Ask Slashdot: Best Laptop With Decent Linux Graphics Support?

jcreus writes "After struggling for some years with Nvidia cards (the laptop from which I am writing this has two graphic cards, an Intel one and Nvidia one, and is a holy mess [I still haven't been able to use the Nvidia card]) and, encouraged by Torvalds' middle finger speech, I've decided to ditch Nvidia for something better. I am expecting to buy another laptop and, this time, I'd like to get it right from the start. It would be interesting if it had decent graphics support and, in general, were Linux friendly. While I know Dell has released a Ubuntu laptop, it's way off-budget. My plan is to install Ubuntu, Kubuntu (or even Debian), with dual boot unfortunately required." So: what's the state of the art for out-of-the-box support?

Comments

It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Hsien-Ko]

Intel.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Tough Love]

Well, AMD is looking good too, with currently shipping Fusion parts for laptops all being Evergreen or Northern Islands, both supported by the open source xorg Radeon driver, with a few exceptions such as full screen antialiasing, which seems to be getting close but currently requires the Catalyst driver. See here for the current xorg driver state. Notice that everything you need for 2D and 3D graphics is there, up to but not including Southern Islands. Just taking a quick look around, it looks like the latest budget AMD laptops are Trinity, which is Northern Islands, which should work fine with the current Xorg driver. But definitely google the specific chipset. Power management... good question. I'm getting solid results with Ivy Bridge, I haven't tried AMD's laptop parts recently.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[marcansoft]

Which means the Optimus solution isn't actually all that bad. I have the opposite viewpoint: I bought an Optimus laptop assuming the nvidia wouldn't work, simply for the other specs and the Intel video. When it turned out that bumblebee worked fairly painlessly and I was able to use the nvidia to accelerate 3D while the Intel drove my displays, I was pleasantly surprised. The solution is a bit of a hack, but honestly, I don't really have anything bad to say about it. It's the best of both worlds: open Intel drivers which are stable and support modern interfaces like XRandR 1.3 and KMS driving the displays, and the clunky proprietary but fast nvidia driver sandboxed in its own backgrond X server doing 3D acceleration only.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Older AMD cards are in general good for the BSDs as well...unfortunately we don't have TTM yet, and the newer cards need that for KMS. We're stuck at RV790 or so. It's too bad, because I think *BSD drivers could impact the embedded space, something which it appears AMD occasionally targets.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Yvanhoe]

I believed this jazz and bought an AMD/ATI laptop after being bitten by nVidia's optimus comment (my nvidia laptop got stolen). Now I miss my nvidia laptop. The Radeon driver is really lacking, has a very high battery consumption, doesn't work well with many applications. The fglrx (proprietary) driver won't work with several Xorg version without that considered a major bug by the dev team.

It is very possible that right now, if you want pure open source, Intel may be the one offering the most supported punch. I will really consider this option for my next one. I wonder if CUDA can be done with intel cards.

The alternative is to use bumblebee on nvidia proprietary driver, which drains battery but allows to enjoy a decent graphical acceleration.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[ah42]

I honestly have to agree with the ease of setting up Bumblebee. When I bought my current laptop online, it was advertised as nVidia graphics, and nowhere did it mention intel... so I was disappointed (and quite confused) to find X using the intel driver. I had never heard of this Optimus thing, and 5 minutes later, I had bumblebee installed, and running.

https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee/+archive/stable

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[AncientPC]

Intel graphics and wifi has a good Linux reputation. Atom was an exception because they used a 3rd party GPU (PowerVR).

Thinkpad with a full Intel stack (CPU, graphics, wifi, SSD) is the preferred route. I prefer the T430 (14") or X230 (12"). The biggest draw back is low resolution (1600x900 or 1366x768). You may want to look into the X1 Carbon as well.

If cost is an issue, I would choose an X220 or T420. I actually prefer the older models as they have 7-row, traditional Thinkpad keyboard vs the newer 6-row chiclet style (Apple) keyboard. You can find them on Lenovo refurbished or off eBay / Craigslist. If the X220 had better resolution, I'd be stockpiling them in my closet. As it is, I'm pretty damn happy with my X220. I even have audio output through my Display Port working in Arch! (Is that awesome or kind of sad?)

If you're looking for a non-Thinkpad solution, the biggest headaches are usually graphics chipset, wifi. AMD / NVIDIA? Check chipset support. With wifi try to stick Intel once again, some Atheros chipsets are nasty and require a flaky ndiswrapper. Paying an extra $10 - 20 to upgrade to an Intel chipset is worth avoiding problems down the road. For touchpad, you usually want to make sure it's Synaptics for multi-touch support. I've had ACPI issues with desktops, but not with laptops thus far (Dell Inspirons / Latitudes, Asus EEE PCs, and Thinkpads).

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Tough Love]

I wonder if CUDA can be done with intel cards.

No, never, CUDA is nVidia only. But Intel supports OpenCL.

Bear in mind that AMD leaves Intel way back in the dust in GPU performance, including embedded GPUs.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[TeXMaster]

OpenCL is supported by all major vendors, and it can be used both on CPU and on GPU. However, Intel's support for OpenCL on GPU is only available on Windows. Until the GalliumComute framework is ready, we won't be seeing any open source OpenCL support anywhere. (Also, Intel's GPUs support OpenCL only from HD4000 series).

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Tough Love]

Thanks for that. You would think the top 500 guys would be anxious to get this on Linux and put some muscle behind it, wouldn't you? Or maybe they already are. There are a few big clusters running Radeon GPUs.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[dbIII]

The submitter was complaining about an Intel chipset, so how the hell did this get modded informative?

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[DarwinSurvivor]

Another happy x220 laptop user here. So far my experience after 6 months is that the thing is amazing.

• Screen resolution is only 1366x768 (bummer, but few non-huge laptops are any better)
• With the 9-cell battery (default is 6) and pcie_aspm=force, I got 11 hour battery new, and 9.5 hours when 6 months old
• Mic-mute button does nothing, but I've never needed it (output mute works perfectly)
• Touchpad enable/disable does nothing, but I've yet to hit the touchpad by accident in over 6 months (and I used to do that regularly on my other laptops)
• With the SSD the only noise is the fan which occasionaly turns itself OFF because the CPU (i3) stays below 50 under normal load and isn't needed 100%!!!
• For non-AAA gaming, the intel chipset does just fine. 60fps in UrbanTerror at full resolution.I can even output full 1080p via ext display (haven't tried with gaming yet).

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that everyone else has been woken up by Apple and is finally making 1920x1080 laptops in 11 inch and 13 inch sizes, even Lenovo is working on it: the upcoming Thinkpad Helix is supposed to have an 11.6 inch 1920x1080 screen.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Interesting. I've always had lots of trouble with Intel graphics, but never any trouble with Nvidia. My current (2 year old) Dell laptop has an FX 1800. It really kicks tail compared to the newest ones some of my coworkers are using. Their (also Dell) laptops have Intel graphics (don't know which).

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[jones_supa]

For touchpad, you usually want to make sure it's Synaptics for multi-touch support.

Multitouch works on Elantech touchpads too.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually open ATi driver is much, much better than intel one, sadly. Also ati cards, even with the open driver, give MUCH better performance out of your gfx card...

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the Pocl project disagrees with you on "won't be seeing any open source OpenCL". GPU-accelerated OpenCL is a sadder story. Also, the Parallella computer with its Epiphany coprocessors should have open source OpenCL acceleration, but will take a while longer for public availability. Of course, both of these are off topic for the original question of supported GPUs in current laptops.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

[Granted, my last cluster is a year old so my circumstantial evidence is aging, but...]

I don't know of anyone using open drivers for compute. Naturally those using Nvidia GPGPUs have to use a proprietary driver, but so do the folks using AMD GPGPUs as open source support for OpenCL still isn't there yet.

Note: while AMD is working on it, you still have to have X11 installed to use their Catalyst driver for OpenCL. Nvidia cards can be run with or without. And of the two, Nvidia's seems to be the most stable.

-Anon

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I can second that. I bought the X220 and I absolutely, totally love it.
I only use Linux and the X220 works amazingly well for me.
Best laptop I ever had.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[anomaly256]

I believed this jazz and bought an AMD/ATI laptop after being bitten by nVidia's optimus comment (my nvidia laptop got stolen). Now I miss my nvidia laptop. The Radeon driver is really lacking, has a very high battery consumption, doesn't work well with many applications. The fglrx (proprietary) driver won't work with several Xorg version without that considered a major bug by the dev team.

This has been my experience as well. AMD's linux driver is very woeful at the moment and they have shown VERY little sign of even caring. Just check the number of issues reported at cchtml.com, which AMD have been shown to read and even respond to, but are still unfixed and not even slated to be fixed any time soon. I hear the open source driver is making leaps and bounds but it's still not as polished as Intel's.

The alternative is to use bumblebee on nvidia proprietary driver, which drains battery but allows to enjoy a decent graphical acceleration.

I use this currently, and it actually works pretty well. Muxless gpu switching is a godsend over the old approach. Also, 'bumblebee' only uses more battery than vanilla Intel when you /choose/ to run a 3d app on the nvidia discrete gpu. If your app doesn't require the grunt, just launch it normally instead of via 'optirun' and battery life remains the same as any other Intel gpu. But the option for more power is there should you ever want it. I really like this setup. For someone who might have actual need of a high performance GPU (ie with steam coming soon) this is the setup I would recommend.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

> Touchpad enable/disable does nothing

Mine works, but it's a PITA to deactivate it every time I power on the thing.

Fortunately, KDE settings allow disabling it. And I've been happy as a clam since then...

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[bemymonkey]

If 1600x900 is too low, look no farther than the T530... a little bit bigger, but only very slightly heavier (not really noticable if both machines have a 9-cell battery installed) than the T430, and the screen is fantastic (MUCH better than the T430 1600x900 screens). 1080p, great color reproduction, extremely bright, high contrast, and very wide viewing angles as far as TN panels go. Now if only there was a 2560x1440 version... :D

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[bemymonkey]

Actually, that DisplayPort supports 2560x1600 output without problems... 1080p is child's play for an X220 ;)

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[bemymonkey]

No, he was complaining about nVidia Optimus (nVidia's switchable graphics), which isn't properly supported on Linux. The Intel graphics part seems to be working fine...

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be that thinkpad was the go-to for spendy but excellent screens; non-glare, hi-res, that sort of thing.

Now, it's boring old more of the same crap that everybody else does except less of it works with open source, there's more weird restrictions (uefi boot string comparisons that oughtn't be there), and no capitalisation at all on what used to be their strong points. Might as well get a dell, dude. Or an apple, which is why you see so many of those on enthousiast conference networks.

Me, I want something with a 4:3 high resolution, high quality screen, a windows key-free high quality keyboard and a trackpoint, no touchpad. But since the only supplier of that went aol on the mainstream, it's not to be had.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Thumper_SVX]

I came here to pretty much say this. I actually got an Alienware M11XR2 for free (it was purchased by my work for an executive who decided he hated it, and nobody else wanted such a small laptop so it was given to me as a play box). I stuck Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it, installed Bumblebee after a bit of research and it works fantastically well. I play FlightGear and Diaspora on it frequently, and just got into the Steam for Linux beta. I haven't had any issues with it at all.

While I agree it's not an optimal solution (groan... oh the pun, the pun!) it works really well. I have just modified the launchers in my start menu to call /usr/bin/optirun when I have a 3D accelerated app installed. Just for the record I run Gnome-Shell instead of Unity because I seriously can't stand it, and editing the menu items is easier.

Interestingly, that extra step is really not that different to what I do on my Windows laptop which has a newer Optimus chipset (Dell E6430); more often than not I have to go and modify the launchers in the start menu to make sure they use the Optimus chipset to run instead of the Intel. Although I do also use the Nvidia control panel for that.

Hmm... maybe all that's missing is a control panel item for Bumblebee... I might have to break out my Python/GTK skills and throw one together :)

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yep, that's the conclusion I came to as well, for this few-weeks-old laptop I'm typing on at the moment (Fedora 17). Intel video, Intel Wireless, Intel chipset. I'll just copy & paste what I wrote on the Dell/Ubuntu thread (specifically addressing the poor video resolution then, but the rest holds):

Agreed. I just needed to buy a new laptop (1.5 yr old MSI just flat died) and I wound up with a Lenovo e430, with all the Intel options (Centrino Wireless, Intel 3000 graphics, etc. - i.e. working drivers). I got a 14" matte screen, a slot for an SSD (128GB Mushkin), and the lowest-power i5 that can still do AES-NI (for LUKS). I got it for $550 from Antonline via Amazon. It was completely non-fussy about inheriting the 4GB DDR3 DIMM from the previous machine and the BIOS lets me put the ctrl-key back where it belongs. :)

It is not the world's finest laptop, but it's quite nice and a decent developer's machine, especially with root on SSD and flashcache in front of /home. But, more importantly, that's the most I was willing to spend for a low-resolution screen. If they had one of the 1900x1200 screens from, what, 2002?, available, I would have spent more. Seeing as all the phones are going higher density now, I'm hoping that technology trickles up (down?) to laptops in a year or two, so I didn't want to spend my 3-year laptop budget at this time. I've spent $3K on a laptop before, but there's just nothing out there at the moment that's worth it.

