[Novalug] Re-intro and advise please

Scott Talbert swt@techie.net
Thu Aug 8 15:44:44 EDT 2013


In general, yes, most laptops can probably run Linux acceptably.

A couple of things to watch out for with hardware selection, though.

If you care about running open-source drivers, and you don't need top of 
the line graphics, I would recommend an Intel graphics chipset.  Intel's 
open source video driver is the best (of the open source drivers).  On the 
other hand, if you need top of the line graphics, and don't care about 
using a closed source driver, using nVidia's binary driver with an nVidia 
chipset is probably going to give you the highest performance.

Along the same lines for WiFi...I would recommend an Intel WiFI adapter. 
Their open source support is quite good.  I would not recommend Broadcom.

On Thu, 8 Aug 2013, Brett wrote:

> Hello All,
> My name is Brett and I have been reading quietly for years and trying to
> learn more and more about Linux all along.
> 
> I have been researching laptops suitable for running Linux as the primary
> OS. Now before everyone tells me any machine can run Linux let me explain a
> bit more of how I am looking to use it. I would be using it to run/learn
> security software like sniffers (maybe an instance of Kali) some analytic
> tools that are resource hungry. Some open office suite, photo and video
> software, surf the web your typical non-technical type stuff. And run VMs
> maybe the awful Windoze for reasons know only to the emperor and the
> teachers at my sons school.
>  
> I would like something that I will not have to upgrade for a while... kind
> of like my wife's Mac. So I have been looking at i7 or at least i5 with at
> least 16GB ram. I would also like to have an SSD drive and any storage could
> be an external USB drive. The problem with the the Mac now is you can't seem
> to change anything like upgrading RAM, not to mention it would cost about
> $2,600.
> 
> So any help/opinions will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks
> Brett
> 
>


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