They have to be building in a couple hundred dollars for especially driver support because I can't see how this is $1500 without the OS license costs. I think I would still rather go with a MacBook Air.
Agreed, web sites today pretty much demand far more resolution than what we had in the 1990's. I imagine it's cheaper and that's why the trend has gone this way but this is a pitiful trend. I think it might be lower than new smart phones.
I was with them right up until this. Even the very similarly speced Lenovo Yoga 13 has a higher resolution screen (1600x900). I've nearly given up on using my 2011 Mac Book Pro simply because the screen resolution is awful.
What's funny is that they put this project on their IdeaStorm website when they started it a few months ago, to get feedback from Linux devs. Almost all of the higher ranking suggestions were about the need for a higher screen resolution, and still they went for 1366x768...
I'm happily using a laptop at 1280x800, and though I miss the big monitor I used when I had my big beast of a machine set up, I can't say I feel constrained; I just use fewer screen splits in Emacs. Still, for $1500, I'd expect better.
First, at the low end, manufacturers emphasise the screen size, but avoid mentioning resolution, so in my local supermarket there are cheap laptops prominently advertised as 15", but they only have 1366x768 resolution. Perhaps that's what the customers want: a big screen that they can use to watch videos in their bedrooms.
Second, even if you do care about resolution, it's hard to find out what it is. It's usually advertised as some cryptic series of letters ending in GA. QWERTYUGA; ASDFXGA; WTFGA. Look at this madness! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution
I wish they'd specify screens in size, aspect ratio, pixel density, and megapixels. (I know some of those are redundant, but shoppers shouldn't need a calculator.)
If this were a low end laptop destined to be used by everyone I could understand. But this is a high end computer meant to be used by developers and it's just a hair under the price of Retina Mac Book Pros and right up with the price of a Mac Book Air. The offering isn't quite as competitive as I would have hoped and for that cost there are a multitude of other options available that are better.
That's the resolution of all the XPS 13's, I believe. The specs that are different for this model are CPU, memory, graphics card, etc.; things that are likely easy to change. I suppose laptop screens aren't one of those.
It's not. Anything lower than 1440x900 is a deal breaker for me. I rather take a hit in performance than go down to 1366x768. You know something is wrong when your 4.3" phone screen has the same resolution as your 13" laptop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
Yes, but you can't say it doesn't work because it didn't work _for me_. I have found people are really quick to blame Linux when things aren't working on their Linux laptop , but they blame everything else before they blame windows when it happens on a windows based system. Thats why you should always check the consensus of the community* most of the time they can point you in the right direction
*I would just like to point out that in addition to having just a good if not better hardware support across the board , Linux really excels with its community and availability of online resources to fix most problems. I know some people don't like the idea that they might need to go look for solution and just want things to work , and I understand that, but I like knowing if I need it there is help out there I can leverage. Things will break no matter what OS your running and someone will need to fix it.
Not arguing against your point, but there's gotta be a fallacy for this. I know people that refuse to eat a restaurant because they got sick or the food wasn't very good a single time. Or they will never buy a brand of car because they know one person that had a bad experience.
I can imagine people base their computer purchase the same way.
The point isn't that it can be fixed. We all know the answer to that.
The point is the issue shouldn't exist. It's not about Gnome 3/Unity/KDE all deciding create the same interface - it's that they shouldn't have that power to begin with.
Once you create behemoths for managing wireless, power, the display, and rendering what do you expect to happen? These are huge artificial systems that prevent any actual innovation.
The Linux desktop needs awesome APIs and to use modern development practices that allow for decoupling between parts.
For the most part they have awesome API's used to manage those things. Everyone uses the NetworkManager API because it works really really well, and the XrandR API was _ supposed_ to support all the rendering configuration ( most free drivers support it fairly well ). There are also kernel API's for power management, but consider that powermanagement is a little more complex then setting some registers, there is a full stack of changes that need to be made, like when your screen turns off do you want you DE to know to lock the sesison, how about _when_ to turn off stuff, how does a cog type program know when to power stuff down if it doesn't integrate with the DE and X server. also how would the GPU know when to power down if it wasn't integrated with X11. when you get into the grits of power management it really makes sense to have it handled as a system. There might me some abstraction that could be done through D-Bus, but in the end its going to be a big integrated system.
