[tbyehl]

Some weird IBM flavor of RHEL 6.5 is what they gave me. On hardware that is near top-of-the-line and thus poorly supported. I bought a docking station and it was an ordeal just to get it to recognize a monitor attached to the dock. And it crashes on undocking.

But the kicker is that my job here revolves around VMware and Windows. VMware's web client needs a newer version of Flash than you can get on Linux outside of Chrome. And Chrome dropped RHEL 6.x ages ago. And every RDP app packed with RHEL 6.x is junk compared to CoRD or RDCMan.

If I could BYOD I'd happily go buy a new MBA and IBM could toss it into a Blendtec when I'm done here.

[sespindola]

I'm currently a fellow IBMer.

Go to w3, search for "approved OS" and take your pick. I'm currently running fedora 20 with mate desktop. Works like a charm on a T430.

[aye]

> On hardware that is near top-of-the-line and thus poorly supported.

Haha, there's got to be a name for that paradox: you want to run Linux on your brand new computer, but the hardware isn't well supported.

Do you:

a) Settle for a Linux install that sometimes does weird things (on my Lenovo Yoga 2, I have to close the laptop lid and re-open it to get the computer to come back from suspend properly).

b) Settle for Windows 8?

Unless you've got the time to write your own device drivers, the MBA is the most "rational" choice for a new laptop. (IBM pun not intended.)