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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I've been running linux on a variety of laptops for 15+ years without any issues that were outside my comfort level.

If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you.

That's really the most extraordinary part of the whole movement. 20 years into it it's become mainstream on phones, set top boxes, and embedded devices everywhere but it hasn't also necessarily become some washed down, stupefied, lowest-common-denominator black box that is impenetrable to look at where you rely on the whims of some private company to fix issues that you are unable to communicate to them.

It's still grass-roots and community driven at its core. It hasn't sold out. Anyone is still just a bit a time and hard work away from making a difference - that's pretty powerful.

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This is all true and I love it on a theoretical level.

But I write code for a living and I really can't justify ever having my laptop out of commission because of hardware/OS issues.

"Hey, boss. I'm not going to have my work done today because I installed an $DISTRO update and now my laptop is having driver issues."

there's certainly a fanboy hobbyist requirement in making a linux-you-install-yourself work for you. it takes a bit of passion and commitment.

Just like the automobile enthusiast who always disassembles parts of their car and replaces components - although their cars probably break down more often these people are enraptured in the art of auto mechanics. What would be our expensive nightmare is to them, hours of enjoyable pastime.

Well, then, you can't afford to have less than two laptops then - because every single operating system, including Linux, Windows and OS/X, had botched upgrades.

True, though I wouldn't personally buy two laptops just to avoid update hell. I'd rather just manually update once I'm sure it won't bork my system, and only when I can afford some potential downtime.

That said, I can't imagine too many developers or IT professionals who only have one working computer at their disposal. I am typing this on my Windows 7/Slackware main workstation, with an old laptop running OpenBSD to my left and an old tower running NetBSD to my right. I can jump on either of those two and get back to work in a few minutes if this one goes down.

Sure. When I was a freelance consultant doing Windows stuff, I did have a backup laptop for just that reason - in case an upgrade borked things, or my hardware failed.

OSX makes this particularly easy, though: you clone an OSX install with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to an external drive. (I have this scheduled to run nightly) You can then boot another Mac from that external drive.

The result is that you don't have to maintain two separate OSX installs. You can borrow somebody else's Mac, boot from your external drive, and boom - your data and your entire working environment are ready to go.

Of course you could also accomplish this with other operating systems. If your main work environment is a virtual machine, it's pretty trivial.

This is the best explanation of linux in terms of where it sits with respect to other operating systems. I've had a pretty similar experience as yourself with linux on laptops. Sometimes there are surprises, especially when upgrading, but nothing that the community can't handle. And usually the experience is much better with linux than Windows. I bought a Win8 machine last year and the wifi stopped working due to a bad driver. At the time I thought it was bad hardware, but under linux it worked flawlessly. Just recently, with the latest win8.1 updates, the wifi started to work again. Yeah, yeah, I know, the windows apologists will blame the wifi manufacturer, anyone but Microsoft. I got you. BUT... it worked for me under linux!

"If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you." LOL, I was going to say, what about chromeOS? That's a locked down distro based on linux. Luckily it is very easy to install a linux distro on it, as I have. You can have the best of both worlds, a locked down simple to use computer, and a tweak to your heart's delight linux distro.

>> If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you.

As other have pointed out System 76 targets Linux. I've got an old Dell that shipped with Ubuntu, still works great. Someone else mentioned their new series for Ubuntu, search on the Dell site.

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