5 ms·

I bought a MacBook Pro 3 years ago, because I was sick of dealing with ugly PC hardware and I had gone through one-too-many 30 hour sessions trying to get suspe

by ekidd 16y ago

I bought a MacBook Pro 3 years ago, because I was sick of dealing with ugly PC hardware and I had gone through one-too-many 30 hour sessions trying to get suspend/resume to work reliably. I've been pretty happy on the Mac. But I miss Ubuntu's giant repository of binary packages, and I've recently fallen in love with XMonad's automatic window management. So now I'm running Ubuntu in VirtualBox, and I'm enjoying it greatly. And I've learned my lesson about Linux laptops: I'm going to buy a premium laptop from a high-end Linux vendor, and let somebody _else_ worry about drivers.

foljs 16y ago
A "high end Linux vendor" for laptops? Like what? And who would be that "somebody else", worrying about the drivers? Surely not the "high end Linux laptop vendor" --because, even though he would have basic stuff like the video card, wireless et al working, with anything not embedded in the laptop, you would be on your own.
- phamilton 16y ago
  The main point being that you have less control over the internals of a laptop than you do on a desktop. So make sure all the internals "just work". Then you can do your own homework on externals.
- samd 16y ago
  Like System76. I've yet to have a problem with drivers on Ubuntu, in fact it's better than Windows. Windows seems to have separate drivers for each USB port. I have to plug my peripherals into the same port they were installed on or it doesn't work. Ubuntu doesn't care, it detects everything no matter where it's plugged in.
- ekidd 16y ago
  ZaReason and System76 are two of the better known Linux laptop vendors. Generally speaking, the biggest problems with Linux laptop drivers used to be suspend/resume and the video card. Unless you were willing to put in a lot of work for each new release of Ubuntu, it was hard to get a Mac-quality experience. If your time was reasonably valuable, you were better off paying a few hundred dollars extra for a well-supported system. I generally don't worry about drivers for random USB junk. Nearly all of it works fine with Linux, and if it doesn't, it's trivial and cheap to replace. I can't wait for 8GB of RAM and an Intel SSD drive. Drool.
  - elai 16y ago
    System76 has laptops with that option now.
peterbotond 16y ago
macports have a lot of packages. simple to use: $ port search keyword $ sudo port install package_name also, you have homebrew. i never used it. and as a protable package mgmnt: pkgsrc.org. works well also.
- ekidd 16y ago
  Yeah, MacPorts and Homebrew are both great options if you want to build packages from source, and your needs aren't too obscure. Lots of people, even in the Linux world, love source-based packaging systems. But I'm massively impatient, and I want my packages _right now_. :-) So I prefer binary packaging systems.
  - jamie_ca 16y ago
    I've never used it, but Fink (http://www.finkproject.org/ http://www.finkproject.org/) is basically apt for OSX.
    - ekidd 16y ago
      When I last used Fink (years ago), it was "apt for OS X" in roughly the same way that an off-brand Android tablet is an iPad: It looks more or less like the same thing, but you just don't get the same experience. Does anyone use Fink these days?
      - Groxx 16y ago
        I occasionally look, and see squat. I think everyone's gone to MacPorts, though Homebrew is gaining a bit of traction; enough to be useful, nowhere near enough to be reliable.
        jamie_ca 16y ago
        I've been perfectly happy in my little corner of the developer landscape (mostly Rails, plus random experiments) with Homebrew. I've had friends of mine complain loudly after ~5 minutes when they find missing "essential" packages, though.
jhancock 16y ago
I've found I don't need top flight hardware, just well designed hardware that has driver support. I'm using an old Thinkpad X41 with ubuntu 10.04 netbook edition. The drivers have been working flawlessly. I get the best suspend/resume battery time I've ever had on a laptop. I'm sure the latest macbook air tops it, but I get a good five days of letting my laptop sit in my travel case unused and I open the lid and resume it goes.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
riobard 16y ago
Remembered years ago when I was still using Ubuntu desktop (7.x ~ 9.x) and the following things just killed me completely: resume/suspend video card ”enterprise” encryption over wireless (read: Windows) less-known USB printers (no Linux driver at all!) various other little things like indicator LED's etc Spent countless hours configuring these things and finally got to a state where the computer was usable. And the laptop was a Thinkpad which was one of the better supported hardware. Then a upgrade came half a year later and I had to repeat the whole process to reconfigure all over again, because some tricks used to work became useless, and parts of the things used to work fine now broke again. Having done this for several times (I think the last major release I used regularly was Ubuntu 9.10) I thought: that's enough! I'm not going to spend my life fighting the endless battles. And at the time a roommate spilled a glass of juice of the old laptop, killing it instantly. I bought the 1st gen Unibody MacBook then. Couldn't be any happier. I still run several Ubuntu and Debian instances in Virtualbox, though, but they are all server editions. I just SSH into them from OS X. Recently I'm wondering maybe the only way for Linux desktops to go mainstream is probably something like Chrome OS there you eliminate everything else except the laptop… (wireless support is still a potential area of pain, though).