But you're applying the data point of "I didn't have any problems" as your generalisation, I can say from having installed Linux on a weird amount of laptops recently that occasionally things like the trackpads will not have full features, occasionally webcams will fail to be found and/or not work properly and so on. But the thing is, that's just my experience with one specific distro (Ubuntu 11.04) out of the box, and shouldn't be taken for a whole.
Things will break, I fully agree, but for the most part they work really really well. I have installed Linux on scores of laptops , and I have seen some stuff just not work, but in general ( and I think you will find this to be the consensus around the community ) it works great and most laptops work with nothing more then a fresh install of your Distro of choice .
Don't get me wrong, for the most part things do seem to work really well, staggeringly so when you think about how much clout a free upstart like Linux should have. However, certain hardware has got poor support on Linux and people do get bitten by it every now and again, my argument was mostly your single data point, and my single data point and kijin's data point don't make a conclusive one as the same model of laptop might actually have a WiFi card from one manufacturer which craps out or one that works perfectly.
But for the most part Linux does cover hardware pretty well, and I've not seen a 'core' part of a laptop not work properly for a long while.
Just like how installing Fedora on a laptop 8 years ago and having everything work doesn't mean that there aren't some things that are perpetually broken on Linux distros.
It is quite clear what perpetually means in that sentence. Are you really trying to start an argument about semantics with a stranger on the Internet? Do you consider this the best use of your one finite lifetime?
I just don't understand what you're trying to save. It can't be or have a "perpetually unfixed problem" if it "everything work[ed]" at one point in time.
Besides, it's not like there was anything substantial there besides more hand waving old inaccurate stereotypes about linux.
As in, every time I install Linux on a new laptop, as I have several times over the past 5 years or so, problems with WiFi continue to reoccur, and require some level of googling around to resolve. Yet, years later, with an updated distribution on a new computer, they occur again, perpetually.
The problem can remain perpetually unfixed at the distribution level if everyone who installs it is willing to spend time tinkering around to get things to work right.
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.
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.
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.
I'll bite. Please tell me which laptops have fully supported graphics cards, including dynamic switching between integrated and discreet without reboot.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Bumblebee works well for me on a Samsung QX411. Once installed, just prepend 'optirun' to any command (like when running a game) and it will use the discrete graphics card.
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.
>> 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.
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
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.
I'm curious what your experience with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon has been - I was one of the beta testers for the XPS 13 (as noted in my other comment in this thread). I absolutely love the XPS 13, but the X1 Carbon was the other laptop I would have considered getting.
It's been great. It's very light, has good battery life (5+ hours), and is responsive (only tried XFCE) so far. One of the great things about this machine is that it's the same size as 13" ultrabooks, but it has a 14" screen. Some people have said that the 1600x900 screen is a letdown compared to some Asus ultrabooks that sport 1080p displays, but that is most definitely not the case for me. There's more than enough screen real estate for me on the X1 Carbon.
Perhaps it's because I'm running a lightweight Linux distro, but I have absolutely none of the heat problems mentioned in the Verge review. The laptop runs very cool - much more so than my ThinkPad T410.
The trackpad is responsive, although I have little use for it. The keyboard design is fantastic, but the layout is a little annoying. They got rid of the 'back' and forward' keys next to the 'up' key, and I used those all the time in the browser. They also eliminated Scroll Lock, which I had repurposed as a keyboard shortcut. Finally, they moved the multimedia keys from Fn+up/down/left/right to Fn+F10/F11/F12, which is really annoying.
But those are specific to previous ThinkPad owners. The only other real complaint I have is that it's useless for 3D gaming. I installed the Steam Linux beta, and even a game as simple as Cogs[0] stutters. However, I'm not a big gamer, so it's no big loss. In fact, it will probably help my productivity.
Do you mean suspend/resume? It works fine with Xubuntu. I close the laptop, it turns off. I open it up, it turns back on to the lock screen. Then when I log in, it automatically reconnects to wifi within a few seconds. This is all without any configuration.
