I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.

The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.

At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.

What kind of research did you do?

I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.

Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.

I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.

It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.