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From OS X to Ubuntu

nicolas.perriault.net

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Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#371

Post by deong »

anuragsoni wrote: post #166
ePierre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the "windows tax" and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn't just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem. I wish I could. Unfortunately, I live in a country (Taiwan) where no one knows about Linux. It's impossible to buy a pre-installed Linux laptop here. You know the most ironic part? My job here is to certify hardware (includ…

There was another post on hackernews today about some new Dell ubuntu-based workstations[1]. The webpage that the post refers to mentions worldwide availability, so maybe dell might be an option for you at some point? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13360339 Also, it looks like that their ubuntu edition and the windows edition of XPS-13 come with the same wireless cards this year (It used to be broadcom on w…

For what it's worth, though the prior XPS line did come with Broadcom wireless on the Windows variants, they give you a full service manual describing how to replace it. It took me about $30 and half an hour to put the same Intel chip that the DE comes with in the Windows one I bought at CostCo. Wireless has been flawless with that chip.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#372

Post by akarambir »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #274
ePierre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the "windows tax" and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn't just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem. I wish I could. Unfortunately, I live in a country (Taiwan) where no one knows about Linux. It's impossible to buy a pre-installed Linux laptop here. You know the most ironic part? My job here is to certify hardware (includ…

That's bizarre, considering 40% of Dell computers sold in China come with Linux.

Parent is from Taiwan and not China. They are different countries(for most parts of world).

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan,_China

  >> However, the term is problematic and potentially ambiguous because since 1949, two sovereign states with the name "China" exist, namely the Republic of China (ROC, founded 1912 and now commonly known as "Taiwan") and the People's Republic of China (PRC, founded 1949 and now commonly known as "China")

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#373

Post by gshulegaard »

timtadh wrote: post #44
sk1pper wrote: post #31

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100%…

Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don't want to devote lots of time to a "project" buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well. Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the "windows tax" and installing a Linux…

In a lot of ways, System76 was a better user experience for me than the Dell XPS 13. But yes both are good (from someone who has both).

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#374

Post by mrsernine »

mcone wrote: post #343
sk1pper wrote: post #31

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100%…

Could anyone suggest some resources for building a Linux desktop computer from scratch? I've been a Mac user forever and I'm interested in building my own desktop computer, but I honestly have no idea how to select components, much less how to tell if they're compatible with Linux or Fedora. Any help would be appreciated.

As pointed somewhere in this thread, the Arch linux wiki is a good resource for hardware compatibility issues. It doesn't really matter if it focus in one particular distro, it's the same kernel after all.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Hardware

To my limited knowledge, intel hardware has excellent linux support. If you need a little more muscle in the GPU go for nvidia rather than AMD.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#375

Post by drvdevd »

ansible wrote: post #335
empthought wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't kid yourself. If IBM had thrown its weight behind FreeBSD instead of Linux in 2000-2001, Linux would be the greener-grass "what if?" OS and FreeBSD would be on most of our phones. Individual users had nothing to do with it.

Even back then, Linux had more traction on embedded systems. FreeBSD was mostly desktop systems, though multiple architectures were supported. The Sharp Zarus, Nokia stuff, and other efforts pioneered the way for Linux on phones.

Yes, that's actually the way I remember it around that time. People were just generally excited about hacking on Linux and the community as a whole had a sense of popularity about it that began in the 90s.

OTOH, I'm willing to accept the notion that, given all that, the big players still pushed the industry direction.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#377

Post by csdreamer7 »

bwat48 wrote: post #362
csdreamer7 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Linux laptop buying in a nutshell. Used a nice little laptop for years in college. I kept fighting it on the headphone jack. It would not recognize when it was plugged in, or the sound did not work period. Hot keys would not work. Etc, etc. Besides that, everyone would always comment on what a nice little laptop it was as I ran it into the ground. When it died I bounced from HP (horrible, came with AMD graphi…

> Ivy Bridge would freeze X if I closed and opened the lid enough, but that disappeared with the next version of Ubuntu. Similar issue with Skylake Lemur, went away when I used Manjaro with Mesa 13. This kind of issue is why I stopped bothering with linux on laptops and got a macbook. EVERY single laptop I've used linux on (which were all researched before hand to include hardware that's not supposed to have issues w…

If I use an updated version of Mesa, the issues go away. This is Intel's fault, not X and not Ubuntu or Manjaro. This really is not different than waiting for an updated driver. I understand you had issues, but mine, that are similar to yours, went away with an update.

