this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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I'm one of the few whose laptop is about 10 years old so it needs replacing. Most likely a new laptop will be preloaded with windows 11. Do they sell laptops pre-loaded with Linux?
System76 has laptops with Pop OS
Depending on your budget, there's the Framework laptops.
Edit: I want to add... What I did, was go to an opshop, get a laptop there, and wipe it for Linux. I got a decent laptop at a decent price, saved a little on ewaste for the world, helped a local opshop make a little money, and not contributed to any corpo greed.
What's a opshop?
Opportunity Shop. A thrift or consignment shop.
At the lower end of the budget you could consider libreboot - it's a one person band who ships refurbished Lenovo thinkpads with Linux pre-installed
You can get a laptop with no OS preinstalled just about everywhere.
That's roughly what I'm hoping for: Former top of the line 7th gen CPU ThinkPad, such as a P51 or P71, might become really cheap as soon as the small Linux used hardware market is satiated when Win10 support ends.
For me, that'd be a massive upgrade :-)
Installing linux yourself is dead easy. I would just buy a Windows laptop and wipe the drive
I don't want Microsoft to have the win of selling even 1 license.
Buy refurb then, it's what I did and it's super fast. Returns are diminishing these days and your money will go further.
It was already quite doable in late 1990s Suse, although it took a day and you actually had to read the book it came with. The partitioning was annoying and confusing for a first-timer, and the default packages were also lacking. Now, not harder than Windows.
eBay has tons of off-lease/refurbished computers for pennies on the dollar. Hard format the drive, install your distro, and you're off and running.
I remember hearing about System76 a while back. They manage Pop!_OS which comes preloaded on their stuff. I don't know much more than that. If you are mainly looking to replace your laptop because you don't want to switch to 11, you could always try out Linux on it with a live USB. Basically you format a thumb drive to act as a boot drive. There are resources online on how to do it and it's pretty simple. It doesn't mess with your current install. If you like it, you can fully install it later.
There are some companies that sell hardware with Linux pre-installed. The bigger companies that do are Dell and Lenovo. Maybe some others I am not aware of. If you want to support a smaller company that also sells Linux preinstalled, you should look into System76 and Framework. I would not be surprised if there are others as well.
If you are feeling up to it, I think it’s a great idea to watch some videos regarding installing a Linux distribution on your own and doing it that way. It isn’t very difficult (You may have to adjust some BIOS settings for example) and many distributions guide you in keeping a windows install and Linux install at the same time dual boot style if you want a back up Windows install. It will be a good first step in learning a little about how Linux works so you can figure out any issues more easily if they happen to come up.
I switched to Linux primarily last year, and other than some distro hopping to find my right fit, I haven’t looked back and I don’t plan on it.
Thanks!
Last time I checked, admittedly years ago, I was irritated at paying the same price as for the windows version of the same hardware. Why do I still need to pay the Microsoft tax and who’s getting it?