Comments on Linux Is Hard, Except When It Isn’t

By: Jeff Licquia

2013-04-25T17:34:34Z

Dell is doing better on releasing their updates with this program. According to the review, their mods to 12.04 are in a PPA, and every one of their mods is in 13.04 as released today.

I agree generally about preloads. The nice thing with Linux generally is that removing the crapware is an easy “apt-get remove” or “yum remove” away.

As for quality: I currently use an Inspiron as my travel laptop, and am happy with it. My point in pointing to this example is the quality of Dell’s bundling of Ubuntu, which I think is noteworthy. I certainly wouldn’t complain if Lenovo and HP followed suit.

By: Sven

2013-04-25T07:24:33Z

Two years or so ago I had my hands on a brand new Dell Latitude E6420 preloaded with Ubuntu. It was as well tweaked for that hardware but to a point where not even all the packages installed on that laptop where available in the Dell repository for that Ubuntu release. And I think it was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS tweaked to work on the by that time brand new Sandybridge plattform which must have been painful to achieve.

I’m not sure if that’s a beneficial way to help the open source community or consumers at large. It’s the same crap you see with windows pre loads. You’ve a lot of stuff installed you don’t need and if you start from scratch you’ll have a lot of problems to get the drivers/tweaked packages back. 🙁

Beside that: I don’t think Dell products are of a desirable quality. I don’t even feel you get what you pay for since they’re not that cheap either.

By: hadrons123

2013-04-25T06:55:03Z

Even though Ars technica is good in terms of tech gadget news, they seriously need a lot of open source knowledge. They have no idea of the open source community at all!