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Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
- jojobas 1y ago> laptop that’s even more obscure than a ThinkPad Ouch
- maelito 1y agoIs there a good linux ARM laptop, fanless ?
- imwally 1y agoI’d be interested in this as well. I want a quiet machine with a decent display and a long battery life. Right now the MacBook Air checks those boxes but I’d be very interested in an alternative that I can throw Linux / OpenBSD on.
- maelito 1y agoMy Ryzen framework 13 is silent almost all the times, except gaming and processing map tiles.
- makeitdouble 1y agoWhile I personally want a fan and see it as price to pay for better thermals, the disadvantages aren't just noise. The most critical issue would be the fans still spinning to cool down the machine when it was sent to sleep. That creates the vicious cycle when bagged right after sleep, where the fan try to lower the temp, but their running in a closed environment warms the confined air, which pushes the fan to run faster yet. That's the recipe for a hot and dead battery when you take it out of the bag. I had that with MacBooks and Windows laptops alike.
- cromka 1y agoHave a look at X1E devicetree in Linux kernel source (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm64/boo... all the way to the bottom). There are some models that have a very active development and an almost complete support by now, with Thinkpad T14s probably the most active.
- dmitrygr 1y agoMacBook Air M1. Find one with max ram (Facebook marketplace, $400), have storage upgraded to 2TB (IYKYK), Linux support is good.
- cromka 1y agoSorry, but no: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#table-of-contents https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#tab... Can't even drive an external display over the DP. Linux support on Apple hardware is subpar compared to ARM Thinkpads.
- fulafel 1y agoI guess it's the physical HDMI port that's needed, as Minis and the Pro laptops have working monitor HDMI monitor support?
- jack_tripper 1y agoHow did you upgrade the soldered storage?
- baq 1y agoTake it to a shop which cnc mills the original one off and solders a compatible new one on. Maybe you can desolder the old one, but why bother.
- jack_tripper 1y agoSounds easy. Why bother getting a laptop with replaceable storage anyway?
- baq 1y agoApple doesn't sell one for any price, so if you want Apple hardware, that's what you get. They objectively make the best laptop hardware package unless you value upgradeability over performance or build quality, which most people also very objectively don't.
- haunter 1y agoYou won't find anything like the Macbook Air M1 in build quality, display, and battery life Thinkpad X13s and T14s (both with Snapdragon) are the best closest alternative.
- makeitdouble 1y agoThe M1 Air display being 2560x1600, it isn't that high of a bar to cross. Surface Pro are 2880x1920, Asus’ pz13 series will be in the same ballpark. Getting Linux on them will be a bit more of a PITA, but you get the touchscreen and form factor to balance. Build quality will be basically on par with Apple, battery life should be taking a more serious hit (linux + smaller battery from the start)
- Projectiboga 1y agoThe Surface has a community doing some work on a kernel focused on that hardware. Unless the new generation is ARM.
- danans 1y agoA Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect. I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30 tok/sec with smaller Gemma models (had to install mesa vulkan drivers from debian-backports for GPU support in the VM). If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1506894/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-an-arm-chromebook https://askubuntu.com/questions/1506894/how-to-install-ubunt... Another Chromebook with the same setup is the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514.
- lukan 1y ago"If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:" "Installing ubuntu on arm laptops is usually not easy, and the GPU drivers are unavailable in most cases (so, the performance is not great unless you use XFCE/LXDE/LxQt)" I do like to use the GPU, though.
- danans 1y agoThe built-in Linux VM supports the GPU (you can enable it in chrome:flags), and Linux GUI apps work fine.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ofalkaed 1y agoChromeOS with the Linux VM is a surprisingly nice setup, I bought a Thinkpad Duet 3 so I could use Linux apps on a tablet and it seriously has me considering getting a Chromebook for my next laptop. Everything integrates so seamlessly and effortlessly that it does not even seem like a VM other than having to start up the VM. The Chrome keyboard has also really grown on me, even with the small and very cheap keyboard of the Duet 3. Battery life and performance is amazing and touch works completely as expected. Not sure if I can actually make the leap and give up Linux after 20 years of nothing but, but I am considering it.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoWhenever Microsoft makes me make an account and I cannot bypass it I just make an throwaway with not so pleasant words in the email. Followed by installing EndeavourOS.
- mystifyingpoi 1y agoI really hope this still works forever. Unfortunately I suspect, that one day they'll require a phone verification or similar, like many services do nowadays.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoNot sure, but I just install Linux on any system that comes with Windows these days, I just don't have any software that's Windows specific that I can't run on Linux.
