
A month with Dell's Project Sputnik - mattspitz
http://mattspitz.me/post/44202150125/a-month-with-dells-project-sputnik
======
foz
Reading this makes me want to keep developing on a MacBook. I love Linux, but
when I'm reminded of all the wasted time and hacks spent on configuring
hardware and researching problems, it makes me happy to stay trapped with OSX.

~~~
mercurial
On a new Lenovo laptop, the configuration hackery was rather limited: \-
disable UEFI and use BIOS \- install Debian (wireless didn't work during the
installation, but worked without a hitch afterwards) \- copy-paste a script
for decent powersaving settings (might have worked out of the box with KDE or
GNOME, but I don't use desktop environments)

The only thing which does not work at the moment is most of the special
function keys, which is no big deal for me as I don't really use the
functionalites anyway.

~~~
jacques_chester
Here's my OS X configuration script:

~~~
p200
I've done nothing to make sure all my hardware worked on my favorite flavor of
linux. My special keys also worked out of the box.

In addition I've spent exactly 0 minutes in the last 5 years figuring out
hardware issues. You may have less success if you want to game or need 4+
monitor support; However I've been very happy in recent years with hardware
support. There is literally nothing I've encountered in popular hardware that
caused me any issues.

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natrius
_"...Unity is horribly inefficient with screen space, and getting anything
done requires a ton of mouse clicks and waiting for menus to load."_

Screen space: The launcher can be set to auto-hide, giving you the same amount
of space you'd have on OS X with an auto-hidden dock.

Mouse clicks: Unity actually impressed me with the amount of attention they
paid to keyboard use. Hold down the Super key and you'll see all of the
shortcuts. It also makes application menu items searchable without a mouse.

Waiting for menus to load: 12.10 and earlier have been terrible about that.
I'm running 13.04 (the next version in development) and they've made it much
better.

~~~
chao-
I have to take issue with your comment on keyboard use, because that single
wart is dealbreaker keeping me from using Ubuntu.

I give Ubuntu another shot every X.10 release just to see if they've finally
made the desktop environment satisfactory, and I must say they are getting
_really, really_ close. The Menu system is getting close to making sense in
Unity, Pulseaudio throws fewer temper tantrums, significantly less hardware
issues, and everything is much snappier (especially compared to memories of
Unity from its Ubuntu Netbook Remix days).

But I can't customize my keybindings for crap.

And you're probably thinking "That's BS, of course you can! It's under
[submenu] of [menu] of [option] of [settings application name]." And you'd be
right. It's just that some subset of keybindings will reset to their defaults
every time you do a full power-down of the computer. Rinse and repeat until
they're all back to their defaults.

It varies which hotkeys will be reset. Sometimes Metacity ones will reset.
Sometimes GNOME bindings will reset. Sometimes opening the Unity configuration
will reset the Metacity keys. Sometimes it doesn't! I even wrote a shell
script to run all the proper `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface
[blah]` incantations upon login, but when that didn't work reliably (again:
Metacity keybindings vs. Unity appeared to be the problem) I gave up.

This has been my experience in Ubuntu 11.10, some mid-2012 version of Mint
(with Cinnamon) and Ubuntu 12.10, so it's not strictly Canonical's fault.
However they haven't seen fit to address it in their user experience, and so I
portion out a slice of the blame for them.

~~~
illumen
Great bug report :) Hopefully someone from Canonical will see this, and can
send it to the appropriate people!

~~~
chao-
It is not a great bug report. In fact, as qznc states, it's not a bug report
at all. However, in my weeklong attempts to deal with the issue, I came across
a few formal bug reports submitted to various projects.

If I recall correctly, and since the issue is a fight between two different
application components that wish to manage keybindings, the bug reports had
responses of the _"It's not our fault, it's the other package!"_ variety.

