Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
What I'd like (and I suspect many other developers would too) is a nice laptop that I can install Linux on, and have it Just Work.
What it looks like Dell is providing is a nice laptop, but with a custom build of Ubuntu installed. If Dell's Windows installs are any indication, that means it's going to be loaded with crapware or custom non-OSS drivers. This is just speculation, but the fact that you can't dual-boot Windows on it is a big hint. Who knows what crapware they're going to load up on it, and then you'll be tied to their special brand of Ubuntu if you want upgrades or support.
What Dell should do instead is work with hardware manufacturers to iron out Linux driver bugs for just one nice laptop. Then sell that laptop with a stock Ubuntu build and let developers go to town. I'd pay a lot of money for something like that. Instead, today I have to buy a cheap Dell laptop, install Ubuntu, and deal with the driver headaches that exist to this day. (And don't tell me Linux is a magical fairy land because it Works For You, because it doesn't Just Work for me. It hasn't for years and it still doesn't today.)
They look nice, maybe you should get one.
Just make sure your ultrabook is Ubuntu-certified or something and let people install the official version.
https://www.system76.com/laptops/
Or Ohava:
Ohava is new to me though - thanks!
They probably don't mean the laptop "can't dual-boot Windows," but that it requires extra steps in deleting Linux, installing Windows, then installing Linux.
Well, the first thing I want is for it to just work. Sleep/Wake should just work. The trackpad should just work. Etc. Oh, and it should all work well.
After that I would love to be able to install some other version of linux and have it just work, but having a Dell version that just works is a big improvement over things not just working.
And that's just the way I like it, because in the end (for me), its the only OS I can configure to such a degree that it lets me "just work".
You are right, this is my perspective, but for Dell it's also a matter of numbers. Which direction, if they can't do both now, will sell more laptops, cause fewer returns, etc.
Also, IMHO, weather dell is doing exactly what you want or not, they are continuing to support freedom of choice, freedom of software, and the hacker community in general. I commend them for the effort, and would love to see other vendors follow suit.
I don't remember having any problems.
I hear people swoon over a particular Lenovo/Thinkpad model, but have no idea which one it is.
IIR I had some acpi driver issue--in fact, had to manually white list my model in it--and power management is mediocre, even with powertop. But it gets the job done decently enough.
[0] YMMV: http://askubuntu.com/questions/98972/does-jupiter-really-imp...
It would be nice if Lenovo or Dell would check how well their laptops (or even some model) worked with linux and tried to get this kind of stuff as default on major distros.
[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/125367/enabling-mic-mute-butt... [2] http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/11954
What worked before no longer works. The card is permanently hardblocked. Supposedly the fix is to install Windows, flip the switch a few times, and then install Linux. I don't want it that badly. I will just figure out ndiswrapper.....
When people say that Lenovo laptops work well with linux they mostly mean Thinkpad series and even then there are some exceptions. Best out-of-box experience will be with one that has intel cpu+intel wireless+intel gpu and was released a year ago. It's about as safe bet for a high quality fully working linux laptop as you can get.
The W5*0 series is also a solid choice.
I'd say, if you have the money to spend buy an OEM laptop.
I run Bumblebee + BBSwitch for NVidia Optimus and it is blazing fast. Sleep works fine and I feel the battery life is much better than running Win7.
Everything on the V131 works flawlessly.
- Durable. I carried it with me on trips and it still works. Its build quality is much better than other laptops.
- Good keyboard. Very important for me as it is my main machine for coding. I like the keyboard better than many full sized ones.
- 4:3 aspect ratio, 1400x1050 non-glare screen (can fit more vertical code).
- Trackpoint device (the "nipple" as some call it). I never liked trackpads (but it has that too, I just disabled it).
Recently my kid tore out some keys off of the keyboard, I started to ran out of disk space on its old 60GB hard drive, and my fan got kind of loud. I considered buying another machine. Looked around. But the more I looked, the more I realized that I just wanted this machine. So I got a 500GB hybrid Seagate Momentus drive, a new fan and a new keyboard. Spent an evening upgrading it and now I am hoping to get more years out of it.
