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Comment by jkelsey | Hacker News Reader

The author was having hardware problems, so he switched his software? There's nothing more open about Dell's hardware than Apple's and just because Dell offers a laptop with Linux does that mean you're now in some sort of open-source utopia where the open-source community comes together to solve every single computer problem that users encounter.

Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is great and there's tons of awesome open-source projects, but I don't think Ubuntu is one of them. If you've been following Canonical's behavior with Ubuntu over the past few years, you should be aware of what I'm talking about. And Dell? Well, their XPS laptops do seem to be of higher quality than what most of the PC industry offers, but support? I'm sorry, but I feel much more confidence in the Genius Bar.

Apple's not perfect, but the rest of the latop manufacturers are a joke.

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I was hoping for a comparison between competing platforms and how they stack up against iOS OSX.

But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") not a serious guide to moving away from Apple.

> But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") [...]

That is what is so irritating about this type of rhetoric; I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and now I'm free! Well, no, you just switched from one corporate controlled Operating System to another. Ubuntu may be open-source, but it's hardly free. Biggest example: You have to opt-out of Canonical's desktop search results sharing relationship with Amazon. At least when I look for files on a Mac, I don't get ads in my search results. If you like Ubuntu over OS X, then that's fine, but please don't say it's because of "freedom".

If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how they switched to free software, they better be running something like Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop (http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-to-...) or perhaps they should think about something else to write about.

> I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and now I'm free! Well, no, you just switched from one corporate controlled Operating System to another.

You're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking. Because there is an obvious difference between the two that you're eliding: Ubuntu is forkable, and OS X is not.

In other words, Canonical only "controls" Ubuntu in the sense that a community of users and developers trust their stewardship of it. If they squander that trust, that community can pick up Ubuntu and take it wherever they prefer it to go.

This is not a theoretical freedom; people exercise it all the time. Look at the diaspora from MySQL to products like MariaDB, for example, or the split from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. These are both cases where the communities around the products decided that the company stewarding those products (Oracle, in both cases, as it happens) was failing in that role. So new stewards stepped forward, and the communities followed them.

If you feel that Canonical's decision to include online search results in the Unity dash is a deal-breaker for you, you are free to vote with your feet in the same way. You could use Linux Mint, for example, which is basically Ubuntu without Unity.

Here is how "corporate controlled" Ubuntu is -- so much so that a third party is free to pick it up, strip out some features, and re-distribute it to users who don't want those features! And those users are free to switch over to it, if they wish; Canonical won't stop you. They couldn't stop you, even if they wanted to. Which is kind of the point.

Now imagine what would happen to someone who decided that OS X would be better if (say) Chrome were the default browser, and released their own re-spin of it where that is the case. The flaws in your comparison become evident.

> If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how they switched to free software, they better be running something like Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop or perhaps they should think about something else to write about.

So either you are 100% Pure, or you are 100% Impure. This would come as news to (among others) the makers of Ivory soap, who famously advertised it for decades as "99 44/100% Pure." I could understand an argument that this degree of purity doesn't make it better or worse than other soap products. What I could not understand would be an argument that unless it is 100% pure, it is not soap.

False premise: something being forkable does not make it free. Perhaps the derivative is free, but this article wasn't about running the derivative, was it?

Also, your last paragraph pretty much backs up my original point: if you're going to stand on your high horse of software-freedom and write about how great it is, you better go all in. That Dell is running proprietary software; at the firmware level in the least, but probably with binary blob drivers. Oh, and the article doesn't mention (nor you) about how you have to opt-out of third party sharing of your desktop search results with Amazon! That's not freedom respecting, so please don't try to divert attention away from these very valid points with arguments about how something is forkable.

Ubuntu is (almost all parts anyway) free in exactly the way the Free Software Foundation defines the word. Ubuntu is created by a community and overseen by a corporation, but you can take the Ubuntu source and do what you want with it within the terms of Free Software. You cannot do this with OS X.

I think Lenovo still makes quality products, I'm currently using their x220 (with Mint). I suppose it's possible that their newer models are worse, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. The x1 carbon looks like a cool machine to play with.

I wouldn't bet on Dell, and HP ever getting back to their glory days, but I wouldn't count out Lenovo, Samsung, Google, and Asus (Asus zenbook prime, looks amazing).

This is my take: if it works for you, and you like it, then go for it. Some people, like you, obviously like ThinkPads, some people like Dells. We're all different and we have different tastes. We should respect that.

My issue with the article is how the author prepositions the argument for her computer with "Apple didn't fix my laptop to my liking, so I got a Dell and now freedom!" The difference in freedom between Apple and Dell is nil, and I'm arguing that the difference between OS X and Ubuntu is worse because at least OS X doesn't ship off your desktop search results to third parties or show you ads in the results.

Oops totally replied to the wrong comment! I agree!

I don't have a single good thing to say about Ubuntu, but it's hard to imagine most people jumping right into the deep end with Linux. Sure, Ubuntu is the wrong way to start IMO, but at least it shows people it's possible.

Speaking of what a joke laptop manufacturers are though, sometime around 2005 or 2006 when I worked in retail, we got these brand new, ~$3200 HP laptops in. DV4000something. While trying to upgrade a customer's laptop to use both DIMMs, we found out that this was impossible. Somehow, HP produced an entire line of laptops where the contacts for the second DIMM slot had no connections to the rest of the circuitboard. We opened up all the ones shipped to our store and confirmed with stores in other states. This actually made it through their QA process!

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