Laptop suggestions?

[knowtree at aloha.com]

> 
> But he has a point.
> Or better: I can see why he is so ambivalent.
> For some people it may be enough that you can boot a laptop with FreeBSD 
> and it works with sound+gfx+wifi (if you buy wisely).
> E.g. it's OK for my Lifebook E8010 and it boots up fast enough so that 
> not having ACPI suspend/resume isn't a drama. It also proved easier to 
> upgrade than Ubuntu on the same hardware.
> But some people just want their notebook to work in the way it is 
> intended to and with all features they actually paid money for.
> For those, Apple's offerings are hard to beat. Heck, Apple notebooks 
> even beat Windows-notebooks from vendors who have been selling them for 
> 10 or 15 years in terms of battery-life, mobility and usefulness on the 
> road. No surprise here that FreeBSD loses out.
> 
> Incidentially. if you go to a (BSD)-conference, even a lot of FreeBSD 
> developers have Apple notebooks (not all, though - but you get 
> Apple-logos galore...).
> Percentage may be even higher among CORE members - and there's nothing 
> wrong about that.
> 
> OTOH, I still prefer konsole and xterms on the above FreeBSD notebook, 
> even compared to my (latest-generation) 24 inch iMac.
> It just feels "X'ier", if you know what I mean....
> 
> There are "voiced opinions" every couple of months that boil down to 
> something along the line of:
> "Just get rid of all the [mobile|old|whatever] crap and concentrate on 
> the server-space, I need [insert server-feature] more than I need this 
> ACPI-stuff that didn't work for me anyway".
> But I don't think this leads anywhere ;-)
> Also, I feel it somehow denigrates the work committers do in this area - 
> unpaid work, mostly (is anybody actually paid for hacking this stuff?), 
> I assume.
> 
> And isn't ACPI nowadays used universally to distribute resources (IRQs 
> etc.) to expansion-cards, even in servers?

I am a long-time fan of FreeBSD. I used it on my servers (had to give them
up due to consolidation), and I prefer doing as much of my desktop work as
possible on FreeBSD + Gnome. My everyday machine is an old Dell Optiplex
GX270, and my laptop is a newer Dell Latitude D830.

Success on the desktop and laptop is vital to the future of FOSS. The
commercial market will continue to try to monopolize new technology, their
goal being to lock customers in and lock us out. If the FOSS community
cannot offer a *viable* alternative to commercial operating systems, nobody
will come to our party. Sure I can put up with not using the built-in WiFi
interface in my D830 -- I have a Lucent Gold PC-Card that works just fine.
That is the tolerance only found in fans. In true believers. The vast
majority of people will laugh at this, dismiss me as eccentric, and go
right on using the commercial OS. Because it works.

I remember when FOSS fans loved to brag about how long they left their
servers up. An uptime of 360d was the Holy Grail. What made such
conversation entertaining was the look on the Windows SAs faces. These poor
guys were lucky to have a system run a whole day. In their world, lockups
and reboots were taken for granted. I want the same thing now. I want
FreeBSD + Gnome to blow the doors off of any and all commercial platforms.
Speed. Reliability. Functionality. Ease of installation. Ease of use.

One last thing. Lately I have gotten the impression that the best hardware
for graphics acceleration on FreeBSD is nVidia. But according to today's
Slashdot story <http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/01/0142219>
a lot of laptops with nVidia chips are failing. Should I avoid nVidia, or
is this blown out of proportion? Has the horse already run away?

Gary Dunn
Honolulu
Open Slate Project 
    http://openslate.net/
73 BMW E9 (3.0 CS) 2213583 (rust repair research project)
    http://e9erust.blogspot.com/