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Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

(arstechnica.com)
520 points iProject | 2 comments | 29 Nov 12 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.015s | 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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batgaijin ◴[29 Nov 12 15:42 UTC] No.4848266[source]▶
Dude when I install Fedora it comes with less power management options because of the _WINDOW MANAGER_!!!

I love Linux, but if you can't admit to how fucked up certain basic concepts are you are living in a TTY.

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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 15:50 UTC] No.4848324[source]▶
Debate.

You can install any number of window managers on Fedora. You can even do it at install time using Anaconda.

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1. batgaijin ◴[29 Nov 12 16:10 UTC] No.4848453{3}[source]▶
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.

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2. dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 16:31 UTC] No.4848555[source]▶
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.