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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's as good a desktop experience as OSX, but for a hacker, Ubuntu isn't half bad, and continues to improve by leaps and bounds. Less and less 'sysadmin crap' is necessary these days.

And you can get an Ubuntu machine from Dell that is very well supported.

I wouldn't recommend it to my parents, just yet (they're happy with OSX), but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Dell+Ubuntu to people here. It might not be as sexy, but it's a setup that works pretty well. I had a tibook a number of years ago, and while it was certainly a beautiful machine that got lots of looks, in the end, I'm just as happy with my ugly clunky (but cheap and well supported) Dell.

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Dell laptops are great if you consider maintenance and repair. I spilled a whole glass of red wine on my Dell Inspiron 1710. Order a $20 keyboard, pull off a piece of trim and undo two screws, do the reverse operations with the new keyboard, and I'm done! It wouldn't have been so easy with my G4 Powerbook! I know, because I've taken it apart a bunch of times, once to upgrade the hard drive. The thing has screws that could be used by watchmakers, and lots of them!

Yeah, if I was optimizing on price I would just get a Dell laptop and throw Ubuntu on it. (Although I would make sure that all the hardware is well-supported first. I have spent far too many hours patching kernels and adjusting parameters when using Linux with brand new hardware.)

You can buy Dells with Ubuntu on them:

http://www.dell.com/ubuntu

It was pretty cool to get it, open it up, and see it boot Ubuntu. I admit I did have to tweak it just a bit (about 15 minutes of googling and config files), but I think it was one of the first ones, hopefully they've gotten even better. I chatted with some of the guys working on it at OSCON last year, and they wrote down a few of the bugs I had found.

I got one of these right after they came out, too. Having had no experience with Linux before then, I've spent more than 15 minutes at a time figuring out how to get things to work. Right away, it was a couple nights on nvidia driver and wpa support. And since then, about once a month, I'll have to spend a whole night or two figuring something else out... last weekend it was something with generic vs rt kernels for ubuntustudio. Anyhoo, looking back, I wouldn't suggest it to any relative novices (like me) who really just want to use their computer to accomplish normal tasks, and who aren't into tinkering for the sake of it. Gnome/KDE in K/Ubuntu are really convenient and slick 29/30 days, but to be honest, I'm getting tired of fighting my computer and I'll likely pick up a Mac when I get a new desktop this summer.

Ditto. I also acquired a Dell+Ubuntu in 6/07. Switched to a Macbook in 10/07. If you are making decent contract money it just isn't worth the hassle to, for instance, try and get a decent music playing software w/ the appropriate codec support.

Well, if what you want out of a computer is simply and exclusively tool, then some proprietary system might well be better, although Ubuntu is getting close.

If, on the other hand, you relish the ability to open things up and hack on them if needs be (whence "Hacker News"), then the extra effort 'fighting' with Linux is often time well spent. It's a good feeling to know a system from the ground up, or (as is the case for most of us), at least be able to figure out bits and pieces from time to time.

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