Philip Bellenoit wrote:
Sometimes bad experiences can be helpful. Here is mine.
[...]
I'm sure that in time I'll get all these issues resolved--part of the problem is my own inexperience. But next time I buy it won't beanything too new.
It's a pitty that still hardware manufacturers don't support linux the way one would expect. The best solution to this is probably to do some research on linux support prior to buying the notebook, which will support those vendors who support linux (better), giving an incentive to improvement.
As already mentioned in the thread, there is an excellent forum for thinkpads
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWikiso prospective buyers can easily benchmark the support they find for models from other manufacturers against that.
A friend of mine bought a laptop that is also sold with suse preinstalled and thus should be supported by linux. It turned out that it is not perfectly supported by debian etch and it took a lot of time to figure out how to configure his graphics and other stuff, because there is not sufficient linux documentation for his model.
I think one can by a decent laptop for debian, but one can cut down immensely on the time spent for setting it up, if one settles for a slightly older model with enough linux information on the net.
YMMV, but my guess is that it in many cases it will take a long, long time before the faster cpu will make up for the additional time spent on configuration, custom kernel compilations and the like.
Johannes