That's much too sanguine. Have been running Arch and Ubuntu on Thinkpads for over 4 years now, which are known for being Linux friendly. And, to be fair, it wo

That's much too sanguine. Have been running Arch and Ubuntu on Thinkpads for over 4 years now, which are known for being Linux friendly. And, to be fair, it works, but it doesn't just work. Power management issues abound: out of the box, Ubuntu on my Carbon X1 was regularly using over 10W, and it was only with substantial tweaking that I could get it to 5.5W-6W consistently. Anytime I need to restart, I need to go through the Powertop suggestions again. Certainly could write a script for that, but it doesn't just work. Suspend doesn't work all the time: I've had days where I've charged the computer overnight, thrown it in my bag, and by the end of the day it was entirely dead, complete with some minor but obnoxious filesystem corruption. Using the hardware mute button fucks up PulseAudio. I'll point out that the Carbon X1 is hardly some "random, low-priced consumer laptop." Probably a bit less Linux friendly than more traditional ThinkPad offerings, but if you go any more higher end with Sony or whatever, I would be very pessimistic about it working, just or otherwise. Now, for my purposes, other alternatives just don't work. I don't know an easy way to have a Windows or OSX system to throw up a private virtual cloud over LXC on your notebook so you can work from a networkless Koh Rong beach. Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) makes this trivial. Everyone else has shitty window managers, while dwm is heaven. In that respect, Linux works. And nothing else mainstream does. But universal mediocrity isn't an excuse for mediocrity.