For years and years now (since the first G4 iBooks), whenever someone asked me for advice about what laptop to buy, my standard answer was simple: get an Apple laptop. Doesn't matter which one. Apple was so far ahead of the competition it just wasn't funny anymore. This past weekend, though, marked the end of an era for me: for the first time, I advised someone to get an Asus ZenBook instead.
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Member since:2006-03-20
I second that, I am currently shopping for a new laptop (my old fujitsu p1610 is beginning to show its age ... for browsing the web!). As much as I like the ultrabook trend, I think that intel is fucking the linux crowd.
My current candidate are currently the zenbook 11" or the XPS13 (but I have some dislike for Dell), and I'm still researching about their linux friendliness.
As pointed out by one user the resell value could be low, but I tend to keep my stuff for quite a long time, so I would no consider it like a waste of money (although for reference a 2006 macbook still cost ~450 U$ on ebay while my p1610 (out in 2006 in the states) would cost ~100$).
Member since:2010-06-14
I have a 13" i7 model ZenBook which is used mainly for Windows and Linux development. Linux support has been great for me so far.
Running Ubuntu 11.10, WiFi, Power Management, 3D are all supported well. The only issues being:
* Battery Life is about half of what it is under Windows (but complete power management is crippled for me since I use Wubi to boot - I can't say what true native booting would be like)
* The USB Ethernet Adapter that ASUS supply isn't supported (although I haven't tried very hard).
* The trackpad driver is single touch only.
I run Gnome Shell, but Unity looked like it worked well too.
Member since:2009-12-15
Yes Yes it does.....https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook
I'm typing this on my Linux Mint Zenbook right now! FYI Kernerl 3.3-RC7 and newer has almost everything working out of the box.
"* The USB Ethernet Adapter that ASUS supply isn't supported (although I haven't tried very hard)"
--Not true, a kernel update to 3.2.6 will get the usb Ethernet working out of the box.
"The trackpad driver is single touch only. "
Not true I have multi-touch working on mine....driver compile into kernel if you get the sentelic touchpad, the elentech has a driver in newer kernels.
Take a look at the Ubuntu wiki and the giant thread, everything has been figured out now with good battery life now that rc6 has been patched by the intel devs.
Edited 2012-03-28 13:25 UTC
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Member since:2005-07-23
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2010-04-30
Sounds great! Does it run GNU/Linux or *BSD? With working wireless networking and power management?