7 ms·
The majority of new laptops work out of the box with ubuntu 12.04. The driver complaint, while still fair in many cases, is not nearly as relevant as it used to
by user49598 14y ago
The majority of new laptops work out of the box with ubuntu 12.04. The driver complaint, while still fair in many cases, is not nearly as relevant as it used to be. Peripherals can be tough, but built-in hardware has come a long way.
Also, IMHO, weather dell is doing exactly what you want or not, they are continuing to support freedom of choice, freedom of software, and the hacker community in general. I commend them for the effort, and would love to see other vendors follow suit.
- mark_l_watson 14y agoI agree. I have installed 12.04 on an old i5 Toshiba u505 and a 13" MacBook Pro (wiped OS X since I have OS X on my Air, and an old backup MacBook). I don't remember having any problems.
- joezydeco 14y agoSo, and I'm honestly curious here because I'm in the market, what is the best Linux laptop out there? I hear people swoon over a particular Lenovo/Thinkpad model, but have no idea which one it is.
- scarmig 14y agoRight now I'm on an x220. IIR I had some acpi driver issue--in fact, had to manually white list my model in it--and power management is mediocre, even with powertop. But it gets the job done decently enough.
- candeira 14y agoI too have a Lenovo x220. I use Jupiter [0] to manually send the computer to "power saving" mode. With that and the extended 9-cell battery, the screen only slightly dimmed, and wifi at full blast, I get around 7 hours of battery doing browsing and coding. I uninstalled Flash, and that gave me back around 2 hours of battery. [0] YMMV: http://askubuntu.com/questions/98972/does-jupiter-really-improves-battery-power http://askubuntu.com/questions/98972/does-jupiter-really-imp...
- trekkin 14y agoI have x230, and I have to use a custom kernel, as the standard Ubuntu 12.04 kernel (3.2.x) hangs all flavors (standard/Unity, xubuntu, lubuntu).
- SeppoErviala 14y agoI have x220i and I needed to fix mic mute button [1] and add a power management script [2] for saving power while on battery. I still get some graphics corruption with gpu accelerated chrome but it's not too common and I can live with it. It would be nice if Lenovo or Dell would check how well their laptops (or even some model) worked with linux and tried to get this kind of stuff as default on major distros. [1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/125367/enabling-mic-mute-button-and-light-on-lenovo-thinkpads http://askubuntu.com/questions/125367/enabling-mic-mute-butt... [2] http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/11954 http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/11954
- einhverfr 14y agoIt gets a little complicated. I got a Lenovo g560 with an Ath9k wireless card, and installed Fedora 14 on it and everything worked. I upgraded to Fedora 16 and everything worked except the wireless card. Apparently there is no way to tell the OS anymore that the wireless card is turned on. Filing bugs with Fedora and asking on the ath9k-devel email lists got no help at all. What worked before no longer works. The card is permanently hardblocked. Supposedly the fix is to install Windows, flip the switch a few times, and then install Linux. I don't want it that badly. I will just figure out ndiswrapper.....
- SeppoErviala 14y agoI know nothing about non-Thinkpad Lenovos and but with a quick googling I wouldn't put my money in one. As far as I'm concerned they might as well be Acer laptops. When people say that Lenovo laptops work well with linux they mostly mean Thinkpad series and even then there are some exceptions. Best out-of-box experience will be with one that has intel cpu+intel wireless+intel gpu and was released a year ago. It's about as safe bet for a high quality fully working linux laptop as you can get.
- padenot 14y agoI have and X220 and a T420 and they work perfectly. The W5*0 series is also a solid choice.
- splicer 14y agoI disagree on your W5*0 point. I have a W510, and it constantly kernel panics. Thermal management is non-existent by default on Ubuntu 12.04, and the trackpad and wifi are extremely flaky.
- lucian1900 14y agoI have a Thinkpad E325, the AMD version. Everything just worked.
- zanny 14y agoI put it on a relatives Toshiba Satellite. 99% of laptop models are going to be fine with Linux, unless they start implementing secure boot. Drivers wise, the embedded cameras and microphones they put in laptops almost always are from a maker that already has some form of Linux driver.
- sigkill 14y agoI bought a generic run of the mill but powerful Sager NP8662 3 years ago. It's a Clevo, and other than the fingerprint reader, I don't need any other custom drivers on Ubuntu. Even the bloody webcam and card reader work out of the box on 12.04, which I'm extremely surprised since I have to install manually drivers on Windows 7. I'd say, if you have the money to spend buy an OEM laptop.
