This week I was talking to a fellow student at my university. He was thinking about buying a laptop to replace his aging Microsoft Surface device. He also expressed interest in trying Linux and asked specifically which laptop I was using. So I said: “That’s a laptop made by TUXEDO Computers. It’s actually pretty cool because the company is located here in Augsburg and they even sponsor our Formula Student team. They ship laptops with Linux pre-installed if you want. Also, you’ll get a discount as a student.”
The rest of that blog post summaries with a lot more technical knowledge than I will probably ever have the reason why I chose not to go with Tuxedo when I switched to a Linux laptop, after 35 years being an Apple user.
Back then, I had no idea about upstream, sharing of source code or those tech stuff mentioned in the blog post. I’m no dev, I am barely interested in my computer as a 50+ user that was looking for a laptop I could fix/upgrade (I decided I was done with Apple the day I realized all their machines were no more fixable/upgrdable), a machine I would truly and fully own.
Since I was interested in two of Tuxedo’s machines but not at all in their own version of Linux, I started digging around their website to find more info about using their laptops and drivers/apps with any other distro and I ended up with more confusion and questions than I had to begin with. Once again, that’s coming from a non-expert user, no doubt someone else would have had better results, but still not the best experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure Tuxedo makes a nice OS that does its job well, it’s just that I did not care about it. I already knew which distro I wanted to use and it was not theirs.
So, since I could not understand enough I gave up on their laptop altogether and simply purchased a used PC laptop I knew would be working fine with Linux and installed my distro of choice on it. So far, I have zero regrets even though I would have liked to buy one of those Tuxedo machines with their great/bright screen ;)
I have a tuxedo laptop and I put a different OS on it, works just fine. You even get support. I didnt even notice that the power profiles didnt work until I read this blog post.
Good to know! I mean, their WebFAI-installer does support installation of other distros as well, so I would imagine it should work better than I originally feared after reading the latest news.