[thechat] laptops for linux

Judah McAuley judah at wiredotter.com
Tue Nov 8 17:04:15 CST 2005


John Handelaar wrote:
<snip>
> I recently "acquired" a Dell Latitude D505 which came from Dell Outlet.
> Super-cheap.  (Back when I had to buy PCs for a 150-person company we
> opted never to go for a warranty longer than a year though - on the numbers
> we found that if it doesn't die in 6 months it probably never will.  YMMV
> of course.)

Regarding the warranty, I certainly agree with your 6 month figure for 
desktops. Do you think the same is true of laptops? I would think that 
failure would happen post 6 months more often with laptops as they are 
constantly being moved, picked up, set down, etc. I was looking at 
Dell's Complete Care warranty which covers accidents (except fire and 
theft) as well as part failure. I figure that being able to take it to 
the pub or Burningman and not have to worry about beer being spilled in 
the keyboard might be worth a couple bucks extra.

> A person could use kubuntu on this if desired, but tbh if I wanted program
> menus with thousands of entries on a butt-ugly silver theme, I'd have left
> XP on it...
> 
> (Less snarkily, if I really did want KDE I'd install Ubuntu anyway and then
> just fire 'apt-get install kubuntu-base' from the shell.)

I'm relatively neutral with kde vs gnome. Most of my linux experience 
for years was on servers, so I didn't get exposed to it. I've been 
running Knoppix on my desktop at work for the past year and it came with 
KDE, so that's what I've used. From what I've seen the general consensus 
is that KDE is more heavier and more resource intensive but has more 
apps and a longer development history. As for Ubuntu with kde vs 
Kubuntu, what would the difference be in your mind?

Judah





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