Battery life is great, I can get 5+ hours. But remember I'm running XFCE - things may not be the same with Unity or KDE.
I just checked the frequency using the xfce4-cpufreq-plugin package, and it looks like the CPU is scaled down to 800 MHz when on battery (the model I selected has a Core i5-3427U CPU @ 1.80 GHz).
It hasn't gotten hot or noisy so far. The most demanding thing I regularly do on this laptop is watch HD video though, so it's not under that much strain. But there are definitely no issues with coding or web browsing.
Yes, I've heard the news as well. I have no interest in a touchscreen laptop though, particularly if Linux support isn't available. In fact, I would look at the release of the touch version as a chance to get the non-touch version on discount (as it will no doubt be once the touch version is released).
> 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
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.
> You can't replace the SSD (it's soldered onto the mobo), and replacing the RAM is not recommended.
That's not quite correct. The SSD is not soldered, it is replaceable. The problem with the SSD is that it's not a standard mSATA part. The RAM does appear to be soldered to the motherboard.
Source: ThinkPad X1 Carbon Hardware Maintenance Manual - http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and-manuals/detail.pa... - SSD replacement instructions on p62; note the absence of RAM replacement instructions, indicating that it is not a Field Replaceable Unit (FRU).
Huh, I watched a review that said the SSD is soldered to the mobo.
As for the RAM, its absence from the hardware maintenance manual is because Lenovo doesn't recommend/support its replacement. You need to remove 7 screws and the entire bottom base of the laptop to do so.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
I haven't had time to do that yet. I mainly use the thinkpad for writing and watching videos when I'm away from home. Windows 8 runs evernote and VCL just fine. I go back to my Mac if I want to do development.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
You can get very nice, lightweight laptops that run Linux perfectly for much less, even from Dell (such as the Dell 14z which was only $300 on black friday). The main tips are to look for laptops that don't have dual graphics cards (nvidia optimus - although it will still work with http://bumblebee-project.org/ ), and google for the laptop model plus "linux" or "ubuntu" to see other folks' experiences with it.
The main issue now though are the new Windows 8 tablets (the Pro ones that mostly are not out yet) - we'll have to see how well they run Linux distros.
I have a Lenovo Ideapad y570, and it does have dual graphics, but it doesn't need Optimus. It has a physical switch, so that means I can use either one whenever I want in Linux or Windows.
I actually think it has more problems in Windows, as sometimes when I switch them, my USB 2.0 driver seems to die, and doesn't recognize the mouse anymore (USB 3.0 one still works), and I have to reboot to get it working again. Not sure why that happens.
It's great to see Dell doing something that resembles innovation, and it's great to see laptops that can run Linux out of the box. But honestly I just don't trust Ubuntu after they built advertising ('online scope results') into their interface. How much more will they cripple their distro as they struggle to monetize? I understand Ubuntu is free, but this fact doesn't benefit the end-consumer much because Microsoft gives Windows to OEMs for practically free and the cost of OSX is irrelevant.
Most people who should be using Linux know how to install it on a wintel machine. I'd rather see Dell put 100% of its open source effort into releasing Linux-compatible drivers for all its laptops instead of marketing niche products.
Thanks for the correction, my information is old. My friend in the XP days told me a company he worked with got licenses for something like 25 dollars each. I just did a google search and it looks like OEM prices have been rising and are much higher now.
> Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working.
Trackpads and wi-fi has been working for me for a long time(not implying this isn't a problem for many people), but what drives me completely insane is the video cards. If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics. The graphic card might or might not run, the card switching will most likely not work, but you can ignore it since you can work with the intel card, right? Well, no. Most of the AGP, whether used or not, will eat up power, the fan will run at full speed and your laptop's behind will be hot enough to stir fry some veggies.
If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, and you can't make it work, just switch off your discrete card.
Laptops in general, and linux laptops tend to run hot. However, don't mess with power settings a lot. Putting harddisks on powersaving mode(refer hdparm) so that they become idle puts unnecessary strain on the disk. You can try out experimenting with cpu frequency(cpufreq-set).
