9 ms·

Every time I read this I have to think to my self how silly it is to lead an article with Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chi

by dkhenry 14y ago

Every time I read this I have to think to my self how silly it is to lead an article with Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working Thats total balony, trackpads and WiFi have been well supported in Linux for almost a decade. It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work. Yes every now and then you get a vendor who insist on doing something different, but most of the time its a synaptic track pad ( well supported ) and a Broadcom or Intel WiFi card ( well supported ). I can remember back in 2004 taking my Government Issued Dell laptop and installing Fedora on it and everything working out of the box.

knightni 14y ago
This just isn't true. A couple of years ago an issue with the USB3 driver broke suspend on laptops with USB3 for quite some time, requiring workarounds. Multi-touch trackpads took some time to get full gesture support. Auto-switch between paired graphics cards still doesn't work. That's not to say things aren't pretty good now - but to imply that linux doesn't require some fiddling about under the hood hardware-wise is stretching a lot.
fernly 14y ago
"It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work..." Nunh-unh. I recently tried to repurpose an original MBA to Ubuntu 12.10 because it isn't supported by current OSX. While I was very favorably impressed by the current state of the Ubuntu out of the box experience, it just didn't work smoothly on the MBA: * Sleep/wake wasn't smooth, often had to click the mouse or the power button to wake it; * "right click" is an unintuitive two-finger tap that is often falsely detected as you attempt a two-finger scroll gesture -- the Mac convention of control-click isn't recognized; * there is a persistent "serious problem" warning that pops up a couple of times every time it wakes up, related to a known bug with the graphics adapter -- it was harmless but would be dead scary to the novice I planned to give the machine to -- and it wasn't fixed after several weeks. * After I plugged headphones into the jack, the internal speaker went silent. Ubuntu still knew whether there was a headphone in the jack or not, but the speaker never sounded again. I finally put OSX Snow Leopard back on it and of course, everything "just worked" (including the internal speaker). The recipient will just have to live with end of life software.
alimoeeny 14y ago
I think when people say trackpad support they want full support not just basic support, like there are many laptops that on windows have scroll and hot corners and stuff but on linux you may only get basic functionality.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  Interestingly, I had the opposite experience with my trackpad: on Windows, it just supported the basics along with scrolling along the side. On Linux, it supported a bunch of multi-touch things (like two-finger scrolling and two/three finger button presses), both horizontal and vertical scrolling and circular scrolling (some of these were settings turned off by default, but they could be configured from a nice settings GUI).
- efuquen 14y ago
  This is exactly what most people mean. I've instead Linux on my Macbook Pro, compared to the support OS X had Ubuntu's was a joke. Same with wifi, it did not just work out of the box for me. And I know it's lightyears ahead of where it use to be, but that doesn't hide the fact that the default OS X experience was just plain better and hassle free.
- dkhenry 14y ago
  That's not always a driver issue. The software must support anything your trying to do. Things like two finger scroll work just fine, however things like pinch to zoom , maybe not.
acabal 14y ago
Not entirely true, wifi on the wrong chipset was a nightmare till just a few years ago, and even on the right chipset (Intel) there were problems as recently as Oneiric. (I installed it and my Intel wifi throughput went down to .5kb/s, there was an active and angry Launchpad issue about it.)
kijin 14y ago
Tell that to the HP Mini 210 that I bought in April 2011. Synaptic "clickpad" trackpad that claims to support multitouch: Sorry, only with their Windows driver. Not only I don't get multitouch in Ubuntu, but I can't even click or drag/drop anything. Ubuntu 12.04 claimed to fix the issue with clickpads, but it didn't work out of the box, and even after extensive tweaking, some features were still very buggy. In the end, I switched to a laptop that has a traditional trackpad without the multitouch bullshit. Broadcom wifi card: Works fine once you install the additional driver. But there's a catch: last time I checked, the driver didn't come with the install CD. So I have to download it in order for wifi to work ... but I need wifi in order to download it. Ended up digging out an old ethernet cable from a dusty closet and crawling under another closet to connect it to the modem. Not pleasant! Of course, most of the problem lies with hardware vendors who don't release fully functional open-source Linux drivers for their gadgets. But since when does the average user care whose fault it is that their trackpad doesn't work? The great thing about this Dell release is that all their drivers are fully functional and freely available as a PPA. Because without those drivers, few of today's latest PC laptops work with Linux out of the box.
- dkhenry 14y ago
  Your doing it wrong [1] A Single data point does not a result make. Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. For a counter point I could never get the CD-ROM hotplug working on my old dell laptop in windows. Clearly windows doesn't support CD-ROMS. 1. http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210 http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210
  - cturner 14y ago
