Here we go again. I think it was about six months ago when I was talking about how much I wanted a laptop and was considering buying a Mac. A co-worker brought his laptop in today and was playing with Ubuntu. He has almost everything set up on it for it to be functional for work. That was part of what gave me pause with getting a Mac, getting everything I needed for work.
I scoped out Dell's site, since they sell computers with Ubuntu installed instead of Windows. The only laptop they offer, after customizing it like I want to, would run about $917. Granted, I could probably get a cheaper laptop with Windows installed and just create a partition but I just don't want to have to mess with any Windows stuff.
I am not actually going to buy it but I do have a longing to replace my laptop. I don't want to buy used either. I am going to wait until the end of the summer, by then I'll hopefully be settled into whatever new place I'll be living in. Then I'm going to revisit the whole laptop thing. I do wish to get away from Windows and with the little I do just on my own, there's really no need for it.
Laptop envy
June 7th, 2007 at 12:36 am
June 7th, 2007 at 03:30 pm 1181226643
June 7th, 2007 at 03:44 pm 1181227487
He said that while the effort was commendable, especially for a first step, there was still quite a bit of tweaking to get everything to work just right.
Of course, with Linux-- even Ubuntu-- hackery just comes with the territory. Though my heart belongs to OpenBSD, I am a huge Ubuntu fan and have it running on a separate desktop. Once it's up and running, it really can do just about everything Windows does... except for a lot of games. (Yes, I am aware of Wine.
Oh, and the best part is that it's pretty cheap. I mean, it's costly to buy hardware pre-installed with Linux, but if you shop around for a gently used PC and apply some elbow grease with your own Linux install, it can come out very cheap indeed. My current Linux desktop costed only a little over $200 to put together, but that's only because I wanted to make a very specific build.
June 7th, 2007 at 04:09 pm 1181228954
My co-worker actually was pretty impressed with the Ubuntu install. It was pretty slick at finding all his devices without really any tweaking. That's why I figure I'll wait til he works out all the necessary evils for work and then my setup (once I get there) should be a breeze.