Best laptop for a hobby OS

[Arpanoid]

Hello,

I wonder what is the most friendly laptop brand/model for a hobbyist OS developer. By "friendly" I mean which has its HW components behaving as closer to the specs as possible, or otherwise well documented with the documentation freely accessible, and other things of that kind.

[JackScott]

As a shorthand, this is probably the same question as "What is the best hardware for running Linux?" as most drivers in the Linux kernel are open-source and written from documentation.

I know the Lenovo Thinkpad range are well thought of in the Linux community for hardware compatibility.

Probably the biggest choice is the graphics chipset. Intel graphics would be the first choice, AMD would be the second choice, and Nvidia would be a very distant third (which is the opposite preference a gamer would have, which might present some conflict if you're interested in both).

With that said, most OS developers do most of their testing in virtual machines, using QEMU or similar.

And finally, all of that assumes you're buying an x86-based laptop. Apple is of course an option for a laptop, and things like the Raspberry Pi are an option for development targets as well.

[Arpanoid]

As a shorthand, this is probably the same question as "What is the best hardware for running Linux?" as most drivers in the Linux kernel are open-source and written from documentation.

I know the Lenovo Thinkpad range are well thought of in the Linux community for hardware compatibility.

Thank you very much!

Yes, I'm thinking about x86 as my main platform. Apples are quite expensive, so I'm not looking in that direction. Raspberry Pi is less performant but still worth to consider as a second platform. And it will be interesting to learn ARM assembly language.

[alexfru]

You could make your own computer to begin with. There are affordable FPGA boards.

[zerodivision]

I think that's the wrong question asked, as there is no "best" laptop for a hobby OS. Instead, an OS is expected to support many different hardware configurations and as such you should ideally have access to as many computers as possible. They don't even have to be new, you can ask your family and friends if they have an old computer they don't need, or go to a computer repair shop and ask if they have old computers for recycling so that you can buy them for a fraction of their original price.

Of course, you should give priority to hardware that is documented or at least has open source drivers for another OS, so that you can actually support it. Which laptop contain that hardware? There is no single answer, because you probably aren't going to support just one model. There is no definite answer either, because even a single model can come in various configurations. When buying a laptop specifically for OSDev, you have to find out its hardware components, then research if there exist documentation for these components, and only after confirming you could potentially support most of them (or at least those that you consider most important) you should buy the laptop.

Given that you mentioned compliance with the specifications, unfortunately, it's not possible to always expect that. Instead you should expect that someone will actually boot your OS on a machine that deviates from the specifications. Different machines exhibit different quirks and your OS will have to eventually work around them. BIOS implementations are notorious for being inconsistent and buggy, and you can test several of them using a suitable emulator like PCem. Hardware quirks, however, require the real hardware to test them.

Hope this helps!