    > A Single data point does not a result make. no, it's entirely reasonable here. Earlier you claimed that linux support was good. It doesn't make many counter examples to contradict that. YMMV is not Good. You had an experience where linux worked. Some other have been able to struggle machines over the line previously but this is not evidence of maturity. > Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. If ever there was clear evidence of platform immaturity, this is it. It's common to read in this forum and others comments like yours, "oh linux has been well-supported on laptops for years" and then to optimistically go out and buy hardware, or try something, and find that you can't boot or similar. Just three weeks ago I had a hell of a time trying to get different distributions of linux (including ubuntu) to boot consistently on a three year old macbook with dual video cards. The problem seems to be caused by an issue that has been known about for two years, but with much fiddling in grub I couldn't get it to the stage where it would boot every time. And then there were all sorts of suspend/resume problems. Wireless has definitely not been mature for a decade. Wireless on ubuntu has been mature from backend to user interface for about four years. Earlier than that there were all sorts of things that should have been done in the background being done in gnome tooling, and it caused suspend/resume problems on some platforms, and configuration was broken. Maybe a commenter could point out that there was some magic combination that didn't have that problem. Doesn't matter. magic combinations != mature. Another favourite is where you install the base distribution, and things work, but then you make reasonable changes using the approved package management system and all sorts of crap just starts breaking. Flash stops working, or audio vanishes, or your display doesn't work in X any more, or your second display stops working.
VMG 14y ago
Not so fast there - Radon graphics still suck, with both the official as with the open source drivers. The Lenovo s300 with Intel HD 3000 however works flawlessly out of the box, with HDMI, audio over HDMI, multitouch touchpad, camera, suspend and everything. Just don't touch anything with an ATI card.
johnward 14y ago
I always hear this comment yet I can still not get wifi to work on an early 2000's HP laptop with ubuntu. I pretty much just gave up this point
armored_mammal 14y ago
I just picked up a laptop for a relative that both had trackpad issues, lacked touchscreen support, and even had fn-keys that didn't work (you know, for controlling brightness and volume and such on the laptop) under Linux. And it was a pretty mainstream ASUS with Intel.
driverdan 14y ago
I'll bite. Please tell me which laptops have fully supported graphics cards, including dynamic switching between integrated and discreet without reboot.
- JasonFruit 14y ago
  I'm not disputing your point, but as a long-time application developer (and of course general computer user), I had to look up what the difference was. I've never had the need to switch between them (that I'm aware of). In what circumstances does it become important?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Do you really not know that? This is done to save battery life. In most situations the integrated graphics are more than enough, so the dedicated graphics chip can be turned off. If, however, that isn’t transparent to the user (i.e. happens automatically and on the fly) it’s nearly useless. Who is going to bother and reboot to switch graphics? This is a pretty standard feature, available in all Apple laptops with dedicated graphics and many (if not all) Windows laptops with dedicated graphics.
    - JasonFruit 14y ago
      Yes, I really didn't know that — it had never come up for me. It sounds like it's mostly really useful with games and similarly rendering-intense applications, which I don't use.
    - Symmetry 14y ago
      If you don't mind me asking, what would you be playing under Linux that would require discrete graphics? Modern integrated graphics are much, much better than they were a few years ago and you should be able to play any Source game, for instance, without trouble. Now they won't handle Crysis gracefully, of course, but if you're resorting to running things under wine then you have to expect some level of breakage.
gnaffle 14y ago
Here's the thing: On most laptops, most things will work "OK enough" under Linux. But there always seems to be some kind of small issue. And even when it works, it often stops working after an upgrade. Like my Toshiba that worked well until an upgrade suddenly made it unable to boot into X, or my ThinkPad that had the annoying fan running all the time for no apparent reason. That's the problem. It means that if you're a linux expert and can spend some time fixing things each time they break, Linux on Laptops is great. And you're in a better position to fix things when they do, since you can modify the source.
- AndrewNoNumbers 14y ago
  That is the truth. I've had Ubuntu on my Dell laptop for years, and it was an entire learning experience to perfect the setup completely to my liking. It was great when I was young and had the time to play around, but recently I made the sad jump to a MacBook, because when it came time to actually work on real projects, I needed a rock solid desktop experience where I didn't have to constantly fiddle with my own computer. My Mac is nowhere near as fun or personal as my Linux setup, but it is what I rely on to do my work. Hopefully this Sputnik project makes Linux what Apple does in terms of the complete hardware/software package
- Surio 14y ago
  >> But there always seems to be some kind of small issue Another Toshiba (Satellite L650) owner here. I had major issues with wifi and display. Drove me mad.... Ubuntu forums were helpful, but ultimately ineffective. If I installed it on VMWare... no issues though.... what in the name of heaven is going on..... >> It means that if you're a linux expert and can spend some time fixing things each time they break And I didn't have that liberty either, plus you really shouldn't be doing this kind of thing at this day and age, if you know what I mean. For Linux, I still have to fire up the VM, the RAM usage goes up, the machine heats up.... and the family has a field day teasing me about my obsession with Linux... Frankly, some days I wonder it it's all worth it to jump so many hoops.
w1ntermute 14y ago
