Linux on the laptop: present, future, and suggestions?

Yes. The OP said “I want to buy a good laptop that works fine on Ubuntu Linux”. Now, technically, that might mean “I want a Windows laptop and I also plan to run Ubuntu on it sometimes”, but I suspect it means “I want a laptop on which I am mainly or only going to run Ubuntu”. So buy one with it on. If what you want is a laptop feature which isn’t supported by Ubuntu, then you wouldn’t want to run Ubuntu on it.

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If you want a laptop feature that isn’t supported by Ubuntu you would probably weigh up how much you want that feature versus wanting to run Ubuntu; I always intended to stick a Linux on this laptop and I somehow still managed to buy it despite the lack of support for bluetooth audio.

This nipple is way more important to me than bluetooth audio so I’ve bought a laptop with a feature unsupported by my OS in order to get a different feature that’s more important to me, but not shipped on any laptop that’s completely supported by this OS.

How savage!

I’ve run Linux (Ubuntu and otherwise) on dammed near every computer I’ve owned since 2002, with various degrees of work involved to get a needed feature set working, but totally doable most of the time.

You suspect well! I basically will NEVER use Windows, so I do NOT want to spend any money on it.
A few years ago, when I was already hunting for a Windows-free laptop, one of the guys in the computer market told me I could just buy the laptop with Windows, then resell the license online! YEAH RIGHT!

[quote=“sil, post:19, topic:200”]Buying a machine with Ubuntu on it will limit your market quite a bit, I admit
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So I went to the computer market last Sunday. @sil, when you say that, you are actually right: It limits my choice to… nothing! There was not a SINGLE laptop available with Linux on it.

You have to understand even the people working in that computer market who spend 12 hours a day selling computers have NO IDEA what Linux is. First of all they pronounce it “Linis”, then they have no idea what I’m talking about (they look at me like “Why do you want to remove Windows 8 in the first place? Ahhhh, you want to install Windows 7, right?”, and I’m like “Nooooo fuckinnnnng way!”). The only guy I found who heard of Linux before told me “oh in that case, any laptop will do, because Linux doesn’t use that much memory”. I guess this one had a cousin working with Unix servers or stuff like that, or he may have heard his NAS was powered by Linux or some shit…

So I’m REALLY trying my best here, trust me, but it’s just not possible at all.

After spending 2-3 hours there, looking for something that I liked, the only option I found so far was an Asus computer: the N56JR that, according to the specs, can be bought with “DOS”. Yep, we live in a World full of surprises.

[quote=“sil, post:19, topic:200”]Dell also have a few hundred Ubuntu shops in China and India.
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Yep, and I live in Taiwan. It’s as if I was telling you you can find the computer of your dreams in shops in Germany :smiley:
(and don’t tell Taiwanese people Taiwan is China, they wouldn’t like it so much ;))

However, after reading your answer @sil, I decided to go on a crusade on Dell Taiwanese website, and fiercely typed “Ubuntu” in the search engine… and Oh surprise! found a few professional laptops… without any price indication. Just for the records, there was a Dell booth at the computer market, and the guy just told me “We only sell Windows laptops”.

So I have to investigate a bit more to see if I can buy a machine from Dell Taiwan with Linux on it, and how much it would be (knowing that it will probably be more expensive than an Asus laptop).

I will let you know the output of my investigation later :wink:

I know you can always get Linux running on even the crappiest and most incompatible piece of hardware possible to a certain extent. The thing is, although I love tinkering and spending time understanding how things work, sometimes I just want them to work. Like when you plug your computer to a TV in order to watch a film, and… it doesn’t work. And your girlfriend is waiting, and you are trying to figure out why the signal would not go through the HDMI… and 30 minutes later, you have the video part kind of working (“it will be fine for tonight, I’ll check that out more in details later on”), but then the audio doesn’t work… and 30 more minutes later, the audio is finally outputting, but with cracks all over the place…

Well, that’s the kind of situation I want to avoid :slight_smile:

