<p>I need to buy a couple of laptops for my children who are in college studying computer science. They are telling me that they prefer something that can run Linux. Any recommendations? Are there brands/models to avoid if the intention is to install/run Ubuntu?</p>
<p>Linux is a free Unix clone. You can get a Mac which is Unix. It can run almost all Linux programs and more. Many engineers/admins working on Linux actually use Mac.</p>
<p>You can always use virtual machine to run Linux on PC.</p>
<p>Linux is ALL I run on my computers as well as those in my research lab. Any commodity PC will probably be able to run Linux if it does not have the very latest hardware, where a driver has not yet been written. Hardware manufacturers tend not to be concerned with Linux drivers first and the Linux community may take a bit of time to get the hardware supported.</p>
<p>Some manufacturers do have Linux compatibility information on their sites and you can start there. Dell has had a reasonable history of supporting Linux and Lenovo does too.</p>
<p>The best way is find a laptop you like and then do a bit of searching online.</p>
<p>@irisss is correct, virtual machines are a good way to run Windows on a Linux computer…</p>
<p>iriss, thanks for the response. They are currently using 2+ year old macbooks and they claim that they need more memory, faster processor etc., etc. I feel that it is better to buy new linux laptops than keep upgrading older macbooks. (I do know that almost all laptops come with Windows pre-installed and it is not that difficult to install Linux if you have the image on a usb drive.)</p>
<p>I hear that Lenavo T series Thinkpads are quite suitable for running Linux. Any thoughts?</p>
<p>By the way, a few years I used VNC to run linux on my windows PC - not a very pleasant experience, to say the least.</p>
<p>EDIT: thanks xraymancs. Didn’t notice your response earlier.</p>
<p>I recently bought a cheap Dell Inspiron from Costco and installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. No problems except the system occasionally freezes if I use Chrome for browsing.</p>
<p>VNC is like a remote desktop where you login to a Linux server on another host.</p>
<p>You can replace the hard drive with SSD, and memory upgrade is cheap. Since they are studying CS, having Mac will enable them to learn iOS and OSX programming which you can’t do on other machines.</p>
<p>irisss, you are right! I meant the virtual machine using vmware.</p>
<p>Can’t they just use the school’s Linux servers? They can just telnet/ssh into it.</p>
<p>Good idea! I will suggest that and see how they react. Thanks!</p>
<p>FYI (you mentioned linux compatibility on Lenovo T series) - I am in a company with hundreds of thousands of employees using Lenovo T series running Redhat. If we need windows we run it on top of Linux.</p>
<p>If you want to run vmware you will need the memory for it. I would say 8GB minimum to run 64 bit windows on linux.</p>
<p>Thanks, maffdad! It is good to know that T-series laptops are being widely used to run Linux. We are thinking about waiting till the end of summer to buy one. From what I have read, prices will drop another $100+ for current (Ivy Bridge based) models and Haswell based models will become available. The advice I am getting is that with Haswell processors the reduction of power consumption is significant and probably worth the wait.</p>
<p>You can run linux on a macbook air using bootcamp, parallels or vmware.</p>
<p>They have the new haswell processors and 12 hour battery life.</p>
<p>Nowadays, most notebooks which aren’t too recent or too low-end will be compatible with the popular linux distros like Ubuntu, Mint, etc.</p>
<p>However, they should have no problems running them on 2 year old macbooks as virtual machines or under bootcamp. </p>
<p>I knew plenty of professional engineers/programmers who program on much older machines than that in computer technology firms. One friend’s company just retired a bunch of 2005 era Dell Latitude D610s and are continuing to use PCs/notebooks from 2006-8 to this very day to do programming work in Windows and Linux. </p>
<p>Moreover, the most hardcore engineering/CS friends tend to gravitate towards netbsd/freebsd, Slackware and/or Gentoo linux. Much more flexible…but also correspondingly more complex to set up and get running. </p>
<p>If they just want something that works…Ubuntu, Mint, etc are fine.</p>
<p>Just bought a 15" Asus Notebook (i5, 4th gen Intel CPU) from Best Buy for $750.
There were no issues intalling Ubuntu and getting it to run. Everything including touch screen worked with standard installation of 13.04 but I had to install a patch for a more reliable WiFi connection.</p>
<p>Folks at Best Buy were very helpful. They let me try out several systems running Ubuntu from a USB drive.</p>