I would like to upgrade my laptop from the Macbook Pro 11,1 to a more Linux friendly platform. What laptop would you choose? Or do you have a different recommendation?

Which laptop would you choose?

I've bought a number of recent modell DELL Latitudes (recycled) from Amazon for $200-300, and been entirely satisfied with them. They look and work like new, and are fully guaranteed.

    WetGeek sadly $200 and a refurb are my only criteria for a new computer....🙁

    I've owned laptops before and decided I could not own anything where I could not tinker under the hood with tools easily, as in prying it open. Have they changed much in that regard? It's been over ten years since I've had one.

        brent Have they changed much in that regard?

        Latitudes are very maintainable, and detailed owners' manuals from Dell are available online. They're part of DELL's professional series, not a consumer-grade laptop. One of these that's professionally refurbished is a very powerful computer that will last for many years. Here are the specs of the one I'm currently using, although there are newer ones available now. And it has a 500 GB NVMe drive.

        If you need a laptop, Amazon's your friend. I can vouch for their refurbisher.

            Just a personal preference, but I usually switch out the wireless chip for an Intel one on any laptop I get that uses a realtek chipset. Intel cards can usually be found for around $20-$30 USD (or cheaper if you get an older one off ebay or something). I find them to be a lot more reliable when it comes to wifi and bluetooth.

              The only thing you need to know (generally) about replacing the wifi card is whether the laptop/device has two antennas or three (virtually all systems except for the very newest ones have two antennas) and whether the existing wifi card uses pcie or cnvio. CNVio is only on Intel CPUs to my knowledge and those cards can only be replaced by other CNVio cards, while PCIe cards are far more widespread.

              Newer 2-antenna wifi cards can still do 6ghz over one of the antennas but will not do 5ghz at the same time. Which frequency to use will depend on what the the access point supports. The other antenna will always do 2.4ghz for bluetooth and longer range wireless. 3-antenna systems can do 5ghz and 6ghz at the same time though this more affects wireless benchmarks and is unlikely to result in anything that an end user can notice.

                diagnostics0 Yes, it does look like it's 2-pin. An Intel AX210 would be an excellent candidate if you wanted to replace it, though I would make sure that you can actually remove the wireless card before you do that. The AX210 support 5ghz and 6ghz over one of the antennas and 2.4ghz over the other one. If you ever updated to a router that supported 6ghz in the future it would work with the Intel card.

                    +1 for Framework laptops. I preordered the Framework 16. It ships later this year and early next year!

                    ReillyBrogan that's exactly why I went with the 210. I upgraded my router last year to an ASUS RT-AX3000 and decided all my laptops also needed to be 6Ghz capable 😂

                      Thanks for everyone's input. Got that Dell ordered for my birthday/xmas gift. Will see how the wifi card works that comes with it before swapping it out!