To be fair, I have spent a non-trivial amount of time tuning it (e.g. Synaptiks for KDE is in an OpenSUSE repo but not any Fedora repos...yet) and still haven't spent the time to get Intel Rapid Start (wake from SSD without BIOS init ... but LUKS...) working yet. Dell might have already worked that all out - but on the other hand I am contributing my tweaks upstream as I go, and expect others to do so as well.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[bonehead]

Well, AMD is looking good too, with currently shipping Fusion parts for laptops all being Evergreen or Northern Islands, both supported by the open source xorg Radeon driver,

Currently typing this on an el-cheapo laptop with a low-end AMD processor and graphics. Needed a replacement quickly and on a tight budget when my good laptop came to a very sad and undignified end.

After playing with several linux distros on this thing, I've found that the x.org drivers run absolutely great, and in fact run quite a bit better than the Catalyst drivers.

(Now if I could just find working drivers for the RTL8188 wifi chip in here, it might actually turn out to be a decent backup laptop.)

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

Agreed.

ATI once made really good graphics cards. After the Nvidia GT that my last workstation came with broke I bought a recent ATI Radeon. It was quite a disappointment.To be honest it was about the worst piece of crappy video hardware I've ever seen- and I've seen Voodoo I (the one you had to install additional to your primary adapter) to III (the one you wouldn't get updated drivers, because they went bankrupt) .

"Luckily" it broke after 1½ years. I am not going to miss it.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Yvanhoe]

Yes, performance-wise, Intel cards are still low, but I wonder if they do not even beat ATI cards when using only open source drivers.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Tough Love]

Yes, performance-wise, Intel cards are still low, but I wonder if they do not even beat ATI cards when using only open source drivers.

Intel embedded against Radeon PCI card? Not even close I can assure you, not even for the cheapest Radeon. The same probably holds for Fusion chips, though I haven't verified it persionally.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Tough Love]

I hear the open source driver is making leaps and bounds but it's still not as polished as Intel's.

Not quite, but it meets my needs to the extent I don't bother with the Catalyst driver. It's been that way for about 3 years now. The open source Radeon driver with a decent Radeon card turns in many times the 3D throughput of the best Intel embedded, and even low end fanless Radeon cards beat Intel easily.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[drinkypoo]

Linux worked fine on my original atom laptop (Single core 1.6) but the performance is nothing to write anyone about.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI = catalyst hell (I have prior experience) i.e. craptastic drivers, OSS driver is pokey v. catalyst
Intel = crappy GPU unless you don't need anything more than the basics and decent video playback(ATI drivers STILL exhibit awful tearing)

Really, nVidia is as good as it gets IF you want a good GPU and good drivers which is why my latest desktop build has a 670 FTW rather than some AMD POS(well the hw is OK, but their drivers are godawful).

(My recent ATI experience is a notebook w/the 4850 mobility radeon hd. Problems include video tearing, apps/games(opengl/directx) freezing in VERY specific situations(unfixed for 3+y), etc. It was just hell, hoping every month that the new release driver would actually fix something, but being continuously disappointed...)

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[DarwinSurvivor]

You are correct, but 1080p is unfortunately the highest resolution monitor I've had the privilige of connecting to it :(

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[bemymonkey]

LOL, me too :(

Those $400 2560x1440 eBay monitors from Korea are starting to look pretty good though... :D

A solution

[byolinux]

I found its actually hard to get a machine that's decent these days, unless you're prepared to put up with a bit of crap.

The solution is to build your own custom laptop -- http://www.avadirect.com/gaming-laptop-configurator.asp?PRID=25095

If you go for the "VISIONTEK Killer" wireless card, it has an Atheros chipset, so you can distro-hop to your hearts content. They also ship it with no OS if you like.

Re:A solution

[Kazymyr]

Or buy from a company that allows you to customize every aspect of the laptop. I have an Eurocom Racer http://web.eurocom.com/EC/ec_model_config1%281,219,0%29 with Radeon HD6970M graphics. You almost can't get better non-Nvidia mobile graphics than that. Got it with no OS installed, and it runs xubuntu like a champ.

Clevo

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a newerish Clevo

Need more information

[damn_registrars]

What do you mean by "decent linux graphics support"? I have a Thinkpad with NVidia NVS 3100M discrete graphics and 512mb vram. I'm perfectly content with it for what I do, which includes 3d molecular modelling. KDE looks great, too. On the other hand I don't play any 3d games so I can't tell you what Call of Duty 12 or any of those look like on here. I would sooner write code in CUDA for the GPU than do that.
R In other words, your sense of "decent linux graphics support" might not be the same as everyone else.

Re:Need more information

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were in the laptop market I would want good graphics too. ThinkPad would be probably be my choice. Too bad they're not as stylish as the MBP.

Re:Need more information

[willy_me]

Probably means "a machine that works". I use Linux at work and I started out with an older ATI card. What a mess, ended up putting in a cheap Nvidia card and that cleared up most, but not all, of my problems. Strange things still happen - like inverted colors in flash. Sure it can (and has) been fixed but I personally don't want to waste my time with such things.

Overall, I would say that Linux drivers generally suck when it comes to video cards. The one exception is Intel as the newer iSeries CPUs appear have good driver support. So my suggestion would be to pick up a laptop with a supported WiFi chipset, embedded Intel video, and a comfortable keyboard / screen / trackpad. It mostly depends on personal preference so it's not easy to recommend a specific laptop.

Re:Need more information

[Tough Love]

Your experience does seem a little out of date. Try a Radeon 6450 for example, it's solid as a rock under both the open source and Catalyst drivers and for $40 you can't complain about the performance.

Re:Need more information

[Nutria]

but I personally don't want to waste my time with such things.

Huh? The fix was trivial. And took no more than 15 minutes of research. Also, it was a solid fix that immediately worked so well that I don't now remember what I did to fix it...

Re:Need more information

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like an AK...it's not supposed to be pretty. You can throw it off a ladder though.

Re:Need more information

[GoatCheez]

The problem that jcreus had was that it was a dual-graphics option. The CPU had onboard graphics support that the laptop used by default, but also had an nVidia GPU that could be enabled. Getting the nVidia GPU to work was the issue. I have a Sandy Bridge laptop with a nVidia GPU - a similar position - but I haven't tried using linux only on it. Instead I have multiple linux VMs. So, the issue, is really getting both the intel graphics and the nVidia graphics to play nice together in linux.

Re:Need more information

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, does your machine resume from suspend properly?

Re:Need more information

[Anne Thwacks]

Assuming he means "with Bios and drive support for 7 years" the Lenovo is the only choice. I have a T61p and use it for PCB layout (as well as OpenOffice and Opera).

I also have a T43p from 2006, and just downloaded upgrades of all the stuff needed for a new Windows 7 professional install (for compatibility with the two family members who don't use Ubuntu). It was in daily use with XP till a week ago! I guess it will be another 7 years before it gets Win8, unless OpenBSD replaces Microsoft by then!

New Thinkpads have piss-poor resolution as your only option. I keep emailing Lenovo, and they keep spamming me about crap hardware ;-)

Re:Need more information

[fa2k]

I had that card too. I was planning to use my Thinkpad as a desktop replacement, but I couldn't watch video on the second screen because of NVidia's TwinView tech. They set the refresh rate of the second monitor to something bonkers in software (but the actual DVI connection works at the correct rate), so video and even desktop effects suffer from quite bad tearing artifacts on the second monitor. This was between 1 and 2 years ago , it may have improved since then.

Re:Need more information

[tylikcat]

It sounds like our experiences are similar. I'm on a Thinkpad 530w, with the dual intel invidia cards. I went through the hassle of setting up bumblebee when I first got it (and pulled down the latest intel drivers as it was too new for the repository to have support) but have been just using the intell drivers since the latest rebuild as they haven't been a problem for anything I'm doing.* ...but more to the point, what molecular modelling? I'm off in neurobio these days (and have been doing softbodied biomechanical models) but I spent a couple of years in the Daggett lab, and kind of miss protein dynamics.

* Mind you, that my tf700t has the same resolution on a much smaller screen kind of hurts. But it was the best option in a Thinkpad, and Thinkpads have reliable outperformed any other laptop I've worked with.

Re:Need more information

[timeOday]

The only solution I know of to fix the inverted colors in flash is disable hardware acceleration, which makes it unsuitable for full-screen video.

Re:Need more information

[Anonymous Coward]

On a Thinkpad, it is the internal LCD that usually runs at a lower 50 Hz refresh rate to save power. Perhaps the applications with the tearing require both displays at the same framerate, and you need to adjust the internal LCD up to 60 Hz?

Re:Need more information

[Nutria]

Maybe my CPU is just beefy enough to handle the work itself. (Also, I don't watch lots of full-screen Flash video...)

Re:Need more information

[jedidiah]

Linux drivers are GREAT for nvidia and quite adquate for Intel. Even ATI drivers are good enough if you aren't pushing the hardware.

If you want a Linux laptop with good graphics perfomance then one with a discrete Nvidia GPU is the obivious choice. Avoid this Optimus nonsense.

I'm suprised no one else has offered the other obvoius answer:

BUY FROM A LINUX VENDOR

Re:Need more information

[partyguerrilla]

Too bad they're not as stylish as the MBP.

That's entirely subjective; I find the bento box design of even lenovo thinkpads much more appealing than brushed aluminum.

Re:Need more information

[Anonymous Coward]

My new Acer Aspire V5 -531 handles graphics rather nicely running GNU/Linux. Then again I do not play games on my notebook computer with the exception of chess.

Re:Need more information

[Rakarra]

If you want a Linux laptop with good graphics perfomance then one with a discrete Nvidia GPU is the obivious choice. Avoid this Optimus nonsense.

The traditional problem with nvidia gpus in laptops has been with cooling. I had an HP laptop with an on-board GeForce 9600M and a number of models of HPs were vulnerable to overheating problems. That particular chipset was notorious for being hard to keep cool, and many many laptops (including mine) burned out the graphics chipsets, making them useless. HP offered replacements (subject to the same flaw), but my laptop line was left out of the offer, even though it was subject to the same flaw.

Yeah, so... I don't buy HP laptops anymore, even though they were one of the better vendors out there for awhile.

I, for one

[Black Parrot]

welcome our new middle-finger-brandishing overlord.

Re:I, for one

[davester666]

Hey, I've been around for quite some time...

ATI Or Intel

[ilikenwf]

No specific model, but Intel and ATI both have excellent support under Linux. Go Intel if you aren't a gamer and don't need super heavy graphics support.

Re:ATI Or Intel

[perles]

Take Intel. I own an old (5+ years) ATI laptop and not happy with it. After ATI dropped its proprietary driver I had to move on and get the open source, which really sucks. My laptop has and ATI r400 series (X1200). Basically, the last 3 years of open source code support sucks. Sloooow 3D! Sure it works fine to play videos. At work I have a Lenovo Intel laptop of about the same age and its 2D/3D graphics are way better than the ATI with open source supported by the manufacturer.

System76

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at System76? They make laptops preloaded with Ubuntu. www.system76.com

Re:System76

[Tough Love]

Have you looked at System76? They make laptops preloaded with Ubuntu. www.system76.com

I just ordered one from The Linuxlaptop. It's basically a Dell Inspiron. I could have gotten it faster and paid a little less directly from Dell, but I'm getting lazy, I want to just turn it on and have it work. I think, from now on I will only order from companies that pre-install Linux. It says something about their commitment.

Re:System76

[nschubach]

Nothing says professional like slow load times and a blurred out stock photo in the banner... I mean, it literally took me 3 minutes to load the page. And now it's down.

Re:System76

[Tough Love]

Nothing says professional like slow load times and a blurred out stock photo in the banner... I mean, it literally took me 3 minutes to load the page. And now it's down.

Slashdotted I'd say. And that's a good thing. I wish these guys the best.

Re:System76

[ittybad]

I've been developing on a System 76 for about a year and a half now (the then Serval model). I absolutely love it. I've become hooked on the finger print scanner for sudo commands. The only problem that I recall having was trying to upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 for Ubuntu. A bunch-o-things got all fubar. Reinstalling 12.04 worked like a charm and my overall experience got even better than before. I ended up having to put a windows dual boot on it for some windows/mac only video conferencing software for work, and System 76 provided all the drivers to make the windows installation work as expected. The bizarre "windows experience index" gave me a seven point something which is apparently good. I highly recommend System 76, but I have yet to try the other vendors.

