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Comment by Prrometheus | Hacker News Reader

It took days of forum diving to get Ubuntu up and running on my desktop. My wireless networking still doesn't work after following a handful of 20-step installation guides, compiling a few kernel modules, editing a few configuration files and the like. Eventually I gave up and strung a 100 ft. Cat 5 cable to the house router. If I weren't already so determined to use it, I would have given up and spent $99 on an XP disk a long time ago.

That said, Ubuntu works great on my Lenovo laptop, not that you would know that from the gargantuan and labyrinthine hardware compatibility lists.

Linux is hard. It takes commitment or an IT guy.

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It takes buying compatible hardware, and things will Just Work. With Windows, the manufacturers design their hardware to work with it. With MacOS, you can't run it on most hardware anyways. With Linux, you have to spend some care chosing hardware -- mainly wireless networking these days; Graphics are far better than they were about a year ago, since ATI released documentation.

It doesn't take any effort to get Linux working on hardware that it claims to support. In fact, I find it far easier to get Linux working on supported hardware than Windows; the install is far smoother, there are no drivers to hunt down after the install, and the software that I care about is 90% preinstalled. the last 10% is just a click in a nice GUI away, and I don't have to search around the internet for a reliable source to download from.

The problem is that it will take you at least a few hours' commitment to find compatible hardware. If you'd also like to buy a box at a good value, the problem becomes exponentially harder.

Hardware compatibility is getting better, for sure. The biggest glaring hole is Linux support for USB wireless peripherals (something a majority of home desktop computers use nowadays). Also, software support for the 64-bit architecture lags behind support for 32-bit architecture despite the fact that every new box is going to have more than 4 gigs of RAM in a year or two.

For 64 bit architecture, the only big hole I found was the flash player -- it's simply broken, even with the npviewer plugin.

As far as wired networks/desktop hardware goes, I find that things Just Work(tm). Laptops, yeah. You do need to google, or buy with Linux preinstalled. thankfully, there are more and more places that sell Linux laptops these days.

Amazon's MP3 downloader and the most recent student version of Matlab also do not support 64 bit architecture.

Most of the stuff in the repositories is good on 64 bit, much of everything else is not.

Hm. Never used the MP3 downloader myself, and Octave has been sufficiently compatible (ie, every bit of code I've encountered/written worked on both) for me to do all the Matlab courses and assignments that I've worked on. I suppose that I should have qualified my original statement -- all the software I cared about as an engineering-physics/computer science student that ran on Linux in the first place runs just fine on Linux 64 bit. (I miss CAD and a good GUI circuit designer, but those were also missing from 32 bit Linux)

It either Just Works or you're in for some pain as you google for somebody who had the same problem as you or try to get help on a forum. I had little trouble getting Ubuntu to work on the machine I'm using now, but I have had serious problems before.

I've been using linux since 2002 and things are getting better. With Ubuntu, your chances of throwing it at a random machine and having it Just Work aren't bad - but they're still far from certain.

Yeah, it can be a pain. Here's my setup (hope it helps):

I've got ubuntu 8.04 running with a PCI 802.11n card, the EW-8828 from EDImax. It's based on the RT2860T chip. I used the open source drivers on RALink's site. It works really well. I'm using it on a WPA-2 network at home (Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n).

Let me know if you want more specifics.

Or picking the right hardware (or getting lucky). Generally Lenovo or boring old Dell boxes (laptops) work quite well with Ubuntu or Fedora (fedora is notable becuase it doesn't include any proprietary drivers, so its even more fussy with hardware then ubuntu).

I am very impressed with how well Ubuntu works on my Lenovo laptop. That said, I couldn't find that information before buying it and I took a gamble with the purchase. I had a nice pit of fear in my stomach when I clicked the "purchase" button on a $1,200 order hoping that it would be compatible.

Dell sells pre-installed Ubuntu laptops, but only with glossy screens.

I hate those glossy screens.

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