[x1]

(I posted this earlier... this is a little off topic)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook#Suspend

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1774661

First off, I'm glad newegg will accept returns but we've got a HUGE problem in the linux community with these newer laptops. The problem isn't that newegg needs to accept our laptops but why these newer laptops are getting bricked by linux!

I want an ultrabook. I want something solid, fast, long battery life, great keyboard, great screen, lightweight and FLAWLESSLY running Debian. I can't buy that, I have to buy a MacPro. Yeah, my MacPro is nice and all (insert appletax joke) but I'd trade it in a HEARTBEAT for the equivalent running my distro of choice.

[wulczer]

It didn't work out of the box, but I have a UX31E and it works flawlessly now (meaning: it behaves exactly how I want it to, all peripherals work), with Debian testing.

I tend to treat the effort of making a new laptop work perfectly with a Linux distro as a one-off cost. If you're using the machine 10 hours a day for two years, spending three days on making it work right is barely noticeable.

In that vein, a friend of mine bought a Mac and spent a similar amount of time making it work flawlessly. That included buying software that minimises and tiles windows, figuring out that if you resume it with a large screen plugged it, the DPI will change and fonts on the laptop display will look weird and first googling and then working around this:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3336420?start=0&tst...

I'm sure someone with a new Windows laptop would spend a similar amount of time to make it work just right.

There are no silver bullets.

[x1]

Fair point. On reflection my biggest problem isn't just tinkering, I don't mind that, but the fact that now when it fails it can fail HARD. That or it just wont have something supported (multi-touch, graphics, webcam)

It's good to know you got your zenbook working, I really like the keyboard and size on that laptop but the fact that I could brick it just makes me uncomfortable.

[astine]

For what it's worth, I have the same laptop running just fine with Linux (Ubuntu) as well. My one complaint is that the keyboard is horrible. The responsiveness is well below that of any other keyboard I've used.

[eeperson]

You can already get pretty close to this with a Thinkpad. I have a Thinkpad T420 and it runs Debian Wheezy flawlessly. Of course you will have to make some tradeoffs in the weight/battery life department because Linux isn't as good about battery life. However, I am able to get about 5hrs with an extended battery and it still feels lighter than a 13in Macbook Pro. You can also replace the CD/DVD drive with an extra battery if you want longer battery life without affecting weight much.

[kamechan]

i have a t420 running arch, and am able to get 13 hours on idle and 10-12 doing work. posted something about how i did this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400

[eeperson]

Thanks for the tip. I always wondered what kind of battery life I could get if I tweaked things.

[streptomycin]

Your first link looks like a pretty bad situation. But there were similarly bad problems in the past too. My Dell laptop from 5 years ago had a hard drive that would basically go nuts under Linux, something to do with the timer telling it when to go into "sleep" mode not working so it switched back and forth constantly. If I hadn't noticed it sounded weird sometimes and taken action to fix it, it would have worn itself out within a year. It took a couple versions of Ubuntu before that bug got fixed by default.

And your second link basically seems to be "my somewhat nontypical graphics setup doesn't work in Linux", which is an age old problem.

[ineedtosleep]

To be fair, "FLAWLESSLY running Debian" is quite a tall order considering that Linux support for newer laptop drivers is typically pretty slow and even if the drivers exist, it's likely to have some wonkiness that kills the "FLAWLESSLY running Debian" qualifier.

I'm not a MBP owner, however, an OS running off of a variation of Unix is probably a huge boon in terms of Linux compatibility when compared to the other laptops out there made to run Windows.

[yardie]

Its also easier to support a distro that runs on 3 types of laptops of the same brand rather than 1000 variations of Wintel laptops.

[slurgfest]

I don't think Ubuntu has ever claimed perfect support for those and I don't understand why Asus is not being held to the mat for not doing basic QA with at least one Linux distribution.

Anyway, when you buy hardware, do not just buy whatever looks nice but buy something confirmed to work for your use cases. If that use case is running OS X, get something which supports OS X. And same for Linux, too.

[bitwize]

I don't understand why Asus is not being held to the mat for not doing basic QA with at least one Linux distribution.

Because there's no money in it.

A PC runs Windows. That's practically the definition of a PC. They're selling into a market that's like 90% Windows -- more like 99% if you filter out all the Macs. Their margins are razor thin. They can either do QA with Windows only at a certain cost x, or they can do QA with Windows and Linux at cost 2x and see almost no additional money for it.

[slurgfest]

OK. It is open season for saying that Linux is bad because your laptop doesn't support it. But if consumers decide that laptop manufacturers only need to support Windows, it should not be a shock when brand new laptops are made without good Linux support.

I can't even imagine how bad driver support would be in Windows or OS X if every single device driver had to be made by the same company selling the OS.

[bitwize]

I can't even imagine how bad driver support would be in Windows or OS X if every single device driver had to be made by the same company selling the OS.

I can. That situation happened with OS/2 back in the early nineties. That's one of the big reasons why you don't hear about OS/2 anymore.

[astine]

The whole point of the Ultrabook is to act as a viable Windows competitor to the Macbook Air. Linux doesn't even enter the picture.

[juliano_q]

I am in this ship too. I was looking forward to change my old macbook white for an ultrabook running some distro, but the reported software problems and some other problems specific to the utrabooks I tested (bad trackpad, etc) made me buy a new macbook pro. It was hard to me to resist to a great hardware allied with a good unix-based os.