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 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.
I don't remember having any problems.
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.