OSNews

ok, so let me take the article, example by example...

1. the 13 buttons work. yes there is a lack of gui apps for setting it up, but xorg can handle the number of buttons and stuff nicely. notice i said xorg. the kernel does not much care about the mouse. its a xorg thing. and xorg can deal with its features, it does not do so automagically (imo thats a good thing, but i can see why its not so for a tweak averse windows user. if that kind of person would buy such a beast in the first place, that is).

2. the bios flash and overclocking is perhaps kernel, but i think i would prefer a in-bios solution (and my current motherboard has such iirc). only issue with that is that they often require a fat partition to read of or similar (and how often do common users flash their bios? i would find it more likely to be done by a geek squad employee or similar). and overclocking? what common user use those again? to me those are like chipping a car. its only the enthusiasts that do that, and most often for gaming reasons. ergo, they would go near linux in the first place.

3. who the hell leaves the g-force meter controlled in the driver?! the best bet would be that its in the hardware, that way it could respond independent of the state the os is in! this smells so bad of winmodem its not even funny. as in, the minimum amount of hardware needed (hardware is expensive), maximum amount of stuff in the code (code is cheap, just stuff it in a driver and burn it to a cd). fingerprint reader? no clue, but again i smell a webcam sensor and software drivers. would love to see the usb dumps on that laptop. custom buttons. write a xmodmap file most likely. ok, i have two here on my keyboard that i cant pick up in linux, but i dont miss them. their feature was to launch "word" and "excel". there are also some multimedia and web browsing keys. those i have full use of in kde and yet again this is not a kernel issue but a xorg issue. and to me it works fine. yes, my distro lacked the correct setup for it. but then i choose one that was that low on preconfigs for a reason. ubuntu would probably differ (altho i see the article talk about running ubuntu on said laptop). those io issues with SD cards should be reported up the kernel chain of command, probably with some usb and pci dumps to id the chip in use.

4.on-board sound? yet another winmodem moment in my experience. i have a motherboard with onboard ati/realtek chip. to get mixing i had to set up dmix under alsa. the driver was snd-hda-intel, and the chip so new alsa could not make head or tail of it. works for my use, but then i never cared so much for sound as long as i had analog stereo and i wonder how many non-enthusiasts that do. and i suspect most of them are on apple anyways...

5. scanners are interesting beasts. up there with printers in my book of hardware lock-in. sure, there exist standards for grabbing grahpics of a scanner, but they only go as far as the driver interface at best. beyond that its every man for himself. that mail button sounds like a cute effect, but i wonder how many times i would use it. most likely it only worked with outlook under windows anyways. the slowness of scanning will probably be fixed in later revisions. could be that the reason is it only scans on max resolution in the current incarnation or something. i say, primary features first, "nice" to have ones (used ones in a blue moon) later. hell, i kinda like how the hp scanner/printer i have available right now takes care of it. built in webserver for basic scanning and imo the interface on that web page is much better for simple use then the overgrown sane interface that the windows driver provides. most features will not be used anyways, one will just hit template grayscale or color and be done with it. if one tries at all. outside of its use as a copying machine, its i that has to operate it anyways, no matter the os (the others can deal with it as a copier as they have experience in the work environment with classical xerox machines and similar). my kids, if i even have any, will probably be more savy with the scanner, then i ever will be. and i suspect they will also speak linux fluently...