Nice try but, dang the hardware is limited. I have XPS 17 that's heavy, but several times more powerful. I'll continue to run Linux on my Dell in a vitual machine...
I don't want to juggle all the driver issues, etc... Hence the vitual machine for Linux amongst all the other guest OSes. Best of all worlds. Plus Linux isn't my primary working OS, I use it for testing and hobby programming.
Yeah, marvellous. Maybe they've released it in the US. Here in the UK I emailed them last week to enquire about whether they would sell me the exact same model with no OS (or anything but Windows), and he answer was just simply 'no way'.
The UK seems to be terrible for getting Linux pre-installed. I've noticed a few major OEMs release Linux laptops elsewhere, but never bring them to the UK. There's nothing like System76, while smaller countries like the Netherlands seem to have companies something like that.
Do our laws let Microsoft get anti-competitive exclusivity deals? Or are we Brits so establishment-loving that the market isn't there?
Sorry, I should have been clearer: system 76 will ship to the UK, and even now offer UK keyboards for some models. What we don't have is any UK based company like that, selling in GBP and without international shipping charges.
OK, there is linuxemporium.co.uk - but it's mostly selling old stuff, and doesn't exactly look professional.
I remember fondly the days when a 15" 1024x768 noninterlaced monitor was the highest resolution you could get for a PC (excepting exotic hardware that only supported AutoCAD), but that was 20 years ago!
Hopefully this (and the Surface RT) mean vendors are experimenting with ways to get the last of the crap resolution panels out of inventory and this generation of hardware will be the last.
Seriously, my 4.7" cell phone has 768 pixels in the short dimension. For a "developer laptop" this is unacceptable.
Great idea, but I wish they had worked with the 14 inch one instead. It's more or less the same stuff on the inside. Hopefully with more programs like this from companies like Dell, companies like AMD and Nvidia will take their Linux drivers more seriously. (As in, at least get them to work, let alone play a game or two.)
Is it too much to hope that the drivers from this effort are not just free, but also open-source?
Other than that, props to Dell for even attempting something like this. The hardware ain't mind-blowing (as others have pointed out), but hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
Linux is like Europe. Kissenger can't call it on the phone. The laptop isn't a win for Linux. It's a win for Ubuntu. It doesn't do squat for any other distro.
Linux has success. It can continue to be successful on its own terms. But it will never be successful in the same way as Windows. Just as Windows will never be successful in the same way as the Mac ecosystem, and the Mac ecosystem will never be successful in the same way as Linux.
Maybe this will help put some gravity around fixing Skype for Linux. Alternatively, does anyone know of a good video conferencing tool for Linux that also supports Windows as well?
I'm going to throw myself out there on this one... but what's wrong with Skype on Linux? I rarely use it (so maybe that's why I'm not understanding), but I've done interviews for multiple podcasts on two different laptops (both with 12.04) and I've never had a problem.
I seem to have a lot of trouble with how it manages the brightness of my camera. `luvcview` displays a working, normal image, but Skype really dims the lights. Also, people report that they receive the message, "requires Skype premium" when the attempt to begin a screen sharing session.
These issues make Skype on Ubuntu a non-starter for me.
I think 4-2 is the 2011 Macbook Air. I've been thinking about getting the 2012 and putting Ubuntu on there, but there seem to be a number of semi-unsupported steps required to resolve kernel panics, you have to disable apic support and various other issues.
I regret that there's no good documentation for installing on the 5-2 (2012 13" Air), something I have to take some responsibility for since I run Ubuntu on such a laptop and didn't share my experiences.
In short, most things work fine on Ubuntu 12.10. I first tried using this guide[1] to install Ubuntu 12.04, but had lots of gnarly install issues. I then tried with the regular 'amd64+mac' graphical installer for Ubuntu 12.10 beta, and got it running easily. I was able to ignore most of [1] except for installing and configuring macfanctld, and making the touchpad perform decently using the advice in [2]. (Unlike the author of [2], I hate tap-to-click, so I turned the TapButton[1-3] settings off.)
