Greetings, all.

I'm planning to buy a new laptop to be dedicated solely to slack - no dual-booting or nothing. Now, I know there's a lot of controversy about hardware/driver support. (I'm using a Dell Inspiron right now with an Intel Link 5100 wireless adapter, which I hear is horrible for Slack.)

So, I'd like your opinions on which brands do you find the most compatible. Which ones are you using now? My preferences are ASUS, Toshiba, Sony and Lenovo.

we'll for one thing, get one with a nvidia graphics card if you want the best 3D support. ATI is coming along but nvidia is still better.

If you have one specific laptop in mind, you could search in the Arch Wiki. They usually have many laptops with lists what is, and what is not supported. For example they had listed my ASUS EeePC 1201T -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Eee_PC_1201T

The ArchWiki provide even more information about laptops: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop

Good luck.

I built my own computer a few weeks back and couldn't be happier. I went for Nvidia graphics over ATI as they have better driver support. I also made sure the wireless card I picked had good review in Linux.

I've been using it mostly to play games (Starcraft 2, WoW, Fall out:New vegas, Counter strike source, Beta of Rift), and I've so far not run in to anything that Slack hasn't been able to handle. I've left a 200gb partition on my hard drive just incase I need to install Windows, but i'm hoping to get away without it.

Hardware: Intel i5 @3.4 ghz, Nvidia gtx460 hawk 1 gb, 4 gig ram, 1 tb hard drive.

Hate to be contrary but I've an Inspiron 1750 that I'm more than happy with (and it didn't cost an arm, leg, and three toes from the other foot). 64-bit, it has Intel graphics (work just fine out of the box), an Atheros wireless card (ditto), plenty of memory, etc., etc. The only downside is that the dual-core processor won't support virtualization (so I could not install 64-bit Win7 in a virtual machine, I'd need the next processor up for that but who really cares about Win7 anyway?); VirtualBox with XP as a guest works just fine.

I suspect that Dell's large-screen super-jazzy graphics machines might be just fine if you avoid ATI graphics in favor of Nvidia but, then, how heavy into graphics stuff are you? Worth the price of admission? Give a hoot one way or the other? On the rare occasions that I plug a DVD into this box they play just fine; your mileage will, of course, vary by what you intend to do...

Hope this helps some.

I'd also recommend laptops with nvidia cards.
You can make use of the hardware compatibility list (HCL) here on LQ
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php/cat/507

Be careful when it comes to new laptops with nvidia. If the laptop has switchable graphics with Optimus (and therefore doesn't have the option in the BIOS to switch between the nvidia and intel GPUs) you will probably not be able to use the nvidia drivers. There's some work being done on this outside of nvidia, but it's all quite hacky, nothing officially supported, and likely to remain that way for quite a while.

Adam

Check out Acer. An Acer laptop is reasonably priced, quite reliable, and a lot of them are stuffed check-full of Intel hardware for graphics and wifi and what-have-you. Intel hardware means open-source drivers; everything works out of the box without you having to mess with anything. My wife runs Slackware 13.1 on a two-year-old Acer Aspire 6930, and the only thing I had to do to make it fully functional was install the OS.

I have 2 asus laptops running quite well. Mine is a K50IJ hers is a K60IJ. I am very happy with both.

I actually just bought my gf a laptop for Christmas and went with a Toshiba. It has AMD for the cpu and ATI/AMD for graphics. I know everyone says "Pick nvidia, their drivers are better", but I would rather support ATI/AMD for actually opening up instead of giving us blobs. </rant> My personal laptop has pretty much the same thing and everything works just fine.

It's interesting you say that. I have a friend who had two Acer tops. Both crashed after about a year, so he switched to a MacBook. Of course, he was running Windows on them, so I'll try not to hold that against Acer.

To answer a question above: I'm not planning to do anything heavy in the graphics department (e.g., gaming, video editing, etc.). I just want something for coding and maybe pen-testing.

Btw, I'm only interested in notebooks, not netbooks. I feel like I might break one of those just by holding it.

Interesting. My mom and I have identical laptops (she runs Windows Vista on hers; god have mercy on her soul), and both are a little over two years old and still run great.

What do you mean by 'crashed'? Did the hardware fail or the OS? From your post I get the impression it was the OS. If it was the hard drive, I'd still not condemn the manufacturer of the laptop. I had a three week old 500GB laptop hard drive fail recently. I realize these things happen, and actually don't really even condemn the hard drive manufacturer for that matter. I haven't looked to see if this is a common occurrence. Need to poke about it again soon then return it.

I have the asus laptop in my signature. It is 100% linux compatible out of the box except for the graphics card, which is a ten minute fix.

I honestly never saw the issue with ati cards. That's all I've ever used, and I've never had a problem. Just download the driver from ati's site, install it, and your good to go.