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Comment by baltcode | Hacker News Reader

You're right, the Wifi chipsets have proprietary driver issues. My graphics card is one of those low end ATI models that come in cheap desktops. I've heard that graphics cards can be an issue. I wonder if I could just disable the graphics card in some Ubuntu setting. I just want to run things like vi, ssh, gcc and a browser most of the time anyway.

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Intel integrated graphics are getting astonishingly better, and they're open source friendly, except for the Atoms that have the pathetic PowerVR graphics. At this point, for casual use, I don't think it's worth the hassle dealing with AMD or NVIDIA graphics.

Though, if you are burdened with having to run a video card in Linux, then AMD models have basic performance for less hassle than NVIDIA. You actually can disable the graphics card, but you probably don't want to, because you would have no bitmap graphics at all. Vi, SSH, and GCC don't depend on graphics, but a browser does.

Heck, I've got a fairly decent graphics card in this not-so-cheap laptop (that's what I hear anyways; it's an Nvidia Quadro K2000m in a Thinkpad W530) and it has problems. Apparently that's due to the Optimus "stuff", though. Fortunately, like you, 95% of my time is spent using Firefox, a terminal, SSH, and mutt, so I don't need the higher graphics capabilities.

(Although occasionally it might be nice to watch a movie at higher quality on a long flight, though.)

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