There are still a few nagging issues I haven't fixed. The Air boots with brightness at the max and won't let me turn it down until logged in, and it loses my touchpad settings on reboot, so I have a little bash script I run to fix them.
I was excited when I heard about this initial project, and was holding out for the official release specs. The display is a big disappointment, and show stopper for me.
I do agree this is a great first step and partnership for hardware manufacturers, specifically for device drivers.
I really do hope this is successful enough that Dell sustains the product line and continues to iterate on improving it over the next couple years. I would love a Mac Airbook alternative ultrabook for development.
Additionally, let's hope this spurs some competition in the market for other manufacturers. I've done ZERO market analysis, but it seems like quite a niche market that is rip for the picking (*NIX DEV Ulatrabook), and has the potential for decent profits w/ the right hardware specs and pricing.
Kudos to Dell for taking the imitative in the right direction. Let's see how it pans out.
Dell has a bunch of engineers working on Linux support for this notebook, they have to pay them somehow. I don't mind paying an extra $50. The big problem is that the Linux version will probably never go on sale, yet the Windows version will be on sale more often then not so there will be a lot more than a $50 delta. I hope I'm wrong.
The Windows version comes preloaded with crapware that Dell gets paid to put there. This subsidises the price. Until Linux comes with all the "free trial!" garbage as well, it's likely to cost more.
And FWIW, I've had major problems with wifi and integrated graphics display as recently as Ubuntu 12.04! Virtual Linux on Win 7 works fine though. And I've been with Linux since Slackware 1.0/RHEL 5 (and several distros later....), still not given up on Linux.... continue to be hopeful....
I'm not sure how they plan to compete with Macs? The price is definitely not competitive. I care about computing experience. When it comes down to it, I haven't found a better *nix workstation than my Macbook Pro.
I love Ubuntu. I use it for all of my server deployments. I'd love an Ubuntu laptop that works well. But, it has to work better than my Macbook Pro for me to consider switching.
360 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadA few tips, just cram in a decent screen and glass trackpad.
How did 1366x768 ever become acceptable?
I know it's a 13" screen but still...
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/ByVPmsSeSEG
I think it's a combination of two factors.
First, at the low end, manufacturers emphasise the screen size, but avoid mentioning resolution, so in my local supermarket there are cheap laptops prominently advertised as 15", but they only have 1366x768 resolution. Perhaps that's what the customers want: a big screen that they can use to watch videos in their bedrooms.
Second, even if you do care about resolution, it's hard to find out what it is. It's usually advertised as some cryptic series of letters ending in GA. QWERTYUGA; ASDFXGA; WTFGA. Look at this madness! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution
I wish they'd specify screens in size, aspect ratio, pixel density, and megapixels. (I know some of those are redundant, but shoppers shouldn't need a calculator.)
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.
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.
1. http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210
*I would just like to point out that in addition to having just a good if not better hardware support across the board , Linux really excels with its community and availability of online resources to fix most problems. I know some people don't like the idea that they might need to go look for solution and just want things to work , and I understand that, but I like knowing if I need it there is help out there I can leverage. Things will break no matter what OS your running and someone will need to fix it.
I can imagine people base their computer purchase the same way.
I love Linux, but if you can't admit to how fucked up certain basic concepts are you are living in a TTY.
You can install any number of window managers on Fedora. You can even do it at install time using Anaconda.
The point is the issue shouldn't exist. It's not about Gnome 3/Unity/KDE all deciding create the same interface - it's that they shouldn't have that power to begin with.
Once you create behemoths for managing wireless, power, the display, and rendering what do you expect to happen? These are huge artificial systems that prevent any actual innovation.
The Linux desktop needs awesome APIs and to use modern development practices that allow for decoupling between parts.
What do you mean by "power management" here? I am having a hard time figuring out what has window manager got to do with power management?
But for the most part Linux does cover hardware pretty well, and I've not seen a 'core' part of a laptop not work properly for a long while.
Just like how installing Fedora on a laptop 8 years ago and having everything work doesn't mean that there aren't some things that are perpetually broken on Linux distros.
(look up "perpetually").
