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Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

(arstechnica.com)
520 points iProject | 3 comments | 29 Nov 12 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.615s | 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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kijin ◴[29 Nov 12 15:21 UTC] No.4848124[source]▶
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.

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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 15:37 UTC] No.4848228[source]▶
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.

1. http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210

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emp_ ◴[29 Nov 12 15:39 UTC] No.4848242[source]▶
Consumers and their whole experience of one are the only data point they use to make decisions after purchases.
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1. dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 15:49 UTC] No.4848314[source]▶
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.

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2. will_work4tears ◴[29 Nov 12 16:06 UTC] No.4848430[source]▶
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.

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3. stonemetal ◴[29 Nov 12 17:02 UTC] No.4848737[source]▶
Hasty generalization, or Unrepresentative Sample.