Re:System76

[Vegemeister]

Ah, good old glossy 1366x768.

My MacBook Pro runs linux

[mozumder]

as well as OS X and Windows.

VMWare is pretty nice :)

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[Pope Raymond Lama]

And can a VMWare hosted Linux desktop do 3D? And about decent 3D?

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. VMware can virtuallize opengl and pass it through to the accelerated host driver. Will even run advanced 3D games.

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare is proprietary trash...I think Xen can pass through an entire GPU to a VM if you swing that way. VirtualBox also has 3D acceleration.

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[mozumder]

yes sir! it won't be as fast as native boot camp, but it does work and is decent enough.

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[mozumder]

and probably the most useful thing is that I never have to worry about driver support in Linux!

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox's 3D accel never worked properly for Linux guests.

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[jones_supa]

Go fuck yourself. VMWare is a great solution for running Windows, because Windows is a shit OS that does not belong on hardware. No one should have to run another OS and build a fake environment just to be able to run Linux.

Why would you have to be "pure"? Is it some kind of religion? If someone runs Windows on the metal and Linux in VM, and that kind of setup it works for him, that's fine.

Re:My MacBook Pro runs linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if fine includes having to hassle with anti-virus, malware and all the hell that is windows total lack of a package manager.

If you have to run windows anyway, might as well just run windows. That is not religion that is practicality. So for me and many other that solution is right out.

something better? what kind of joke is this

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf do you mean "something better"? You have Nvidia or AMD/Ati, or Intel if you just don't care, which is what your already on - there is no other choice for graphics, at least not any other choice that you would want.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is something better -- they may not have much capability, but 100% of that capability is exposed through open drivers that don't crash. (vs. nvidia, where 10% is in open drivers, and the other 80% is in closed, crash-inducing binary lumps... oh yeah, the last 10% doesn't work at all in Linux. Or ATI, where the open drivers are a little better, but the closed ones needed for most stuff don't even provide all functionalities of the open ones, and yeah, they crash a lot too.)

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Tough Love]

ATI, where the open drivers are a little better, but the closed ones needed for most stuff don't even provide all functionalities of the open ones, and yeah, they crash a lot too.

Smells like FUD, it must be FUD. Catalyst has never crashed on me, even once, in a few years of using it. The main annoyance is, you need to reinstall on every kernel update, which is why I now use the Xorg Radeon driver. Less than half the 3D performance, but that's still more performance than I need. 3D cards are ridiculously powerful these days.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Nutria]

nvidia, ... 80% is in closed, crash-inducing binary lumps.

What universe is this where the nvidia blobs induces crashes on even a semi-regular basis? I can't remember the last time video caused my system to hang/crash and I've been using the nvidia blob for at least 6 years.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[GoatCheez]

I was using nVidia blobs prior to that on a 3 year "fuck windows" hiatus. Don't recall any crashes from video then either. If I had any it was from me or something else. Still, I wish they would fix this issue sooner rather than later (although it may require some changes out of their scope for the moment).

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Arker]

Unfortunately this is exactly what you can expect with blobware support. Some people get lucky with the correct combination of software and hardware and it will seem to work perfectly. So you wonder why others complain. Well, they arent using the exact same software and hardware you are, and binaries are brittle. They break. One machine may work fine with blob drivers for a long time. A slightly different system may experience regular crashes. A more radically different system may not be able to run the blob at all. The only way to properly support Linux is with a Free driver which can be cleaned, fixed, and maintained by the kernel team.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago, I had a computer freezing all the time, just after installing an NVidia card. After a few days, I came to think about the power supply. Sure enough, the problem was solved by to cooking the planet a little more.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Nutria]

The only way to properly support Linux is with a Free driver

I live in the real, imperfect, gray will-never-get-everything-I-want world where one must compromise on a regular basis.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[dbIII]

Back in ... oh wait, that never happened in anything other than the betas.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Anonymous Coward]

The blobs wouldn't crash ever, unless if the kernel devs constantly changed things without any proper reasons. Those terrorists do it in purpose to maim the Nvidia drivers.

If they had given a proper stable ABI years ago as any sane people would have, the drivers for linux would have been so much better.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Arker]

So do I. The trick is to know what's really important and what is less important and choose your compromises accordingly. For instance it's better to deal with slightly less stunning 3d performance in order to avoid relying on blobware, rather than the other way around.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[ZeroPly]

Nvidia is utter crap. I put together a new system this year with dual 24" monitors, an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, a SSD boot drive, and RAID data drives. Unity kept crashing out repeatedly. I spent several hours reading forum posts. I tried a newer Nvidia driver. I tried three different old ones. I tried the "open" driver. I tried various X configuration settings. I upgraded Flash Player. I removed Flash Player. I installed Gnome and tried using that in 2D mode. Each time the GUI would just crash in different ways, usually in the middle of heavy work. Forget trying to play a movie or do graphics in Mathematica.

Finally, I said "fuck Nvidia" and put in a $40 ATI Radeon card. It works perfectly. Smooth graphics, no crashes. Now it's the way I remember Linux being.

Someone high up the food chain needs to state definitively: "Linux is not compatible with Nvidia graphics cards". That would save a lot of people a lot of time.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[anagama]

Same thing here. I put together a new machine this summer to replace my core 2 duo/intel system. Before that intel system I'd always had great luck with AMD/nVidia with respect to video stability. I've never experienced so many crashes in my life as I have with this system across multiple distros. Not even with the last version of Windows I ever used (ME) crashed this much. Of course, in the mid2000s AMD/nVidia was a really reliable choice and ATI was the nightmare, but that bit of old wisdom seems dead now.

Anyway, It's so bad I've been thinking of redoing the system with Intel stuff including Intel video, but I think I'll give ATI a try first. That's a lot cheaper and a lot less hassle than starting over, plus I won't have to basically toss $700 in parts. Hopefully it works out and I won't be tossing $740 in parts.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[jedidiah]

Yes. Quite.

Modern graphics cards have their own power connections now.

Let that just sink in for a minute.

It's an expansion card that draws so much power that it needs and it needs it's own power connection.

That makes it very much a possibility that you will end up with too much GPU for the rest of your system. Like trying to strap a jet engine to a Yugo.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[jedidiah]

What nvidia card?

Your entire post means fuck all without actual part numbers.

I've used several generations of nvidia GPUs to drive HTPCs over a number of years and never had any problems like that.

The biggest nvidia problem is that they run hot and cook low profile systems like the Mac Mini.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Nutria]

I've used several generations of nvidia GPUs to drive HTPCs over a number of years and never had any problems like that.

Not only that, but the whole raison d'etre of the blob is so that Nvidia can sell uber-expensive super-cards to movie studios who run their CG software on Linux machines. They pay a lot for Nvidia to fix bugs and we get the benefit.

silly question

[Anonymous Coward]

why dual boot?
and I hope you do a google about "Linux Laptop" to look at laptop that come with Linux preloaded.

System76: Good support

[CajunArson]

System76 gives good support. They aren't the cheapest option out there though.

If your goal is not to play 3D games, then Intel HD graphics have by far the best open-source support and HD 4000 graphics are actually pretty good overall. If your goal is to play games, then Nvidia or AMD with proprietary drivers will be your best bet, with the edge in driver quality going to Nvidia.

AMD does have some open source support *BUT* the 7000 series cards (meaning everything released in the last year) are extremely poorly supported with AMD only having released part of the necessary documentation so far (and it took them 10 months to release the part that is out there....).

Re:System76: Good support

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, System76's laptops are good and all hardware works out of the box. It is a relief to be able to simply plug and play with external monitors and beamers and such, and have the desktop handle it perfectly. The desktop environment was never the problem, the proprietary drivers were.

I'll go back to AMD or Nvidia when they commit to a free software driver. If heavy-duty gaming is a requirement the Intel HD4000 may not be enough, but if you are a casual gamer and prefer a solid desktop experience, than it is an excellent option along with the whole Ivy Bridge platform.

I love my System76 Gazelle Professional (Intel HD4000 and i7 CPU), FullHD screen too.

System-76

[Anonymous Coward]

Wide variety of customizable laptops and desktop that all ship with Ubuntu

Straight Intel

[fnj]

Intel HD2000/3000/4000. The only graphics worth a bucket of warm spit. If you need more than that you're doing it wrong.

Re:Straight Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeap, you are doing it wrong if you are trying to use Linux for meaningful gaming. Steam may fix this eventually but for the moment, use Windows or don't game seriously.

Re:Straight Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel HD2000/3000/4000. The only graphics worth a bucket of warm spit. If you need more than that you're doing it wrong.

oO .. That is the most idiotic thing I've ever read...

Re:Straight Intel

[fnj]

Couldn't give a shit about games. Maybe that's the difference. I use computers for actual productive purposes, and I care a lot about power efficiency.

Re:Straight Intel

[Psyborgue]

So if you're say... sculpting a high-poly character in Blender or using the new Cycles renderer in CUDA mode, you're doing it wrong? Playing a steam game? Doing it wrong?

Re:Straight Intel

[bemymonkey]

On a laptop? Yeah, you're doing it wrong.

SSD, gobs of RAM, lots of CPU power, nice bright screen with high resolution... all of these things belong on a laptop because they're useful in places where you can only use a laptop, without significantly reducing battery life or being useless 80% of the time.

High powered gaming graphics, on the other hand, belong in desktops or luggable workstations... or in an eGPU unit.

Re:Straight Intel

[Psyborgue]

Depends on what you use your laptop for, again. If you're playing games or doing 3d content creation, you do, definitely, still need a powerful chipset. Yes, especially on the road. Intel does not cut it. For most users, I might agree with you, but most is not all so "doing it wrong" hardly applies to everybody. You could just as easily say your average user does not need 8GB or ram, must less 16, so going over 4GB is always "doing it wrong". Different people have different requirements.

Re:Straight Intel

[bemymonkey]

You should always ask yourself whether you really need to be playing games or doing 3D content creation on a device with a very small thermal envelope, limited power consumption and limited screen space... eventually you'll reach the point where it's easier to put a desktop in every room and just lug a hot-swappable hard drive or sync everything.

And apart from gaming, a lot of the high-horsepower stuff is easily done on a workstation via RDP... :)

Re:Straight Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if you're a windows user you can use, say, a Thinkpad W530, and if you're an OS X user you can get a Mac Pro, but if you want to run Linux you should just put a desktop in every room?

Re:Straight Intel

[bemymonkey]

Um... no. This reasoning applies to all OSs... :)

Re:Straight Intel

[celtic_hackr]

You keep assuming that everyone works from a fixed office. Some people have mobility and work from both desktops and laptops and need a computer that is mobile enough to go where the person is working. High end desktops for doing 3D work is wonderful, but some people work outside of an office also, and sometimes even while travelling.

I don't even want to think about doing 3D on a RDP connection that is also likely piped through a firewall and VPN. the fact is, sometimes you NEED that high-end 3D on a laptop, at least occasionally, and Intel isn't going to get you there.

Not sad at all

[fnj]

Not sad at all for me.

Re:Not sad at all

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's great. Intel has invested a lot in Linux drivers for graphics (and wifi). The "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge" stuff is nice.

Re:Not sad at all

[dmt0]

The "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge" stuff is nice.

I have an Ivy Bridge laptop. What's so nice about it? How much time has passed since the hardware release? I still have tearing artifacts around every title bar on KDE, all because of bugs in drivers - both with Ubuntu's default driver and the one from PPA.

It's all great that their drivers are open and free, but quality-wise they have always been a mess.

At this point, if you want a great out-of-the-box support, all you can do is wait. Either when Intel will improve their quality, or when nvidia fixes their optimus stuff. Don't know much about the AMD side of things.

Re:Not sad at all

[Anonymous Coward]

No problems here on Debian sid. Did you try newer kernel/mesa/xorg driver? The xorg-edgers ppa has updated versions for all of these.

Re:Not sad at all

[fnj]

Intel drivers by far and away have been the best for as long as I can remember. Not the slightest hint of a problem on an RHEL6 clone. I can't even begin to imagine how you can have "tearing" on a static image. Sounds like hardware problems to me.

Re:Not sad at all

[dmt0]

Who's talking about static image? When you minimize/maximize you get tearing around the title bar - in my case that is. Here's a description of the issue from Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxMTM Hasn't been fixed still.

Re:Not sad at all

[realityimpaired]

That's a problem with your implementation. I have a Sandy Bridge laptop, and have never seen any hint of problem, using either Unity/3D or E17's built-in compositor with OpenGL support. Similarly, I have never noticed a problem running OpenGL-based games such as TuxKart.

That tells me that KDE is doing something wrong.