Intel hardware is not problem free on Windows or Mac OS X. I have a dual boot of Windows 7 on my older Lemur. The Intel driver, which last I checked, had not had an update in years for 7, still has graphic glitches in a few places. Firefox with Suspend tab extension will not render the side bar correctly (or the toolbars) on 7. Intel's drivers are just not that good.

I do not have this problem with the Mesa drivers on Linux. As far as I can tell, I do not have any problems. The Lemur is rock solid. The only reason I bought a new one was because I abuse the poor thing and System76 had a sale.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#378

Post by bisby »

pawadu wrote: post #360
bisby wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad and I have the same Samsung laptop from 2012-ish. It came with Windows 7, and after upgrading to windows 8, a lot of stuff stopped working. Samsung didnt have "special" drivers for windows 8, so a lot of stuff (like the backlight buttons) didnt work properly. Eventually they fixed the problem, but they were weird out of date drivers. Windows 10 had no drivers at all. I moved my laptop to Linux full time around…

> Everything worked great in Linux for me until kernel 4.2 or something when backlight brightness stopped working. Interestingly, this also happened to a lot of Vaios when people upgraded to Windows 10. Now, your Linux was eventually fixed while my Vaio is still running at 0% backlight with zero response from Sony.

I dont know what changed in linux at kernel 4.2 (or maybe it was 4.1 or 4.3? I dunno. it was early 4.x), but I was able to fix it with a kernel boot parameter (acpi_osi=linux acpi_backlight=video). This tells the GPU to control the backlight, and everything works. Theres a lot of different laptop configurations of who powers and who runs the backlight. linux has all these options set up, but it has to pick one by default. So my laptop didnt "just work" on a fresh installation, but I was able to fix it.

I think I know what happened in windows: windows itself has no backlight driver, and the standard GPU drivers have no backlight handling (or do, but its disabled by default). So previously, these laptops would ship with a special Windows 7 driver that would handle the backlight. But its "so much work" to port that driver to windows 10... so they don't. So in this scenario, my laptop originally worked. A fresh installation would require proprietary Samsung drivers, and samsung has stopped providing those for windows 10... literally no fix available (it's possible the windows 7 drivers still work? to be clear, Ive never checked if there are work arounds or other drivers available. I switched to linux before windows 10 came out, and my dad is happy with linux resolving his backlight issues, so Ive never had to look it up)

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#379

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

mhw wrote: post #316
nkoren wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, this, a thousand times this. One thing that Apple has done very well is put together a website that: A.) Tells you what they are selling, and B.) Can sell it to you. Why is it so hard for other vendors to figure out that this is a pretty good way to sell computers? My girlfriend bought an Asus Zenbook the other day; it's a really nice machine and made me wonder whether there might be a Zenbook for me. So I ende…

> One thing that Apple has done very well is put together a website that: A.) Tells you what they are selling, and B.) Can sell it to you. C.) Be able to configure a US keyboard when you're not in the US. I'm in the UK, but I've used a US keyboard layout all along from the days that I bought an obsolete Sun3/50 to use as an X terminal. My last ThinkPad was bought in the US by a friend who came from there and sold it…

I wonder if it reflects how they manufacture them. Do they print the keycap labels on demand?

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#380

Post by agmcleod »

I think linux is nice and all. But i've had my share of issues with Ubuntu & video card drivers over the years. I've tried to run dual boot on my PC at home, and haven't had much luck keeping it stable. I think the best experience I had was running Ubuntu back around 2008, 2009, on my dell inspiron laptop. Wireless was a challenge, but otherwise it ran great.

On the weekend I picked up a laptop I ordered during boxing day sales. An asus rog with a gtx 1070 in it. More for going to gaming events and that, but I put linux mint on the second hard drive so I can mess around from time to time. Haven't tested the web cam, but most things seem to work fine. I guess time will tell if it's something I want to move to (still use a mac at work)

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