My Dell Inspiron works well with Ubuntu. Suspend works great, boot times are faster than Windows, and I didn't have any issues getting sound, wireless, or 3d acceleration working.

Power management is improving, but it still has a ways to go. Suspend/sleep worked for me out of the box, as do most monitoring functions (CPU speed and battery, I'm not sure about temperatures and fans).

I can't use hibernate because I have more RAM than swap space (I need a bigger hard drive), and setting options for when to change state (when to shut down screen, hard drive, etc and when to run on reduced speed vs. full speed) are still easier under Linux than Windows.

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Does Linux work as good on laptops as on a desktop computer?

I have never had any problems what so ever running linux on my laptops.

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Are all those exotic laptop components supported by Linux?

Im supprised how fast the linux kernel add support for new hardware.
I have used linux on Fujitsu/Siemens laptops for a few years and linux (debian, gentoo) never had any problems detecting the hardware. You might have to compile your own kernel to get support, but thats something I would do anyway.

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How well do laptops support something like totally erasing your HD, partitioning it and installing Linux on it?

Hmm, I cant see why this should be a problem. I have done that several times myself.
(If that was a problem I would go back to the harware vendor and tell them that this laptop does not work)
The partitioning tools in linux has always been superior to windows. (big supprise :D)

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Is it even possible to buy a laptop with no Windows on it (don't want to waste money on that)?

Ive never seen a laptop without a logo on it saying "Hi! I have windows inside"

I have asked myself many of the same questions you ask, and so far the answer always turned out to be linux does better
We would probably never heared about linux in the first place if it wasnt ten times more stable, agile and extendable than windows.

Note that my experience is with Fujitsu/Siemens laptops only.

Quote:Original post by Richy2k

Quote:Original post by zerotri
my advice is to avoid Toshibas if you're looking to install linux

To be honest I figured Toshibas were quite Linux friendly. Although I haven't looked much at the newer ones. My old satellite runs better in Linux than it did in Windows. Although I guess it IS quite old, so should be supported quite well.

Some of them might be, there is a section of their site dedicated to running linux on them. Yesterday though, I got a Ubuntu distro and everything seems to run almost perfectly with Ubuntu...it's just the other distros I've tried that don't like it. I'll probably be trying Simply Mepis in a few days, but for now, the only linux distro I've seen that fully supports my laptop out of the box is Ubuntu...although Slackware is said to work with a good deal of time and effort :
-Wynter Wooks(aka Zerotri)

Hmm, I'd be wary of Debian based distros if you've got a SATA RAID setup like I do, in my laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M3438G).

With every Debian based distro I had, the root FS would scramble and be unaccessible... completely at random. Ubuntu did it, and SimplyMEPIS did it as well, albeit less often. I switched to VectorLinux (Slackware based), and it worked fine.

Problem is, all the distros I've had hang/stick temporarily on starting up the hotplug interface, and none of the fixes work. Also, SimplyMEPIS was the only one that actually worked my soundcard (Realtek ALC880) straight out of the box. I think I got it working on Ubuntu eventually, having followed almost literally hundreds of people with the identical problem i.e. Realtek sucks balls. Problem was, SimplyMEPIS couldn't do anything else properly, and eventually scrambled on me and died like Ubuntu did.

As for graphics, I've got a GeForce Go6800 256Mb PCI-E. It worked fine, but you needed to download the nVidia driver and perform a few bits of jiggery-pokery with stuff like xorg.conf (and said jiggery-pokery sometimes failed to work completely, it was a total lottery) until the resolution option for my display (1440x900) magically became available in the K Control Centre.

I've given up on Linux until I can slap together a nice desktop machine, with vaguely standard hardware. This laptop is a total joke as far as non-Windows is concerned (even though you can run any Windows install and not just the OEM one).

YMMV, but my Linux laptop experience was basically total cack.

It's pretty arbitrary. Many models work extremely well, others won't even boot without significant effort (Most lie somewhere in between).

Modern and/or weird hardware is generally the most annoying. In particular:

- Winmodems - most laptops have them. They're cack anyway, but if you *really* want to use a modem, you might have a hard time
- ATI graphics - most laptops have these too. Only fairly recently did ATI make a Linux driver which actually works vaguely correctly with power saving (still not perfect). Until recently, even shutting the lid on my laptop caused the screen to become unusable until the next reboot (thankfully, it now works)

Modern distros are trying to make things work better by default. I have an older version of Ubuntu on there, and a few things were slightly weird (all fixed now though).

Generally speaking more popular, slightly older laptops are the best, as they will have had the most testing with Linux and any work-arounds applied. So ideally, go for something like a Dell or IBM that is a couple of years old (the model, not necessarily the machine) (I'm not vouching for the robustness / quality of either of these, just their Linux-compatibility).

Mark

i have a Dell Inspiron B130 (or 1300, same thing apparently). i installed Ubuntu 6.10, i believe the sound worked right after install, getting it to use 1280x800 resolution was not a problem at all "sudo apt-get install 915resolution", wi-fi was a pain to get set up, mostly because the guides i was using left out steps. beryl works surprisingly well also(intel graphics). i haven't had a chance to test out mic / line in yet. but i'm definately enjoying it more than windows.

although i doubt it's the easiest laptop to get set up, at least everything works after a little configuration. too bad it's pretty old, they stopped selling them like a month after i bought mine :/