[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Sat Sep 14 03:23:21 PDT 2013


On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 05:58:51AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 09:19:42 +0200
> Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote:
[...]
> > laptops sold with Linux support.
> 
> Those exist?
> 
> I've long heard stories about such things, but they seem to be like
> unicorns or mermaids or bigfoot...fantasy creatures you only ever hear
> tales "through the grapevine" about. Not so much real evidence or
> first-hand accounts.

I used to own one of them. It came preinstalled with Debian, so I'd like
to say to all the accusations of FOSS zealotry: so there! ;-)

It does have some binary blobs for a few device drivers, though, but
that didn't pose a problem 'cos they were custom-installed by the
manufacturers, so apt-get upgrade left them alone for the most part.

It worked pretty well as a laptop -- I of course nuked the default GUI
configuration and installed my own (at the time I was still into vtwm --
this was before my ratpoison days -- so it wasn't *too* foreign from the
preinstalled setup). But then the warranty expired, and so did the PSU.
I took it in for repair once, which was extremely expensive, but it
didn't last very long after. That was when I acquired a strong distaste
for laptops -- I learned that they have basically *no* user-serviceable
parts, and even something as simple as installing a different hard drive
(simple on a desktop, anyway) required custom tools that only laptop
manufacturers or repair shops have access to. Besides, even if you could
find the tools, laptop parts generally aren't sold in the consumer
market anyway, and they are also very model-specific, so there's no such
thing as going out to buy a replacement for a failing part. It's take it
in to the repair shop and pay an arm and a leg for the repair which
exceeds the cost of buying a new laptop. Sigh...


> > As an example, last April, an Ubuntu update borked my wireless
> > driver, because of religious FOSS. Ubuntu developers changed the
> > binary broadcom driver, working flawlessly, for the open source one,
> > which was still half done.
> > 
> > There is a discussion about it on their forums, if you want a link
> > for it.
> > 
> 
> Well, I don't use Ubuntu anymore for my Linux boxes. Migrated upstream
> to Debian. Any idea if one of the less religious distros (like Mint)
> would be decent for a laptop, or are non-OSS drivers merely one issue?

I'd advise caution and very *very* thorough research before purchasing a
laptop. Some laptops have hardware with no known Linux drivers (not even
binary blobs), so no matter which distro you choose, it wouldn't work.
One approach might be to look up a laptop model known to have been used
by a Linux-preinstalled manufacturer -- then you know there are drivers
for it out there somewhere. Suitable googling should be able to get you
downloadable blobs and installation instructions. Sadly, hardware
support for Linux is still spotty esp. for newly-released hardware, as
most manufacturers tend to prefer working with proprietary-backed OSes
first (esp. if some new features are developed in tandem between them).

(Caveat: I swore off laptops since 6-7 years ago, so my information may
be outdated.)


T

-- 
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.


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