My experiance with ubuntu
So I recently installed ubuntu linux on my laptop, and to be honest, I hate it. It’s supposed to be linux for humans, but its far from a replacement to popular operating systems.
Maybe it’s just because my laptop is weird, but it seemed that to do anything with my laptop, I had to google the problem, hunt down the solution, and prayed that it worked for me too. I still never fully fixed my wireless. And the speakers have just been funky, turning the volume all the way down didn’t mute them.
I plan on switching back to XP this weekend. I still think ubuntu looks cool, and would probably put it on a spare computer if I had one, but for now my main OS needs to be something that A) I can easily fix and B) is able to run popular applications natively (WOW, iTunes).
Matthew McCullough on Wordpress 
I have been running Kubuntu on my laptop for a few years now. The only issue I ever experienced with were the ACPI functions like hibernate and suspend. They are really flaky, but then again the manual says to expect that.
From my experience – some wifi cards are just a lost cause. This is why I usually do not recommend installing linux on a laptop unless you are comfortable messing around with strange hardware issues.
Note that you’d probably have similar issues with windows. Next time you install XP on some machine see how much of the hardware does not run out of the box. I work with Dell Latitude and Inspiron laptops and after you do a clean windows install you need to install drivers for the video card, sound board, wifi, lan adapter, modem, bluetooth and few other things.
Funny thing is, when I booted Ubuntu on that same machine, the only thing that didn’t work out of the box was wifi. So comparing out-of-the-box hardware support, most linux distros are light years ahead as compared to windows.
But of course your laptop usually ships with either a resource CD with all the windows based drivers you need making it easy for you to get everything working. Now if they also included Linux binaries on that disk, it would be equally easy to get it up and running. 🙂
Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 10:20 am
Yeah my wireless card was really funky. But right now I’m just stuck with this computer until I get a mac 🙂
Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 1:05 pm