Free Software Laptop

[adam.tropics]

Free Software Laptop (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/131)

Does anyone here 'in the know', happen to know if it is looking like anything practical will come from this?

If you don't know, what do you reckon? The idea seems to have gotten all quiet of late, so I was wondering if it had been filed under 'Nice idea, execution a nightmare'! I hope not.

[Beaucephus]

In my opinion, many users don't care much about the "free as in freedom" part. I personally could care less that firefox has a proprietary logo and trademark name. Some people do care, but they don't have to buy a special laptop to get what they want. They could be running a completely "free as in freedom" LT right now.

[gpilkay]

Depends, I guess. Right now, I have a desktop that loves Ubuntu 7.10 (though I haven't upgraded the kernel today due to the issues faced by others), but my laptop could not even install it properly. So I have XP on my laptop with Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice, AVG Anti-Virus, and Comodo Firewall, plus Spybot and others.

A lot of these things are free, but not Open-Source. But they work for me, and I think in many cases, so long as something works, it will be hard to convince people to change it.

[adam.tropics]

I guess for me, it's more about the hardware meets software. Morals and causes aside, I like the idea of a high end laptop where each component has been picked to work properly with Linux. With desktops, we have the luxury of picking and choosing all the time, but currently with laptops, there is (generally) a higher degree of trade off required. For example you can have almost everything, but suspend/hibernate don't work, or you can go the model up and get suspend/hibernate but expect wireless issues. Always seems to be something.

It's not so much that I am complaining about what we don't always have, but I'd be lying if I said the idea of finally having it didn't appeal!