[PLUG] deep philosophical question

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Mon May 21 09:17:02 UTC 2007


# from Russell Senior
# on Monday 21 May 2007 12:53 am:

>("too many variations", et al).  

Yes, apple has the upper hand here because they ship one distro on your 
choice of black or white hardware.  Having an extremely small set of 
configurations to target and selling them in large numbers has to be 
easier.  I wonder if a Linux laptop vendor with the same approach would 
get any traction?  From what I've seen of Emperor Linux, they are 
stretched rather thin to be offering the variety that they do and I'm 
sure they don't have nearly the volume of apple.

Think about what it would cost to provide a lifetime of QC'd kernel 
upgrades (e.g. no regression in suspend, X, etc) on every system ever 
sold and what sales volume would be required to support that kind of 
testing.

>FWIW, my T42 thinkpad has been pretty well-supported (suspends,
>hibernates, battery lasts 4+ hours, wireless works, etc).

Thinkpad does seem to do fairly well (there's that numbers game again), 
though the couple of X2n models here are flaky on 2.6.18 wrt suspend 
(and something involving battery charging) on debian.  Then there's 
that whole keyboard thing.  I'm trying to break the esc habit and 
switch to ctrl+C (meanwhile, vim dutifully keeps offering help when I 
forget it's a thinkpad and whack the misplaced F1 key.)  I also sorely 
miss the super and menu keys :-(

On a related note, I just ran across this story, but I see no penguin on 
the linked page.  Did that deal get quietly dragged into the back room 
and shot during the "Microsoft loves linux" Novell smokescreen?

  http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7778908329.html

--Eric
-- 
software:  a hypothetical exercise which happens to compile.
---------------------------------------------------
    http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------



More information about the PLUG mailing list