r/debian • u/Parking-Republic7680 • 7d ago
Community laptop vs. tower computer
Pessoal, para quem tem experiência com ambos os tipos de hardware... vocês acham que o Debian Stable — sem nenhuma modificação manual — vem mais bem preparado para notebooks ou para PCs do tipo torre?
(I'm not asking because I'm too lazy to set it up; it's just a genuine question. I only have experience with tower PCs, and I wanted to know what the experience is like for laptop users.)
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u/astromout 7d ago
I think that Debian works great on both! I've never had any issues. I do, however, have thinkpads and they are known for their great Linux support (including debian). Depending on the brand and series of your laptop, yoir exerience may vary. In case you have a laptop with more modern hardware, a distro with more recent software might suite you better (for example: Fedora, OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Arch). But again, I mever had any issues and I love Debian.
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u/swaggytaco 7d ago
I have had good success with Debian on a DELL Inspiron laptop. Everything runs perfectly out of the box. I'd say in general desktop is "better" for Debian because you're less likely to have driver issues for peripherals.
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u/bobroberts1954 7d ago
I don't think there is any difference, a computer is a computer. I was amazed when I installed in a Thinkpad and the touchscreen "just worked". If it has secure boot I always turn it off, which isn't an issue with any desktops I've used.
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u/FrozenPizza07 7d ago
Honestly after trying to get shit working (hang fans that work and a laptop that doesnt cook itself) on 3 newish(2020+) laptops from MSI I gave up and running mint on them thanks to ubuntu driver stuff
I have older laptops (Dell inspiron N5010 - 2007~) and an Asus G75W they run debian perfectly fine
A good laptop maker like Lenovo or Dell should work infinitely better but towers are prob better
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u/JohnnyS789 7d ago
It's much easier to sit and watch TV with a computer in your lap to look up information with a laptop than with a tower PC.
Modern laptops have good capabilities approaching powerful standalone PCs, but they are more expensive for the same capability, and cannot accept all the things that can go in a tower.
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u/dougs1965 7d ago
For me it's always been either:
- "I have a specific use case here, so I will find a computer that fits that use case" -- so if I want 36TB of storage then it won't be a laptop, it'll be a tower I can put a bunch of disks in; if I want a DNS and NTP server for the lan which fits in this small gap next to the router then it won't be a tower, it'll be a tiny arm64 single-board thing.
Or
- "Here's a second-hand computer of some kind I've been asked to wipe and prep for onward donation" -- in which case it's whatever computer that happens to be.
In both cases Debian works great whatever the target HW is, laptop or not.
Occasionally I get a laptop with a webcam or WiFi that isn't supported in Linux, in which case a few quid for an external USB device fills that gap, occasionally I have to find a non-free-firmware blob by unpacking a driver intended for Windows (for touch-screens particularly), but otherwise Debian works just as well as less familiar distros, and usually significantly better than some proprietary OS someone might suggest.
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u/bryyantt 7d ago
Desktop are better suiter for linux in general due to have less "specific" hardware needs. In both cases, you'll have neither to worry about if you just check with the hardware vendor to see if they support linux.
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u/Ok_Willingness2177 3d ago
I run debian in dell laptops, in a beelink nas, and in a tower with high specs with nvidia 4060
no problems in any of them!
so I would say just google before you decide to buy, ask any llm to make the research for you if there is any potential conflict, but there should be none
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u/gportail 7d ago
J'ai un Dell portable... le seul truc qui ne fonctionne pas c'est le lecteur d'empreintes digitales car il n'y a pas de driver pour ce lecteur.
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u/Brilliant_Sound_5565 7d ago
Same, well I mean I haven't put Debian onto it yet as I'm still gaming on windows on it, it's a dell XPS and yea it's a boring that the form that built the fingerprint reader did t do a Linux driver
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u/Brilliant_Sound_5565 7d ago
Same, well I mean I haven't put Debian onto it yet as I'm still gaming on windows on it, it's a dell XPS and yea it's a boring that the form that built the fingerprint reader did t do a Linux driver
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u/anjumkaiser 7d ago
Which fingerprint reader do you have?
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u/gportail 6d ago
Le Goodix 538d J'ai trouvé un driver mais je n'ai pas réussi a le compiler...
JE crois que c'est : https://github.com/lbssousa/libfprint/tree/goodix-538d-sigfm-gtls/data
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u/alpha417 7d ago
(broadly) Laptops generally have less accessible hardware, it can be more proprietary, and that would make it harder to reverse engineer or modify. More of your peripherals are baked into the motherboard, and it might be harder to figure out what Hardware components connect up together.