On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 05:58:51AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 09:19:42 +0200 > Paulo Pinto <pj...@progtools.org> wrote: [...] > > laptops sold with Linux support. > > Those exist? > > I've long heard stories about such things, but they seem to be like > unicorns or mermaids or bigfoot...fantasy creatures you only ever hear > tales "through the grapevine" about. Not so much real evidence or > first-hand accounts.
I used to own one of them. It came preinstalled with Debian, so I'd like to say to all the accusations of FOSS zealotry: so there! ;-) It does have some binary blobs for a few device drivers, though, but that didn't pose a problem 'cos they were custom-installed by the manufacturers, so apt-get upgrade left them alone for the most part. It worked pretty well as a laptop -- I of course nuked the default GUI configuration and installed my own (at the time I was still into vtwm -- this was before my ratpoison days -- so it wasn't *too* foreign from the preinstalled setup). But then the warranty expired, and so did the PSU. I took it in for repair once, which was extremely expensive, but it didn't last very long after. That was when I acquired a strong distaste for laptops -- I learned that they have basically *no* user-serviceable parts, and even something as simple as installing a different hard drive (simple on a desktop, anyway) required custom tools that only laptop manufacturers or repair shops have access to. Besides, even if you could find the tools, laptop parts generally aren't sold in the consumer market anyway, and they are also very model-specific, so there's no such thing as going out to buy a replacement for a failing part. It's take it in to the repair shop and pay an arm and a leg for the repair which exceeds the cost of buying a new laptop. Sigh... > > As an example, last April, an Ubuntu update borked my wireless > > driver, because of religious FOSS. Ubuntu developers changed the > > binary broadcom driver, working flawlessly, for the open source one, > > which was still half done. > > > > There is a discussion about it on their forums, if you want a link > > for it. > > > > Well, I don't use Ubuntu anymore for my Linux boxes. Migrated upstream > to Debian. Any idea if one of the less religious distros (like Mint) > would be decent for a laptop, or are non-OSS drivers merely one issue? I'd advise caution and very *very* thorough research before purchasing a laptop. Some laptops have hardware with no known Linux drivers (not even binary blobs), so no matter which distro you choose, it wouldn't work. One approach might be to look up a laptop model known to have been used by a Linux-preinstalled manufacturer -- then you know there are drivers for it out there somewhere. Suitable googling should be able to get you downloadable blobs and installation instructions. Sadly, hardware support for Linux is still spotty esp. for newly-released hardware, as most manufacturers tend to prefer working with proprietary-backed OSes first (esp. if some new features are developed in tandem between them). (Caveat: I swore off laptops since 6-7 years ago, so my information may be outdated.) T -- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