I just got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon[0] ultrabook 2 days ago and installed Xubuntu 12.10. It really is stunning how the hardware just works. I didn't have to fiddle with any of it - I had out of the box support for the video card, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. Even multitouch trackpad gestures work (although I personally prefer the trackpoint). The laptop itself is nothing short of amazing[1], especially once you wipe Windows from it. In fact, Lenovo TrackPoints have never worked the way I like in Windows (where you can use the middle mouse button for both middle-clicking and scrolling), but they do in Linux. I thought I would dislike the new chiclet keyboard, which deviates from IBM/Lenovo's two-decade old keyboard design, but unbelievably, I actually like it. Having used chiclet keyboards on MacBooks, I never liked them, but Lenovo seems to have done it right. Edit: there's one other issue, but this seems to be a (depressing) trend in the industry: decline in user serviceability of laptops. You can't replace the SSD (it's soldered onto the mobo), and replacing the RAM is not recommended. The price is quite high, especially if you upgrade the SSD (not recommended; just get a 2.5" USB 3.0-powered external HDD - I got a 1 TB one for $70 just a few days ago) or RAM (recommended; 8 GB is always good to have these days, and there's only one slot, so if you replace it later, you'll still have to buy 8 GB), so watch for sales/coupon codes (there was a good one for Black Friday) or use your college .edu address to get a student discount. Edit 2: Lenovo also changed the power connector to a rectangular shaped one, because the X1 Carbon's profile is too thin to use the old, circular one. This means all your old ThinkPad power cables are now useless. 0: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon/ http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x... 1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3232132/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-review http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3232132/lenovo-thinkpad-x1...
- pnathan 14y ago
  > It really is stunning how the hardware just works. That's been my experience with Linux in the last 3-4 years. Almost everything just works for the "usual" settings. No more futzing with XFree86Conf files... :D
  - niels_olson 14y ago
    Actually, I would go further include the BSDs. I recently installed PC-BSD 9, and the only issue I had was some uncommon aftermarket usb speakers needing a one liner to be recognized on boot. Runs nVidia drivers, etc, etc.
digitalzombie 14y ago
Mint didn't work on my t510 laptop (I bought the laptop refurbish three months ago after my lenovo t4xx die after 10 years of usage). I reinstalled it with kubuntu 12.10 and the volume buttons doesn't work nor some of the fn+command keys. Sometime the touchpad just die and I have to restart the computer if I really want the touchpad (I use vim+tmux to dev so I don't need the touchpad unless I want to surf the web). edit: As for what was wrong with mint. After Nvidia's driver update sleep wouldn't work, it would sleep forever like sleeping beauty unless you hold down the power button for several second to turn the laptop off and reboot.
nollidge 14y ago
Linux seems to work fine on 90% of laptops, but from a consumer perspective, I don't want a 10% risk that some little thing won't work. You're right in that I can be reasonably certain that a laptop I buy will run Linux, but I can't be certain that there won't be issues. And I can't be certain that the random forum poster who successfully is using Linux on the model I want to buy uses their device like I do - maybe they never sleep and always shutdown, or don't ever use bluetooth, or don't care about USB 3.0, or never use two-finger scrolling, or don't need to access SAMBA shares, and so I cannot know before my purchase whether it'll do everything I want. And so, I stick with Windows, because it is the devil I know.
- technomancy 14y ago
  So spend 30 minutes doing a little research before you buy? Seems like something you should be doing anyway before making any >USD1k purchase.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    Why thank you, kind sir, I never would have thought of that myself. Where do you research it? As I was intimating, all I can ever find is some person on some forum who says it's working fine for them. I have zero confidence in such "research".
epochwolf 14y ago
Ubunutu on my new Thinkpad x131e can't change the brightness of the LCD and it runs the battery dry in two hours. Windows 8 can run for 7 hours with bthe brightness at 70%. The track point sensitivity is too low and I have it at the highest sensitivity. (You need to turn the sensitivity in the settings to the lowest value to get the highest sensitivity!) Don't get me started on lack of uefi boot support. Grub recognizes Windows 8 but refuses to boot it. I've had to install an msata ssd and put the Windows bootloader on that and install grub and a boot partition on the hdd to get useful dual booting. Linux is far from a cakewalk on my machine.
- vegardx 14y ago
  You should take a look at ThinkWiki, they usually have good information on how to get around the little quirks of Linux on a Thinkpad. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki
  - epochwolf 14y ago
    I'll take another look. I didn't find a lot two weeks ago. Update: My device isn't listed on the wiki. I'll have to spend several more hours digging through various pages to find things to try. This is why I don't like linux for laptops. Windows 8 works out of the box. I'd rather just up the ram to 8gb and virtualize linux.
    - cturner 14y ago
      Have you been able to do that in a way so that power consumption doesn't get high? I try to run my laptop so the fan doesn't kick in in normal operation, and when I've tried linux under vmware I've found it gets hot fast. I've got a thinkpad and have also had trouble getting the trackpad stuff configured the way I want it to work with extra utilities. That's the only problem I've had with it though. I wish the bios just had a way to switch off the trackpad, but leave the buttons above it functioning.
      - epochwolf 14y ago
mongol 14y ago
Dell Precision M4500. 2 years old. Trackpad scrolling: did not work. Wireless: not working out of the box. SD card slot: not working. Camera: not working out of the box. The list goes on. For me that was the last straw, after using Linux as my main OS since -96 I am now mainly a Windows user. I am too old to spend hours investigating the state of kernel patches to get basic hardware working. I love Linux but the state of hardware support has reached a steady state in my opinion. Things break, others start working, then they break again.
trotsky 14y ago
you just have a different value for baseline. I assure you that getting multi-touch trackpads ready for more than two finger gesture support under x does indeed remain quite fiddly in the majority of cases today.

