this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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Corporates are using ThinkPads, HP EliteBooks and MacBooks. OS being Windows, macOS mainly. Linux on workstations is pretty rare - mainly used by developers - and the distro being Ububtu LTS (which I do not recommend).
Since you want to use Linux, go for a ThinkPad. There are more Linux-friendly laptops of course (like Framework and System76) but I believe none of them offer corporate-levels of stability and build-quality like ThinkPads yet - as you have experienced yourself with System76.
Main pro-tip is to avoid systems that use nVidia cards - they're often responsible for buggy suspend/resume in Linux, and can break your OS sometimes when you do an OS/kernel upgrade. So if you're after stability, avoid nVidia like the plague.
For the docking station, I've had good experiences with the HP Thunderbolt Dock G4. The initial releases were in fact a bit buggy with suspend/resume, but HP have released subsequent firmware updates to fix those issues. In fact, HP have been really good at providing regular firmware updates for those docks, and the best part is that it's on the LVFS too - which means the firmware can be updated directly in Linux using
fwupd. A lot of vendors don't bother updating docking stations - and even fewer update them via LVFS, so this is something you might definitely want to look into.Finally, for distro recommendations, I would recommend a Fedora Atomic distro since they're immutable, and rollbacks are as easy as just selecting the previous image in the boot menu. Given your requirements, I'd recommed Bluefin - specifically the Developer Experience version, since it comes with virtualisation tools OOTB.
For reference, I mainly use Bazzite (another variant of Fedora Atomic) on my pure-AMD ThinkPad Z13, and haven't had any issues with suspend/resume, external monitors, or virtualisation dev/test workflows. There's virtually no overnight battery drain either when suspending. My system also supports Opal2, so my drive is encrypted transparently to the OS, with virtually no performance overhead. It's also nice not having to muck around with LUKS and the complexities around it. I use this system for both work and personal use (gaming), and it's been a great experience so far - both software and hardware. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
Super appreciate the reply, d3Xt3r!
I've been screwed by nVidia cards before. I knew that but still bought the System 76 laptop... I have some decent laptops from previous jobs, I have a pretty beefy ThinkPad P52 that I will spin up Bluefin once I get a little freetime.
Thanks for the in depth response.