Opening it, it just confirmed the build quality. The components inside, the materials used just seems better than in equivalent HP and Dell laptops I had to take apart.
This can be fixed with vga switcheroo, but it's really not an optimal solution. Net, avoid hybrid graphics laptops, usually they don't work well with Linux.
For some reason Canonical decided to sacrifice stability and focus on something most users don't think they need (Unity).
Second, while I share somewhat common opinions on Unity, this particular example is a kernel bug. Most likely, ubuntu will backport those changes to 12.04 or has already provided a ppa for a newer kernel.
Yes, this is a kernel issue, already fixed in 3.3.x. But Canonical has no intention of backporting it to 12.04 (3.2 kernel). And we are talking here about "just working", not installing an unsupported kernel manually from a dev repository.
I don't know how long it's been since you've bought a Dell Win PC, but they aren't 'loaded' with crapware, not like it used to be. I just got an XPS 8300 from the Outlet, and all I had to do was remove McAffee and the Dell Support Suite. I went into Add/Remove Programs, uninstalled each, and shortly thereafter, it might as well have been a fresh install of Windows.
What they could do and which would be bad is use some sort of component which requires a non-free driver that's not supported well/anymore (so you're stuck with Ubuntu 12.x) or non-redistributable (ie. only available as part of Dell's iso). Let's say they ship a 100% proprietary and non-redistributable driver for NVIDIA's Optimus. But that seems very unlikely (if somewhat hilarous). And other than that I can't imagine any reason why you'd have any issue installing any other Linux distribution.
If the OS and hardware are not from the same vendor, this is always bound to happen.
I've had 3 Dell laptops running Linux and I've never had a problem. Recently I've been using Mint, but before that I used Debian and before that Slackware. The biggest problem I ever had is that some of the wireless drivers had to be installed via module-assistant, which is annoying. Also, I couldn't get accelerated OpenGL on one of them, but that was due to an ancient video card that was unsupported even on Windows at that point.
I will admit they were second hand laptops, so maybe the bugs were worked out in the time between their being released and my buying them.
I simply installed stock Ubuntu immediately after receiving it due to the same fear of crapware. But still, having it come with Ubuntu preinstalled means I knew all the hardware would work, as it has so far. Also it means I voted with my dollars for wider adoption of Linux by vendors.
One thing that always bothered me is that its has always been hard to get a decent laptop without Windows. I hate paying for Windows which I had no use of, and got that removed as soon as I bought laptops. Even if I may not use Dell's install of Ubuntu and replace it with my own choice of distribution, I wouldn't mind them shipping Ubuntu, as overall I'm hopeful this would push hardware vendors to get more serious about Linux drivers overall.
Although they come with FreeDOS, this is not a signal the hardware is Linux compatible.
There is, that's why some computers come with FreeDOS.
I imagine Dell must suffer from the same problem on their online stores.
Amazon: http://amzn.to/OasYWz
Flipkart: http://bit.ly/Q72mcV
Indirectly, I have a somewhat larger problem because it leads to things like fewer cheap Linux laptops available.
My point above, however, was that I might not be paying extra - the crapware pushers might be subsidizing my linux box (with an extraneous tithe to MS).
Sure, comparing retail price in China to the west usually has China being lower. However, most savvy buyers in the west buy their laptops from deals or outlet and with endless coupons. I haven't found either Dell's or Lenovo's outlet in China yet. Do they exist in China?
If the os comes pre-installed, they only have to support drivers, and hackers like you or i can strip it if we want at our own risk.
This is illegal in many countries, as a computer isn't bootable in that situation.
Computer parts are not full PCs.
I'll check if I can find any example.
Because it's a very small market. Not very many people want to buy something that they can't use out of the box.
Of course, it's not as convenient as the ideal circumstance of not having Windows installed by default, but it's the next best alternative nonetheless.
