Hi, I'm running both Ubuntu and openSUSE on a Toshiba laptop. I was wondering how many Wilders' users are running Linux on their laptop, and if the option is considered satisfactory!?
Mint 16 on Acer. I love it. The only issue is Nvidia Optimus. No Linux support so my powerful graphics card is essentially stuck in power saving mode. If anyone knows of a way to get it stuck in performance mode, I would love to hear. My BIOS does not have an option.
Got a netbook running Linux Mint XFCE 13 LTS. So far it runs better than Windows 7 Starter, and I have little issues with it having prior Linux experience for years. I'm planning to clean install Linux Mint XFCE 17 LTS once that's released. Haven't replace my main gaming laptop though, due to (possible) compatibility issues (hardware and software) and lack of fluency. I will consider it when Windows 7 Home expires, and Microsoft doesn't offer anything good by then. Not that I hate Windows 8/8.1, but find it unnecessary at this time.
I always try it and I never get it working. So far I have tried Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mint, Fedora and some others with unity, KDE or LXDE. I understand, that Creative is not very supportive with its drivers for linux, but it is not just that. If the OS is lagging just when browsing internet without sound, that does not provide much of a confidence. I still hold some hopes for SteamOS but simply put, you can get 8 running on 10 years old laptop without too much of a hassle, but it is hard to get linux running on a new one.
I know the pain. Maybe not 10 years but It took me consequtive 10 weeks to get my trackpoint working on ubuntu and another 2 months to get it working on linux mint debian. Not that there is lack of instructions on the web, a lot of time those instructions are outdated and not very noob specific. Suprisingly people don't like providing enough details for the noobs, not even wiki pages. You kind of have to guess things around in the first few weeks. On the bright side one I got past that very steep learning curve, things have became much esier. As for your laptop, you may want to stick with windows on it and for your next purchase read a little bit which graphics are more/less suited for Linux. Steam is gonna change things around but it's going to take time. After months of distro hopping, I have noticed that I stick with a distro for much longer amounts of time these days. And Im hoping that one day I will settle on one. This month Im running Debian 7 stable. Not the easiest distro to work with but feels so much better than its derivatives. And iceweasel is amazingly fast.
Use Ubuntu at home (2 laptops and 1 netbook) and work laptop. Works without fault and all machines, all work without additional configuration needed. I do take care to pick laptops that work on Linux.
There is [some] Linux support, look up Bumblebee: http://www.bumblebee-project.org/ https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ looks like you have to manually edit .desktop files (which define your menu entries) or run from command line, but automatically turns off when application exits.
On my laptop the distros that work very well are CentOS and Debian And I'm currently using Debian Wheezy, I've used all kinds of distros but so far Debian rocks them all. Had CentOS for over a year but I grew tired of recompiling wifi driver and nvidia proprietary drivers upon new kernel.
Mint 13 on Toshiba A75 laptop dual booting via Yumi with XP. Very nice system, except I can't print on my fancy printer because printer drivers don't exist. There are some poor man's solutions, for instance, scanner might be supported. That's not good enough.
Ubuntu 13.10 on 2 laptops. You get used to Unity after a while... though I still don't know why they don't let you place it at the bottom of the screen. Never had any issues with drivers. Never done this and never had issues installing Linux on any laptops in the past. Bad luck on your part or good luck on mine?
Debian seems to work best on my 4 year old Asus and Intel based laptop. 2nd and runner up would probably be Mint.
Agreed, installing additional repo's and configuring priorities so that packages don't break is no fun.
I only installed RPMForge repo or whatever it's called. I wanted to maximize stability over anything else. And I read somewhere that installing more than that would produce problems in CentOS. Anyways this experiance made me appreciate openSUSE for its out of the box experiance and ease of use... Still I wanted to find something more stable than SUSE so now Im on Debian. And now the biggest challange is probably gonna be getting OpenVPN support for SecurityKiss and forcing it to use UDP to bypass VPN blockades. But challange is always fun.