Dell also have a few hundred Ubuntu shops in China and India. >> Yep, and I live in Taiwan. It’s as if I was telling you you can find the computer of your dreams in shops in Germany

Yeah, I know – Dell having shops in India is no use to me either :slight_smile: My point wasn’t “haha you can go to one of these shops”, it was “there are shops. But they’re no good to you. Buy online. But one day there will be more shops” :smile:

Thank you for the report back! I suspect you’ll need to buy online, which isn’t necessarily very good – real shop retailers mostly haven’t embraced Ubuntu yet, which is sad. But one day there will be some…

It is even harder if you use lxde to find some place that will preinstall although you could just get a metapackage on ubuntu. I have seen things that let you choose xubuntu or kubuntu in some places but finding places that let you get lxde without contacting customer support is hard.

I guess I must have been really lucky with laptops. My first was a Mesh system which was basically just a re-badged Clevo laptop. Other than the built in win-modem everything worked with minimal fuss, I did have to use non-free drivers for the onboard NIC though. I also had a Lenovo from about 2007 I can’t remember the exact model but I still remember it fondly. Unfortunately this laptops incompatability with red wine saw it to an early grave :(.

Currently I use a Sony VAIO which again pretty much works out of the box (non-free nic driver again though). I would not have ordinarily gone for a Sony but it was an ex-display model going cheap and following the red wine incident I needed something really quickly. This is now showing its age so I will soon be in the market for another laptop. In the UK I have been eyeing up laptops from Novatech and from PCSpecialist who both sell laptops without operating systems.

I have never had much of a need for powerful graphics cards which I suspect is one of the reasons I have not had any real issues. Generally my requirements would be:
A decent screen resolution (surprisingly hard to find these days).
A pokey processor.
Support for a decent amount of RAM (8-16GB) mainly for virtualisation.

This is also what I’m looking for, especially since I’ve seen games being run on Intel HD4600 and HD5000 chipsets: Even latest generations run pretty well (if you lower some of the graphical details).

The problem is if you want a good screen (i.e. minimum IPS Full HD screen), companies suppose it’s to play videogames, and therefore it comes with that bloody nVidia Optimus.

I kept digging in the choices I have, and I think I will get an Asus N550JV because it has an IPS Full HD screen and I can upgrade the RAM up to 16 GB. I just need to see if I can find one in Taipei :slight_smile: I’ll probably go back to the computer market tomorrow and do each booth one by one until I find it.
Also, in the specs sheet on Asus website, it is said that the laptop can come with either Win 8, Win 8.1 or DOS. So I hope I can force the reseller to remove the Windows license… We will see.

I seem to be wanting lots of ram for virtualization with not that much graphics aas well and big screen resolution is nice. My screen resolution is only 1366x768 on my current laptop. You can get into bugs with things not fitting on the screen.

Final episode of my saga, with a twist in the end (spoiler alert!)

So I went to the computer market, ready to throw wads of Taiwanese dollars in order to get that Asus N550JV… And the sales refused to sell it to me! Well, basically he told me a new version was coming in the next few weeks with better perfs and all… Basically I think it was just an update with a more recent nVidia card, which I don’t care anyway.

So I went back home empty-handed (well, apart from my wads of cash).

Then I started to think about it, I remembered @sil’s review of his desktop, and I remember a friend telling me he was getting pissed at the small size of his laptop screen.

So I started to investigate to get a desktop, and exactly as @sil mentioned, I realized I could get a much better machine (that is, a PC that would perfectly fit my needs — no crazy gaming graphic card — and my philosophy — NO-Windows-thank-you-very-much) at a much lower price.

