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Dell Latitude - unbelievably good. Built like a tank - I believe these are built to Mil-Spec. I have been running Linux on my laptop for the last 6 years (comm

Dell Latitude - unbelievably good. Built like a tank - I believe these are built to Mil-Spec. I have been running Linux on my laptop for the last 6 years (commuting through South East Asia and India), so I believe it has stood the test of time and kernel upgrades in hot & dusty New Delhi. I run Ubuntu 12.04 on a 6 year old E6410 and everything works - including suspend/resume, smart card reader, bluetooth, etc. I also have a second hard drive and am able to boot off either using UEFI. I'm also able to connect my HDTV using a displayport-HDMI adapter and watch movies. Wifi works out of the box, but even if it didnt, you could swap out the mini-pcie card for a few bucks. And unbelievably upgradable - couple of days back I replaced my keyboard, while the laptop is still running, in under 2 minutes. A couple of days before that I replaced my laptop fan - bought easily off ebay because of the latitude platform's popularity. Dell's after sales support is legendary - in India, it is called CompleteCover and covers next business day onsite replacement and accidental damage warranty.

zapman449 13y ago
+1 I'm typing now on a u6430 running ubuntu 13.04, and it runs great. Three challenges: 1) On a busy wifi, I have some challenges with connection drops, but I haven't determined if that's a driver issue, or a chip issue. The connection drops are mostly after several minutes of idle network connections. (Now that I think about it, its probably driver, since rmmod/modprobe the wireless modules fixes things) 2) The thumbprint reader doesn't work out of the box, but honestly, I'd rather type a password. 3) When I try to use a usb3 'docking station', it works. However I find that I need to rmmod the usb3 module, and then modprobe it again to get it back to life after ~10 undock/redock operations. After about ~20-30 undock/redocks I find I need to reboot.

zapman449 13y ago

+1 I'm typing now on a u6430 running ubuntu 13.04, and it runs great. Three challenges: 1) On a busy wifi, I have some challenges with connection drops, but I haven't determined if that's a driver issue, or a chip issue. The connection drops are mostly after several minutes of idle network connections. (Now that I think about it, its probably driver, since rmmod/modprobe the wireless modules fixes things) 2) The thumbprint reader doesn't work out of the box, but honestly, I'd rather type a password. 3) When I try to use a usb3 'docking station', it works. However I find that I need to rmmod the usb3 module, and then modprobe it again to get it back to life after ~10 undock/redock operations. After about ~20-30 undock/redocks I find I need to reboot.