The regular price of the Windows version would be $1000 and the Linux version would be $930. The thing is, nobody buys Dell products at full price. They wait for the sale. The Windows versions would be on sale all the time and the Linux ones never were, so the Windows version was often actually cheaper than the Linux version.
Dell also needs to be able to promote their laptops using features of the OS, or software that comes with it. They also need to mark down the OS versions to coincide with promotions or market activity.
Plus, if you're a linux guy, and the windows version is cheaper, just buy that and get the ubuntu image or drivers from dell support. It's not like canonical is missing out on a sale.
I disagree with your suggestion to buy the Windows version if it's cheaper. It's frustrating to me to see the $1000 Windows laptop marked down to $900 and the Linux one be sold at the original price of $930. I want to buy the Linux version for $830, not the Windows one for $900 :)
In truth, the first thing I would do after buying a Dell Laptop with Linux installed is wipe it clean and install Linux with the settings that I prefer. So the value of the preinstalled Linux for me is really just that I know that the hardware is all supported under Linux and I'm not paying for an OS that I don't want.
This is not an option if you are opposed to the Windows Tax on principle. I am extremely uncomfortable with artificially boosting Windows sales and indirectly supporting a monopoly.
And no, this by no means not a monopoly. Windows comes preinstalled on the overwhelming majority of computers today, and most of the time, there is no way around that. Most manufacturers even deny refunds, even when they are required to do so by law ("whatcha gonna do, sue us?").
For the record, I've been having "fun" with Lenovo trying to get my rightly deserved refund. I'm actually not adverse to taking this to court, but I'm a student and not exactly rich, so I don't know if I could afford that.
It's my firm opinion that forced bundling should be outright illegal, and it somewhat already is. There's a consumer protection directive from the EU that forbids "agressive or unfair practices", which this most certainly falls under.
* The image is custom, but it is maintained by Canonical, and one can download Ubuntu independently and then enable a bunch of Dell PPAs for hardware support (see http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/).
* Dell is contributing to OSS with this project. They have, with Canonical and the manifacturer, already built open source touch-pad drivers that seem to be working very well (a rarity on Linux).
* Selling an OS-free website is actually doing the Linux community a disservice. The reason is that it takes time and fidgeting in order to make everything work on Linux (and you can, in fact, screw up your computer if you don't set up fans correctly, for example), and the average developer (and, of course, any other user) doesn't want to waste time making suspend function when they can be working. For this reason, desktop Linux will not gain any significant market share if it is not pre-installed. This project will raise the Linux desktop market share, and thus encourage others to do something similar.
* This project started as a pilot in order for Dell to gauge interest, and they deemed it having enough potential to actually launch. The buzz from Dell (really, the "Project Sputnik" blog) is that if it is successful, there might be a follow-up.
With all that said, I will still not be buying this computer. The high-end version that they're selling is too expensive because of a large SSD (still too expensive), while only having 4GB of RAM. In the age of streaming and Dropboxes, I'd rather keep $200 and have 128GB SSD with 8GB RAM. Plus the screen is mediocre (although the keyboard feels amazing, I tried it at Best Buy).
Edit: Added newlines.
I don't know how you ship laptops where the headphone jacks don't work and every update borks the sound completely unless you want them to fail. Did they not have anybody actually turn one on before selling them on their website?
Dell doesn't fit into that worldview.
As nice as this is I just doubt the hardware is of a similar quality. Additionally, for a notebook the magsafe connector is a huge deal as it's the thing I've seen die first on notebook after notebook.
I do all my dev on linux VMs at this point, and I'd imagine that's a lot of other devs.
