On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote: > On 2014-10-02, Frank Cox <theatre at melvilletheatre.com> wrote: >> >> Since it has now become amazingly difficult to get a laptop if you're not planning to use Windows, at least around here, I'm wondering what the rest of you fine folks do when it comes to purchasing a laptop? Next time this comes up, I'd rather not have to spend all day on something that used to take fifteen minutes. > > I know this is probably a bit sacrilegious, but recently I have been > tending to get a Mac laptop, and run any linux distributions I need > inside a VM. OS X is (just barely) tolerable enough to be usable for > most of my desktop purposes. (It's not really cost-effective compared > to non-Apple laptops, unfortunately.) > That approach works with windows too. You take a small hit in performance as a tradeoff for not having to scramble for drivers all the time. But, most of my real work actually runs on headless servers with NX/freenx giving a fairly efficient remote X desktop from linux/windows/mac systems with the advantage that you can suspend the session and pick it up from a different location with everything still running. X2go has equivalent features and seems to replace freenx for CentOS 7. I just haven't switched because I run 'synergy' to share the keyboard/mouse on my main desktop and there is some sort of conflict. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com