Linux on Notebooks

[Araneidae]

2. As we do not install Linux on any of our Laptops we cannot guarantee that all drivers are available however when customers in the past have installed linux on our laptops they have done so successfully, most moan about the wireless drivers (Azurewave wireless cards) but they find a driver sooner or later - I'm sure if you know what your doing you should be ok.

I'm looking for a mid price Linux laptop, and the options on the PC Specialist website look very encouraging. However, could I please beg you to take the time to support a Linux distribution (Ubuntu would seem simplest) on at least one of your laptops.

My experiences with Linux on laptops are that there are three areas where things can be horrible to set up if the vendor isn't paying attention:

1. Graphics card driver support. This seems to be settling down, but for gaming this remains a can of worms, depending on the choice of card.
2. Hibernate or Sleep and restore. Frequently a disaster area in my limited experience.
3. Wireless drivers. Either works or doesn't! Such a pain if it doesn't, it'd be nice to know not to buy a laptop with the wrong wireless hardware.

These are all down to hardware component vendors failing to cooperate with Linux development, and it would be very helpful to the poor buyer if the system vendors (yourselves) could at least pay some attention to the cases where these problems arise.

 

[PCS]

Welcome to our forums Araneidae

I've moved your thread to a new post because it's a seperate topic to the original.

We used to offer Ubuntu on our notebooks, but due to a very small takeup we decided to remove the option. It seems that most customers who use Linux prefer to install it themselves.

Regarding your points above, points 1 & 2 are beyond our control unfortunately. This is down to the graphics card manufacturers and the Linux OS. However, we have supported customers who order wifi cards in the past with Linux drivers. We don't guarantee support, but in most cases our wireless cards have worked correctly once the right drivers have been installed. If you let us know the model and wifi choice you plan to order, I will let you know the wifi card model you will receive so that you can investigate this before ordering.

 

[Araneidae]

Thank you for moving the post. I thought as I posted that I was probably in the wrong place.

I'm currently looking for a medium sized laptop to replace my aging iBook G4, but I think that's a topic for a new post: you seem a little short of 12" screens.

I'm sorry you had so little take up on Ubuntu -- I'm alarmed at how hard it is to buy a computer without Windows on it.

 

[LDUK]

I don't mean to sound like an A** or ignorant, but I never understood the whole Linux thing. I've been there and was very dissapointed. Could you explain what makes you go for Linux Araneidae? If it's not too much trouble.

 

[HMFC_Riley]

I don't mean to sound like an A** or ignorant, but I never understood the whole Linux thing. I've been there and was very dissapointed. Could you explain what makes you go for Linux Araneidae? If it's not too much trouble.

It's much better suited for people who like developing things IMO. I find it much easier myself to program in C and Java than I do on Windows. However I much prefer Windows for normal tasks.

It's the same kind of rivalry as Intel/AMD and nVidia/ATi etc.

 

[Araneidae]

I don't mean to sound like an A** or ignorant, but I never understood the whole Linux thing. I've been there and was very dissapointed. Could you explain what makes you go for Linux Araneidae? If it's not too much trouble.

I'll try.

I guess the reasons are many, this might turn into an essay. I can probably group my reasons into three categories: technical, personal, and political, but there's quite a bit of interweaving of these ideas.

Fundamentally (and this is personal and political) I believe that I own my computer, I'm not renting it from an organisation that is letting me use it under sufferance. Many of the control strategies engaged in by both Microsoft and Apple make me very angry, and although I've used OSX for quite a while now, I've had enough. I developed software to run on Windows for fourteen years, and at the end I realised that Microsoft deliberately follow two strategies: 1. don't waste time fixing bugs on new releases, instead make the next release shinier by adding more and more gimmicks, eye candy, whatever (I guess this finally caught up with them with Vista!); 2. force developers (and users) into a constant upgrade process by continually obsoleting technologies and APIs. The combination of 1+2 is that older APIs suffer a horrible kind of bit-rot: anybody who has tried to run old Windows programs on new Windows installations will be familiar with the pain.

