←back to thread

Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

(arstechnica.com)
520 points iProject | 1 comments | 29 Nov 12 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
Show context
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.

replies(16): >>4848021 #>>4848075 #>>4848124 #>>4848125 #>>4848147 #>>4848207 #>>4848214 #>>4848275 #>>4848375 #>>4848551 #>>4848605 #>>4848747 #>>4848778 #>>4848865 #>>4850179 #>>4851665 #
1. fernly ◴[30 Nov 12 03:20 UTC] No.4851665[source]▶
"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.