Re:Not sad at all

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to try Intel's experimental kernel
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-experimental/current/

It has been more stable for me than the default ubuntu kernel. I had issues with xlock/xscreensaver crashing the desktop... that have gone away since switching.

Re:Not sad at all

[Larryish]

Try this:

Trident 89-1627-1 ISA Video Card

http://www.recycledgoods.com/images/41998_1.jpg

Re:Not sad at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your RAM. Intel Sandy Bridge are known to have graphic artifacs problems with more than 4GB of RAM

Re:Not sad at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy yourself a Lenovo Thinkpad ... most of them work out of the box with Linux Relases (i hava an R61 with NVidia quatro - work fine)

Re:Not sad at all

[anechoic]

I just inherited two Lenovo T500 Thinkpads - one is running AVLinux while the other will soon get Mint loaded onto it - they both use the Intel Mobile 4 chipset which seem to work fine

Re:Not sad at all

[Hsien-Ko]

Try this:

Trident 89-1627-1 ISA Video Card

http://www.recycledgoods.com/images/41998_1.jpg

That would require a docking station, which in turn would require a power source, defeating the purpose of a laptop. It'd also require a monitor.


Also, that's no Tseng ET4000.

Re:Not sad at all

[fnj]

So are you seriously suggesting that tearing while moving windows on the desktop is a genuine problem? I can understand minor annoyance, but I fail to see how it interferes with work. I assume you are using the absurdity of desktop "effects". There sure isn't the slightest problem with Gnome2 or Xfce4 desktop configured sensibly.

Re:Not sad at all

[fnj]

Or it's exercising some pretty obscure feature that Unity and E17 don't.

www.system76.com

[Anonymous Coward]

system76 laptop comes with ubuntu preinstalled. they have good support for linux. If I were you, I would definitely look their website. I think the Dell ubuntu laptop is expensive. https://www.system76.com/laptops/

Re:www.system76.com

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Gazelle Professional" looks nice, though a little bit pricey. Do they have non-US keyboards?

Not enough information + binary blobs

[storkus]

There are two problems here:

1a. You haven't specified exactly what you'll be doing: if it's just office crap, anything will do; but if you'll be running the GIMP, games, etc, you'll need higher-end hardware (both CPU and GPU).

1b. Do you need x86/x64? If not, a Chromebook or tablet with USB-OTG and hub may be an answer; unfortunately, the below blob problem still applies.

2. For GPUs there are two kinds of drivers: reverse-engineered and proprietary blobs; you almost certainly know this. NVIDIA is the king of the blob department, AMD/ATI is middle of the road, and Intel (along with older stuff like SiS) is mostly completely reverse-engineered or even released open. Bear in mind, the open drivers are messy: based on the state of the art, graphics is by far the most difficult thing to reverse engineer a driver for, and I really feel for the guys working on them! (Edit: AMD/ATI's blobs are well known for being a mess, too!)

Bottom line: if RMS can barely get a machine to his liking, you'll have only a marginally less difficult time. Sorry.

Re:Not enough information + binary blobs

[jgrahn]

1a. You haven't specified exactly what you'll be doing: if it's just office crap, anything will do

Except for that which doesn't work reliably, e.g. locks up or has graphics bugs. Or that which needs bizarre, non-free or bleeding-edge drivers.

but if you'll be running the GIMP, games, etc, you'll need higher-end hardware (both CPU and GPU).

I don't know how you use the GIMP, but I use it for plain 2D image editing, and used that way it just needs to render bitmaps. Nothing your web browser doesn't want to do already.

Re:Not enough information + binary blobs

[Anonymous Coward]

2. For GPUs there are two kinds of drivers: reverse-engineered and proprietary blobs; you almost certainly know this. NVIDIA is the king of the blob department, AMD/ATI is middle of the road, and Intel (along with older stuff like SiS) is mostly completely reverse-engineered or even released open.

And drivers developed in the open, upstream, like the Intel driver. Enter Spanish inquisition, there are *three* kind of drivers...

Re:Not enough information + binary blobs

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, your web browser is more likely to make use of 3d acceleration than anything like GIMP.

To anyone reading from nvidia

[Anonymous Coward]

I experienced a situation a little like the OP in as much as I had a terrible experience with a dual Intel/nVidia system from Asus. It worked when I bought it, but Asus didn't provide new driver updates, and new drivers from nVidia either wouldn't install, or when hacked to install wouldn't work properly with the Asus software, leaving the community to fend for themselves - you could either install drivers that somewhat worked hacked together by some random guru on the internet, or stick with an old driver that didn't work properly with certain games etc. I will never, ever buy another hybrid graphics laptop. You can blane yourselves and Asus for that. Intel drivers on the other hand just install and work.

What sort of specs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you need OpenGL support? Accelerated video decompression? ...

Re:What sort of specs?

[ShoulderOfOrion]

Agreed. Not enough information here.

This has been my experience:

- if you're into hardcore gaming, nothing is going to beat the nvidia blob at this time for raw 3D frame rate. Power consumption and stability may suffer, and Linus will still be ranting.

- if you're doing 3D primarily for desktop compositing and OpenGL CAD-type stuff, I have found the radeon FOSS driver to be very stable and fast enough on non-bleeding-edge chipsets. It is much improved from years past. The only reason to use the fglrx binary blob is for faster gaming 3D, and for that the Nvidia blob blows it out of the water.

- if you're into 2D applications and video, or if power consumption is important, the Intel FOSS drivers are your best bet. The Intel 3D hardware is getting better with each new chipset, but it still hasn't caught up to Nvidia and ATI, and the software is still too buggy IMO. Power management is typically best with the Intel software though.

Some day Intel will eventually pull ahead when it gets tired of putting more cores on every die-shrink and starts adding GPUPUs instead.

Re:What sort of specs?

[Thumper_SVX]

If you're into hardcore 3D gaming there's also the NVidia Optimus, which while I know is the solution that OP is complaining about is also supportable with Bumblebee (http://bumblebee-project.org/). It works fantastically well on my Alienware, and I've tested it on a Dell Latitude E6430 with great success (before I put Windows 8 on it for work). Power consumption is also great because I'm using Intel graphics most of the time for the desktop and only running the NVidia when I want to fire up Diaspora or FlightGear.

ThinkPenguin's got the best free software support

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike system76, ZaReason, and every other f'ing company there trying to fix the mess. ThinkPenguin's been working with Atheros for instance on getting the complete source for a USB wifi chipset. That'll bring us the first truly Linux friendly USB adapter which is fully supported. There are two other older USB chipsets which are also not dependent on non-free software. The older N chipset has issues with some routers (then again it's really pre-N so that is to be expected) and the G chipset is well supported provided you stick to browsing the web and don't venture off to setup your own access point.

Anyway. Back to ThinkPenguin. The company has a number of laptops at a variety of prices points that anybody can afford. They are starting at $500 and you can throw any distribution on them just about because the company doesn't depend on pieces that are outside the mainline kernel and/or other major projects nor proprietary. And to make you feel better they are HUGE contributors to free software. 25% of there profits go to Trisquel and other projects as well. They are also working on numerous initiatives to better support people around the world. For instance there manufacturing keyboards for a dozen languages/regions and have brought support for lots of other hardware to the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe (as well as elsewhere).

I don't understand the fuss

[smittyoneeach]

I can use emacs at any resolution, irrespective of X11, pointing device, or keyboard.

Re:I don't understand the fuss

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:I don't understand the fuss

[Anonymous Coward]

These elements don't scare me!

Re:I don't understand the fuss

[fa2k]

Sure, Emacs has always had good hardware support. This is about a lesser OS called "Linux"

Re:I don't understand the fuss

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but vi/vim works better than emacs on low-resource computers and is universal in *nix. Besides everybody knows emacs is an operating system with a powerful shell presented to the user.

There's no simple "good" answer.

[wangmaster]

Yes, Linus gave Nvidia the middle finger, and from a certain perspective it was for a good reason, but from another perspective, it's just "ranting".

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

ATI/AMD is in the same boat. They have proprietary drivers. Arguably, Nvidia drivers are better. In my experience the ATI/AMD drivers tend to have more bugs. They also have a tendency to release support for a new xorg-server well after the server has been released, thus forcing those of us on the bleeding edge to wait. On the otherhand, they help support the open source drivers, which is great. But, the open source drivers lag behind, so if you're a gamer and dual boot to Windows and have a great ATI/AMD card, it may not work properly under the Linux open source drivers or with a bleeding edge distro with the latest and greatest xorg-server.

Otherwise, if you want "gamer-grade" graphics, you basically have a choice between Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Both have their tradeoffs.

If you don't care about gamer-grade graphics cards, Intel drivers are open source, well maintained, and the new sandy bridge and ivy bridge graphics are more than good enough for almost anything but gaming (they're okay for low to mid-low end gaming but that's about it).

My solution is a thinkpad w520 with optimus graphics. I use optimus graphics under windows when I want to game (quadro 2000m) and use the integrated intel graphics for linux with bbswitch to disable the nvidia gpu so my battery life doesn't suck. But it really does boil down to, do you want to game? If so, you have no choice but a proprietary driver or not-up-to-snuff open source driver. If not, stick with onboard Intel. Decent graphics performance and much better battery life than most discrete solutions.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[chmod a x mojo]

Don't forget, NVidia are great for supporting older hardware... at least a LOT better than ATI/AMD.
ATI/AMD has dropped the HD4200 series cards as of something like 6+ months ago from the newer drivers. NVidia on the other hand still supports a huge range of older cards, and supports VDPAU on pretty much anything from the last few years at the very least.

For non-gaming needs the radeon driver works out well for most cards though, so it's a trade off. And the X.org boys are ( or at least have been, I haven't been following too close lately ) working on getting VDPAU working on the HD4XXX+ hardware with the radeon driver.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Agent ME]

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

Nvidia Optimus cards aren't even usable in Linux until the Bumblebee project reinvented support for the Optimus stuff on their own. If that's not complete *crap* on Nvidia's part, then I don't even know what we can call crap.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[mallan]

No, not true - you can certainly use Optimus cards on Linux, you just have to choose between the integrated chipset or the dedicated chipset at boot time. What you don't get is the power savings from being able to dynamically switch between the low-power integrated Intel gfx and the high performance NVidia gfx. It's really not that big of a deal - the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI/AMD is in the same boat. They have proprietary drivers. Arguably, Nvidia drivers are better. In my experience the ATI/AMD drivers tend to have more bugs.

You're in epic understatement of the century mode here. nVIDIA closed-source drivers blow everyone else away. Problem is, those are closed source (very high quality, fast, etc, but closed-source). The open-source Intel and ATi drivers may be better than the nVIDIA open-source driver, but if you want real performance and quality the nVIDIA closed-source drivers are still second to none.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Arker]

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

Unfortunately that does, indeed, mean they are crap. It makes them *impossible* to troubleshoot or support and it also means they wont even run at all on many linux systems! It's hard to imagine what one could possibly do to produce something that is more 'crap' than that.

The fact is that 'supported' in the context of a Free system has to mean Free drivers or it's nonsense. This means the only recent video hardware that is really supported is the Intel HD. Some of the older Nvidia and ATI hardware can be properly supported, but caveat emptor. It's not easy to find supported hardware.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're still better than any of the open source graphics drivers by a huge margin. Deal with it freetard.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bull. You are just a rant-kiddy like Torvalds. I have never found a Linux machine on which I couldn't get the Nvidia drivers working, and it has been that way for over 10 years. I would never get anything other than Nvidia because I know it will definitely work on Linux which can not be said for any other brand of card.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[fa2k]

the problems with the open source drivers are in the areas of performance and power management. As for performance, I don't actually know, I have to take other people's word for it. I have an AMD desktop card and Linux native games work brilliantly, but there seems to be a problem with almost every Wine game.

Power management is limited on the open source driver. You can choose between performance profiles for power saving and performance (hot, loud and fast), one in between and one adaptive profile. The three former settings cause the card to run at a fixed clock speed. The adaptive setting is quite experimental, and is not used by default by many distros. In the documentation it says that it's not supported when using multiple screens.

Depending on the card, most users can run at low speed all the time, and hope that they remember to crank it up in the rare case when they need some 3D. Low speed works great in KDE, but didn't work well in Gnome (3/Shell) for me, though I suspect that was a bug.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Muxless Optimus (the most common kind these days) doesn't have that option.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[bemymonkey]

"...the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time."

Unless you need more than a few hours of battery life at a time. I've been buying solely Intel graphics based Thinkpads for a few years now, and currently I no longer need to carry a power supply with me... the 9-cell in my T520 lasts all day (from about 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM when I get home, with a few short breaks for lunch and such... I use public transit, so it's usually in use during transit as well). Can't see doing that on nVidia graphics (I'm getting about 12-13 hours of actual use on a charge, while colleagues with the NVS4200 based T420/T520 get about 6 hours when they turn Optimus off in the BIOS - and that's with the same 94Wh 9-cell battery).

