Derek Glidden wrote:
>
> On Jun 25, 2004, at 5:55 PM, Mike Branda wrote:
>
>> this may be a hassle for some but seems to be a little overdone as a
>> statement. linux distro flavors seem to have more quirks between them
>> than the more recent hardware in my experience. obviously within reason
>> that the bleeding edge hardware takes some additional time.
>> I'm writing this from a 3 month old DELL Inspiron 5150 P4 2.6 GHz 768 MB
>> DDR running SuSE 9.1 that previously ran 9.0. All hardware including
>> firewire, USB, Touchpad, Sound, Battery/Charging recoginition and more
>> worked flawlessly from the box. the only piece of hardware I had to
Honestly Mike, I agree. The most pain I had with a Linux laptop was
really the suspend/resume nightmare - something my PowerBook does
*wonderfully*. Working around flakey bleeding edge Linux device drivers
that simply cannot handle a suspend/resume cycle without a great deal of
handholding and module trickery - that was what drove me to a Mac.
> I am shamed.
You should be! :-P
> That's the same laptop I have (or close, mine's a 5150 3Ghz P-IV) and I
> still, more than six months later, have failed to get _any_ linux distro
> running smoothy on it. Dell claims "we cannot reproduce the problem" so
> it's "not defective" according to them, since it passes the full "diags"
> test suite. Yet it randomly locks up probably two or three times a day
> under even light use, even under the version of windows that came
> preinstalled on it.
I've had Linux running smoothly on various Laptops. Honestly, I think
Derek had a dud laptop (he had me look at it more than once, and I
couldn't explain its behavior either).
> I've tried debian, redhat, gentoo and SuSE with both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels
> and none of them work consistently or reliably. I'm sure it's the
> laptop's fault, but short of a class-action lawsuit (many, many other
> people have had problems with the 5000 series) there's not a whole lot I
> can do about it since Dell refuses to admit there's anything wrong with it.
Welcome to the commodity hardware market.
> Note here that this is not a case of linux not working, but a failed
> laptop. So I definitely don't blame linux. I do however blame the
> laptop manufacturer's for failing to make laptops with "standard"
> components that linux can support. Not that there's anything anyone can
> do about that.
Not much we can do about it at all.
> /me only slightly bitter...
Only slightly?
If you want to get into religious OS wars, can you tell me why my OS/X
10.3.3 install consistently goes into a "pinwheel spin of death" when
trying to wake up from a blank screen screensaver? (but I can still ssh
in?) Or why my laptop occasionally refuses to take input at the keyboard
(but I can still ssh in?) Or, better, why my laptop occasionally drops
its entire networking stack, and refuses to talk to the network until I
reboot the !#$@%!@ thing? Also, I've given up getting VirtualPC's
networking to work with anything beyond 10.3.1 - and Microsoft is never
going to release 7.0 any time soon.
OpenSource. God I hate commercial software. This is what is quickly
driving me away from the Mac as a platform. Sure, it looks great, but
the commercial buggy software continues to pain my computing experience.
Also, I'd really love to have VMWare again, or UML for that matter.
Honestly, give me a small, light, large battery Linux laptop, that can
survive a quick suspend/resume cycle with a wireless card and bluetooth
support, AND YOU HAVE A SALE (namely: me)
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