[GLLUG] Hi all.. question about hardware purchasing..

[Mike Brodbelt]

On 19/03/13 16:23, Imran Chaudhry wrote:

> * try and stick with Intel brand internal hardware - there is good
> opensource support for things like 3D acceleration and wifi (that said
> I have machines with an nVidia card and a Broadcom wifi chipset as it
> "all works")

This is good advice - Intel provide excellent driver support for almost 
all their hardware (the exception being the odd Intel badged thing that 
was actually bought in, like the Poulsbo graphics chips). Modern CPUs 
with integrated graphics cores are more than good enough for most uses, 
and will just work out of the box, accelerated video and all.

> * In laptops, Acer and Lenovo have a good reputation for working well
> with Linux. For example, I hear many Debian developers have the Lenovo
> E520 - a good sign it works well under Debian at least.

Thinkpads have a long history of being decent machines. I'd also give a 
big thumbs up to the Dell XPS 13 (macbook air clone), which has a good 
spec. Dell have made sure that everything on it just works - they called 
it "Sputnik":-

http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/07/dells-sputnik-git-what-you-want.html

The second gen version moves it to a 1920 x 1080 screen, addressing my 
main gripe with it, and works out of the box with Ubuntu 12.10.

> Bear in mind that what I bought is not the "latest and greatest" -
> this actually helps as there is more chance of support having caught
> up.

That's often true, but again, with Intel stuff, driver support often 
beats the silicon. My X startup log indicates that the intel graphics 
driver supports no less than 36 variants of the Haswell graphics 
architecture, which isn't going to be commercially available until June.

Mike