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Thumper_SVX]

Incorrect; Bumblebee allows you to boot into Intel and run Optimus stuff on the Nvidia with a simple command of "/usr/bin/optirun (application)". I use it all the time and it works great on a couple of different Optimus-equipped laptops I've tested it on. On my own Alienware M11xR2 I can get 4 and a half hours out the battery if I don't run 3D stuff... about 2 and a half when I do.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[rtfa-troll]

Don't forget, NVidia are great for supporting older hardware... [etc...]

Both you and the grandparent are missing two crucial things. Firstly, the purely selfish thing. Debugging of other hardware on a system with a proprietary driver is often much more difficult than debugging on a pure open system. Some call or other sends data into the proprietary module, another call brings it out. You don't know the relation between the two, so it's difficult to spot when the first call was causing wrong data in the second call. This problem is so bad that there is even a special mechanism (tainting) which gives a warning to kernel developers when a fault report (kernel oops) comes from a system with a proprietary module. Fault reports from such systems are by default thrown away without being examined.

This first problem means that other hardware that is normally put together with NVidia becomes less reliable than it would normally be since bugs in the drivers are fixed less quickly. For example, your hard disk may corrupt your data, and when you change it the problem stops. You think the problem is the hard disk driver and that's true, but that problem would have been already solved if your system didn't have an NVidia chip. Your NVidia chip is causing your system as a whole to be more unreliable.

The second, more community thing, is that of course there are some situations where kernel developers do have to work on proprietary drivers and binary blobs. This has been described quite well in the video binary blobs attack. Basically, when this happens, a kernel developer who could normally have fixed four problems or worked on a new feature instead ends up spending the same time to fix one problem. What this means is that Linux overall develops more slowly because you some Linux users buy things like NVidia chips with proprietary software attached.

Simply put. Avoid where binary blobs and proprietary drivers where possible. If it allows you to get a system going where you wouldn't otherwise, then go for it. If you are buying a new system, then aim to avoid them.

Re:There's no simple "good" answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, I choose the card at boot and both work great.

Although I would prefer OS drivers I have little objection against proprietary drivers because I see them as a sort of extension of the firmware.

--

Teun

easy 3 steps.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. download kinoppix or other live cd distro. ideally without binary blobs.
2. go to a store like fry's or bestbuy
4. reboot machine, disable safe boot, boot from usb, check hardware support.

ATI's even worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't used the machine with the ATI card in it for about 4 months, but last I was on there, it couldn't run minecraft with the open source ati drivers. I mean like, min settings, 11fps if I was lucky. This is on an admittedly older laptop, with a Core 2 duo 2.0ghz+2MB L2 cache and a Radeon HD 4500M.

Basically, ATI is fine if you don't need 3d acceleration. The open source drivers are great with 2d, compositing, etc. The second you need 3d though, they're pretty much worthless (at least since I last used them), and you'll end up having to deal with the proprietary drivers instead. In my experience, they're pretty friggin sluggish in comparison. Lots of latency when starting X11 and switching between vterms and desktops, lag in some compositing/moving around windows/opening them, and a SHIT TON of bugs.

Not to mention Arch hasn't supported the binaries outside of the AUR for a few years now. Check out the ATI bar and Grill thread if you're interested.

For me, due to a bunch of random issues, I had to go the route of using third party repositories that kept me on older versions of X server in order to keep playing games. I eventually just said fuck it and haven't dealt with that machine since. Now, I actually stick to windows on it since it's mainly my work laptop anyway. Keep in mind, I'm an arch linux user, so ymmv if you go the ubuntu, mint, fedora, etc route.

So, yeah. Nvidia is a lot better from my experience. I know that's saying I'd rather get fucked with a stick than a knife, but it's true nonetheless.

As everyone else is saying, Intel is really the only company around that is worth its weight on the drivers side. Honestly, my Core i7 3770 can run Assassins Creed revelations pretty much fine on medium settings, 1080p (windows comparison, I know), so it's not the end of the world. Integrated is getting better. AMD's offerings on integrated are even better as far as power is concerned, but I'm fairly certain they have the same drivers as the discrete cards, so that's kind of a moot point anyway.

My advice? Buy a good intel chip from ivy bridge, and you won't really miss the discrete card unless you play a lot of resource intensive games. Wait around and pray to god Nvidia or AMD gets their act together soon.

Re:ATI's even worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, to clarify: The proprietary ATI drivers wouldn't work with the latest version of X server, so I did the work around using third party repositories that would automatically get the newest stable ATI proprietary driver and the version of X server compatible with it. This would sometimes be two generations out of date, ex 1.8 versus 1.10 was one of those cases if I remember correctly. And as far as the bugs were concerned? Frame buffer not being updated, leaving windows half loaded, only drawing the broder of windows, and worst of all, there was some bug that was a pain-in-the-ass to fix where, upon closing my laptop lid, the system would freeze up, unresponsive to any commands. Even if I didn't start X. Basically, if the fglrx module was loaded (kept the old name), the thing would freeze on me whenever I closed the lid, and not just the display, but the entire system. sudo halt wouldn't do anything.

Eh?

[NewtonsLaw]

What do you mean I can't get a laptop with a Hercules mono graphics card in it?

And who said CGA was "so last century".

Hell, maybe it's time I upgraded.

I noticed that I became much better at playing minesweeper after switching to an NVIDIA card.

Hmmm... I think this morning's earthquakes may have rattled something loose in my head ;-)

Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 3 GFX card chip vendors (forget the rest): NVIDIA, ATI, Intel ... have you ever read in the last 100 years anything good about NVIDIA or ATI on Linux (or even Windows) regarding driver support?

Buy a fsckn Lenovo Laptop WITHOUT hybrid GFX, just plain Intel. Is it fast? No, it's fsckn Intel! Will it work out of the Box? Yes, it's fsckn Intel!

It's 2012 but i would have said the same 8 years ago when i got a private NVIDIA and for work a Intel Laptop ... nothing changed. Closed source driver = problems. I'm sick of dealing with it ...

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

both suck even on windows. On linux it's a joke. Even after you get the chipset from the list of supported cards for some feature, say, video acceleration, you find out that the card you bought based on that information have a rebagded chipset and you will not have video acceleration.

nvidia is the worse on rebadging chipsets. ATI is mostly retarted with the names, but still no excuse.

Re:Wrong.

[jedidiah]

Nonsense.

The current nvidia driver will pretty much support everything that is out there. It's pretty much just like the Windows driver. The notable exception is Optimus and this is because that is a hack that X was not originally built to accomodate.

Chromebook

[tuppe666]

I would be tempted to buy a cheap chromebook [yes the ARM one] for $200, which allegedly run ubuntu very nicely. I would probably be tempted to either they drop in price to get rid of the old stock, or buy one of the new versions that come with a touchscreen next year.

...Oh you want dualboot. I assume you can still run chrome ;)

Re:Chromebook

[hazem]

As far as I can tell, the newest Acer Chrome-book is nearly the same computer as their celeron-based Aspire-One computers. I have one of those and as far as I can tell, the computers are nearly identical. So I'm suspecting it should be easy to put any flavor of Linux on it, since it doesn't appear to be an ARM computer.

Re:Chromebook

[Andy Prough]

Chromebook already runs a specialized version of Gentoo, which you can unlock in Dev mode and run (http://georgemcbay.blogspot.com/2012/10/go-on-samsung-arm-chromebook_25.html). For dual boot, you can just run a version of Linux on a USB stick (http://www.chromebook-linux.com/2011/11/booting-gnulinux-distribution-from-usb.html).

ThinkPenguin hardware (it's all freedom friendly)

[Anonymous Coward]

ThinkPenguin is the only company supporting free software. They're handing over 25% of the profits to support free software development and working with companies up the chain who actually do the manufacturing. They ship only free software supported chipsets so everything works really really well.

lets look at your 3 choices in laptops

[Osgeld]

Intel
AMD/ATI
Nvidia

now choose which pile of shit you want to fight linux to use

Re:lets look at your 3 choices in laptops

[arashi no garou]

What fighting is necessary with Intel? The last time I can recall Intel video being buggy in GNU/Linux was with trying to set up KMS on an older kernel that didn't fully support it. It's all done automatically now in most distros.

I'm going with the consensus here: If you want good open source drivers, go Intel. If you want good 3D support and don't care about open source, go Nvidia. If you want half-assed open and closed drivers at the same time, go AMD/ATI.

Or just don't install X at all, and you won't notice a difference among the three. ;-)

Re:lets look at your 3 choices in laptops

[Osgeld]

my work laptop has intel video, when I installed linux on it, it wouldnt accept any widescreen resolutions 3,2,1 fight!

Wait for Haswell

[Wyzard]

If you can wait awhile longer before buying, Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is reported to have significantly improvied graphics performance, and Intel GPUs are well-supported with free drivers in Linux and Xorg. They're less-powerful than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but should be fine unless you need to play high-end games on high quality settings.

Re:Wait for Haswell

[dmt0]

If you can wait awhile longer before buying, Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is reported to have significantly improvied graphics performance, and Intel GPUs are well-supported with free drivers in Linux and Xorg. They're less-powerful than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but should be fine unless you need to play high-end games on high quality settings.

Yes, and than wait another year or so until they get the drivers to work properly, which they still didn't with Sandy Bridge.

Re:Wait for Haswell

[DpEpsilon]

Yes, this. Haswell is the reason Valve is investing so much of its efforts on Intel Linux drivers. It will make buying AMD or NVIDIA cards pointless for gaming.

Re:Wait for Haswell

[gl4ss]

Yes, this. Haswell is the reason Valve is investing so much of its efforts on Intel Linux drivers. It will make buying AMD or NVIDIA cards pointless for gaming.

well thats nice since valves games are essentially targeted at 5 year old hw.
with intel it's always the next gpu that's coming out in a year thats going to bury ati/intel - been listening to that line for a decade now though. sure the latest cards aren't really shitty, but they're still 5 year old performance - it's just that previous intel models were so fucking bad compared to them it's like living in 35th century.

No such thing.

[Charliemopps]

Decent Linux Graphics Support?

There's no such thing. Wait until Valve/Steam get going and maybe... just maybe... But right now? Fuck no.

Re:No such thing.

[Arker]

You really expect a company that requires you to install a rootkit just to buy their products is going to somehow improve the situation for Free drivers? Are you out of your blooming mind?

best out-of-the-box Linux graphics support

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel graphics is the best choice but performs just so-so, though most non-gamer users won't notice.

Intel drivers are free open source and included in major distros, ready out of the box.

I have nothing but trouble with Intel graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

My latest experience:

1. I built an Ivy Bridge machine with the latest Intel onboard graphics. I installed Mint 13 KDE, and I got crashes like crazy.

2. I put in an nVidia card, installed the nVidia proprietary driver, and everything has been smooth since.

I've had this exact kind of thing happen on several previous builds. In every case, the solution that worked for me was to ditch the Intel onboard graphics and get nVidia.

I know nVidia's proprietary binary blob sucks, but it's the only thing I've found so far that allows me to stay on Linux.

Maybe other solutions work too, but my recommendation is (1) stay away from Intel graphics, (2) try nVidia first.

Re:I have nothing but trouble with Intel graphics

[waperboy]

There's a difference here, in that this works on desktop machines - (I have an Ivy Bridge CPU with an nVidia card, running Ubuntu, and it works perfectly). The issues are on laptops with Intel + nVidia as far as I understand.

Re:I have nothing but trouble with Intel graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have been unlucky. My company runs Linux on our laptops.
Since the past 5 years or so - we have only bought laptops with Intel graphics .. we have not had any issues due to this choice.
The main reason for *only* buying Intel hardware has been that they work so well under Linux.
During the past 5 years - I've gone through 3 laptops - all different makes but all with Intel graphics. No issues. My wife uses a mega-monster Nvidia gamer laptop and while it runs kinda ok (Ubuntu) it has about 2 hours battery time and crashes frequently.
For workstations, we can get an Nvidia card - but no Nvidia components are allowed for workstations/servers that are supposed to run headless - this due to the closed source drivers (there have been bugs in Nvidia drivers that have caused security issues - issues that are impossible to deal with as you're completely dependent on Nvidia fixing these.. which takes time).
So - my advice would be precise opposite: Stick with Intel Graphics / components.

Re:I have nothing but trouble with Intel graphics

[Sibelius]

I wanted to add on to this. I've had pretty painless experiences using the nvidia drivers under linux for several years, now. If you don't want or need the most up-to-date driver, Ubuntu has the older ones in their repository. 3D, window acceleration, and various display-, TV-, and HDMI-out work with no issues.

