Rattle wrote:

Decius wrote:
I went through about a year back in the early part of the decade trying to work with desktop linux on a laptop. It didn't work very well. Eventually I got a mac. The trouble with Apple is that about 30% of the hardware they produce has serious design flaws. After many years of dealing with them I'm tired of the high cost of their stuff and the annual week without a computer.

So I thought I'd give Ubunto a try. I'd been told by many people that it "just works." I installed it on a pretty run of the mill Dell laptop. It did not "just work." Within a few minutes I'm googling around for long winded explanations of how I have to configure this and compile that and download this other thing in order to get this OS working on this extremely ubiquitous hardware.

This HOWTO describes how to get Wifi working on your Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 laptop using Ndiswrapper.

Im sorry, but if in 2007 you STILL have to compile something in order to get a basic thing like wireless networking working on an extremely popular hardware platform, LINUX WILL NEVER BE SUCCESSFUL ON THE DESKTOP.

Accept the truth. All computers suck. You are never going to find a hardware/software combination that will work the way you want it to. All combinations will bring you roughly equal amounts of pain, misery, and frustration. Accept your fate.

While I agree more with Rattle than anything I'm about to say, I'm surprised that you had problems with Apple. That's pretty much all I've owned for the last 4 years and the only problem I've had is a bad 3rd party RAM stick in a G4 Mini that has caused quite a bit of admin time until I tracked down the bad stick (it's been rock solid since, with Leopard, for about 15 days). I'm not sure what design flaws you're talking about, but I'm pretty happy with all of my hardware. The worst thing I've experienced is a slight fitment problem on my MBP 15". The left top edge doesn't quite seem perfectly with the case enclosure, creating a bit of a lip that annoys me. Seriously. If that's the worst thing, then I'm lightyears ahead of where I was 5 years ago when I was spending every fucking weekend admin'ing two Wintel boxes and a RH Linux server just to stay productive during the week. One thing about Apple hardware : it's not more expensive than anyone elses but I generally avoid 1st gen issues and wait until they get the bugs out of the supply chain before I buy anything. This usually comes with some price discounts as well. It's the reason why I don't own an iPhone yet (well... that and the whole ATT thing).

But while I'm on the subject, I'll tell you one other thing to be frustrated at about the state of Linux. Not only does it fail miserably on current and widely available hardware, but it is losing legacy support for hardware too. I recently have spent A FULL YEAR trying to find a distro that I can run on some older harder. Originally this was a P3 450 with 1GB of RAM that I just wanted to use as a backup JBOD box. I even upgraded the mobo to a Gateway P4 1.2G with 2GB of RAM - a VERY common platform, and STILL could not find anything that would install cleanly or without heroics of kernel patching and compiling. Many older versions of distros are not available, or need to be patched immediately for security concerns, rendering stability or hardware support inoperative. That's fucking bullshit. I cut my loses and bought an XServe on Ebay. It wasn't cheap, but given the sunk cost of my time and the various materials (power supplies, cables, USB cards, new Mobo, RAM sticks, etc) that I've put into this damn project, I would've gladly paid retail a year ago had I known it was going to be such a hassle. That is ridiculous. And so now we're back to Rattle's sage insight.

RE: Ubuntu sucks, nothing has changed.