I ended up in the computer market again last night, discussed with one of the technicians of a shop that was selling PC hardware, and ended up with a pretty nice configuration that cost me less than 890 USD/640 EUR:

  • i5-4570 with an integrated Intel HD4600 graphic chipset
  • a small, thin case, power unit and Asus motherboard
  • 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM (Kingston)
  • 1TB Western Digital hard drive
  • 120GB Intel SSD
  • A PB238Q Asus 23" Full HD IPS screen

I haven’t received the screen yet, so I haven’t installed any OS on it yet, but I’m pretty confident if should be a smooth ride :smile:

One question for the people out there: Should I put my /home partition on the SSD as well, or leave it on the WD drive, although it contains the configuration files for the different softwares I’m gonna use?

Cheers everyone!

I have my / on the ssd and my /home on a spinning disk. have my dot files in the hdd doesnt slow me down. You could put /home on the ssd and then sim-link all the folders onto the hdd.

I applaud this choice that you have made. Glad I could help :smile:

In my opinion, there is no need to put /home on a separate partition or separate disk. Then again, I’m OK with having only 180GB of space in total, and a bunch of stuff lives on my server :slight_smile:

Funny that you mention that you can live with 180GB of storage. I use to be drive bi-polar. It made no difference if I had 1GB or 1TB, I was always loading up and then removing programs to keep my numbers at about 60% clear. I don’t know what it was but if I pushed the drive to more than 60% I would panic and start removing things from my HDD. Now with a Chromebook I am stuck with a small drive and I am learning how to manage my the GB and how to live frugally in regards to space.

In the end, I did as @mbs suggested: / on the SSD and /home on the HDD.

Existential question: with 16 GB of RAM, what about the Swap partition? How big should it be (0? 1GB? 16GB?)? Where should it be (SSD? HDD?)?

I installed Ubuntu 13.10 on it, the longest part of the install was actually to wait for the updates to download. Now it boots in 20 seconds and fills my eyes with little sparkles… it’s awesome!

To be honest, I was expecting something to go wrong. In 10 years using Linux, I’ve always faced a hardware-compatibility problem at some point. When I bought this machine, I reduced the hardware to the bare minimum to minimize the issues, but I was expecting the UEFI BIOS to be totally incompatible with Linux, or shit like that… but no! No! Not a single issue!

It just runs.

2014, year of the desktop for Linux.
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I agree totally with Mr Langridge. Desktops are generally better. But when I upgrade my old ‘travelling’ laptop, which is currently a Lenovo x61, I’ll be getting a novena laptop (when it exists).

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3597

Well now I’m just thinking:

  • a desktop to produce content (write articles, code, process pictures, videos, sounds, etc.)
  • a tablet to consume content and, in a limited way, to produce some (answer e-mails, or maybe write articles with a bluetooth keyboard)
  • a smartphone to consume content (and +1 on Google+, does it count as producing content? ;))

(I don’t have a tablet yet. Maybe when I get bored of being in my office room in front of my desktop, I’ll get one… but that can wait a while, maybe until the first Ubuntu ones are released)

kiaora everybody.
i recently bought a samsung NP350 and installed debian on it. everything worked perfectly except for a minor transposition of one key on the keyboard (@ and ").
sadly i guess i paid for the windows, but i got a deal on a last display model at the shop, after the stock had been sold. (ive bought a few things the same way) paid $1200 NZ with the RAM filled up (like $1000 US)
my desktop is an old one which i rebuilt with new motherboard (gigabyte GA970) HDD, video card, and RAM, and installed KX studio on it (built on ubuntu) and again everything worked just fine. i think that cost $5-600 NZ
having mucked around with installing different distros for 15-20 years, and finally stopped dabbling and settled on debian/ubuntu, finding the support for components to be really good these days. no more dramas getting X windows going.
im not a programmer, im a musician…

I just bought a Lenovo Yoga 11S, hopefully I can get Linux working with all the features.

This can be a real issue.

With a desktop you have a lot more control over the hardware while with a Laptop you can’t swap out a video card or Wifi board. You need to do some reasearch before buying a laptop to make sure all the hardware you care about is supported.

I also try to test macines with a live USB/DVD of the OS I plan to install before I buy. In my experience small independant shops are happy to help while the big chains make it pretty much impossible for me to do this.