- jjice 1y agoTossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it was perfectly fine. It was a pain to get to, but no problems. On a Dell Latitude, it refused to charge my non-OEM battery replacement. My fault - I should've done some research. In my experience, Dell and Lenovo have excellent Linux hardware support. I don't know about other manufacturers, but I hope that that's also the case now too.
- Avamander 1y ago> Things I learned to look out for: Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in. When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though. They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point. There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways. I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
- eptcyka 1y agoM1 and M2. But those are in an entirely different price bracket. I’d go so far as to say those are not comparable.
- doublepg23 1y agoYou can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.
- gchamonlive 1y agoIf you want portability on something premium, I can't recommend enough the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. Specwise I've got the one with the Core ultra 5 125h. It also has an option with the 155h, but it battery and thermals can take a hit that I don't think it's worth it. It's got 16gb spread across 8x2gb modules and 512gb of ssd, both soldered, both extremely fast. Build quality that rivals MacBooks, but with superior keyboard, very nice battery life and an oled screen on top of it. The problem I had with the oled screen is that I thought it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vibrance-oled.glsl https://github.com/gchamon/archie/blob/main/hypr/shaders/vib.... I am looking for a better solution because the filters get picked on screenshots and washes out the colours. I need to find an ICE profile or export one from Windows. The camera also behaves a bit weirdly. It has noticeable quality difference when using chromium and other browsers, the latter with perceptible quality degradation. Other than that, a very good mobile linux driver, snappy, cool, quiet, charges fast and a joy to use.
- aruggirello 1y ago> it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade Another option would be Redshift, which has a nice widget (Redshift Control plasmoid) for KDE Plasma. It doesn't affect grabbed screenshots or stuff like simplescreenrecorder, BTW
- gchamonlive 1y agoWill give it a try, thanks!
- user_7832 1y agoDo you know what the oled screen resolution is on your device? One of my family members has what I believe is the same laptop, and while I appreciate the build quality, the OLED clearly isn't RGB (in its subpixel arrangement - or some other such major aspect), because the 1080p screen looks so bad for text I initially thought it was broken.
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- rcarmo 1y agoIf you have an old Intel MacBook Air, they work beautifully with Linux as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200
- jebarker 1y agoI did this with the 11”, which was one of the greatest sized laptops for travel IMO, just had to replace the explody looking battery!
- incanus77 1y agoSame, I have a 2013. It’s such a good size.
- w0m 1y agoI'm down to ~10m of battery life on my i7 11" - any pointers on battery replacement? Laptop worked great otherwwise (retired it last year due to battery life)
- bxparks 1y agoI tried eBay like 4 times. But they were all fake or defective. At least one of them was dead on arrival. I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple. Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.
- jebarker 1y agoI used iFixit. I haven’t been tracking battery life really, but after a couple of years it’s still going strong
- rcarmo 1y ago
- marcodiego 1y ago> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation. The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
- mystifyingpoi 1y agoBut what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?
- makeitdouble 1y agoIf the company fully managed the previous windows install, they'd have control on the upgrades to the BIOS as well and could just block them. These restrictions disappear with standard windows install.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI've seen laptops stuck in weird state. Most likely, Fujitsu didn't bother to test turning off secure boot once they received the BIOS they bought, and fixed the toggle in a firmware update. Linux boots fine using standard secure boot, so if it refused it's either NixOS using an unsigned bootloader (which is surprising to me) or secure boot just being bugged to hell. Another option is that NixOS uses secure boot but uses a signature that's too recent: one of the secure boot CAs is expiring soon, and an old BIOS may not carry the new key if NixOS opts to sign their bootloader with the latest key. This issue doesn't just affect Linux, certain Windows images won't boot on older devices either if this mismatch happens. My bet is on NVRAM getting into a weird state or a buggy BIOS. That's the most obvious thing that would get fixed by updating the BIOS.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- varispeed 1y agoIn my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- michaelg7x 1y agoThis was my first thought as well.
- 2b3a51 1y agoThe OA was describing the use of a refurbished laptop made by Fujitsu Japan (so 50% owned by Lenovo since 2017). No profit goes to Fujitsu UK (a subsidiary). And the Horizon system has a complex history [1]. But still, perhaps no, simply in solidarity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_accounting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_accounting_system
- forinti 1y agoYes, Fujitsu did some nasty things, but half the world would have reasons not to do business with the UK. Plus, the Post Office Scandal had a lot of input from the PO itself and the British legal system. It was a very British failure overall.