Disabling the nauseating window-switching animations in Lion (not Snow Leopard), the ability to implement proper tiling window management (think wmii, not Divvy/Shift), focus-follows-mouse, arbitrary remappings of keys, mapping keyboard shortcuts involving the return/enter key, disabling the hardcoded built-in delay in the Caps Lock key, unified package management (homebrew != portage), unified binary package management (pacman != homebrew != portage), launching of 'applications' from a terminal without hunting down the location of the binary[1], renaming Documents/ and Downloads/ to their lowercase equivalents without breaking tab completion (seriously??), getting GNU screen/readline working in Terminal.app without really awkward line wrapping problems, the ability to access basic utilities (like system temperature) from the command line, upgrading system versions of things like the python interpreter (this may have been fixed), changing the resolution and font-size system-wide, scripting arbitrary window behavior in any language (again, think plan9/wmii), mounting /tmp in RAM the way tmpfs in Linux provides...
...that was just off the top of my head, but clearly there's quite a bit. Some of that is because it ships with a version of bash that's on the order of a decade old... but that's a problem in and of itself!
[1] Yet another example of how the concept of applications is broken on OSX - installing an application from a .dmg file is a completely different process from installing something via make install on a traditional (*)NIX.
It's fair to say that you might reasonably class such configurability as the defining killer feature of linux - and different people will be more or less willing to trade it off in favour of a lower-hassle experience.
There is a minor problem where the trackpad sometimes thinks I'm double-clicking after the laptop comes out of sleep, but that's being worked on. It rarely happens, and when it does, logout+login fixes the problem. That's pretty much the only quibble I have.
Windows 8 is "theoretically" only bootable when secure boot is turned on.
"Microsoft does not mandate or control the settings on PC firmware that control or enable secured boot from any operating system other than Windows.
[...]
A demonstration of this control is found in the Samsung tablet with Windows 8 Developer Preview that was offered to //BUILD/ participants. In the screenshot below you will notice that we designed the firmware to allow the customer to disable secure boot. However, doing so comes at your own risk. OEMs are free to choose how to enable this support and can further customize the parameters as described above in an effort to deliver unique value propositions to their customers. Windows merely did work to provide great OS support for a scenario we believe many will find valuable across consumers and enterprise customers."
"... other than Windows," i.e. Windows 8 itself "theoretically" wants Secure Boot turned on.
I've read the link; there's no indication that the Windows 8 Logo Compliance requirements force Windows 8 to work with Secure Boot turned off. And obviously, ARM-based Windows 8 systems will require it to be turned on:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/01/microsoft-mandating-...
Of course, the pages show "Dell recommends Windows® 7" because by doing this their OEM licenses cost a little bit less.
The laptops are at http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops.aspx?c=us&l=en...
For what it's worth, I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v with Ubuntu Hardy preinstalled 2.5 years ago. It didn't suspend/resume properly and video out was flaky. It died after two years of use (with strange electrical problems). I don't think I'll buy a Dell in the future.
Also, it comes with a weird dock thing that has an external graphics card. Ideally, you would plug this in and have better graphics processing when you're at home. I haven't been able to get this to work on Linux. However, I haven't been able to get it to work on Windows 8 either :/.
So for me, the whole dock thing is just an overpriced external dvd drive. I really like the idea of having an external graphics card like that, but the implementation just isn't great.
Out of all the laptops I've read about online, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon[1] really stands out. If I was looking for a new one, that's probably what I'd get. I'm not sure how well it supports Linux, but it just seems really awesome.
[1]: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x...
My old Sharp MM10 had a magnesium alloy case... I still miss that one.
That said, if the X1 carbon was out when I was buying my laptop, I'd probably have gone for it. The low resolution of the old X1 was what really turned me off. Also, I think a 14" screen is a better compromise than 13" between portability and convenience.
Maybe it doesn't match a MBP, but if I can get 3 hours or more out of a charge, I'm pretty happy. There aren't many times that I'm going to be away from power longer than that. Now someone who's flying coast-to-coast on a routine basis and needs to get all the productivity they can out of 6+ hour flight, may need something different.
Except...Unity sucks (the UI). Gnome 2 rocked.
I'm so tempted to buy this one, but I decided to skip this and wait for Haswell instead. I'm reasonably sure I can pull my Core 2 Duo/Penryn for another year.
I'm talking about review from Mobiletecreview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVK-9cPRTLw