Want a good laptop for linux? Buy ... a macbook. Okay, that was perhaps not the most useful piece of advice. I'm interested in this too: When comparing linux vs. mac, I often see my friends compare a MacBook (which is (duh) filled with hardware specifically designed for Mac OS X) against a random windows laptop they got from someplace else or bought with the intent to use as a windows laptop, running linux.
That's not a fair comparison: What happens when you set out to buy a laptop specifically to run linux on it? Has anyone recently done this - where do you check if the hardware works well? It's not exactly trivial, here's everything that needs to work just right: - Multitouch trackpad (is that even possible on linux)? - Sleep / Hibernate mode: If you close the lid, does the system go to sleep and does it wake back up instantaneously when you open it up? What's the battery drain like in sleep mode? From personal experience, windows laptops will waste the entire battery in sleep mode in about a day. A mac takes a month to do the same thing. - High quality keyboard that's not too noisy (biggest drawback to me of the new-style click-entire-trackpad mac trackpads is that they are noisy when you click down!) - Sound, Video, wifi and bluetooth drivers. - Battery life: Can the OS properly shut down what's not being used in order to get to the battery life that I'm used to - 4 hours minimum. None of these things show up in an advertisement for a notebook; those just contain lots of numbers: Speed, screen size, disk size, all stuff that's mostly irrelevant (to me, anyway). On Nov 1, 8:23 am, Kirk <[email protected]> wrote: > I was about to buy a new laptop just as this disturbing news about Java came > out. Now that I step back and take a better look at things, I think there is > more than just that reason to go with something else. I have two reasons for > Mac. First, the OS well integrated with the hardware, it is Unix and it just > works out of the box. I'm not interested in messing with drivers. Second, is > the trackpad. Every trackpad I've tried on Windows spec'ed hardware leaves me > wanting to use a mouse. > > Question to the group is; what is a good choice for a laptop that has good > Linux support? > > Regards, > Kirk -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