- rwyinuse 1y agoI would say buying used Fujitsu from a third party seller is still better than letting it become e-waste. It's not like Fujitsu is getting any of that money.
- UncleSlacky 1y agoTL;DR: When in doubt, update the BIOS before doing anything else.
- qrobit 1y agoUnless there is some vulnerability in the current version that you want to take advantage of. See e.g. mediatek exploit to unlock bootloaders without authorization by OEM or hacking PS4.
- winrid 1y agoThis. I went to install Linux on a brand new $3k ThinkPad, to do this you had to disable dedicated Nvidia graphics during the install. Doing this on the the included bios bricked the machine and it spent two months getting the motherboard replaced at OfficeMax (lenovo had a partnership with them at the time). It took me another few weeks to get them to swap it for a new one because I didn't pay for a refurbished machine.
- internet2000 1y ago> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”. It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.
- Ezhik 1y agoThis website is called Hacker News.
- ireflect 1y agoSuit yourself. I think a little whimsy is refreshing.
- bitwize 1y agoI actually find this rather interesting. Gibson knew dick about computers in 1984, which makes his early cyberpunk works more interesting because so much of the technical stuff is pure imagination and guesswork. He peppered his 1980s prose with Japanese-sounding brand names because he assumed that the Japanese would dominate computing the way they dominated electronics for things people like William Gibson do—things like listening to music. And it didn't quite work out that way, because Japanese computer manufacturers tailored their output to peculiar Japanese needs (specifically, needing high resolution displays and lots of memory in order to draw kanji well and needing Japanese language support in the OS) rather than hewing to emerging industry standards. This kept prices of NEC, Epson, and Sharp gear high, and allowed American manufacturers like IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Apple to get a significant foothold in the emerging industry worldwide. Toshiba emerged as an early leader in laptops, but laptops wouldn't really find their market niche until the mid-90s or so. So these days, you go to like Den-Den Town in Osaka, and you will find Dells and HPs for sale, and of course all the pretty Japanese girls are all about their Apple gear, just like here. Even so, Japanese buyers tend to prefer Japanese brands, followed by other Asian brands, and Western brands (except for Apple) third. So I can totally see a Japanese executive rocking a Fujitsu laptop, but I haven't seen Westerners in possession of one.
- 1y ago
- sunneyx 1y agoIt's kinda old though
- the_plus_one 1y agoIs that necessarily a bad thing? I have older laptops than the U729 that still see some use. If you're not locally compiling a big codebase, running some AI/LLM thing, playing GPU-intensive games, etc., you really don't need much.
- chem83 1y agoFor something portable with a dGPU, I recommend the Asus ProArt px13. Works very well with Linux, including NixOS with the right config, with the community asusctl and supergfxctl. AMD, OLED screen, nVidia 4070 (4060 in the US, maybe we'll get 50xx next year). Downsides: the keyboard is not amazing, it comes with MediaTek WiFi, but is replaceable, and the SSD is 2230, which limits capacity. I haven't been able to fine-tune touchpad sensitivity in Wayland and I do get some screen flickering despite fiddling with some boot params and being on 6.17.x. Fewer constraints if you're willing to go 14-inch with the Zephyrus.
- javaunsafe2019 1y agoI also went this route but was disappointed by: - bad speakers - poor battery life - inferior screen quality Nowadays where you can get a MacBook Air 16gb m2 for around 600€ this would be my pick if I’d have to find a new machine for travel and casual use.
- goranmoomin 1y agoThis article just pushed me over to retry Linux on my laptop, and I've been spending the last 2 hours on a Linux desktop. I would love to use it as my main driver (will try the next week), but it still feels like a thousand paper cuts and realize why I was stuck on macOS for the last 10 years. Ugh :(
- bartvk 1y agoWhat kind of hardware did you install it on? And what hardware wasn’t supported? Or was it the software that caused the papercuts?
- bornfreddy 1y agoCurious what the cuts are? I'm forced to use MBP at $JOB and it sucks compared to Linux at home. Maybe I'm just used to Linux, don't know? But I love the fact that I can configure it the way I like, especially all the keyboard shortcuts. On MacOS this has proven to be difficult.