by dkhenry 14y ago

knightni 14y ago

This just isn't true. A couple of years ago an issue with the USB3 driver broke suspend on laptops with USB3 for quite some time, requiring workarounds. Multi-touch trackpads took some time to get full gesture support. Auto-switch between paired graphics cards still doesn't work. That's not to say things aren't pretty good now - but to imply that linux doesn't require some fiddling about under the hood hardware-wise is stretching a lot.

fernly 14y ago

"It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work..." Nunh-unh. I recently tried to repurpose an original MBA to Ubuntu 12.10 because it isn't supported by current OSX. While I was very favorably impressed by the current state of the Ubuntu out of the box experience, it just didn't work smoothly on the MBA: * Sleep/wake wasn't smooth, often had to click the mouse or the power button to wake it; * "right click" is an unintuitive two-finger tap that is often falsely detected as you attempt a two-finger scroll gesture -- the Mac convention of control-click isn't recognized; * there is a persistent "serious problem" warning that pops up a couple of times every time it wakes up, related to a known bug with the graphics adapter -- it was harmless but would be dead scary to the novice I planned to give the machine to -- and it wasn't fixed after several weeks. * After I plugged headphones into the jack, the internal speaker went silent. Ubuntu still knew whether there was a headphone in the jack or not, but the speaker never sounded again. I finally put OSX Snow Leopard back on it and of course, everything "just worked" (including the internal speaker). The recipient will just have to live with end of life software.

alimoeeny 14y ago

I think when people say trackpad support they want full support not just basic support, like there are many laptops that on windows have scroll and hot corners and stuff but on linux you may only get basic functionality.

