Dell Puts Out Updated Ubuntu Linux Laptop

[Sonadow]

I wonder what people call "quality". Apple macbook pro's are pretty, and the whole notebook is encased in a practically solid aluminium shell.
But the inside parts run scorchingly hot and have a rather high fail rate, their wifi reception is pretty close to pathetic, trumped even by my ancient Acer One netbook.
Thye are also irreperable, and once out of warranty, they just litter around because nobody even cares to go through the trouble to keep them running.

So if this is the cost of "quality", I'm not sure I want it.

I choose my computers based on repairability, heck, my 7 year old notebook is doing active duty to this day. Amasing what you can get an old machine to do with a few minor, well selected upgrades.

Notebooks with replaceable parts (especially ultrabooks) are as good as extinct today.

I've opened up Samsung Series ultrabooks, ASUS Zenbooks, Acer's S3 and S7 ultrabooks and Lenovo's X-series ultrabooks and all i see are a combination of the following:

- Soldered-down WiFi
- socketed WiFi cards that use a PCIe connection but with a proprietary port (Lenovo and ASUS, i'm looking at YOU)
- soldered down RAM
- soldered down SSDs
- Glued batteries
- soldered processors
- zero SATA ports (kiss that SATA SSD or mechanical HDD goodbye)

[AJenbo]

I had a used Dell Latitude D510. That was an amazingly durable machine and spare parts are available to this day.

[grigi]

I wonder what people call "quality". Apple macbook pro's are pretty, and the whole notebook is encased in a practically solid aluminium shell.
But the inside parts run scorchingly hot and have a rather high fail rate, their wifi reception is pretty close to pathetic, trumped even by my ancient Acer One netbook.
Thye are also irreperable, and once out of warranty, they just litter around because nobody even cares to go through the trouble to keep them running.

So if this is the cost of "quality", I'm not sure I want it.

I choose my computers based on repairability, heck, my 7 year old notebook is doing active duty to this day. Amasing what you can get an old machine to do with a few minor, well selected upgrades.

[AJenbo]

Yeah, but the MacBook Air is thinner, prettier and better build quality than the Dell.
Also the trackpad on the MacBooks are said to be superior to the trackpads on other laptops.

On the downside you get a ugly Apple logo that lights up and a device that looks exactly like every other laptop around you.

The pulsing white light on the front of my wifes macbook drives me crasy some nights. Does any one know if you can trun it off (running mac os x 10.7)

[liam]

Yeah, but the MacBook Air is thinner, prettier and better build quality than the Dell.
Also the trackpad on the MacBooks are said to be superior to the trackpads on other laptops.

On the downside you get a ugly Apple logo that lights up and a device that looks exactly like every other laptop around you.

I've read enough Matthew Garrett posts to know not to buy an apple laptop and expect linux to work well (or for long). Besides, I don't want to support Apple. If they are a hardware company, as so many suggest, why won't they let me install my OS without using the bootcap intemediary?

[Ericg]

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~danvet/...ac23ccbccde0cd is the fix

I'm guessing that it doesn't fix the XPS 13z wanting to use the vendor specific backlight setting instead of the intel one. Though thats a fairly easy fix with backlight=vendor.

But if that can fix the strobing and pulsating thats definitely a big help since those two aren't fixable with kernel paramaters

[Sarvatt]

Reference, Sarvatt? I've been watching the Vetter's blog for awhile now since he was the head developer for that bug and didnt see any note about it finally being mainline-fixed o_O

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~danvet/...ac23ccbccde0cd is the fix

[Ericg]

The safe backlight fix will be in 3.9 and is cc:stable, that shouldn't be a problem too much longer

Reference, Sarvatt? I've been watching the Vetter's blog for awhile now since he was the head developer for that bug and didnt see any note about it finally being mainline-fixed o_O

[Ericg]

I just configured a 13" MacBook Air with a i7 CPU, 8 GB RAM, and 256 GB SSD HHD just like this model. It's $1600 ($50 more) and the display resolution is 1440x900 which is quite a bit lower than this Dell (1920x1080).

This is expensive relative to larger non-ultrabook laptops, but this price is in line with competing ultrabooks from ASUS, Apple, and the rest.

For an Ubuntu laptop, this is what I would buy if I was buying today. The quesiton is: when will Haswell models start shipping?

Display difference isn't a huge deal to me, ive got the original model right now and its usable (I wont say NICE but still definitely usable)

The 50 dollar difference....better trackpad. God what I'd do for a nicer, properly supported, trackpad on this thing ><

[Awesomeness]

Remember Microsoft got a stake in Dell now?

So far Microsoft has nothing. A buyout by Michael Dell with the help of Microsoft was proposed but so far a bunch of shareholders are against it and if they don't sell, the whole plan is dead.