Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
The stupid question is the question not asked
 
PerlMonks  

Re: What *nix do you recommend for a laptop?

by tirwhan (Abbot)
on Feb 28, 2008 at 16:52 UTC ( [id://670933]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to What *nix do you recommend for a laptop?

<unpopular>If you want something with bells and whistles that locks you into a vendors idea of what your laptop should do (i.e. a Windows thats better than Windows) use OS X. If you want an open system that may take a little more getting used to but allows for better customisation and hackability use Ubuntu.</unpopular>


All dogma is stupid.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: What *nix do you recommend for a laptop?
by kyle (Abbot) on Feb 28, 2008 at 17:19 UTC

    I have an old PPC PowerBook that started with Jaguar and is now Tiger (OS X). Just recently I had to replace the hard drive, and I replace the battery every 10–15 months or so (I overuse it), but otherwise it's been solid for years.

    For $work, I have a Dell Latitutde (D620, it says on the front) running Ubuntu 7.04. I've had it for about six months, and it works fine.

    I like Ubuntu better for programming. It has the nice package management I'm used to, so I can just ask it to install or uninstall all manner of Linux goodies. On the other hand, making the wireless do what I want seems like quite a pain. I haven't gotten WPA to work at all, and I sometimes wind up dropping to a command prompt to issue iwconfig commands to get things working. That's been a fairly typical experience—things that should be easy, aren't. I stopped trying to suspend it because it would usually wake up confused. I have never tried anything like bluetooth.

    I like OS X better for desktop type stuff. It's where I have my music, where I watch movies, where I pull photos off my camera, etc. For the most part, it just works. The biggest problem I've had with it is that it is closed. If I want to do something off the wall, I can't always go out and download some half-baked patch and do it. That said, it is Unix underneath, it does have Perl, and there's always ssh.

    Update: I forgot to mention, when I retire the PPC eventually, it's probably going to get a Debian GNU/Linux install and sit in a corner as a headless machine. I haven't tried using Linux as a desktop on a Mac, but I have put it on another PPC laptop whose display was destroyed in a toxic corn syrup spill. It's working as I'd expect any other Linux machine to work.

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://670933]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others avoiding work at the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-03-29 05:29 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found