tikhonj 14y ago
Interestingly, I had the opposite experience with my trackpad: on Windows, it just supported the basics along with scrolling along the side. On Linux, it supported a bunch of multi-touch things (like two-finger scrolling and two/three finger button presses), both horizontal and vertical scrolling and circular scrolling (some of these were settings turned off by default, but they could be configured from a nice settings GUI).
efuquen 14y ago
This is exactly what most people mean. I've instead Linux on my Macbook Pro, compared to the support OS X had Ubuntu's was a joke. Same with wifi, it did not just work out of the box for me. And I know it's lightyears ahead of where it use to be, but that doesn't hide the fact that the default OS X experience was just plain better and hassle free.
dkhenry 14y ago
That's not always a driver issue. The software must support anything your trying to do. Things like two finger scroll work just fine, however things like pinch to zoom , maybe not.

acabal 14y ago

Not entirely true, wifi on the wrong chipset was a nightmare till just a few years ago, and even on the right chipset (Intel) there were problems as recently as Oneiric. (I installed it and my Intel wifi throughput went down to .5kb/s, there was an active and angry Launchpad issue about it.)

kijin 14y ago

Tell that to the HP Mini 210 that I bought in April 2011. Synaptic "clickpad" trackpad that claims to support multitouch: Sorry, only with their Windows driver. Not only I don't get multitouch in Ubuntu, but I can't even click or drag/drop anything. Ubuntu 12.04 claimed to fix the issue with clickpads, but it didn't work out of the box, and even after extensive tweaking, some features were still very buggy. In the end, I switched to a laptop that has a traditional trackpad without the multitouch bullshit. Broadcom wifi card: Works fine once you install the additional driver. But there's a catch: last time I checked, the driver didn't come with the install CD. So I have to download it in order for wifi to work ... but I need wifi in order to download it. Ended up digging out an old ethernet cable from a dusty closet and crawling under another closet to connect it to the modem. Not pleasant! Of course, most of the problem lies with hardware vendors who don't release fully functional open-source Linux drivers for their gadgets. But since when does the average user care whose fault it is that their trackpad doesn't work? The great thing about this Dell release is that all their drivers are fully functional and freely available as a PPA. Because without those drivers, few of today's latest PC laptops work with Linux out of the box.

dkhenry 14y ago
Your doing it wrong [1] A Single data point does not a result make. Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. For a counter point I could never get the CD-ROM hotplug working on my old dell laptop in windows. Clearly windows doesn't support CD-ROMS. 1. http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210 http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210
- cturner 14y ago
  > A Single data point does not a result make. no, it's entirely reasonable here. Earlier you claimed that linux support was good. It doesn't make many counter examples to contradict that. YMMV is not Good. You had an experience where linux worked. Some other have been able to struggle machines over the line previously but this is not evidence of maturity. > Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. If ever there was clear evidence of platform immaturity, this is it. It's common to read in this forum and others comments like yours, "oh linux has been well-supported on laptops for years" and then to optimistically go out and buy hardware, or try something, and find that you can't boot or similar. Just three weeks ago I had a hell of a time trying to get different distributions of linux (including ubuntu) to boot consistently on a three year old macbook with dual video cards. The problem seems to be caused by an issue that has been known about for two years, but with much fiddling in grub I couldn't get it to the stage where it would boot every time. And then there were all sorts of suspend/resume problems. Wireless has definitely not been mature for a decade. Wireless on ubuntu has been mature from backend to user interface for about four years. Earlier than that there were all sorts of things that should have been done in the background being done in gnome tooling, and it caused suspend/resume problems on some platforms, and configuration was broken. Maybe a commenter could point out that there was some magic combination that didn't have that problem. Doesn't matter. magic combinations != mature. Another favourite is where you install the base distribution, and things work, but then you make reasonable changes using the approved package management system and all sorts of crap just starts breaking. Flash stops working, or audio vanishes, or your display doesn't work in X any more, or your second display stops working.

VMG 14y ago

Not so fast there - Radon graphics still suck, with both the official as with the open source drivers. The Lenovo s300 with Intel HD 3000 however works flawlessly out of the box, with HDMI, audio over HDMI, multitouch touchpad, camera, suspend and everything. Just don't touch anything with an ATI card.

johnward 14y ago

I always hear this comment yet I can still not get wifi to work on an early 2000's HP laptop with ubuntu. I pretty much just gave up this point

armored_mammal 14y ago

I just picked up a laptop for a relative that both had trackpad issues, lacked touchscreen support, and even had fn-keys that didn't work (you know, for controlling brightness and volume and such on the laptop) under Linux. And it was a pretty mainstream ASUS with Intel.

driverdan 14y ago

I'll bite. Please tell me which laptops have fully supported graphics cards, including dynamic switching between integrated and discreet without reboot.

