There isn't an easy place to find out how well various laptops are supported. Years ago I decided to buy a laptop and did a lot of research to find one that worked well with Linux, and I found many people who claimed to have Linux working well on their laptops. However, when I looked for detailed information and dug into write-ups people did, I found that there were always problems. Suspend and hibernate didn't work right, usually, and various laptops had various other issues as well. Config files had to be changed, firmware had to be patched, kernel patches from obscure places had to be applied, and surprisingly often there was a small kernel patch written by the author himself. I would find these problems in reports of "success" stories, so I just assumed that everyone was struggling, and people who said they had no problems had crazy expertise and were just like the people who said the Linux desktop was totally awesome and fine in 1999.
As the situation of Linux on laptops has improved, however, it's been harder to find installation write-ups, which probably means that people who have no problems simply do not bother posting detailed accounts of the fact that they have no problems! I mean, here's one, but how many people are meticulous enough to write a blog post about the fact that their laptop works, and then add the post to http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ so I can find it?
So true success stories are mostly invisible, or at least outwardly look the same as the "success" stories where a guy applied six kernel patches and wrote a shell script that he runs manually whenever he needs to hibernate and claims, "Hey, wow, my laptop works great now, and it was so easy!"
For a person like me, who doesn't want purchasing a laptop to turn into a major educational experience, it would be nice to have some way of knowing whether a specific laptop will work out of the box with major Linux distributions.
Isn't this at least partly the manufacturer's fault? I think Ubuntu is trying to work with PC makers to get drivers written and tested before the hardware ships.
Maybe it's a bit chicken-and-egg to get that to happen - people won't buy Linux boxes until it works on every machine, but makers won't try to get it to work on their machines until people are buying Linux boxes.
I did manage to buy a Linux box from Dell a while back. Even though I immediately wiped their custom install and upgraded to the latest version, set up dual-boot, etc, buying one with Ubuntu pre-installed was the best way I could determine to make sure the hardware would actually be compatible.
Yeah, I definitely think it's a chicken-and-egg problem. In general, my experience is that the hardware that has official support in Linux works much better there than in other OS'es.
Things are certainly getting better than they used to be, now I'm more surprised if things like wifi and webcams don't work out of the box, whereas a while ago, it was almost a certainty that they wouldn't.
Yeah, I've always found Thinkpads to be some of the most compatible machines for running Linux (after Dell business machines, which tend to/used to be spec'd to be available for purchase with an Ubuntu flavor).
I do think Thinkpads have lost some of their *nix roots since the Lenovo split because IBM was traditionally a big supporter of Linux, Lenovo less so.
I'm running on a ThinkPad X41. It has the following issues:
- The headphone jack stops working after the second suspend-to-ram after a fresh reboot. The only way to get it working again (without rebooting) is to suspend-to-disk (hibernate). It will then work until after the next time I wake from suspend-to-ram.
- I'm still on Jaunty, but the last couple of revisions of Ubuntu failed to correctly detect and set-up scrolling on my TrackPoint. Prior to the move to evdev, it worked out of the box. There are various write-ups on ubuntuforums.org and blog posts about the fix, but IIRC as of 9.10 it still wasn't in the default install. It may be working now.
- Both the Cardbus slot and the SD reader slot work out of the box, but they seem to have IRQ issues. Reading data off of either slot (the only cardbus card I have is a CompactFlash reader) causes the system to slow to a crawl with hte mouse jerking all over the place and windows refreshing at a snail's pace.
- The mute button only mutes. Pressing it a second time does not unmute the audio. I suspect this is as the BIOS level, but GNOME sees the second press and thinks that the sound is un-muted, and thus reports sound as un-muted. (The only way to un-mute is to hit the volume up or down buttons)
All of that said my biggest gripes with the X41 are the lack of a working headphone jack, and the fact that IBM didn't use a standard 2.5" hard drive. I'm stuck with a max of 60GB of space due to their usage of non-standard 1.8" hard drives.
I have a recent Thinkpad X201 (got in May) and it required some tweaking to get any kind of graphics (even for the OS installer itself) to work with Lucid Lynx.
Some features still don't work as well as they do under Windows 7 on the same machine, mostly in power management department:
- Battery life is not as good (4 hours max)
- Fan seems to be on more under Linux
- Screen brightness can't be adjusted
- Fingerprint scanner doesn't work, but I don't need it anyway
Otherwise, the machine is great under Ubuntu:
- It's fast and powerful but very light
- Easily fits into any bag (12 inch screen)
- Quite sturdy construction
- 500GB of hard drive space allows me to run any kind of VMs I need
- Up to 8GB of RAM
- 802.11n networking (works fine with Ubuntu)
- All of this for about $1200 Canadian, including taxes (13%) and shipping - it was under a promotion
Ditto this, although I did have a few issues when trying to run the 64-bit version. That had more to do with 3rd party driver support than Ubuntu itself, though. I'm completely addicted to the lightning quick boot times of Linux on modern hardware.
I thought that was surprising also. ThinkPads have a good track record of Linux compatibility.
Is it IBM versus Lenovo difference, I wonder? IBM used to be fairly good about using reasonably open or at least industry-standard hardware when they were running the ThinkPad show.
