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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: 0.01s | 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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driverdan ◴[29 Nov 12 15:35 UTC] No.4848214[source]▶
I'll bite. Please tell me which laptops have fully supported graphics cards, including dynamic switching between integrated and discreet without reboot.
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JasonFruit ◴[29 Nov 12 15:48 UTC] No.4848304[source]▶
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?
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arrrg ◴[29 Nov 12 16:24 UTC] No.4848529[source]▶
Do you really not know that?

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.

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1. Symmetry ◴[29 Nov 12 17:35 UTC] No.4848967[source]▶
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.
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2. tomflack ◴[30 Nov 12 12:08 UTC] No.4852889[source]▶
Plenty of other things use GPU other than games.