How do I choose a laptop with decent graphics for Linux without drivers related troubles?

I want to chose a laptop with latest OpenGL standard support to study graphics programming. Possibility to play around CUDA is a plus. Fast googling results about nvidia cards support on Linux is a kind of discouraging. How do I avoid risk of buying a laptop with unsupported/poorly supported graphics?
Answer:

I use a Lenovo y410p. I bought it refurbished and did a clean install of Xubuntu (no dual boot). The graphics card that comes stabdard is a CUDA-enabled card with compute capability of 3.0. I'm very satisfied for the price. I did have to install drivers to get it to recognize the NVIDIA card, because it insisted on using onboard graphics at first. Also when I do updates it sometimes reverts back to the onboard card, but I just have to change a setting and/or reinstall a driver. Overall pretty problem-free for intetfacing Linux with special hardware. The one problem is that it gets hot when I run computations that have high CPU usage, I'm not sure if it's the laptop itself, the linux install, or the fact that it's refurbished.

Sulimon Sattari at Quora Visit the source

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Other answers

You will have the best Linux compatibility with a business class laptop such as an IBM Thinkpad T series or a Dell Latitude since they tend to use hardware that has higher manufacturer support for different operating systems.

Jorge Gonzalez

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