JasonFruit 14y ago
I'm not disputing your point, but as a long-time application developer (and of course general computer user), I had to look up what the difference was. I've never had the need to switch between them (that I'm aware of). In what circumstances does it become important?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- arrrg 14y ago
  Do you really not know that? This is done to save battery life. In most situations the integrated graphics are more than enough, so the dedicated graphics chip can be turned off. If, however, that isn’t transparent to the user (i.e. happens automatically and on the fly) it’s nearly useless. Who is going to bother and reboot to switch graphics? This is a pretty standard feature, available in all Apple laptops with dedicated graphics and many (if not all) Windows laptops with dedicated graphics.
  - JasonFruit 14y ago
    Yes, I really didn't know that — it had never come up for me. It sounds like it's mostly really useful with games and similarly rendering-intense applications, which I don't use.
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what would you be playing under Linux that would require discrete graphics? Modern integrated graphics are much, much better than they were a few years ago and you should be able to play any Source game, for instance, without trouble. Now they won't handle Crysis gracefully, of course, but if you're resorting to running things under wine then you have to expect some level of breakage.

gnaffle 14y ago

Here's the thing: On most laptops, most things will work "OK enough" under Linux. But there always seems to be some kind of small issue. And even when it works, it often stops working after an upgrade. Like my Toshiba that worked well until an upgrade suddenly made it unable to boot into X, or my ThinkPad that had the annoying fan running all the time for no apparent reason. That's the problem. It means that if you're a linux expert and can spend some time fixing things each time they break, Linux on Laptops is great. And you're in a better position to fix things when they do, since you can modify the source.

AndrewNoNumbers 14y ago
That is the truth. I've had Ubuntu on my Dell laptop for years, and it was an entire learning experience to perfect the setup completely to my liking. It was great when I was young and had the time to play around, but recently I made the sad jump to a MacBook, because when it came time to actually work on real projects, I needed a rock solid desktop experience where I didn't have to constantly fiddle with my own computer. My Mac is nowhere near as fun or personal as my Linux setup, but it is what I rely on to do my work. Hopefully this Sputnik project makes Linux what Apple does in terms of the complete hardware/software package
Surio 14y ago
>> But there always seems to be some kind of small issue Another Toshiba (Satellite L650) owner here. I had major issues with wifi and display. Drove me mad.... Ubuntu forums were helpful, but ultimately ineffective. If I installed it on VMWare... no issues though.... what in the name of heaven is going on..... >> It means that if you're a linux expert and can spend some time fixing things each time they break And I didn't have that liberty either, plus you really shouldn't be doing this kind of thing at this day and age, if you know what I mean. For Linux, I still have to fire up the VM, the RAM usage goes up, the machine heats up.... and the family has a field day teasing me about my obsession with Linux... Frankly, some days I wonder it it's all worth it to jump so many hoops.

w1ntermute 14y ago

I just got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon[0] ultrabook 2 days ago and installed Xubuntu 12.10. It really is stunning how the hardware just works. I didn't have to fiddle with any of it - I had out of the box support for the video card, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. Even multitouch trackpad gestures work (although I personally prefer the trackpoint). The laptop itself is nothing short of amazing[1], especially once you wipe Windows from it. In fact, Lenovo TrackPoints have never worked the way I like in Windows (where you can use the middle mouse button for both middle-clicking and scrolling), but they do in Linux. I thought I would dislike the new chiclet keyboard, which deviates from IBM/Lenovo's two-decade old keyboard design, but unbelievably, I actually like it. Having used chiclet keyboards on MacBooks, I never liked them, but Lenovo seems to have done it right. Edit: there's one other issue, but this seems to be a (depressing) trend in the industry: decline in user serviceability of laptops. You can't replace the SSD (it's soldered onto the mobo), and replacing the RAM is not recommended. The price is quite high, especially if you upgrade the SSD (not recommended; just get a 2.5" USB 3.0-powered external HDD - I got a 1 TB one for $70 just a few days ago) or RAM (recommended; 8 GB is always good to have these days, and there's only one slot, so if you replace it later, you'll still have to buy 8 GB), so watch for sales/coupon codes (there was a good one for Black Friday) or use your college .edu address to get a student discount. Edit 2: Lenovo also changed the power connector to a rectangular shaped one, because the X1 Carbon's profile is too thin to use the old, circular one. This means all your old ThinkPad power cables are now useless. 0: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon/ http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x... 1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3232132/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-review http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3232132/lenovo-thinkpad-x1...

