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Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

(arstechnica.com)
520 points iProject | 4 comments | 29 Nov 12 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.315s | source
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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 14:53 UTC] No.4847958[source]▶
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.

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1. alimoeeny ◴[29 Nov 12 15:04 UTC] No.4848021[source]▶
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.
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2. efuquen ◴[29 Nov 12 15:16 UTC] No.4848098[source]▶
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.
3. dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 15:34 UTC] No.4848209[source]▶
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.
4. tikhonj ◴[29 Nov 12 17:55 UTC] No.4849137[source]▶
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).