Mike,
Running Linux on a laptop, in my experience, runs the gamut of people having little to no issues, to people having loads of issues. I had a couple of Dell laptops over the years that worked with Linux. My mother and my Wife both run Fedora (24 I think) on Dell laptops which are probably 6 years old at least. They never complain to me about anything, granted they are just using it for email, facebook.
The latest two laptops I have purchased were economical to say the least. They are both Windows 10 laptops from Best Buy. They ran about $450 to $550 or so in price. One laptop is an HP - 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i5 - 8GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive - HP, and the other is a Dell Inspiron 15 5566. Neither one of these did too well on Linux (Fedora 26, Debian 9 (KDE,Gnome, XFCE), or Linux Mint). I prefer the HP to my Dell. They both will run at least 6 hours on battery. I have 4h 23m 57% remaining as I type this.
Now, I think, I need to define what I mean by 'not well'. Both of these laptops had touchpad issues at the minimum from what I remember. No matter what settings I tried to use, I was just not happy. As I typed, windows opened closed. If you type relatively fast as I do, and you don't need to be looking at the screen when typing a document, you would find that the cursor had jumped around, thus putting your document in a state of WTF. I'm sure there is a solution to these issues, but they were not readily available to me. Suspend and Hibernate did not work with Linux on these either. There were things still running that would burn the battery down to nothing, and I didn't have the time to figure it out. Some people have the skill to write their own drivers or what not, but I am not that guy. I just need things to work. I don't have time to turn my use of a laptop into a Comp Sci project. That said, I use Windows 10, and I run all of my Linux from VMware or VirtualBox.
My contention is that the newer laptops are being made for the largest market share, Windows. These newer laptops have the Windows license number in the motherboard, further proving to me they are not generic systems to say the least. This is probably why my older laptops worked better with Linux as the sole OS.
Also, if you dual boot Windows 10 with Linux your Windows time clock will not hold its timezone value. There is a reason for that, and a solution which goes outside the scope of this email, but be aware of that if you go that route.
I didn't catch all of the responses to this, but I do know there are some PLUG members that run Linux on laptop successfully. Successfully is a relative term used here.
Good Luck
Ron
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Ron Guilmet
ronald.guilmet@phillydatasolutions.com
Cloud Solutions Architect
www.phillydatasolutions.com