[TriLUG] Good distro for laptops?

Robert Floyd r.floyd3 at verizon.net
Tue Oct 7 11:57:09 EDT 2003


On Tuesday 07 October 2003 06:48, Roberto Dohnert wrote:
> I have always had better luck with SuSE 8.2 on the Laptop.  Performance
> is good and it picked up everything hardware wise.

That was my experience on my previous laptop, but this one has not done well 
by SuSe 8.2. This laptop, like, apparently, most newer ones, eschews APM for 
ACPI. SuSe's ACPI support doesn't seem to include suspend and hibernate: 
without those, there's not point of power management on a laptop.

It also doesn't have driver support for the video (Radeon IGP 340M), the DVD 
burner (Sony DVD+RW DW-P50A, though it does support CD burning) and the 
built-in wireless (that's not SuSe's fault: it's a Broadcom, and I understand 
they're not forthcoming with information to allow a driver to be written).

I know the conventional wisdom that Linux runs best on machines that are not 
cutting edge. However, it does become a little frustrating to have (at last!) 
a state of the art machine and be unable to run a state of the art OS without 
industrial level tweaking which is, at this point, beyond my capabilities. I 
know, I know: I should learn how to do kernel compiles and not be dependent 
on rpms for software installation. But, really, why should I have to do that 
to use the basic features of a computer?

I don't mind paying for my software (I've bought copies of every distro I've 
used, and I even bought a copy of Star Office to help support the 
OpenOffice.org folks). If someone has a distribution that will support my 
laptop out of the box (with the understandable exception of 802.11g support), 
I'm ready to pull out the plastic and pay for it. Help me spend my money, 
folks!

Robert Floyd
Durham, NC



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