pnathan 14y ago
> It really is stunning how the hardware just works. That's been my experience with Linux in the last 3-4 years. Almost everything just works for the "usual" settings. No more futzing with XFree86Conf files... :D
- niels_olson 14y ago
  Actually, I would go further include the BSDs. I recently installed PC-BSD 9, and the only issue I had was some uncommon aftermarket usb speakers needing a one liner to be recognized on boot. Runs nVidia drivers, etc, etc.

digitalzombie 14y ago

Mint didn't work on my t510 laptop (I bought the laptop refurbish three months ago after my lenovo t4xx die after 10 years of usage). I reinstalled it with kubuntu 12.10 and the volume buttons doesn't work nor some of the fn+command keys. Sometime the touchpad just die and I have to restart the computer if I really want the touchpad (I use vim+tmux to dev so I don't need the touchpad unless I want to surf the web). edit: As for what was wrong with mint. After Nvidia's driver update sleep wouldn't work, it would sleep forever like sleeping beauty unless you hold down the power button for several second to turn the laptop off and reboot.

nollidge 14y ago

Linux seems to work fine on 90% of laptops, but from a consumer perspective, I don't want a 10% risk that some little thing won't work. You're right in that I can be reasonably certain that a laptop I buy will run Linux, but I can't be certain that there won't be issues. And I can't be certain that the random forum poster who successfully is using Linux on the model I want to buy uses their device like I do - maybe they never sleep and always shutdown, or don't ever use bluetooth, or don't care about USB 3.0, or never use two-finger scrolling, or don't need to access SAMBA shares, and so I cannot know before my purchase whether it'll do everything I want. And so, I stick with Windows, because it is the devil I know.

technomancy 14y ago
So spend 30 minutes doing a little research before you buy? Seems like something you should be doing anyway before making any >USD1k purchase.
- nollidge 14y ago
  Why thank you, kind sir, I never would have thought of that myself. Where do you research it? As I was intimating, all I can ever find is some person on some forum who says it's working fine for them. I have zero confidence in such "research".

epochwolf 14y ago

Ubunutu on my new Thinkpad x131e can't change the brightness of the LCD and it runs the battery dry in two hours. Windows 8 can run for 7 hours with bthe brightness at 70%. The track point sensitivity is too low and I have it at the highest sensitivity. (You need to turn the sensitivity in the settings to the lowest value to get the highest sensitivity!) Don't get me started on lack of uefi boot support. Grub recognizes Windows 8 but refuses to boot it. I've had to install an msata ssd and put the Windows bootloader on that and install grub and a boot partition on the hdd to get useful dual booting. Linux is far from a cakewalk on my machine.

vegardx 14y ago
You should take a look at ThinkWiki, they usually have good information on how to get around the little quirks of Linux on a Thinkpad. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki
- epochwolf 14y ago
  I'll take another look. I didn't find a lot two weeks ago. Update: My device isn't listed on the wiki. I'll have to spend several more hours digging through various pages to find things to try. This is why I don't like linux for laptops. Windows 8 works out of the box. I'd rather just up the ram to 8gb and virtualize linux.
  - cturner 14y ago
    Have you been able to do that in a way so that power consumption doesn't get high? I try to run my laptop so the fan doesn't kick in in normal operation, and when I've tried linux under vmware I've found it gets hot fast. I've got a thinkpad and have also had trouble getting the trackpad stuff configured the way I want it to work with extra utilities. That's the only problem I've had with it though. I wish the bios just had a way to switch off the trackpad, but leave the buttons above it functioning.
    - epochwolf 14y ago

mongol 14y ago

Dell Precision M4500. 2 years old. Trackpad scrolling: did not work. Wireless: not working out of the box. SD card slot: not working. Camera: not working out of the box. The list goes on. For me that was the last straw, after using Linux as my main OS since -96 I am now mainly a Windows user. I am too old to spend hours investigating the state of kernel patches to get basic hardware working. I love Linux but the state of hardware support has reached a steady state in my opinion. Things break, others start working, then they break again.

trotsky 14y ago

you just have a different value for baseline. I assure you that getting multi-touch trackpads ready for more than two finger gesture support under x does indeed remain quite fiddly in the majority of cases today.