100% agree. At this price point who has the time to debug wifi?!

Wi-fi basically works across the board. System76 cares about fan curves and other mechanical/electrical details. Battery life is easy to call out, but I’d say that the work being done now is more nuanced.

I think battery life is one area vertical integration really helps. If all the hardware and firmware don't play nice, sleep and other power savings doesn't work right (at least in my experience). You'll have one rogue device preventing the machine from or some hardware missing software daemon power management config.

Only the people writing wifi drivers, and students trying to figure out how things work for the novelty.

Me.

Ironically enough, my Dell laptop arrived without a working wifi card. They had a bios update at some point which made it less crap, but I had to replace it after the nth time where it seemingly just randomly turned itself off /hard crashed.

Now that I think of it, I must have some really bad luck. Every single laptop I have owned, has has a wifi issue at some point.

And yet every time I post running Linux on a modern laptop as a daily driver is not a good idea I get heavily downvoted.

Disagree, depending on what you mean by modern. A model that just came out that includes freshly released hardware? Unless it's a Dell Developer Edition or similar that comes with a Linux distro preinstalled and is thus tested, yeah, there might be driver issues.

Otherwise stuff just mostly works. Some due diligence ahead is a good idea to ensure there's no problematic hardware though.

Probably because it depends on the modern laptop.

I bought my current daily driver when mobile Zen 3 parts were still new. Arch supported it 100% without any random tweaks since day one. As a comparison, Windows only figured out how to work the webcam about a year later...

Complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense :)

(FWIW I agree with you, Linux on laptops is a recipe for pain)

I've been running my 12th Gen Intel Framework for just over a year (since I got it) with Linux (KDE Neon). Bluetooth, expansion cards, thunderbolt, wifi - literally no issues. I haven't even had to fiddle with it. I use it all day for work (software engineering - lots of VM's and browser tabs) and all evening for Minecraft and movies. When I'm at my desk at home it's plugged in to a Thunderbolt 4 dock driving two monitors and getting Gigabit network speed.

Before that I had a brand new Dell XPS 13, which again I had for a little over a year, running KDE Neon. It wasn't used for work as much, but again it worked perfectly fine, including the touch screen I didn't even want on it (okay- a major issue was the battery life, which was atrocious).

Neither of these even came with Linux installed.

If you spend a lot of your time working in/with Linux, I think it's fine. If you don't, you soon will.

All the time: I use WSL. The right tool for the right job. Linux userspace for development -- but Windows for the kernel because that's where the drivers are.

There are brands selling preinstalled laptop, this is the way to go if you want to be 100% sure of a supported laptop. There is a curated list at this page: https://linuxpreloaded.com/

Purism is another company that ships GNU/Linux laptops with their own OS.