Recently, I bought my first laptop: a Thinkpad T60 from LinuxEmporium – it came with Ubuntu 6.06 (“Dapper”) pre-installed. I decided to buy from them because the fact that they were selling them with Ubuntu pre-installed indicated good Linux hardware support for the system and, although the cost was a little more than might have been the case for a big-supplier selling the same model with Windows XP pre-installed, I felt that it was worthwhile encouraging suppliers who do this kind of thing.
I’m very pleased with it. I am attempting to use the system as far as possible like a “real user”, rather than as a sysadmin/geek. This is because this kind of laptop is intended to be used by Normal People. Basically everything has behaved largely as expected and well. The only initial niggle was that the laptop shipped without ‘network-manager’ installed, which meant that a bit of hackery was required to get the wireless connection connecting to my WPA-capable wireless router. The application suggested by Linux Emporium was ‘Wireless Assistant’: this application is fine, except it doesn’t support WPA. I’ve sent a note back to Linux Emporium suggesting that they modify their stock build to include ‘network-manager’, since this is a very handy bit of software to have installed. It helps particularly if you are ‘roaming’ from one wireless network to another.
The only exception to the “use it like a real user” approach is when I come across a problem or bug: when that happens, I pull out all the sysadmin/geeky stops and use every means at my disposal to formulate a useful bug report. And, at the same time, I’m answering a couple of questions on the Ubuntu Support site, to help out other users.
In the past, I’ve been a little negative about Ubuntu: Debian has previously been my distribution of choice. However, for friendly desktop use and in particular for laptop use, I think it fits the purpose very well.