[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[Iain Buclaw]

On Sep 14, 2013 11:25 AM, "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>
> 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.

Some manufacturers even actively work against Linux at the hardware level.

http://linuxologist.com/02hardware/even-more-incriminating-evidence-in-the-foxconn-debacle/

Regards
-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';
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