- wpm 1y agomacOS has two keyboard shortcut management mechanisms. I find it far easier to control keyboard shortcuts on macOS vs Linux. You either can do it in the GUI in Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts, either per app or global, or you can use the older KeyBindings method: drop a .dict or a .plist in ~/Library/KeyBindings with your shortcuts in there. See https://web.archive.org/web/20070513170225/http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/cocoa-text.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070513170225/http://www.hcs.ha...
- bornfreddy 1y agoThis is nice, I agree, but you can't e.g. switch Fn and Ctrl keys this way, afaik.
- hollerith 1y agoI don't need the OS to do that because Emacs will do it. I need the OS however to pass fn-N and fn-P to Emacs (instead of the default behavior of interpreting them as Expose shortcuts) and it does not seem possible to configure that without turning off SIP.
- lpcvoid 1y agoLenovo Z13 Gen 2 with 64GB RAM and AMD 7840u is what I daily drive. It's 13.3 Inch, premium build with glas and aluminum. It's my favorite laptop by a wide margin, and runs Linux perfectly. Unfortunately Lenovo stopped producing the Z13/Z16, no idea what I will do afterwards.
- kombine 1y agoI run T14s Gen 3 AMD, it's a perfect laptop and it got an update this year.
- kristianp 1y agoIs that the ones with the Ryzen AI chips? How do you find them?
- microtonal 1y agoGen 3 is way before that. I have a T14 Gen 5 and it's not a Ryzen AI chip. I think only T14(s) Gen 6 has a Ryzen AI option.
- nullbyte808 1y agoDear god its ugly.
- killerstorm 1y ago~12 years ago I installed Linux on Fujitsu UH572. As an "ultrabook" it came with 16GB of fast SSD which could be used as a cache via some Windows-specific Intel feature, while main storage was a slower spinning disk. As Linux did not support cache feature, I thought I can just format it as ext4 and use as a storage for things which can benefit from more iops, e.g. running DB tests. And as SSD technology was still rather new at that time, I started with running some IO benchmarks. Well, it survived formatting into ext4 and few minutes of that IO benchmark, then it became permanently unresponsive. My guess is that wear-leveling algorithm was designed specifically for the FS originally had (some version of FAT?), and different FS caused it to corrupt some internal data structure, so SSD's controller firmware went into panic on each boot. Unfortunately, this added few minutes delay to boot as Linux tried to communicate with unresponsive SSD controller, but otherwise laptop worked fine...
- ezst 1y agoSimilar-enough story on an Asus similarly branded "ultrabook", I figured I would put my whole fedora root partition on that cache, which worked wonders for a few months, until I started having random freezes and crashes that I later diagnosed thanks to `rpm -V` to be data corruptions. At that point the hinges were dead, pulling the screen away from the chassis during operations and dangerously exposing a mainboard PCB. That's when I replaced it with a ThinkPad T that's still going like new after 8 years :-)
- jackyard86 1y agoStop referencing Twitter posts. The only thing I see in it is a popup that I should sign up for their platform.
- hnarn 1y agoEven more annoying when the twitter post in question is literally just a screenshot. Put it in the blog post.
- RunningDroid 1y agoYou can use xcancel.com or farside.link's nitter redirect to avoid that, if you're on Android it's easiest to use URLcheck‡ with these chunks added to the pattern checker: ``` "Twitter to Nitter": { "regex": "^https?:\\\/\\\/(www\\.|mobile\\.)?(twitter|x)\\.com\\\/(.)", "replacement": "https:\/\/farside.link\/nitter\/$3", "enabled": "true" }, "Twitter image to Nitter": { "regex": "^https?:\\\/\\\/(pic\\.twitter|pbs\\.twimg)\\.com\\\/(.)", "replacement": "https:\/\/farside.link\/nitter\/pic\/$1", "enabled": "true" }, ``` (I haven't updated my copy of the Twitter image regex for the rename because I haven't seen any X.com image links and upstream seems dead) ‡: https://github.com/TrianguloY/URLCheck https://github.com/TrianguloY/URLCheck
- justsomehnguy 1y agoTD;DR: Author breaks his lovely Mac Book, too poor to repair it or buy a replacement one, gets an almost 7 year old laptop because it's vendor is named in a 40 years old novel, shits on MS, praises what everything works (on a 7 year old laptop).
- pjmlp 1y agoLast year I went through yet again a similar set of speed bumps like those, in the end, I rather keep using WSL, which replaced my use of VMWare Workstation/Virtual Box.