I had a former employer get me a pimp asus zenbook, the nice 2800x1600ish 15" display, dual ssd, etc, but it was a freakin basketcase under ubuntu to get working. Even trying arch and some others were painful, each with widely varying quirks.

Their bios didn't support "legacy" booting, so I had to learn efi which wasn't itself so bad, but very different and took some time to figure out my raid+crypto+lvm with gpt. I encountered countless bugs/quirks, many with the nvidia video that the desktop version wouldn't work oob without causing the oss drivers to wig out at 100% cpu, and if I let the display sleep, it wouldn't reawaken. Great, since the install took forever with it pegging the cpu the whole way, and having to reboot it constantly to work around the crappy ubuntu desktop installer quirks that came with 13.10 at the time.

Some reason I don't remember, the alt installer wouldn't work on it too, I think the 4k resolution blew up the vesa compatibility for the ncurses-based di installer. I think sound didn't work at the time too (needed newer kernel support at the moment).

Once it was working, I'd have lots of random lockups and other things my laptops just didn't do, which really made using it far more painful than my little crap hp folio, so I just kept using that. When I quit, I gave it back gladly and checked Asus off my buy list. Asus obviously didn't give a darn about linux support, not even as an afterthought, and I doubt they've changed much since early 2014 when that adventure took place.

I'm currently using a 12" lightweight dell latitude 7220 laptop, i7 ulv proc, 16gb of ram, dual msata ssd, 1080p touch screen, and a docking station. Only a dual-core and crap intel graphics, but as a workstation, it's light, docking station is wonderful, and works almost entirely great with linux, having run mint debian and settling back on ubuntu.

I say almost, the only issue I've had is after a month or so of use, it'll go into this zombie mode that I can't get it to shutdown or hibernate without a hard powerdown, as it'll literally keep waking up immediately after going to sleep. More than a few times I pulled it out my laptop bag broiling itself, but now I just pay attention and hard power it down (holding the power for 10sec) if it does. I need to harass dell some, this is a bios bug it seems.

It's kinda pricey new ($2200ish), but I never buy new, rather look for dell outlet coupons around holidays, usually finding 30-35% off, at refurb price made it a steal (I think I paid ~$900), saving to upgrade the memory and ssd's.

-mb

On 07/05/2015 11:16 AM, Stephen Partington wrote: