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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Beware. I went out of my way to get an Ubuntu certified laptop[1]. It took me months to get it to a usable state. Graphics drivers crashed or corrupted the screen[2]. Bluetooth didn't work. Wifi didn't work. While suspended to RAM, it drained 10% of the battery every hour. In short, it was a nightmare.

I've had it for almost two years now, and I've given up on getting Bluetooth to work. After resuming from suspend, the wifi works about half the time, and screen brightness is always set to maximum. It's tolerable, but I only use the laptop when I have to.

I doubt I'll ever buy a Linux laptop again, but if I do, I'll be sure to try it hands-on before buying.

1. The Lenovo X140e: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201309-14195/

2. https://twitter.com/ggreer/status/548923450640056321

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> Beware. I went out of my way to get an Ubuntu certified laptop[1]. It took me months to get it to a usable state.

Why didn't you return it and get -say- a Thinkpad? (Were you -perhaps- just curious how shitty the "Ubuntu Certified Laptop" program is?) It clearly failed the "Fitness for advertised purpose" test. AFAIK -if you're in the US- the seller can't refuse to accept your return... unless it was sold as-is.

> I doubt I'll ever buy a Linux laptop again, but if I do, I'll be sure to try it hands-on before buying.

I've found great success with the following method:

* Get a detailed list of the parts inside a given laptop. (lspci info from the target model is a really good sign)

* Run screaming if the video card is made by Nvidia. [0]

* Find if there are in-tree kernel drivers for each of the parts. (If there are, this is a really good sign.)

* Find the out-of-tree drivers for the remaining parts, and see if there are solid plans to get them in-tree. (If there are any such plans, that's a good sign.)

* Discover the known issues for all of those drivers.

* If the drivers seem to do everything that I need them to, and the known issues list doesn't contain any show-stoppers, the laptop will likely work just fine. :)

[0] I know that this is a controversial opinion. I've had awful luck with the nouveau driver and really bad luck with the official Nvidia driver. Other people haven't. I'll stick with Intel-powered laptop video cards if I can. :)

> Why didn't you return it and get -say- a Thinkpad?

The Lenovo X140e is a ThinkPad.[1] I didn't blindly trust Ubuntu's certification. I made sure to get a brand that historically has had good Linux support. I also knew about Nvidia graphics and avoided them. Still, I got burned.

I don't doubt your checklist is good advice for buying a Linux laptop, but it's simply too time consuming to check all of those things. Even if it wasn't, the likelihood of everything working well is low. All it takes is one bad driver for one piece of hardware and the laptop becomes a constant annoyance. Considering the number of hardware devices (Bluetooth, wifi, mic, camera(s), trackpad, GPU, fan, power saving, etc.) it's all but certain something will go wrong. Maybe audio won't automatically switch between headphone and speaker output. Maybe the fan will run at a few discrete speeds instead of gradually ramping up/down. Maybe it will wake from sleep if you open the lid, but not if you hit a key on the keyboard.

I'd rather just pay money and get something that I know will work. That's why my main development machine is a MacBook. I wish there was a competing brand of unix laptops, but so far… no dice. :(

1. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x140e... Though after I purchased it, some people told me it wasn't a true ThinkPad, whatever that means.

> The Lenovo X140e is a ThinkPad.

Oh, heh. Derp. Edit: I mean to say: My bad. I overlooked that. :(

I see at [0] that the only Ubuntu Certified configuration is with a rather ancient pre-installed version of Ubuntu. Did you get the system in that configuration, or did you purchase it and put Linux on it? [1]

Regardless. Why didn't you return it and get something that worked? Curiosity? Cussedness?

> [I]t's simply too time consuming to check all of those things.

Odd. I find it reasonable to spend between a couple of days to a week researching the suitability of something that I'll use throughout the day, every single day for next three-to-ten years. Perhaps my opinion is atypical.

> Considering the number of hardware devices (Bluetooth, wifi, mic, camera(s), trackpad, GPU, fan, power saving, etc.) it's all but certain something will go wrong.

I guess I've had fantastic luck with my personal selections and the recommendations that I've given to others. Given that luck is my super power, I'm somewhat willing to believe that my experience is somewhat atypical. :)

Anyway. Good luck with your projects and such, and I hope that Apple keeps producing hardware that meets your needs.

[0] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201309-14195/

[1] Still... one would expect that any Ubuntu Certified Laptop that has a supported hardware configuration would be detected by the Ubuntu installer and configured appropriately (or you'd get a big fat warning when the hardware isn't "supported" by a later Ubuntu release). OTOH, Canonical isn't the best at getting things right, so... :-/

> I find it reasonable to spend between a couple of days to a week researching the suitability of something that I'll use throughout the day, every single day for next three-to-ten years. Perhaps my opinion is atypical.

Aargh, this is precisely the sort of attitude that is causing problems in the first place! Of course some research is necessary prior to any purchase, but the issue here is that clear and correct information doesn't even exist in the first place!!

The expectation of nerds that people have this sort of time to take off simply to get a working computer in this day and age is mind boggling. People shouldn't HAVE to take a week to do research to get basic things like this to work.

It's not reasonable and your opinion is atypical for people who have full time jobs with long hours and families to look after. I really want to use and support Free/Libre Gnu/Linux, whilst still being productive. But many Linux users have better things to do than trawl through lspci, do literature reviews of ancient threads on email lists and bug reports, etc, etc, and then finally somehow manage to design a hardware/software configuration that even mostly kind of works. The very worst thing of all is that the typical Linux nerd thinks that this is normal.

So just get a laptop with pre-installed Linux then...

Can you give me a recommendation?

I think that Dell do some. There is a company called System 76 that sells pre-installed Ubuntu boxes. I can't speak for either companies products having personally tried neither myself. I will be using one of them for my next purchase but I'm not sure which.

> Did you get the system in that configuration, or did you purchase it and put Linux on it?

I tried to get it with Ubuntu preinstalled, but neither Lenovo's website nor their phone support could configure it that way. After about 20 minutes on the phone, I managed to get the exact hardware configuration shown on Ubuntu's certification page: AMD A4-5000, Broadcom BCM43142, etc. In hindsight, I doubt Lenovo ever sold an X140e with Ubuntu preinstalled.

> Regardless. Why didn't you return it and get something that worked? Curiosity? Cussedness?

When I first turned it on, I noticed the X140e had several annoying LEDs. Both "ThinkPad" logos had glowing red dots in their i's. There was also a large green LED near the camera. It glowed whenever wifi was powered-up (pretty much all the time). I found these annoying, so I painted them over. Oops. Next time I'll use nail polish, which can be removed with acetone.

> I find it reasonable to spend between a couple of days to a week researching the suitability of something that I'll use throughout the day, every single day for next three-to-ten years.

Our thoughts on this matter are quite similar. On average, I spend almost 10 hours a day using my primary development machine. I upgrade every 1-2 years, which works out to 5,400 hours of use. That's a lot of time interacting with one piece of hardware. I definitely want to make sure I get the best tool for the job. That 5,400 hours has another implication: Amortized over the life of the machine, even a $3,000 laptop will only cost ≈50 cents per hour. That makes me extremely insensitive to price. I simply want whatever works best.[1]

As peatfreak said, research won't guarantee satisfaction. The only way to really know if a piece of hardware will work for you is to actually use it. That's one huge advantage of Apple (and now Microsoft) products: I can walk into a store and test the hardware/software combo. In just a few minutes, I can tell if the it lacks the annoyances in my list[2]. These details are extremely hard to verify without actually using the machine.

I would be much more open to getting a Linux laptop if I could try it out before buying. Unfortunately, I don't think the market is big enough to make brick-and-mortar stores feasible.

1. I've written about this in more detail at http://geoff.greer.fm/2010/10/30/expensive-computers-are-wor...

2. http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/07/25/laptop-annoyances-or-why-i-...

> Run screaming if the video card is made by Nvidia.

In my experience, it's the opposite. 5-6 years ago, ATI was the friendly one and nvidia gave you hell trying to get it to work. Now it's flipped - the ATI cards I've tried just plain don't work, whereas the nvidia ones will work, and with a few choice harsh words, will work well. Just my anecdata, though, and this is with desktop cards, not laptops (I use thinkpads with intel graphics...)

Are the ATI cards you've been using the absolute newest ones, or a couple of generations back?

Also, are you using the closed-source or the open-source ATI drivers?

And, are you using Ubuntu, or are you using some other distro? (My experience with non-LTS Ubuntu has been... substantially less than stellar over the past several years.)

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