I wanted to especially point out that the latest driver release from nvidia fixes the Youtube blue-tint video problem, so you can again enjoy hardware-accelerated Youtube videos. Nvidia did this despite having essentially no financial incentive to do it (so far as I can tell.) Kudos to them, and I'm happy to say I'm a satisfied nvidia customer and Linux user.

AMD...Not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really an answer to your question, but still relevant. I have an AMD Radeon HD 3870. It came out maybe a little over 5 years ago. I had a lot of issues with it when I first got it about a year ago simply getting dual monitors working, and after that, getting WoW to run in Wine in a reasonable way. It's since been updated and seems to have largely tackled these problems, though I still have silly bugs like losing sound and the occasional artifacts while playing. I recently got into the Steam on Linux beta, At least at the moment, games will only run with the very latest beta release of the AMD graphics card. The problem being, they stopped updating the Radeon HD 4000 and earlier series a few versions ago.

So, contrary to what a few others are saying, AMD graphics support is really not very good, at least in the case of chips a couple years old, which could be your chip before you know it. Keep in mind that this is DESKTOP graphics, I seriously doubt you will have any better experiences with a mobile chipset.

IIRC, Torvald's anger had to do with NVIDIA's unwillingness to cooperate in the mobile phone sector. They certainly appear to have the best outlook for PC Linux gaming.

All in all though, it's a truly sad situation on all sides. Valve's actions certainly seem to indicate a brighter future, but it might be a ways off yet. Unless of course you aren't concerned about any modern gaming, in which case Intel's open source graphics drivers really are your best bet.

Re:AMD...Not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boy, so many typing mistakes. Don't try to explain things while sleep deprived. My apologies. Hope everyone gets the idea though.

OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want OpenGL support, you want nVidia.

System76's crap

[Anonymous Coward]

They hide behind non-free software and claim freedom... not that this is any different than any other company advertising linux laptops (except for thinkpneguin). The point is if your going to do nothing to fix the problem and push non-free stuff don't claim your a free software supporter.

I have abought systems from System76, Dell, Lenovo, HP, LinuxCertified, EmperorLinux, and a number of others. None of them understand the need for free software drivers/firmware. They all ship with shit that stops working on you because somebody who controls the driver they depend on decides to discontinue support.

What is worse is that HP, Lenovo, and Dell (and by that EmperorLinux) all ship systems which are infected with digital restrictions that won't even let you replace these components when they stop working. Or don't work right in the first place. Both in the CPU and on the wifi card. The CPU is less an issue although it does exist.

Re:System76's crap

[jampola]

RMS? Is that you?

Re:System76's crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You think RMS would buy a system dependent on digital restrictions or other proprietary crap?

Obviously not. However much fun you make of free software supporters there are a lot of people majorly impacted by non-free software. Its the primarily thing stifling Linux adoption.

Re:System76's crap

[unixisc]

RMS only buys Lemote Yedong. No way would he buy any of the above.

asus g53

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an Asus g53 running centos 6.3 - everything works, including the nvidia geforce

Nvidia Optimus workaround

[EightBits]

I recently had this issue with my Slackware install on a brand new Thinkpad. I can't vouch for all systems, but on mine I was able to tell the BIOS to disable Optimus and use ONLY the Nvidia chip. It was a really simple work around. Although, I did have to use the Intel graphics during installation. But once I rebooted from the installer, I was able to switch the BIOS to the Nvidia chip and have been using it ever since with Nvidia's drivers. I'd like the power savings of the Optimus feature, but that will have to wait until the appropriate dev teams can work up the support. Nvidia has an absolutely top tier driver team. I think if the support were already there in both X and the kernel Nvidia would have simply used it. I imagine it's not all there yet.

And don't worry about Linus and his middle finger. He always acts like a whiny little bitch when things don't go his way. If we followed his example, we'd never know if we're going to use Gnome or KDE on any given day.

Nvidia will work out for you. But you have to be a little patient for the OS support. You could also try looking for a laptop with Nvidia graphics that does not use Optimus. I would imagine they're getting to get difficult to find new these days, but you can probably still get them.

Re:Nvidia Optimus workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, the support isn't there, which is why bumblebee can't do it... Oh, wait.

Re:Nvidia Optimus workaround

[Thumper_SVX]

Bumblebee. I use it, and it works.

Re:Nvidia Optimus workaround

[EightBits]

I'm aware of Bumblebee but after reading about how it worked, I decided against using it. Bumblebee is a work around, not a solution. My comment was primarily referencing Airlie's livejournal about what was needed to make this work. I believe some of the required memory sharing in the kernel is in place now, but nothing else has been done that Nvidia needs to implement Optimus properly in Linux.

Re:easy 3 steps.

[hazem]

And check the "little things" and not just main support. For example, I have this little Acer Aspire One (AO756) that I like a lot. It has a celeron processor and linux runs on it well. EXCEPT: I've tried everything I can and there seems to be no way to get an external microphone to work (it has a combo jack, like a cellphone). Also, the SD card slot does not work in Linux either. Both of these things work fine in the Windows 7 that the machine came installed with.

I have hopes that future kernel updates will fix these problems, especially since the newest Chrome-books are Acer computers with nearly the same specs as my netbook.

But what I'm trying to say is to check all the smaller details. It may not be enough to just make sure it boots and the video works.

To my surprise...

[erp_consultant]

my MacBook Pro does an outstanding job of running Linux. You can dual boot it or run Linux in VMware or Virtual Box. No graphics card issues at all. Everything worked right out of the gate - sound, graphics, wireless, everything. If you can, try and find one a few years old. The new ones have those soldered on chips that make it impossible to upgrade. Get an SSD, take out the DVD, put in a second HD and you're off to the races.

Re:To my surprise...

[tlhIngan]

my MacBook Pro does an outstanding job of running Linux. You can dual boot it or run Linux in VMware or Virtual Box. No graphics card issues at all. Everything worked right out of the gate - sound, graphics, wireless, everything. If you can, try and find one a few years old. The new ones have those soldered on chips that make it impossible to upgrade. Get an SSD, take out the DVD, put in a second HD and you're off to the races.

Actually, all you need are the ones that lack the "Retina" display. Apple still makes regular plain old Macbook Pros (13" and 15") with fully upgradable everything. Just avoid the MacBook Pro with Retina display and you're fine. You don't want it anyhow - running at native resolution is a good way to strain your eyes. And running non-native looks ugly on any OS other than OS X (Try running 1920x1200 on it - it'll look practically native on OS X, and ugly as heck on any other OS).

So stick with the traditional line and you'll be fine. Easiest way to tell is because they still come with optical drives.

No reason to not get the latest tech, especially as Apple is still manufacturing them.

Re:To my surprise...

[amorsen]

You don't want it anyhow - running at native resolution is a good way to strain your eyes.

Do you have problems reading stuff printed on 1200 DPI printers? Professional offset printing must be a nightmare for you.

Re:To my surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

running at native resolution is a good way to strain your eyes

DPI

Re:To my surprise...

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Nice try at sarcasm. Unfortunately there's a big difference between a sheet of paper and a backlit LCD screen.

Note also that the resolution of what you term "professional offset printing" is often lower than the raw DPI because of the use of halftones or a patterns of dots to simulate the appearance of gray. A magazine picture printed at 1200 DPI may well have a resolution merely equivalent to a 300 DPI photograph printed using traditional analog film processing techniques.

Re:To my surprise...

[spagthorpe]

As long as you don't have an objection to running KDE, Plasma runs just fine on the Retina displays as the window components are resolution independent. It is the only workspace I know of that is unfortunately, but I've been running it for a while on my MBP and have zero issues. Looks fantastic.

Re:To my surprise...

[amorsen]

Unfortunately there's a big difference between a sheet of paper and a backlit LCD screen.

Yes, one is backlit and the other isn't. What is your point? I hate being able to see the pixels on either. Do you actually believe that being able to see the pixels helps readability and reduces eye strain?

Note also that the resolution of what you term "professional offset printing" is often lower than the raw DPI because of the use of halftones or a patterns of dots to simulate the appearance of gray. A magazine picture printed at 1200 DPI may well have a resolution merely equivalent to a 300 DPI photograph printed using traditional analog film processing techniques.

Beyond 300DPI there are diminishing returns, but the jump from 100DPI of a typical screen to a "retina display" is certainly visible.

Re:To my surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

With all professional printing I've seen, they don't scale what's being printed down to a miniscule size and say "well there's loads of room for more stuff now!". We're almost in 2013 and most OSes still don't resize properly or at all - insane.

Re:To my surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

Earlier this week, I replaced my 128 GB HD with a Samsung 840 SSD. Amazing difference.

Re:To my surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is lack of quad-pixel = 1px mode in Linux drivers. Web pages and apps specify dimensions in pixels, and some icons are bitmap. In normal mode a CSS 1px line on a retina display is two pixels wide, but Apple has "batshit crazy mode" where 1px = 1pixel. On Linux, I presume only "batshit crazy" mode is supported. but I don't buy any Apple stuff, so really you should be telling me this, not the other way around, if you were more interested in being helpful than in being a snarky attention whore.

Re:To my surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong resolution.

The retina panels are 2880 x 1800 (2560 x1600 for the 13"). If you are downresing, anything that isn't a multiple of that is going to look "ugly as heck" because you are stretching pixels. 1440 x 900 (1280 x 800 for the 13) are what you want, as that will use four pixels for every one displayed, and will look "native".

Re:To my surprise...

[tlhIngan]

Only if text gets printed 5 dots high at 1200 dpi.

Which is the problem with these "retina" displays on non-OS X - either they run 1:1 (which makes text look really damn small, and using the higher-res modes of the OS tends to screw up apps because they assumed the screen DPI was 72/96/132 fixed and don't leave enough space for the label).

The 1200dpi is because the printer can only print binary - on or off. Halftoning makes the greys and being able to control it means the variations can be more precisely controlled. In the end, the graphic itself is only printed to 300-odd DPI. Basically the printing press scales everything up so it can "retina" everything to make text super-sharp and graphics not have the "comic book" color dots.

Unfortunately, today's OSes don't really handle high-res all that well, so it's like printing a 300dpi document at 1200dpi - what you'll get is a page of 4x4 pages - each page is printed using 300dpi, and it can fit 4 inches into 1 now, resulting in being able to squeeze 16 pages onto one. Great if you're doing cheat sheets I suppose, but annoying if you have to continually use a mangifying glass to read it.

Hell - try that new HTC phone - the one that squeezes a 1080p display into 4" (400+dpi). Resolution-aware apps look great (though not so much better - the dpi is too high to be seen), but resolution unaware apps are unusable - they see a 1080p screen and still draw test 5 pixels high.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[kernelpanicked]

Eh you're mostly right on. The downside to ThinkPenguin, and I just recently did some PC shopping so I know for a fact, is that unless you want some POS Celeron with no memory to speak of, you're gonna be forking over Apple-like prices. No thanks.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference though between what you get for $400 from walmart and what you get from ThinkPenguin is night and day even at the low end. Your also not going to get the support or full functionalit and more than likely your going to run into problems with digital restrictions as all the major companies (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc) are shipping wifi slots with BIOS based whitelists. Unless your going to risk ruining your new system it is well worth the price. You might have the time to screw around trying out different laptops although most people don't.By the time you actually get the right one you'll have spent either the time or money or both which could have one to a good cause.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[kernelpanicked]

Yep. Replying to mahself. I just want to add that I would go out of my way to avoid any project that contributed to projects such as Trisquel. I'll happily contribute to Debian or Canonical before handing over good money to a project that exists only to repackage another distro, minus any actual useful bits, just to appease RMS.

I'd be more worried about wireless support

[Anonymous Coward]

My B570 Lenovo laptop has Intel graphics. I use Kubuntu, and haven't had any issues for graphics, but then I don't do games, so maybe that would show some issue I'm not aware of. GIMP, Office, email, web browsers, VLC for movies -- just fine.

The issue is wireless support. Broadcom or Atheros chipset can be supplied with this "same model." I was unlucky enough to get the Broadcom. The stock Kubuntu wireless widget/daemon is useless, especially to setup any WiFi security. So I installed Wicd instead. Then a standard distro channel update to the kernel killed the broadcom driver functionality, so I've stuck my kernel version at 3.0.0.17 since.

GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP? Depends what you're doing I suppose, but I edit photos fine on GIMP on a 2005 Dell D610 laptop. Google Earth isn't bad either. 3D games like UT2K4, hell no. But GIMP ought to run decently on any new laptop if this does.

Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz
Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller
1GiB DDR
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Audacity isn't bad either, but that's 10.04; 12.04 Audacity can't stumble out of it's own way on 2005-era hardware for some reason I haven't tracked down yet.

