MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-06-05 |
| FROM | Rick Moen
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Linux Laptops cheap
|
Quoting Ruben Safir (mrbrklyn-at-panix.com):
> that doesn't always help either. The chips are often swap out from
> version to version without changing the identification information,
> let alone telling anyone.
You know who does that dramatically more often than any other OEM? Dell
Computer. I used to say that Gateway 2000 ran a distant second, but I
see that Acer finished digesting them in 2012.
In recent years, the only major OEM I've seen playing chipset du jour is
Dell, and fortunately that's been almost entirely on miniPCI cards,
e.g., wireless cards bundled with laptops, and the good news there is
that if you get one that's unexpectedly lemoney for Linux use, you can
return or sell it without needing to do likewise with the main unity.
> At least if it is running and being sold with Linux, there is a good
> chance that it has been initially speced out and tested with a default
> linux version.
This doesn't seem logical to me at all. OEMs think it's extremely
normal to have to retrofit weird drivers from doubtful sources into OS
preloads, so why would they not consider that normal with Linux?
Instead of a machine that you can safely asasume runs vanilla Ubuntu out
of the box, you are at least equally likely to get one that's useless
with regular Ubuntu unless you also provide proprietary Nvidia X11
software and a bunch of similar things.
> That being said, when I've purchased preinstalled Linux laptop boxes,
> there has always been some decent engineering of the OS by the
> distributor. This was particularly true with Emperor Linux.
One, you cannot generalise from hardware OEM Emperor Linux to anyone
else. That's like generalising from Stephen King to other authors.
Two, I would personally be very unhappy to own hardware requiring a
special-sauce installation to function properly. If I end wth such
hardware, it means I've failed as a purchaser, and I sell it.
You like buying hardware that needs the OEM to cobble together X11
drivers on the spot? I wish you joy of that. But I'd rather have
hardware that works great without secret-sauce OEM help, e.g., if I
needs to reload the OS from scratch a year from now and the OEM no
longer exists.
You may have heard of this concept of software continuing to be
maintainable after the sponsoring company vanishes. We call it open
source. ;->
|
|
