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Comment by rufius | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather be running something not Linux on a laptop... and I do. I use it on the desktop, but its shite on the laptop. Awful wireless and less than stellar performance as far as battery life goes compared to Vista (and likely Win 7).

Meh. All the OS's suck, its just a matter of choosing one that sucks the least for your use case.

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Are you serious? I had to reinstall Windows on my laptop the other day, but since I didn't have a Windows CD with me, I installed Ubuntu to use in the meantime until I got back home to reinstall Windows.

Ubuntu worked fine out of the box and detected all the drivers perfectly, and the wireless worked fine. The battery life applet in particular was extremely nice, providing a watt-by-watt breakdown of power usage over time. To put it simply--everything Just Worked. Now, I had a huge number of pet peeves about 8.1 which I discovered soon after I installed it--but despite the various minor but annoying problems I had with it, it worked.

So then I installed Windows when I got home, since that's the platform I develop on.

It didn't have any LAN drivers, so I had to grab a USB thumbdrive to install those.

Nor did it have wireless drivers. Or graphics drivers. Or sound drivers. Oh, and it bluescreened when it tried to install the webcam drivers, so I had to force it not to. It had basically nothing out of the box.

It took me an entire day to get Windows working with a basic development environment, all my drivers, and all the latest updates. By comparison, this took 30 minutes on Ubuntu.

Laptops seem to be Windows' week point with regards to drivers: it seems as if Microsoft has completely ignored them with regards to hardware support. Given this kind of experience, it's no wonder Linux is making inroads in the laptop market!

Laptops seem to be the weak point of a lot of things, and it makes sense: nonstandard hardware, heavy use (movement), batteries, suspend...

In the end, it's all dependent on your hardware. Some laptops work well with linux, some do not. Some have buggy ACPI, some do not. Forex: my laptop works great with suspend and hibernate. My wireless card has OSS drivers. Not all laptops do.

Agreed, I've actually had more trouble with Ubuntu quirks on my System76 laptop than I did on my old Vaio.

> Laptops seem to be Windows' week point with regards to drivers

I disagree. I had the exact same experience with a 2002 IBM ThinkStation. Intel Chipset - as standard as anything comes. Ubuntu worked out of the box, Windows had nothing. It booted in 640x480 (IIRC, maybe it was 800x600) for crying out loud.

The point that Linux enthusiasts become Linux realists is when they realize they are afraid to put their laptop to sleep by closing the lid.

Bingo! That is why for the past few years every laptop I have bought has OS X on it. The hardware works, in particular sleep suspend. Close the lid and it goes to sleep, open the lid and it wakes up in moments, not thirty seconds. On the desktop I run Linux, but for a laptop it is all OS X. Everything I do is c/c++, unix, or web related so working in OS X doesn't matter.

My Eee Pc 901 works fine with suspend/resume, both take just a couple of seconds. The only thing that sometimes fail is audio, but that is easily recovered.

EDIT: With Ubuntu 8.10

"Easily recovered" translates to "minor pain in the ass"

Lot of build up for the pain body, bro.

The point that Linux enthusiasts become Linux realists is when they realize it doesn't magically work on every computer, and buy something to suit.

I hit the power button, choose suspend or hibernate.

Later I hit the keyboard to resume, enter my screensaver password, and resume work.

Edit: I play music and download files with the lid closed. So I don't want my computer to turn off when I do that. And OS X uses screensaver when resuming too - I own one.

That's pretty long-winded. I save several seconds on each of those operations by not having to do any of them, ever - just close the lid, open the lid.

I love my Mac.

That was actually the switching point for me, from Linux to OS X. After months of effort, I finally got suspend/resume working well on my laptop, but still couldn't find a way to close the lid, connect to a monitor, and have X11 automagically handle the screen resolution shift.

I'm not sure I could switch back; I'm more likely to switch to Windows than Linux again, just for the international support.

Me too, and Debian runs great on it; suspend/resume included.

uh, suspend/resume works fine on both my laptop and my netbook under linux...

But keep telling yourself that Windows is the future; it's part of my competitive advantage ;-)

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