On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:19 PM, James Harper
<james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
> On 14/09/11 14:45, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > support for laptop-specific stuff (graphics switching, etc) on linux
> > is still problematic. If you choose your laptop carefully, it works
> > great. But if you just buy one without researching it thoroughly,
> > you'll probably be disappointed.
>
> Most people I know who aren't serious techies just have laptops. I
have gone
> through quite a lot of laptops too.
> NONE of them have managed to work out-of-the-box properly with Linux.
> Usual suspects are the wifi or suspend not working, but if it's not
that, it's
> something else like sound or accelerated video.
>
The second-hand market is great for Linux use. Unless you want something
exceptionally fast and shiny and new, a 3 year old laptop will probably
work just great with some more memory and maybe a new battery. I was
recently gifted an old HP nx7010 (which is maybe a little older than 3
years) and Ubuntu "just worked" with the exception of tv out which
required a tiny bit of fiddling. Wireless, graphics, touch pad, all
good. When doing repairs on laptops I often boot off a Linux USB stick
to test things and haven't had problems except for some very new models,
although a USB recovery stick hardly equates to production use - I'm
guessing if I wanted accelerated graphics I might have more trouble with
the newer stuff.
James