October 17, 2007 at 00:424 reasons not to use Linux on a laptop.
I use Linux almost every day when working on a laptop, for several years I have accumulated enough experience and impressions from working with it.
Many things are very convenient and very well implemented, but there are also disadvantages that sometimes cause quite difficulties at work. I found 4 good reasons not to work on a laptop with Linux ...
1. Iron support. It is a fact that support for many notebook hardware remains insufficient. Webcams, card readers, PCMCIA devices rise either with the use of many hours of ritual dances with a tambourine and mana, or do not rise at all. The same applies to the support of external monitors / TVs / projectors - let's hope that with the advent of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) the last problem will be solved ... The inability to change the brightness of the display is also depressing, in fact all my Fn keys do not work as intended (I have Toshiba )
2. Battery life. It is almost impossible to tune battery life without a file, don’t even look for the “Long Life” item in Power Management :)
Intel has taken certain steps in this direction - it released a utilityPowerTop , made a section with tips & tricks and programs and parameters that can be "tweaked" to increase the lifespan of your laptop. But first, you need a kernel of at least 2.6.22 (it will only be in the new version of Ubuntu, or you need to search and install it yourself), and you need to download all the tweaks, then patch the raw programs and compile everything manually again. And then if you want to update the program version - the procedure must be repeated again.
3. Network Manager.Well, something, but with a network Linux should work with a bang - many think. I also thought so, maybe I'm wrong and I don’t know all the power of working with a network that is hidden in Linux. But apparently I do not know this, not only me, but also my Network Manager, which always hangs in the gnome tray, helping me work with the network. At the moment, this product does not know how to connect to wifi networks when there is no distribution of IPs by dhcp. Support for vpn is also not very good, if again the connection to the network is carried out statically, then the Network manager will tell you that there are no active network devices and will not connect you to vpn. In principle, the developers promise a lot of goodies in version 0.7 (the current version 0.65), but it will all be at least for the new year, or even later ...
4. Suspend \ hibernate.There is still not a lot of work with this item in Linux. The kernel developers themselves who work with suspend \ hibernate support complain about the huge difficulties in implementing these functions. I will not give the technical details of the problem, but every user of a Linux laptop experiences the inconvenience of not having a debugged suspend \ hibernate function.
As a result, I will say that I did not dare to return Windows instead of Linux or buy a MacBook;) I am interested in following the development of Linux, how it is improving every day and participating in its development myself. And the problems - which distribution does not have them? ;)
Many things are very convenient and very well implemented, but there are also disadvantages that sometimes cause quite difficulties at work. I found 4 good reasons not to work on a laptop with Linux ...
1. Iron support. It is a fact that support for many notebook hardware remains insufficient. Webcams, card readers, PCMCIA devices rise either with the use of many hours of ritual dances with a tambourine and mana, or do not rise at all. The same applies to the support of external monitors / TVs / projectors - let's hope that with the advent of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) the last problem will be solved ... The inability to change the brightness of the display is also depressing, in fact all my Fn keys do not work as intended (I have Toshiba )
2. Battery life. It is almost impossible to tune battery life without a file, don’t even look for the “Long Life” item in Power Management :)
Intel has taken certain steps in this direction - it released a utilityPowerTop , made a section with tips & tricks and programs and parameters that can be "tweaked" to increase the lifespan of your laptop. But first, you need a kernel of at least 2.6.22 (it will only be in the new version of Ubuntu, or you need to search and install it yourself), and you need to download all the tweaks, then patch the raw programs and compile everything manually again. And then if you want to update the program version - the procedure must be repeated again.
3. Network Manager.Well, something, but with a network Linux should work with a bang - many think. I also thought so, maybe I'm wrong and I don’t know all the power of working with a network that is hidden in Linux. But apparently I do not know this, not only me, but also my Network Manager, which always hangs in the gnome tray, helping me work with the network. At the moment, this product does not know how to connect to wifi networks when there is no distribution of IPs by dhcp. Support for vpn is also not very good, if again the connection to the network is carried out statically, then the Network manager will tell you that there are no active network devices and will not connect you to vpn. In principle, the developers promise a lot of goodies in version 0.7 (the current version 0.65), but it will all be at least for the new year, or even later ...
4. Suspend \ hibernate.There is still not a lot of work with this item in Linux. The kernel developers themselves who work with suspend \ hibernate support complain about the huge difficulties in implementing these functions. I will not give the technical details of the problem, but every user of a Linux laptop experiences the inconvenience of not having a debugged suspend \ hibernate function.
As a result, I will say that I did not dare to return Windows instead of Linux or buy a MacBook;) I am interested in following the development of Linux, how it is improving every day and participating in its development myself. And the problems - which distribution does not have them? ;)