Besides, it's not like there was anything substantial there besides more hand waving old inaccurate stereotypes about linux.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perpetual
occurring continually : indefinitely long-continued
As in, every time I install Linux on a new laptop, as I have several times over the past 5 years or so, problems with WiFi continue to reoccur, and require some level of googling around to resolve. Yet, years later, with an updated distribution on a new computer, they occur again, perpetually.
The problem can remain perpetually unfixed at the distribution level if everyone who installs it is willing to spend time tinkering around to get things to work right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although at the moment it's a manual install, it should find its way into popular distros soon enough.
http://bumblebee-project.org/
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.
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.
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/x...
1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3232132/lenovo-thinkpad-x1...
Perhaps it's because I'm running a lightweight Linux distro, but I have absolutely none of the heat problems mentioned in the Verge review. The laptop runs very cool - much more so than my ThinkPad T410.
The trackpad is responsive, although I have little use for it. The keyboard design is fantastic, but the layout is a little annoying. They got rid of the 'back' and forward' keys next to the 'up' key, and I used those all the time in the browser. They also eliminated Scroll Lock, which I had repurposed as a keyboard shortcut. Finally, they moved the multimedia keys from Fn+up/down/left/right to Fn+F10/F11/F12, which is really annoying.
But those are specific to previous ThinkPad owners. The only other real complaint I have is that it's useless for 3D gaming. I installed the Steam Linux beta, and even a game as simple as Cogs[0] stutters. However, I'm not a big gamer, so it's no big loss. In fact, it will probably help my productivity.
0: http://www.cogsgame.com/
Do you mean suspend/resume? It works fine with Xubuntu. I close the laptop, it turns off. I open it up, it turns back on to the lock screen. Then when I log in, it automatically reconnects to wifi within a few seconds. This is all without any configuration.
Battery life is great, I can get 5+ hours. But remember I'm running XFCE - things may not be the same with Unity or KDE.
Yes but also CPU throttling. With that battery life it must be working. Does it get very hot or noisy?
It hasn't gotten hot or noisy so far. The most demanding thing I regularly do on this laptop is watch HD video though, so it's not under that much strain. But there are definitely no issues with coding or web browsing.
Isn't a touch version of that coming out soon? Even if you don't like touch, it might be good to have if it's not too much extra cost.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon...
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
That's not quite correct. The SSD is not soldered, it is replaceable. The problem with the SSD is that it's not a standard mSATA part. The RAM does appear to be soldered to the motherboard.
Source: ThinkPad X1 Carbon Hardware Maintenance Manual - http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and-manuals/detail.pa... - SSD replacement instructions on p62; note the absence of RAM replacement instructions, indicating that it is not a Field Replaceable Unit (FRU).
As for the RAM, its absence from the hardware maintenance manual is because Lenovo doesn't recommend/support its replacement. You need to remove 7 screws and the entire bottom base of the laptop to do so.
56. 56 goddamn screws.
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.
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.
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".
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.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The main issue now though are the new Windows 8 tablets (the Pro ones that mostly are not out yet) - we'll have to see how well they run Linux distros.
I actually think it has more problems in Windows, as sometimes when I switch them, my USB 2.0 driver seems to die, and doesn't recognize the mouse anymore (USB 3.0 one still works), and I have to reboot to get it working again. Not sure why that happens.
Most people who should be using Linux know how to install it on a wintel machine. I'd rather see Dell put 100% of its open source effort into releasing Linux-compatible drivers for all its laptops instead of marketing niche products.
Practically free? I don't think so, except for Windows Starter Edition on Netbooks and those have strict guidelines on what qualifies as a netbook.
Trackpads and wi-fi has been working for me for a long time(not implying this isn't a problem for many people), but what drives me completely insane is the video cards. If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics. The graphic card might or might not run, the card switching will most likely not work, but you can ignore it since you can work with the intel card, right? Well, no. Most of the AGP, whether used or not, will eat up power, the fan will run at full speed and your laptop's behind will be hot enough to stir fry some veggies.
