Linux laptop; the 3 year wait...

I am very neutral when it comes to choosing the technology that powers my life. I am a little more Apple leaning but I own both a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 4th Gen.

Now the thing is that ever since I have been into computing I have favoured the underdog or the technology that was striving to be the next best thing. I started with Commodore and moved to Apple (while lusting for the power of real Unix machines like the NeXT and more exotic ones like BeOS; both in the Apple universe in a sense); with some PCs along the way. It was in 1995 that I first used Linux that I bought from a University book shop in the form of a bunch of CD-ROMs containing an early RedHat Linux distribution. I would install these OSes as a matter of natural curiosity to see whether there was something I was missing out on.

Anyhow, long story short (and I have touched on this in past posts I'm sure) I decided in the last 3-4 years that I would make bigger efforts to move to entirely open source software and I had my first serious attempt three years ago by buying the Thinkpad X1 Carbon and like the HP Elitebook I bought and returned for not being supported by drivers - it still had some things that took manual tweaking of config files etc to make work. Screen HiDPI issues and inconsistencies between trackpoint and touchpad etc. Little niggly things including the updates that sometimes meant another round of troubleshooting.

What I am getting at is any brand new high level laptop by the major makers is going to have hardware that will prove challenging to use with Linux. So I did eventually cave into buying another Macbook Pro after trying the Thinkpad for a year or so. I found that I was commonly just booting up the Windows 7 Pro partition to do real work. The ArchLinux was just a toy that occasionally needed some extra love and care. I didn't really want to be using Windows 7 as my main OS.

The Macbook brought me back to a machine that integrates with my phone and tablet; aside from being essentially a Unix machine which I love anyway.

And this is where my Thinkpad comes back in. My recent upheaval of my home media server with Ubuntu server made me finally try Ubuntu Workstation on my laptop and the passage of those 3 years has meant that the hardware is virtually fully supported now. I guess that's how the ball rolls with Linux. Maybe I should be buying my next Linux machine now so that it will be ready for use in a couple of years....