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bakli
Dell Laptops are really very confusing with the fn key. My inspiron required
me to press fn key and f4 so it works as if you just pressed f4. If I simply
press f4, the screen brightness reduces. Very inconvenient!

~~~
yen223
Is it similar to how the function keys in Macbooks work? If so, I would
consider it a feature. I have to tweak screen brightness more often than I
need to press F4.

edit: I forgot that in Windows, F4 is a very important key (Alt+F4).

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lifeisstillgood

      Just find a way to run `synclient MaxTapTime=0` when your X session starts up, and you should be golden.  This just disables tapping the trackpad to click, similar to how a MacBook’s trackpad behaves.
    

I want his babies for this - I have just "lived with it" on every laptop for
years simply because I was too lazy to dig into the hell of X and drivers and
docs. But now I see the light

~~~
gcb0
recent gnome3/unity and gnome2 since forever: settings > mouse (or "mouse and
touchpad" in unity/gnome3) > touchpad tab > [ ] enable click on touchpad.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yeah but I _hate_ GUI settings and control panels - its not possible to script
them so next time I blow up my laptiop or move machines I have to do it all
again

But thanks.

~~~
gcb0
gconf editors are pretty scriptables

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k_bx
> Unity is horribly inefficient with screen space

WUT? Unity needs LESS screen space then AWESOME WM or something similar
because of it's global menu. Look! <http://screencloud.net/v/zB84> How much
more vertical space would you have in awesome?

And, as someone mentioned, left panel can be hidden, but I prefer to use it.

~~~
lake99
AwesomeWM can be configured to make the statusbar vertical. I have seen a few
people on the mailinglist who prefer it that way.

The titlebar that you see for firefox, in the link you provided, AwesomeWM
does not waste space on that: you'll find the title in the statusbar/taskbar.
These bars can be hidden in AwesomeWM too. How big are your window borders in
Gnome/KDE? With one line of configuration, I set my borders to 1 pixel.

~~~
k_bx
No, I'm talking about menu like "File, Edit, View ...". It's just not visible
because you have to put your mouse on that panel to see it.

It's not that it's "unity thing", it's just that I'm not sure if you can do
that in Awesome WM.

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niggler
"Did you just get used to OS X Lion’s inverse scrolling? Me, too! "

I initially thought the author was being sarcastic, but the next few lines
suggest he was serious. There's a really easy way to change the OSX setting
(and I do this on every mac I use):

System Preferences -> Mouse -> Scroll & Zoom -> uncheck "Scroll direction"

~~~
vxNsr
Yeah, I barely use OS X (all home computers are W7/8 and my Uni has a very
limited number of macs,

in fact I only ever used them because of the novelty but when I found
everything ten times harder to do because I couldn't use my shortcuts and the
UI was totally different from what I was used to I avoided them)

but the first thing I did after realizing that OS X messes with scrolling was
change it so it made sense. no googling was required, I just checked out the
Sys Preferences like you suggest.

~~~
cshesse
Yeah same here, only replace "OS X" with "Windows".

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sanathkumar
Dell has gone on and off with their Linux support during previous releases.
But, I am not particularly concerned because in the Linux community, if there
are drivers for your hardware today, they will likely exist forever. As for
Unity, I can't agree anymore with your observation that it requires many mouse
clicks to get something done. Compared to OSX and even to Windows, Unity has
wasted tons of screen estate and made it much harder to get things done.
GNOME2 is definitely legendary especially because of it's simplicity and
versatility.

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paulbunn
Are there any decent tiling window managers for OSX? A quick google doesn't
seem to reveal anything as awesome as AwesomeWM (or its counterparts).

~~~
mrpollo
Slate - <https://github.com/jigish/slate>

Divvy - <http://mizage.com/divvy/>

Tyler WM - <http://www.tylerwm.com/>

Moom - <http://manytricks.com/moom/>

ShiftIt - <https://github.com/trisweb/ShiftIt>

I'm pretty sure I'm leaving something out.

~~~
chelmertz
Spectacle - <http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/41147/spectacle>

Very basic and easy to get used to, fixed options for screen estate.

~~~
cshesse
+1 for Spectacle, I only use like 3 simple configurations, and Spectacle is
simple and free.

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macco
Unity is inefficient with screen space - does he mean this serious?

And Unity is totally optimized for keyboard usage, the whole Dash concept is
based on keyboard usage.

I liked the idea for the trackpad, reducing the clicking time to 0.

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epikur
As a Colemak user, I would suggest remapping Caps Lock to backspace instead of
Ctrl.

~~~
callahad
But with Ctrl, you have access to ^H, ^W, and ^U. It's 3 backspaces in one!

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gcb0
summary:

paragraph 1, i don't like gnome3/unity

paragraph 2-n, how to change settings, in the worst way, so it behaves like a
mac

only thing I agree is the trigger to gnome-settings-daemon. that is really
trick.

~~~
mattspitz
Thanks for the summary. I probably should have just written that instead.