If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, and you can't make it work, just switch off your discrete card.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics
Laptops in general, and linux laptops tend to run hot. However, don't mess with power settings a lot. Putting harddisks on powersaving mode(refer hdparm) so that they become idle puts unnecessary strain on the disk. You can try out experimenting with cpu frequency(cpufreq-set).
Wow what a deal. /s
(PS, It's not quite Dell with this under-powered laptop, but they're close! )
I find that intensely annoying.
Do our laws let Microsoft get anti-competitive exclusivity deals? Or are we Brits so establishment-loving that the market isn't there?
You mean this is not available in the UK? (Genuine question.)
So why is omg ubuntu covering it? (genuine Q)
OK, there is linuxemporium.co.uk - but it's mostly selling old stuff, and doesn't exactly look professional.
Close tab.
But true. Good news is that more and more vendors get this.
Hopefully this (and the Surface RT) mean vendors are experimenting with ways to get the last of the crap resolution panels out of inventory and this generation of hardware will be the last.
Seriously, my 4.7" cell phone has 768 pixels in the short dimension. For a "developer laptop" this is unacceptable.
Other than that, props to Dell for even attempting something like this. The hardware ain't mind-blowing (as others have pointed out), but hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
And if you think I'm wrong, what does this get you if your organization was standardized on Fedora?
If the vendor doesn't support it - this is why Linux fails
If it works and the vendor supports it - this is why Linux fails
hmmm...
Linux is like Europe. Kissenger can't call it on the phone. The laptop isn't a win for Linux. It's a win for Ubuntu. It doesn't do squat for any other distro.
Linux has success. It can continue to be successful on its own terms. But it will never be successful in the same way as Windows. Just as Windows will never be successful in the same way as the Mac ecosystem, and the Mac ecosystem will never be successful in the same way as Linux.
Long live the Commodore Amiga.
These issues make Skype on Ubuntu a non-starter for me.
*edit: plus the vizio TVs are really nice.
For the same price you can get a MacBook Air with a 1440x900 screen.
In short, most things work fine on Ubuntu 12.10. I first tried using this guide[1] to install Ubuntu 12.04, but had lots of gnarly install issues. I then tried with the regular 'amd64+mac' graphical installer for Ubuntu 12.10 beta, and got it running easily. I was able to ignore most of [1] except for installing and configuring macfanctld, and making the touchpad perform decently using the advice in [2]. (Unlike the author of [2], I hate tap-to-click, so I turned the TapButton[1-3] settings off.)
There are still a few nagging issues I haven't fixed. The Air boots with brightness at the max and won't let me turn it down until logged in, and it loses my touchpad settings on reboot, so I have a little bash script I run to fix them.
[1]: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2039799
[2]: http://uselessuseofcat.com/?p=74
Or $1430 (still over a hundred dollars less) with twice as big of an SSD: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-MD232LL-13-3-Inch-VERSIO...
This XPS does have 8GB RAM (versus 4), but that's the only big advantage that sticks out to me.
I do agree this is a great first step and partnership for hardware manufacturers, specifically for device drivers.
I really do hope this is successful enough that Dell sustains the product line and continues to iterate on improving it over the next couple years. I would love a Mac Airbook alternative ultrabook for development.
Additionally, let's hope this spurs some competition in the market for other manufacturers. I've done ZERO market analysis, but it seems like quite a niche market that is rip for the picking (*NIX DEV Ulatrabook), and has the potential for decent profits w/ the right hardware specs and pricing.
Kudos to Dell for taking the imitative in the right direction. Let's see how it pans out.
> Edit spur competition
[1] http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-l321x-mlk/pd
[2] http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/xps-13-linux/pd.aspx
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/11/system76-unviel-17-extrem...
And FWIW, I've had major problems with wifi and integrated graphics display as recently as Ubuntu 12.04! Virtual Linux on Win 7 works fine though. And I've been with Linux since Slackware 1.0/RHEL 5 (and several distros later....), still not given up on Linux.... continue to be hopeful....
I must be mad! (/joking to myself there)
Erm, gotta go, bye.
I love Ubuntu. I use it for all of my server deployments. I'd love an Ubuntu laptop that works well. But, it has to work better than my Macbook Pro for me to consider switching.