So that's the gist of my personal and a hint of the political reasons for going with Linux. As a software developer I'm a great believer in Open Source development, and I think that at the moment Linux is going from strength to strength, but still very slowly.

So let's have a closer look at the technicalities of using Linux. At home I used to run FreeBSD, but that has become archaic and I don't see the point anymore. I also have two PowerPC machines running OSX, but they're now trapped in the past, abandoned by Apple to rot -- it amuses me hugely (with sour irony) that the only application which now receives updates on OSX 10.5 from Apple is iTunes.

On the other hand, installing and upgrading Linux is easy and getting easier. If you go for a mainstream distribution (I've recently only tried Debian and Ubuntu) upgrading is as simple as running the built in upgrade tool (and wincing as my DSL line saturates for half an hour), and making a fresh install on a new machine is a matter of preparing a bootable USB key. No license authorisation nonsense, just download and install.

The selection of applications that runs on Linux continues to grow. The package manager with Ubuntu has tens of thousands of applications, each can be installed at the press of a button, and the appropriate line saturation (I'm amazed that the Ubuntu servers always saturate my feeble 2.5Mbit connection).

I can even run Windows applications! The Wine application (installed as above) makes Linux look like Windows, and many Windows applications just run. For example, I play TF2 without problems.

Um. Did I just say "without problems" there? Aw, crap. But wait, before I get onto the problems (which are legion), there is one final major major benefit of Linux over Windows: no goddamed viruses! Oh, and Linux is stable: people running Linux were boasting multi-year uptimes when Windows literally *couldn't* run for more that 40 days without crashing.

Right. The problems. Sigh. They are legion, and come from so many sources.

• Installation and usability problems. Well frankly this seems to be a thing of the past. Of course, it does help if you're comfortable at the command line, but I feel crippled without it.
• Unhelpful hardware vendors. Do not get me started. Seriously. At least the nVidia drivers on newer cards seem to work ok now, but this is where Linux continues to struggle. What's particularly unfair here is that in fact Linux supports more hardware than any other OS. Unfortunately hardware vendors seem to think that they're protecting something by hiding the details of how to talk to their hardware.
• Annoyances. I guess the biggest source of annoyances is Wine: my experience with Wine is that about 50% of games I try either just work, or work just fine with a bit of tweaking, but the remaining 50% are DOA. Have to say, the chances of getting an antique like Zork Nemesis to run on a modern Windows strikes me as close to nil, but alas it was DOA on Wine the last time I tried.

Hum. I thought this would become an essay. Let me try and recap.

• With Linux I feel that I am in control of my system, and if I need more control I can choose a less obtrusive distribution than Ubuntu (at work I build my own).
• Once something works on Linux it stays working. The tool I do most of my scripting in is more than forty years old, and yet I can use the newest tools with ease if I wish to.
• There's no getting away from it. I dislike Microsoft, will not pay the Microsoft tax (PC Specialist seem very unusual in providing a "no OS" option on built systems), and am very disappointed that Apple are following in their footsteps.
• I feel crippled without the command line shell.

 

[LDUK]

• With Linux I feel that I am in control of my system, and if I need more control I can choose a less obtrusive distribution than Ubuntu (at work I build my own).
• Once something works on Linux it stays working. The tool I do most of my scripting in is more than forty years old, and yet I can use the newest tools with ease if I wish to.
• There's no getting away from it. I dislike Microsoft, will not pay the Microsoft tax (PC Specialist seem very unusual in providing a "no OS" option on built systems), and am very disappointed that Apple are following in their footsteps.
• I feel crippled without the command line shell.

Wow. Well, Wow. Linux seems to fit you perfectly. Makes sence as to why I don't like it because your reasons are opposite to mine. I got windows 7, because I didn't want control, I want it to do stuff itself. I'm attracted to shiny stuff. I can change the colour of my task bar, that's all I need lol. You made a great statment. Thanks for the info