Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 23rd Mar 2009 11:37 UTC
Go on, go around these gadget sites and read all that talk about netbooks and what not. Acer Aspire One this, MSI that, Dell Mini 9 this, Asus that. It feels like the second coming of laptops in this netbook revolution. But truth is, even back in 1999 you could find super-lightweight laptops in the market (for the right price). This 2005-released IBM Thinkpad X41 laptop that Geeks.com sent us, a well-known shop for computer parts, is one of the best Linux-compatible laptops you can buy today for cheap.
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Member since:
2009-02-12
I purchased my X41 around 2005 and having been running various flavors of linux on it since then. Much of the hardware is "supported," but recent "improvements" have made the system effectively unusable under many distributions (Ubuntu 8.04 & 8.10, Arch 2009.02, OpenSUSE 11.1). Improvements in power management cause the backlight brightness to oscillate between bright and pitch black (gnome-power-manager made the mistake of stepping through every brightness level when performing transitions). Improvements in X11 broke most of the extra keyboard buttons (like volume control; changes in the ACPI handling removed some important special cases). Other improvements in X11 cause the X Server to crash or produce rendering errors (the i815 driver was phased out because the developers did not want to support mode-setting in it, and the new intel driver provides terrible support for older chipsets). These bugs have been reported and some of them have fixes in the upstream repository, but many still effect users either because fixes do not exist or because distributions must wait for bug-prone projects to release something stable.
At any rate, I felt compelled to post a comment. I've been using linux for a little bit more than a decade, and trying to run linux on the X41 was something akin to the last straw. I've been putting up with the terrible interface and constant regressions for years, and finally decided the "linux desktop" was hopeless. I now use an Apple laptop and have no regrets.