Time for a new laptop....Ubuntu maybe?

Well it's time for my career to take a new direction. I just put my two weeks in today which means it's time to turn in my old laptop back to my employer. It was a Dell Inspiron which served me well for the past 3 years.

Being that it's getting turned back in, I decided to do a bit of experimenting on it. Last week I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and I have really been enjoying it. Probably because it's something new, but to me it just seems to run better than my Windows XP edition. it just seems to utilize the memory better and run alot smoother than my XP ever did. Which got me thinking......Maybe it's time to make the switch. And that's when I found this

It seems like it might be what im looking for. So I figured I would get you guys opinions on Ubuntu. For those of you who like to screw around with Linux based systems, what are the pros and cons? The only con I've come up with are hardware compatibilities which should be (and I stress should) be taken care of since the laptop is being built as a Ubuntu machine.

Cheers

That is a nice machine, I have an Asus F3F and Ubuntu runs great on that. The only real issue I had is that the external switch for my WiFi doesn't work under it. But buying a machine with it pre-configured would eliminate problems like that.

EDIT - The resolution for that screen size is a bit low, I would shoot for 1680x1050 if you can find it.
EDIT 2 - "Full Hi Definition, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD (1920x1200)" is an option for only $150, I would recommend that. When I bought my laptop I didn't pay attention to the native resolution and am stuck in 1280x800 hell.

Tenchiro said:

EDIT - The resolution for that screen size is a bit low, I would shoot for 1680x1050 if you can find it.
EDIT 2 - "Full Hi Definition, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD (1920x1200)" is an option for only $150

Click to expand...

Oh Yes, they joys of "Customize It"

The link I provided is just the base machine. Im sure if I do decide to go with this it will be up quite a bit more than the one advertised

Ubuntu is a good distro if you like things to usually work and don't feel like messing around under the hood so much. Generally a nice looking distro that is good for someone making the switch to Linux.

I myself use Gentoo, but it is a bit more "hardcore". When you install or upgrade the packages are actually compiled for your system with your tweaks. Makes for a really nice running system with a lot of power. Can be a pain if you want a large package quickly though (although you can usually get binaries for the large stuff) and if you wait a long time to upgrade it can take awhile.

As far as a laptop...I think Lenovos are great for Linux. A lot of community support out there: ThinkWiki

Fedora - Fedora - OK, I like it.

Some info on the top ten Linux distros.

Gentoo. Ha, ha.