- reinhardt 14y agoDell Inspiron here, was running Ubuntu 10.04 for two years and recently installed 12.04. It's the first time in the last 5-6 years I've been running Linux on various laptops that suspend actually works (out of the box at least).
- joezydeco 14y agoMy previous machine was a Dell Latitude E6500, and it ran (well, still runs) Karmic like a champ. Suspend worked great there too.
- FlyingSnake 14y agoI use LinuxMint 13 on Ideapad Y470. It has 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, slot for mSATA SSD and NVidia 550M GPU. I run Bumblebee + BBSwitch for NVidia Optimus and it is blazing fast. Sleep works fine and I feel the battery life is much better than running Win7.
- cgag 14y agoT410 here and no issues.
- Ralith 14y agoT430 here. Great machine, but the intel wifi drivers for the 6300 chip are unusably buggy at the moment.
- pearle 14y agoI have a Lenovo X220 and a Lenovo X1. Both work well with Ubuntu.
- rbanffy 14y agoI have a Dell Vostro v131 that came preinstalled with Ubuntu 11.10. It's not the fastest computer around, but it's decently fast (I develop for Django, App Engine and Plone), reasonably expandable and seemingly well built. Plus, it's cheap enough you can buy one and a Macbook Air for the price of a high-end ugly Windows notebook. Everything on the V131 works flawlessly.
- rdtsc 14y agoI have an 5 year old T60 and love it. What I like about it: - Durable. I carried it with me on trips and it still works. Its build quality is much better than other laptops. - Good keyboard. Very important for me as it is my main machine for coding. I like the keyboard better than many full sized ones. - 4:3 aspect ratio, 1400x1050 non-glare screen (can fit more vertical code). - Trackpoint device (the "nipple" as some call it). I never liked trackpads (but it has that too, I just disabled it). Recently my kid tore out some keys off of the keyboard, I started to ran out of disk space on its old 60GB hard drive, and my fan got kind of loud. I considered buying another machine. Looked around. But the more I looked, the more I realized that I just wanted this machine. So I got a 500GB hybrid Seagate Momentus drive, a new fan and a new keyboard. Spent an evening upgrading it and now I am hoping to get more years out of it. Opening it, it just confirmed the build quality. The components inside, the materials used just seems better than in equivalent HP and Dell laptops I had to take apart.
- jamespcole2 14y agoI have a System76 Lemur UltraThin it came with 11.04 pre-installed(I'm now running 12.04) and it runs like a dream
- ekianjo 14y agoHP Touchsmart tm2 here, and not everything works well. It has hybrid graphics (Intel chip for low power, and ATI for more graphically hungry applications) and Ubuntu 12.04 still cannot make any use of the ATI card. Worse, the ATI card is powered together with the Intel GPU at start, making the battery run out very fast and the laptop overheat. This can be fixed with vga switcheroo, but it's really not an optimal solution. Net, avoid hybrid graphics laptops, usually they don't work well with Linux.
- stusmith1977 14y agoI've got a Lenovo G770. Not particularly pretty but seems solid and has a nice big 17" screen for a decent price. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu without problems.
- mtgx 14y agoCanonical is also very aggressive about ARM support, and they want to be among the very first to support Cortex A15 and then the ARMv8 architecture. They're also making a big play with ARM servers and Ubuntu.
- trekkin 14y agoActually, most of new laptops do not work out of the box with Ubuntu 12.04 - you need to manually compile and/or install a custom Linux kernel in order to avoid hanging, as it is documented here: http://partiallysanedeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/05/ivy-bridge-hd4000-linux-freeze.html http://partiallysanedeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/05/ivy-bridg... and here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2005305 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2005305. For some reason Canonical decided to sacrifice stability and focus on something most users don't think they need (Unity).
- sandGorgon 14y agoCouple of things - replace "majority of new" with "ivy bridge chipsets ". A lot of people actually buy sandy bridge or even AMD you know. Second, while I share somewhat common opinions on Unity, this particular example is a kernel bug. Most likely, ubuntu will backport those changes to 12.04 or has already provided a ppa for a newer kernel.
- trekkin 14y agoWell, I work at a Linux shop, and I don't know anyone who would buy an AMD laptop to run Linux on it. And it's been more than two months since IvyBridge release, so a laptop that runs SandyBridge is probably not technically new (it can be never used, but already morally old... :) Yes, this is a kernel issue, already fixed in 3.3.x. But Canonical has no intention of backporting it to 12.04 (3.2 kernel). And we are talking here about "just working", not installing an unsupported kernel manually from a dev repository.
- sadga 14y agoSandy Bridge had the same sort of problem. It took a year to get Linux graphics working properly.