand! I've just used Gigabyte for many years and they've just worked (with a BIOS update now and then of course) . I am not an over clocker so BIOS options on that front aren't of much interest. YMMV of course.

Well, the Asus review was better again, but not believably so. I'm a hardware guy, so on hardware reviews I can cut tyhrough thr crud fairly quickly. The only negative on the MSI over Asus IIRC was that the nvme sockets sat quite tight on the m/b. Some might class that as an advantage.

I bought the MSI, and it is a complete joy. EVERYTHING worked out of the box. Problems were sorted out easily, and NO nasty words were uttered at all.

Oh Joy!

Glad to hear it! Enjoy. What distro are you using? Oh .... slackware?