I had problems.... a lot of problems! It took me 3 days and posting all over internet forums to get Ubuntu on my Thinkpad X230. 1) EFFI or something like that was blocking my installation of Linux. After I turned that off in bios everything worked. 2) Linux mint bad installation CD/USBs - I had at least a dozen of those problems. I actually now thing that it might be a bug. What happens, after installation is complete and I restart, I get a blank screen with blinking underscore and nothing happens. 3) Mageia (and others) kernel panic after installation had made my laptop several times unbootable. The best way to go is to buy official DVDs. I have also noticed that several distros are more prone to these issues than others. CentOS/openSUSE NEVER gave me any of these problems. They always booted after installation. Debian derivatives are the biggest offenders. I can't say much about Debian stable itself, I only installed twice.
I have a toshiba satellite laptop and have been running linux mint 16 for a few months now and not experienced any issues yet. Im new to linux and it has been a very large transition from windows 7 to linux mint. The security aspect is something im still grasping at the moment.It feels strange not having a real-time antivirus running. I have asked before on this very forum if an av is needed and opinions are varied. Is linux more secure than windows.? This is a question for the more educated amongst us i feel and answers would be very much appreciated.
Reading this I remember on my desktop machine got the same issue right after installation (was a long time ago) and I never gave it a second chance, it was an instant buzz kill for me. I'm not saying Mint is bad, the huge user base speaks for itself, it's just that I had bad experience with it. I've used Mint on my laptop (which is my main computer) but I dont remember what made me switch distros.
Asked before, basically the answer is trusted repositories instead of downloading from WWW wherever and security by obscurity.
Currently running... grayarea (EeePC 1005HAB netbook): SalixOS 14.0 with Ratpoison. Not the full Ratpoison desktop though - I did a base system install and built it up from there. --- OS pros: very convenient, simple design, utterly bloat free, never updated for features. OS cons: rather small project Verdict: pretty good overall, not suitable for office use. --- Hardware pros: long (6+ hour) battery life, very portable, looks cool, runs almost any Linux, lasts a long time (I've had mine since ~2009) Hardware cons: not very fast, small screen, small keyboard Verdict: absolutely fantastic for what it is. If you want a netbook, get one of these. --- caleuche (Compaq TC1000 tablet): OpenBSD 5.4 with Fluxbox, and a minimal set of minimal applications. --- OS pros: less RAM usage than Linux, much better multitasking, simpler and more stable design, supports ancient hardware really well OS cons: fewer applications supported, much less user friendly, poor Unicode support, no accelerated graphics, badly coded applications may be unstable Verdict: not as versatile as Linux, but try it on an old machine some time; it's worth it if you're a *nix enthusiast. --- Hardware pros: nice keyboard, nice matte screen, nice button-mouse, portable, quiet, comes with a neat carrying case, BIOS can boot from USB, looks really spiffy Hardware cons: really tiny screws, rubbish IDE controller, rubbish video card with *nix support ranging from horrible to nonexistent, rubbish "active" pen that needs a battery, rubbish 4200 RPM hard drive by default, rubbish Transmeta Crusoe CPU that is slower than a Pentium II at half its clock speed, rubbish USB controller with awful performance, won't run any modern Javascript capable browser, can barely run anything that uses GTK2, crashes randomly during boot with every Linux distro I've tried, etc. etc. Verdict: brilliant concept, fails utterly in the execution. I'd say that hardware wasn't good enough at the time, only I have actually seen much better performance (and much better Linux support) from a Thinkpad 600e, with half the memory and half the clockspeed. The pretty silver chassis just adds insult to injury.
Debian in a Virtualbox VM with a nested VPN setup per Mirimir's instructions on iVPN's site. Without pfsense though. I got that machine for when I want anonymity now and don't use VPN's on this one anymore.
