Wade Arnold

I started using linux in 1995 as my primary operating system. Back then it was Slackware and took a LUG in order to even get your desktop to work. If anything changed in the kernel or on your hardware you were pretty much SOL. I rocked linux on an IBM dual processor desktop called Vador for most of my college years. I even had dual 21″CRT monitors which was about as baller as it got back then. RedHat 5 made the world a lot better but it was still a chore to install. In early 1998 I purchased my first gateway laptop. Gateway actually supported linux drivers for their laptops back then. This is before they started “apple” style stores and selling tv’s which ultimately lead to their demise. I kept my faith in linux. Then I bought a dell, HP, dell, and they all sucked. Power management, sound cards, external displays, cd writers, etc  all never worked the way they were suppose to. At least the way that it did on windows. Around that time Apple dropped their crappy OS and released OSX 10! The holy grail to laptops developers. I purchased the very first 17″ MBP that I could. 5 MBP later and about 40 for T8 Webware I still think they are the best laptop hardware I have ever owned….. Until last week.

For fun… OK for 16Gigs of ram and 8 cores of sandy bridge processor with a bad ass screen I ordered a decked out System 76 Gazelle. This pimped out machine was only 1700 too! Because a lot of the work I have been doing latly has been with Scala parallel collections and specifically akka for parallel processing it felt like a good excuse for testing. I was also jazzed to no longer deal with MacPorts or HomeBrew just Ubuntu Linux with EVERYTHING working. Remember why we all bought macbook pro’s as developers? So that everything worked. We all loved linux but we all needed to get things done. Messing with why our battery died when we shut the lid was not something that you could charge a client for! Developers we finally have a linux laptop that boots faster than a MBP, you can shut the lid and it works, and all the drivers for every port work out of the box. It even has a finger print scanner that is tied into authentication. With a laptop like this and the current anti developer mantra of apple we could actually all switch back to linux?!? Kind of crazy i know.

Regardless! Thank you System76. I never thought that the day would come were linux on a laptop was pleasant. Your product makes Linux on the laptop like the server, it just works. After 16 years of being a Linux advocate I feel like system76 makes it a reality for daily use.

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