This. My 3 year-old MacBook is starting to show its age, so I took a look at what's out there. I was intrigued by the HP Envy 14--at long last, it seems somebody besides Apple figured out how to build a nice laptop. And you seem get a lot more for your money.

Of course, going back to Windows after 3+ years on OSX is no option, so I looked into Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu on a machine at work and have been very impressed--we've certainly come a long ways since the dark days of Slackware `96! I am enough of a "power user" that I could weather the switch just fine; really the only thing I would miss is iTunes since I have two iPods.

Anyways, I started Googling around on the topic of "hp envy 14 +ubuntu". And that's when I was instantly transported back fifteen years to the days, weeks, months I spent tinkering with past laptops in order to get everything working on them under Linux. I had all but forgotten about 30-page hardware HOWTOs on getting Linux to work with your specific laptop; the 20% battery penalty you pay because pm never quite works; the inability of some things, usually network and sound cards, to wake from sleep; the lack of hibernate; buggy graphics drivers; etc. etc. etc.

I am aware that the situation has improved considerably since then, but problems still remain. I just don't have the time like I did in my teens and early 20s. Or rather, my time is worth considerably more now--I'm happy to pay the Apple tax if it means I don't have to deal with this shit.

That said, if some major HW manufacturer ever came out with a completely supported laptop with Ubuntu preloaded, working power management, graphics drivers that do what they are supposed to, etc., I would totally bite. (I am aware the some, e.g. Dell, have done so, but when I see warnings like http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/... it's evident that they half-assed it. What I'm after is a full-assing.)

My experience installing Ubuntu involved running commands and editing settings 'blind' because the graphics card driver messed up and although the machine was running, you couldn't see anything on the monitor. After counting my keystrokes for hours, the whole thing ('your grandma could install Ubuntu!') seemed like a sick joke.

Sounds like you haven't tried Ubuntu in a few years. I switched permanently a year or so ago after trying several times to make the switch over the last decade or so. It works almost completely without issue on three different systems of mine with very different hardware.

It was Fedora and, yeah, it's been 2 years. I don't think I'll own a laptop made by anyone other than Apple for some time. Desktops, I'll probably use Linux.

Yesterday evening I installed Ububtu (32bit because recommended grml) on my Macbook Pro 5,5. Booted it up, spent 2 hours getting everything set up (sound, keyboard backlight, power management, the touchpad - o m g the touchpad was the most frustrating, xmodmap tweaking for the keyboard).

Then I realized ubuntu would only recognize 3GB of my 8GB of RAM. (Yeah, it's a 32bit kernel but wtf? My 32bit OS X kernel recognizes all the RAM and 8gb isn't that uncommon nowadays.)

So I googled and found there was the option to install the PAE kernel (alternative would be to reinstall the 64bit ubuntu). So I fired up the packet manager, installed the PAE meta package, rebooted and nothing worked. My NVidia and Broadcom wireless drivers were not updated. X wouldn't start up.

So after fiddling with the X config files I got X to run again (by removing the nvidia stuff). Only to discover that my wifi card wouldn't work. I tried to reinstall the drivers but the jockey driver tool quitted with some obscure error message like "error, there was an error. see error logs." ... the error logs had something like "couldn't install wifi driver". (NVidia drivers wouldn't install because I wasn't connected to the internet but the error message stated that clearly.)

I went to bed and haven't tried again to get it running. I guess I will install the 64bit version when I got time to play around. (But I have a strange feeling that there will be problems with flash.)

Maybe a little rant to defuse my inflammatory comment:

I was really impressed by Ubuntu. I remember the times when I couldn't get copy and paste working between Netscape Navigator and a text editor. I remember when it was almost certain that I wouldn't get sound with my exotic non-soundblaster card. I remember when I had to fiddle hours with X-Setup to get a graphical environment.

Linux has come a long way. I certainly didn't expect Ubuntu to support something like keyboard backlight or the extended function keys of my Apple Notebook. But it did. The Desktop environment is really thought through and usable. I love that chat integration with the Desktop. I love that the 32bit version had installed binary blob drivers so I could just enter my wifi password and was online.

Nevertheless I chose the "dumb user easy linux" and went the recommended road. And that's why there's a bitter taste to it that something like updating the graphics drivers to a new kernel was not done for me, the dumb user, automatically.

But it's nice to see that there's an alternative to OS X for my Macbook if Apple should ever decide to completely fuck up OS X or to deprecate my hardware too soon.

You could always run Ubuntu in a fullscreen VM on top of a barebones OSX. That would probably work correctly.

I find that it generally works better to have your X server running outside the VM. You'll still want to install X on the VM to satisfy dependencies, but as for actually using it it's easiest to just install xquartz and use xdmcp.

I thought 32-bit operating systems had a hardm limit of 4GB of RAM, no? (Something to do with 2^32 being roughly 10^9, but I frankly don't know the details.)

32-bit operating systems do have a hard limit of 4GB of RAM but that's per process. See PAE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

And the 32-bit address space generally has some space reserved for the kernel, so more like 3GB per process, depending on the OS.