Thought I would put this here in case it helps anyone searching for answers who like me has been looking for a great ultrabook for Ubuntu.
I agonized over the choice between:
- Samsung Series 9
- Zenbook
- Vizio ultrabooks
- hp envy spectre
Here's what I ended up with:
- Samsung Series 9
That's what I bought.. specifically the NP900X4C-A1.. or in other words the 2nd series, 128gig SSD drive 15" model.
Why?
- 1600x screen resolution on a 15" screen is perfect.
- the new NP900X4D is actually not as good. The 4C is still available
- people have successfully upgraded to 16gb ram
- the main complaint is a slow SSD drive, so I bought the small one and know I'll upgrade it in a year for a new zest.
Installation took 6 minutes (after taking 90 minutes to get Windowz to recognize an external drive and make a mirror of the 70GIGS of junk.. yes.. only 56gig free upon arrival.
CHECK FOR FIRMWARE UPDATES BEFORE WIPING WINDOWS.. because there is one and it fixes the suspend on lid close issue.
There's a Ubuntu community page for the series 9 and the only thing I have had to do is 2 cut and pastes of 4 lines to add some function key mapping for keyboard backlight..
DONE.
Why not the Zenbook?
- expensive
- I don't want a machine with 1377x resolution
- I think that 1920x resolution is TOO MUCH on a 13.3 inch screen
- When you look at Ubuntu install success there are all kinds of horror stories. I just didn't want to go there.
If I HAD gone for the zenbook I would have bought the NON SSD x32 version or whatever it is because people have found that you can up the ram on that to 8gig and install an SSD drive, and the big thing is that one of the versions has an nVidia card with 1gig of ram which seems pretty hot for an ultrabook.
Why not the HP?
- It's interesting, but do I really want a laptop with a big sheet of glass on it?
- Not getting great performance reviews
Why not the Vizio?
VERY TEMPTING but not much information out there about Ubuntu install success. The main concern is that even after driver updates the non synaptec touchpad still has issues in Windows and that seems like a bad idea.
There you go. Hope this helps anyone else out there going through the same process.
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