The argument I saw brought up when I was working at Canonical (before the weird hiring process thing, n.b.) made some sense:
They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.
In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.
Having people source random laptops to help increase compatibility doesn't seem like a terrible idea, but the company definitely should reimburse you for the purchase. I certainly can't blame them for dogfooding their own OS either.
Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
Well, they do give you a lump sum every 3 years to buy whatever laptop you want with.
Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was already doing open source work with, no reason for me to change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as usual, and got paid for it).
Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about, this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased? Sure...
They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in my book.
They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.
In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.