Jeni's Musings

I have just moved away from a MacBook Pro, mostly because I was simply booting the Mac to start Ubuntu (Gutsy) in a VMWare Fusion partition.

Nokia bought me a Lenovo X61s (older version of the X300), which is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the MBP. I run Ubuntu Gutsy, and it (now) works fine. Since Lenovo took over the Thinkpad line, I’ve been less happy with the keyboards on their laptops, but this one is still better than the one on the Macbook Air (keyboards are very personal though.)

If you run Ubuntu on your laptop, I would say that “some assembly is required” but you can certainly get to a place where the machine works as well as a Mac for the activities you mention. It will easily beat Windows Vista in usability and performance, and be slightly better also than Windows XP.

I do still need Windows (Nokia uses an Excel spreadsheet for expense reporting which requires a Windows-version of Excel) and it runs for my occasional usage quite nicely in VMWare Player…

General issues with (Ubuntu) Linux on laptops:

i) Sleep. Hibernation worked out of the box on my Lenovo, but “suspend” did not. I fixed “suspend” but it took me a while, and some arcane commands. I like ‘hibernate’ a lot, as it uses no power while the machine is asleep. It’s quick to shut down, but almost as slow as a boot to start (the advantage being though that your application session is restored). ii) Fonts. You need to do some font customization if you want your screen to look as nice as a Windows or Mac screen. I installed the Microsoft fonts, and use MS’s Tahoma font now. I also customized my Emacs fonts (which may or may not be important to you ;) iii) External projector/monitor. Works for me only if I hibernate/suspend the laptop, plug it in, and then turn it back on. At some point, I’ll try to make it work properly, as I suspect it would if I tried a little harder to make it work. iv) Wireless. If you need to connect to an Apple Airport network using encryption, you need to know the “network equivalent password” for the specific network (not just the ASCII WEP key). You can’t get that from a Linux (or Windows) machine - you need a Mac. Once I did that work, and entered the WEP key, this connection just worked (I’m using it right now). I’ve travelled extensively with this laptop, and never had any problem with any other network than encrypted Apple Airport networks, which also give Windows conniptions…

Everything else worked out of the box, even though I installed Gutsy myself. I use OpenOffice instead of MS Office, and I haven’t yet found the need for MS Office other than to fill the proprietary Nokia expense report spreadsheet. Occasionally someone sends me an MS Office 2008 formatted document, and I return to sender with a request to supply the document in a prior version format of Office (just like several of my colleagues who don’t have MS Office 2008, even on Windows, do).

In summary, if you want everything to work out of the box, Ubuntu is not for you.

If you don’t mind doing some tricky work, or know a good Linux admin (hint to your dad, perhaps? ;) Ubuntu can be very nice indeed. If it’s OK for Cory Doctorow, and Mark Pilgrim (see http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/29/mark-pilgrims-list-o.html), I decided, it must be OK for me ;)

I would never buy a Macbook Air - it is simply missing too many things that I like (memory expansion, swappable battery for long trips for example). The Macbook Pro is certainly a wonderful laptop. I personally hate the (“non-pro”?) Macbook keyboard, but I know others who like their 13” Macbooks.

Good luck with your decision!