Re:GIMP

[jones_supa]

Actually it's not even that far from running UT2K4. :) According to my tests, a X3100 (found in 965 chipset) is already capable of running it in playable framerates.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about that though. It is a bit short sighted to be against the company just because they see the value in freedom. That said though the company also contributes substantially more to Linux Mint and they include non-free bits. Linux Mint though despite being the arch enemy of RMS and the FSF is not developing non-free bits. The reason you should care about Trisquel is because they are taking a stand against the non-free bits which are causing all sorts of havic. If nobody stands up and says no more more we are going to continue to suffer with hardware and software that doesn't work. Supporting Trisquel has nothing to do with RMS. Trisquel is a perfect distribution to discover just what hardware your going to have a problem with later. You don't have to agree with RMS to understand that there are all sorts of issues created by these non-free bits. From losing support for java (recent oracle debacle) to adobe flash (firefox). And then you have issues with things like digital restrictions from manufacturers and printers, wifi cards, video cards, and all sorts of other devices which stop working.

Beware EFI

[ah42]

I just bought a laptop myself (MSI-GT70), and the hardware (as far as I can tell) worked flawlessly with linux (even Optimus, see my above comment about bumblebee).

However, the major stumbling block was EFI and Windows Dual-Boot (I have my reasons):
No matter how I tried, I could not get any EFI bootloader to boot linux. I could get grub-efi, efi-shell, elilo, to all boot themselves, but none of them are able to boot the kernel. So I must use linux in Legacy (BIOS) mode.

Since windows is pre-installed, and the new recovery system isn't actually a proper installer (as far as I can tell. I haven't wanted to risk wiping the installation to test...), I must continue to boot windows in EFI mode.

So now my dual boot menu is actually chenging between BIOS and EFI, instead of choosing an option from the grub menu.

Re:Beware EFI

[Anonymous Coward]

Just bought a Toshiba Satillite C850D and a second HD. Lappy was still in the box, slipped the old harddrive with windows 8 on it out of the unit, slid the new hard drive in, flashed it up, set bios to legacy mode and installed xubuntu. Only problem was a very unstable acpi option. acpi=off in the boot options and I'm totally happy with my new lappy.

What trouble have you had with Nvidia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously their closed drivers work great on x86-64 Linux. Never had an issue. If you're a rabid open source proponent, fine, i can understand you might have trouble. But Nvidias binary blob drivers are fantastic.

Re:What trouble have you had with Nvidia?

[GPLHost-Thomas]

You mean that crap, with a proprietary X-Window app, which requires about 30 clicks to switch monitor? My wife hates it, she can't even figure out how to switch screen, and I always have to help here with this stupid interface. And no, she's not stupid, the problem really is the stupid software.

On the other side, with my laptop running an intel chipset, I just plug the laptop to the TV, and ... that's it! I don't even have to do a single click, my desktop resizes on the laptop screen (to match the one of the TV), and the output to the TV is activated automatically. That's a nice feature that came with Gnome 3 on Debian Wheezy, which of course, doesn't work with the NVidia proprietary drivers.

It could have been about "a rabit open source proponent", but it doesn't even have to.

Re:What trouble have you had with Nvidia?

[EzInKy]

It only makes sense that those using a FOSS operating system would have problems with closed drivers, and it is silly of you to try to dismiss them out of hand with the term "rabid". But I am wondering, what is it that drew you to Linux if it wasn't openess?

Depends on your needs

[slacka]

I've worked extensively with ATI, Nvida, and Intel Linux laptops and unfortunately there is no ideal solution. First, you need to decide whether you need open source or proprietary drivers. Proprietary drivers give vastly superior performance and expose the most OpenGL features. If you want support for the life of your laptop, be aware that manufactures will drop support after a few years as was done with my ATI X1800.

The open source drivers tend to give the solid 2D experience and have great support for wayland and compiz. You also don’t have to worry about kernel updates breaking your drivers. With open drivers forget about and serious gaming. OpenGL performance is still terrible compared to proprietary drivers. Intel has the best open source drivers. If you need more performance than an integrated GPU can deliver, ATI has the 2nd best open drivers.
TL:DR Propriatary -> Nvidia, Open -> Intel or ATI

Re:easy 3 steps.

[arashi no garou]

Indeed, the Toshiba laptop I just got in a trade is 99.9% supported in GNU/Linux. That 0.1% is the headphone jack; with pure ALSA it simply doesn't work, and with PulseAudio it works but has to be manually switched when I plug in my 'phones or external speakers. Also, with Pulse I get a nasty static from time to time and the only cure is to reboot (I've tried stopping and starting the sound system and no dice).

Of course, the fact that the Intel HD graphics are fully supported is really great. Still, it's that one audio niggle that keeps me from truly enjoying GNU/Linux on it.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[Arker]

They sound like a great company, and paying $500 for a laptop isnt much if you can be sure you arent getting crap/unsupportable hardware in the deal. I will keep them in mind for my next purchase but... at the moment they dont seem to be shipping anything with ECC so I guess I will have to build my next purchase myself like usual.

Ensure you can switch drivers on your existing box

[beachdog]

I recently converted a 2008 vintage Compaq and a newer AMD 64+Nvidia graphics laptop to Ubuntu.

The older laptop required editing a file in /etc to force an alternate video driver to load. The other laptop works best with a driver named nvidia.

What worked for me was refreshing my memory by reading the classic explanation of how a Debian Linux loads drivers, noting a few key filenames, and doing the few simple steps to switch video drivers and restart the computer. After writing it down on a sheet of paper, switching drivers was easy and picking the video driver that worked best was easy after I had confidence I was actually switching drivers and seeing the freshly rebooted video display.

Decent support ...

[sgunhouse]

Coming at this from the other side ... as someone involved in tech support (as a volunteer), we've recently had an issue that only shows up with the 3.5 kernels and the Catalyst driver. My own distro isn't using 3.5 kernels yet - the people reporting this were all using one of the latest *buntu versions. Since the original question was about Ubuntu, all I can say is be very careful. If the current LTS version doesn't have the 3.5 kernel yet, then go with that and avoid the issue.

I have had good luck with nVidia systems, but these were all desktop systems with only one adapter present. If there is such a thing in a laptop these days, that would really be my first choice. My current laptop (a Toshiba) has ATI graphics and is dual-boot, but freezes unless I boot Windows then reboot into Linux (my guess is some firmware issue: Windows loads the firmware that somehow my distro is lacking and after that Linux is fine). I wish I could paint a rosier picture, but I can't - that's what it is. Intel graphics may not even be in the same class as the other two big names, but they will work.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[rhavenn]

They sell 3 laptops. All three have only a 1366x768 rez. For a "high-end" boutique dealer that's a joke. 1600x1050 minimum and 1920x1080 preferred or no deal. I don't care if everything else is perfect.

Personally, got a 17" HP 1920x1080 with i3 SandyBridge about 1 year ago and everything works. ArchLinux is rock solid and the Intel drivers have been stable. LAN / Wifi worked out of the box as well as the webcam which suprised me. It was about $600 give or take. My $.02

If you don't need a gaming rig or 3d video editing, stear away from anything with a nvidia optimus setup as it's not supported and personally, the ATI stuff isn't all that much better then Intel and the Intel drivers are top notch from a open source perspective.

Am I the only one using DKMS for video drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Intel - should work out of the box with zero work.

2. AMD or Nvidia - wait a few months after brand new hardware release and everything works fine.

I run debian testing and use dkms. AMD and nvidia update automatically on their respective machines about 1-2 releases from bleeding edge. Even mouthbreathing ubuntu users could handle this today.

nVidia is the best Linux 3D choice

[darkeye]

if you're aim is to go for fast 3D, your range of choice is narrowed down to either ATI or nVidia. and, nVidias drivers are the better one.

yes, they are closed source, etc., but still they work.

no open source driver for these cards produces a sufficient level of performance. and, they lack a lot of features that are important for laptops. for example, the open source ATI drivers doesn't scale the GPU clock, which means your GPU will run at 100% all the time, your battery will get drained with it real fast (and your GPU fan will be spinning constantly)

then again, your goal might be different, and you're may not be focused on 3D

Optimus

[tiffany352]

I do not have any issues with my Nvidia+Intel setup, aside from some mishaps when I upgrade my Linux kernel (Bumblebee sometimes becomes a zombie kernel module, which won't unload, and that isn't fun).

There is Nouveau if you hate closed-source or something, but it has a lot of issues right now that should be resolved in the future: namely, that it doesn't support setting the clock rate of the GPU, so the GPU always runs at boot clock speeds by default. This means that your out-of-the-box performance with Nouveau could easily end up a tenth of that of the Nvidia blob.

There's ATI, but I've heard bad things about the stability of its driver. There seems to be a lot of activity on its driver development though, so that's good.

Do not go Intel. They have yet to release a 3.1 driver for Linux/Sandybridge (while Windows has had one available for quite some time). I do not know why they are claiming haswell will do 4.0 when their driver isn't even up to par with 3 year old specifications. I'm developing a game engine and am currently waiting on Intel to release a 3.1 driver. It's sad to see such a major player in GPUs to be so far behind on OpenGL. I doubt anyone would buy Intel if their GPUs only went up to, say, DirectX 8.0...

Warning: GMA 3600/3650

[YurB]

Yes, but be careful with the GMA 3600/3650 included in the Intel Atom N2600 and Atom D2500 and used on the many new netbooks today. The driver status is not that good (may even fall back to vesa), but may change in the near future.

Sony F-Series VPC23FD

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony F-Series VPC23FD, running Ubuntu 12.04 with the nVidia 310 driver runs very well.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[Anonymous Coward]

FIrst of all not everybody is looking for a super high resolution screen. The reason they haven't put one out is because there isn't enough demand for it and it is tricky because of the Intel graphics. There are only a handful of laptops with a 15.6" screen, intel graphics, and at 1920x1080 resolution. Not including the hybrid graphics. The CEO posts to the Trisquel forums all the time about the issues and why things are the way they are. These options would be available if people would care a bit more.

They aren't shipping a 17" laptop and the comparison isn't fair anyway."Working" by your definition is clearly not the same definition that ThinkPenguin has. Just because your hardware works today doesn't mean it will work tomorrow. A crummy $600 system that lasts a year isn't the same thing as $1500 system even if the specs are largely the same.You need to have the right combination of chipsets and quality or your likely to get screwed later when the drivers are abandoned or your hardware fails just short of being covered by the warranty. I'm also sure that $600 system didn't come or have available the options that ThinkPenguin offers. The level of custom configuration is insane. Matte screens, ssd, low end drives, etc.

I agree on the Intel graphics. They are definitely the way to go.

AMD Trinity APU

[Anonymous Coward]

It has cpu+gpu in one chip. It's super fast and tiny power consumption compared to processing power is awesome. So I would suggest AMD A6. It works flawlessly with Ubuntu 12.04, just use latest AMD Catalyst drivers and you can play games as well as on windows.

ThinkPad, T-, W- or X-series

[Anonymous Coward]

A proper ThinkPad will serve you well. Even the proprietary bits are manageable, but you can also just cold avoid buying a nvidia ("optimus technology") discrete laptop (though the W-series is only available with discrete graphics). Every one of these from the T40 on can be had with Intel wireless, which has been best of generation for three or four iterations now.

Also the delicious keyboard, though the current models have this odious chiclet keyboard that definitely compromised design, layout, and feel. On the other hand it is better than other chiclet keyboards by miles and miles.

Avoid the other kinds of ThinkPad, and anything else from Lenovo. The S-, L-, E-, Edge-, and other sub-ThinkPads, while nice in the cheapo family facebook machine category, are worthless for any enthusiast who'd install GNU/Linux on one. Also avoid the "s" or "l" submodels, e.g. T430s: those are reduced-price editions with shit like non-replaceable batteries and whatnot.

Re:ThinkPad, T-, W- or X-series

[EzInKy]

So you are saying that unless you are lazy and willing to do research it is best to avoid Lenovo all together? If that is the case it is truly a shame because Thinkpad is the first thing that comes to mind when Linux support is important.

My new Chromebook

[Andy Prough]

arrives tomorrow. Can't wait.

Laptop-give up and run Linux in a Virtual Machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up fighting to get Linux things working on my laptop years ago and started running Linux VMs instead. Thanks to virtualbox, the hardware that Linux sees is 100% under my control and has absolutely nothing to do with the real laptop hardware.
Linux always sees an Intel PRO/1000 NIC. It doesn't matter if I'm using wired or wireless networking - to the Linux VM, it is always an Intel PRO/1000.

Linux always sees the vbox GPU with 128MB of RAM. It works, supports 3D accel instructions and whatever display resolution I like. No more fighting with GPU drivers. When I run full screen, I can't tell the difference. Flash and audio playback works fine too as does VLC, mplayer and any of the other movie players for Linux.

If you are running Linux, you are probably not a gamer and office productivity apps don't need high-end graphics.

You'll never need to screw with GPU drivers or worry that the Broadcom network chip isn't supported again. Running Linux as a VM under Windows7 has been extremely stable since about a year after Win7 was released. Prior to that, VMs would lock up about once a week. Since then, I can't remember **any** lockups.

To clarify, the Linux VM is my primary desktop. Windows only has 3 programs loaded into it.
* VirtualBox
* TrueCrypt - all VMs reside on an encrypted data partition
* KeePassX - I use long and strong random passphrases for TrueCrypt access.
No email.
No web browser.
No Putty.
No SCP/SFTP ....

The lack of 3rd party programs probably explains why Windows is so very stable.

The VM performance can be tuned to provide about 95% of native levels. I honestly forget that I'm in a virtual machine. It is THAT fast.

Once, a few years ago, the laptop died with a cracked motherboard while I was on business travel. I dropped into a BestBuy, spent $750 for a Core i5 laptop, then loaded those 3 programs and downloaded my "VM" overnight. The next morning, I started up the VM and was 100% productive again. Everything was just where I left it, just the 20 files that had changed since my last VM copy the week prior needed to be restored from the daily rdiff-backup backup. Trivial.

Decoupling the hardware from the OS has many benefits. Too many to list them all. Also, the full partition encryption means that the client OS doesn't know anything about the encryption. EVERYTHING is encrypted, including the boot sector. When I shut down the physical machine, no power in the verse will decrypt it.

This is everything wrong with Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

This question encapsulates, by implication, everything that is wrong about Linux users. "Linux" doesn't support the graphics card. X does. Or Wayland, I guess.

love'em - hate'em

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha, this is funny.
ALL new intel CPU come with the "grafic" part built in.
luckely the opensource intel grafic drivers allows the
"living-inside-cpu"-gpu to be turned off ... riiight?

My experience shows ...

[sfarber53]

that Nvidia support for Linux is first rate. I've been using Ubuntu with Nvida cards for years. If you've eliminated Nvidia from consideration I think you're cutting off your nose as it were.

I've recently converted a late 2006 vintage Macbook, 2Ghz Core 2 with 2Gb Ram, and it is also wonderful. Again, I'm running Ubuntu, and the Intel graphics and wifi work beautifully.

It is great to have so many options. We didn't have them in the past. I am about to build a new desktop PC and need to investigate fully before deciding on graphic support. Radeon needs a sniff since I am an AMD fan.

Anyone who says that linux isn't grown up is full of poop! After all, I just threw over OS X for Ubuntu on my laptop and I'm loving it!

Intel works well!

[polyp2000]

Unless you are playing high end 3D games make sure you buy a laptop with an all Intel chipset. IMHO do that and everything just works (tm).

Just buy it preinstalled

[Rozzin]

There are several makers of Linux laptops, at this point:
I've had great experiences buying from ZaReason, I know people who have had great experiences buying from System76, and ThinkPenguin is another option.

I'm writing this from a ZaReason UltraLap 430 (see recent review on Ars Technica, and a video review by Tom Merritt [note that there are a couple of mistakes about specs in the video]), which I love even more than the Thinkpad X-series that it replaced.

My wife has a ZaReason Alto 4330 that she loves even more than the Thinkpad X-series that it replaced.

For work, I've had several ZaReason machines--including some Alto 3880 laptops (the previous generation of what my wife now has). We got the Altos with 8-way multiprocessing (4-core + hyperthreading) and gobs of RAM, with run-times of 3-4 hours on a single charge and weight just over 4 lbs; they've made fantastic developers' laptops for us.

And, for what you get, the ZaReason machines aren't even that expensive (seriously--a monster-power Alto is only ~$1k).

If you ask for it, the computers even come with whatever username you want setup--you don't even have to fill your name into the account; you just turn the computers on and use them (if you don't ask for it, they infer it from the name on the order).

As I understand it from my friends, System 76 is basically the same way, except that they're Ubuntu only.

Linux-designed laptops can be bought from

[Anonymous Coward]

system76.com

They have a broader choice of configuration options than Dell. At the moment they're the only vendor I know of that is consistently Linux-friendly in their hardware designs.

wise words from Tony Soprano

[epine]

Commendatori

She comes on to Tony, but tension is also resolved when Tony reluctantly informs Annalisa that to have a sexual relationship with a business partner would be bad for business and states he does not want to "shit where he eats".

120 fps with FSAA / rock solid stability / effective driver support: pick any 2-arctan(epsilon)

Blob support: Basically a coin flip. You might get a "works for me" you can live with, or you might not. When things go wrong, they usually stay wrong. Harmful to the open source ecosystem in the long run.

Open driver support: Good to great for carefully selected older product lines a generation behind the performance curve; sometimes excellent if you can shed the most extreme features; Chinese water torture otherwise.

I'll never build a game machine again that I'm also intending to use for real work. Tony knows.

nvidia or amd best option

[Vince6791]

The only main concern with linux is the gpu drivers the rest of the hardware like wi-fi, sound, nic, are well supported either by linux open source drivers or the manufacturer themselves like marvell, realtek, broadcom. Best thing to do before buying a laptop mainly for using with linux is to go to nvidia, ati, or intel website and see which mobo gpu they support for linux. That's pretty much it.

From what I can tell is that Nvidia and Amd(ati) have pretty great driver support for linux. The main difference between these 2 right now is that the "tear free" option is in the amd catalyst interface, not sure if nvidia has this option in their driver interface now but you can enable this by modifying the /ect/X11/xorg.conf and a few things in the nvidia driver interface than compiz. I'm using amd gpu now so i forgot the process in enabling tear free in nvidia.

For easy friendly linux distro use go with mint, ubuntu, kubuntu, opensuse, debian, PCLinuxOS, and fedora which every version has all the latest packages but it's still experimental based distro.

Clevo P170EM/150EM

[Analog Penguin]

I recently bought a Clevo P170EM with a hybrid Intel HD 4000/Radeon 7970M setup. The Intel card was supported perfectly in Linux out of the box. Getting support for the 7970M took a few months, but the most recent Catalyst release supports it under Ubuntu 12.04, and setup was relatively painless. The only minor hassle of this setup is the need to restart the X server to switch the active card. I understand 12.10 is a little dicier due to the new version of X, and I don't know about any other distros, but I've been running this setup for a few months now without any problems and can highly recommend it. If the P170EM is too big, the P150EM is essentially the same hardware with a smaller screen. Every other hardware component except the fingerprint reader works perfectly in Ubuntu as well.

System76 also sells machines with Ubuntu pre-installed, and they recently introduced a model with discrete graphics, so you could also look into either their computers or the Clevo computers upon which their models are based (I believe the Bonobo, their discrete-graphicsed model, is based on the P370EM).

Dell M6500

[rlk]

I have a used Dell M6500. It's a big machine, but (almost) everything works just fine under OpenSUSE 12.1 and 12.2. It's a 17" WUXGA display (much better than the 1920x1080 on the newer models), 4 DIMM slots with 32 GB capacity, 2 drive slots, Radeon HD5800 (works fine with recent Xorg, with full HW acceleration), and an mSATA slot which I'll eventually populate. It's a first generation i7-920 mobile, so newer processors might be faster, but it's still a fast, powerful machine.

The only things that don't work:

1) USB 3.0 ports cause all sorts of problems with my USB 3.0 card reader. Could be the reader, could be the kernel driver.

2) If I enable OpenGL compositing under KDE 4.x, I get some display glitches with emacs and xterm. Switching to the other option (which is still hardware accelerated) gets rid of those.

Yeah

[aliquis]

"Anything with Intel"? Not really a need for a thread.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya buddy, there's nothing better than NVIDIA for Linux. Sorry Linus.

High Resolution and Resolution Independence

[catchblue22]

I'm thinking about a Lenovo T530 or perhaps something from zareason. They both have 1080p offerings for screen resolution (although with zareason, to get that resolution I'd be stuck with nVidia, since their intel graphics laptops have lower resolution.). I was wondering how well Linux deals with high resolution screens in regards to readability, font size and general appearance. I'm not even sure yet whether I will go for gnome, kde, xfce, or something else.

Re:High Resolution and Resolution Independence

[DarwinSurvivor]

There was a slashdot article about this a few weeks ago if you care to search for it. I believe the consensus in the comments was that KDE is the only desktop asside from OSX that easily handles high DPI screens without the need to squint.

Will you stop already

[Dunge]

Linux is not done for gaming. If the worst Windows video card (Intel) is the best on Linux, you are far from getting somewhere. Just stick to what is the most advanced and developed technology : Windows, DirectX and nvidia. That's the optimal way to do graphic on a PC.

Re:ThinkPenguin's got the best free software suppo

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a ThinkPenguin laptop. It runs very well. I ordered it with Trisquel 5.5 preloaded.
( It is intel@core i3-2350M @ 2.30GHzx4 3.8GiB with 300GB HD)
I have had it over a year. Very Nice

text mode

[Skapare]

Which is the best when I throw in my need for text mode support. Right now, NVIDIA plus Nouveau accomplishes the requirement well (in a frame buffer way). I get direct kernel console output (can see the last kernel traceback before it died ... instead of having it hidden behind X Windows which can't show it if the kernel died). It also makes the mode correctly match the monitor and supports a wide range of fonts and font sizes. Until I know an alternative that works just as well, I need to stick with NVIDIA plus Nouveau.

nivida is fine

[luther349]

your video card is fine your problem is the dual card setup linux support on that is crap at best. get a laptop with just a nivida card and it will work fine. or as others have said a system 76 there boxes they make sure they run linux fine.

AMD or Nvidia

[issicus]

choices , choices....

Simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want perfect out of the box support and you don't need great performance : Intel. Ivy bridge.

  If you need high performance : Nvidia. You can deactivate the Intel built-in chip in the Bios (if you're lucky enough to have a modern bios in your laptop) Or there are some manipulation to do so in Linux directly.

  (I don't understand why you can't get your nividia card to work. You can't get hybrid graphics (optimus) to work that I understand but you should be able to shut the Intel built in card all-together. (at the expense of battery life)

Intel graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

If you aren't playing games then Intel graphics will meet your requirements, and they have the best open source drivers.

People should be rewarding Intel for providing really good open source drivers.

Very simple solution on a simple distro

[Shingetsu]

Arch Linux. `# pacman -S nvidia` Worked with every video card I've installed it on with performance as good or better than windows. Includes old old cards like GT 9800 and new new cards like GTX 690. Installing a SINGLE package is as much out-of-the-box as you can get, in fact even more out-of-the-box than it is on windows.

There is no perfect solution

[Shirley Marquez]

Intel has been very supportive of the open source community. But their hardware simply don't measure up in graphic processing power. It's adequate for basic desktop use, but if you want serious 3D performance you'll have to look elsewhere.

NVidia has offered high quality proprietary drivers, although they sometimes lack features that are in the drivers for other operating systems. Notably, Optimus support for systems with integrated graphics plus an NVidia card is missing in Linux. That's where NVidia picks up the heavy lifting for graphics-intense applications and the integrated graphics do all the basic stuff. They continue driver support for many years after a product is discontinued. If their drivers work on your system and distro, NVidia is probably the most solid choice for 3D performance. However, they have not been supportive of open source, and so the non-proprietary drivers for NVidia hardware are terrible. When the company drops support of your hardware, you're pretty much SOL; you'll have to stop upgrading your Linux distro because the last driver that supports your card probably won't work with a new Linux version.

AMD/ATI is a mixed bag. The quality of their proprietary drivers has sometimes been lacking, and they drop support of products much sooner than NVidia does. (I've seen ATI hardware that is less than three years old lose driver support.) On the other hand, AMD has been reasonably cooperative with the open source community, so the open source driver for ATI is much better than its counterpart for NVidia. If you go with a new computer with AMD graphics, you can expect to have to use the proprietary driver for the first couple of years, and at some point soon after that to be forced to switch to the open source driver. The short duration of manufacturer driver support for AMD/ATI products makes them hard to recommend for any Linux system that is also going to run Windows.

Instructions to get the "unholy mess" working

[Anonymous Coward]

I got nvidia optimus working fairly well on my Thinkpad W520. Instructions here: http://blog.echo-flow.com/2012/08/04/thinkpad-w520-multi-monitor-nvidia-optimus-with-bumblebee-on-ubuntu-12-04/

Dell workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

My dell Precision M4600 runs linux just fine. i have installed about every flavor of debian and opensuse. it has the Quadro 3000M card and i have zero issues to multiple monitors. nvidia-settings makes it easy.

matter of fact i have a couple generations of dell workstation class laptops that all run linux great with x gen Quadro card in them.
known working with linux and *.bsd nvidia drivers installed

dell m65
dell m4300
dell m4600