same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.
old IBM Thinkpads were pretty solid, but now they're made by Lenovo who has a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors, usually in exchange for money. They've even been caught stuffing malware into UEFI so that users reinstalling their OS would be infected over and over again. However nice their laptops are, I could never trust them. They have already proved that they are perfectly willing to compromise your security and privacy to line their own pockets.
All the builtin radios, cameras, microphones, and sensors in modern laptops make them ideal for stealing your private data. I already have an untrusted cell phone, I want my personal laptop to be something I can feel comfortable keeping my data on. Because I can't personally audit every chip, that means I need some level of trust, and Lenovo has demonstrated over and over and over again that they cannot be trusted.
every once in a while there's a lenovo default windows image/hardware security controversy, but never one that has affected me directly.
i don't care what they put on the default windows partition (i replace it on arrival) and the uefi issue was a production mistake where they imaged with a nonproduction image.
they're still used widely by serious people in academia, open source and security sensitive industry.
i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.
if you're truly paranoid, a pine arm machine or fully open source risc-v may be your jam. everything else is going to be loaded up with proprietary blobs everywhere along with overcomplicated supply chains and overzealous marketing departments cross selling adware onto that default image you should be tossing anyway.
> i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.
No, it's really just them. They worked hard to earn that bad press. It's not even that they keep pre-installing malware, but how they've handled it when they're caught speaks volumes.
When the truth about superfish came out first they fiercely denied there was any security risk to anyone ("we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns”), then eventually they admitted it was a problem and said they'd stop shipping devices infected by it, but continued to anyway more than a month later (https://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/information-technology/20...) and the instructions they gave users for removing the offending software still left systems vulnerable while giving people a false sense of security. When they were caught doing that they issued new instructions and those still left users vulnerable!! (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/lenovo-ap...)
I had a Framework and really liked it. Unfortunately the components just degraded really quickly for me, and now can't work but 20 minutes at a time until it freezes completely. Swapped out for a Thinkpad last week.
Even swapped out the Framework mainboard after a long back and forth with support. Just some poor battery unloading or similar causing shorts. I was very close to committing my company to using them until this started happening to my tester unit and my lead engineer's tester unit.
I hope the best for Framework -- I really love their repairability promise -- but before I can commit my company to them I need them to not be lemons.
Right now I'm liking System76. Expensive, but I like that they come with linux working out of the box. They're specifically designed/tested to work well with linux so no worries about the hardware not being supported. Like many other companies they are basically selling re-branded laptops made by the Taiwanese company Clevo. I still can't audit every chip in them, but at least I don't have clear documentation of repeated abuses (so far).
System76 is looking into making their own hardware now too so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with in-house.
I got a Meerkat mini desktop 6 months ago, and I love it.
They do make their own desktops and minis now. I think they use Clevo for laptops, and those do get more complaints here on HN than the desktops (but I think the consensus is they are getting better). They have more laptop models, so making their own would be a huge task.
> a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors,
Lol thats rich. They did it like 2 or 3 times for the windows laptops they sold most of the time not part of the thinkpad line. So yeah. Long history it is. You also have a long history of making bad comments then?
HP Elitebooks and Thinkpads are designed and built with Linux in mind. I never came across an HP Elitebook or Thinkpad which failed to run Linux out of the box.
Dell XPS is the latest addition to this group.
Consumer laptops come with a lot of trickery analogous to WinModems of the era, which require Windows specifically. Hence these cost saving measurements create a lot of problems.
They never fail, true, but there is always some special model capabilities that can only be made available after the usual weekend and late nights fine tuning.