by ekidd 16y ago

foljs 16y ago

A "high end Linux vendor" for laptops? Like what? And who would be that "somebody else", worrying about the drivers? Surely not the "high end Linux laptop vendor" --because, even though he would have basic stuff like the video card, wireless et al working, with anything not embedded in the laptop, you would be on your own.

phamilton 16y ago
The main point being that you have less control over the internals of a laptop than you do on a desktop. So make sure all the internals "just work". Then you can do your own homework on externals.
samd 16y ago
Like System76. I've yet to have a problem with drivers on Ubuntu, in fact it's better than Windows. Windows seems to have separate drivers for each USB port. I have to plug my peripherals into the same port they were installed on or it doesn't work. Ubuntu doesn't care, it detects everything no matter where it's plugged in.
ekidd 16y ago
ZaReason and System76 are two of the better known Linux laptop vendors. Generally speaking, the biggest problems with Linux laptop drivers used to be suspend/resume and the video card. Unless you were willing to put in a lot of work for each new release of Ubuntu, it was hard to get a Mac-quality experience. If your time was reasonably valuable, you were better off paying a few hundred dollars extra for a well-supported system. I generally don't worry about drivers for random USB junk. Nearly all of it works fine with Linux, and if it doesn't, it's trivial and cheap to replace. I can't wait for 8GB of RAM and an Intel SSD drive. Drool.
- elai 16y ago
  System76 has laptops with that option now.

peterbotond 16y ago

macports have a lot of packages. simple to use: $ port search keyword $ sudo port install package_name also, you have homebrew. i never used it. and as a protable package mgmnt: pkgsrc.org. works well also.

ekidd 16y ago
Yeah, MacPorts and Homebrew are both great options if you want to build packages from source, and your needs aren't too obscure. Lots of people, even in the Linux world, love source-based packaging systems. But I'm massively impatient, and I want my packages _right now_. :-) So I prefer binary packaging systems.
- jamie_ca 16y ago
  I've never used it, but Fink (http://www.finkproject.org/ http://www.finkproject.org/) is basically apt for OSX.
  - ekidd 16y ago
    When I last used Fink (years ago), it was "apt for OS X" in roughly the same way that an off-brand Android tablet is an iPad: It looks more or less like the same thing, but you just don't get the same experience. Does anyone use Fink these days?
    - Groxx 16y ago
      I occasionally look, and see squat. I think everyone's gone to MacPorts, though Homebrew is gaining a bit of traction; enough to be useful, nowhere near enough to be reliable.
      - jamie_ca 16y ago
        I've been perfectly happy in my little corner of the developer landscape (mostly Rails, plus random experiments) with Homebrew. I've had friends of mine complain loudly after ~5 minutes when they find missing "essential" packages, though.

jhancock 16y ago

I've found I don't need top flight hardware, just well designed hardware that has driver support. I'm using an old Thinkpad X41 with ubuntu 10.04 netbook edition. The drivers have been working flawlessly. I get the best suspend/resume battery time I've ever had on a laptop. I'm sure the latest macbook air tops it, but I get a good five days of letting my laptop sit in my travel case unused and I open the lid and resume it goes.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

riobard 16y ago

Remembered years ago when I was still using Ubuntu desktop (7.x ~ 9.x) and the following things just killed me completely: resume/suspend video card ”enterprise” encryption over wireless (read: Windows) less-known USB printers (no Linux driver at all!) various other little things like indicator LED's etc Spent countless hours configuring these things and finally got to a state where the computer was usable. And the laptop was a Thinkpad which was one of the better supported hardware. Then a upgrade came half a year later and I had to repeat the whole process to reconfigure all over again, because some tricks used to work became useless, and parts of the things used to work fine now broke again. Having done this for several times (I think the last major release I used regularly was Ubuntu 9.10) I thought: that's enough! I'm not going to spend my life fighting the endless battles. And at the time a roommate spilled a glass of juice of the old laptop, killing it instantly. I bought the 1st gen Unibody MacBook then. Couldn't be any happier. I still run several Ubuntu and Debian instances in Virtualbox, though, but they are all server editions. I just SSH into them from OS X. Recently I'm wondering maybe the only way for Linux desktops to go mainstream is probably something like Chrome OS there you eliminate everything else except the laptop… (wireless support is still a potential area of pain, though).