[ltp] More war stories about Lenovo build quality

[Micha]

On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:41:03 -0400 (EDT)
"David A. Desrosiers" <desrod@gnu-designs.com> wrote:

[ ... ]

> 
>  	3. At some random interval, the keyboard decides to "forget"
>             how to use ctrl/alt/shift keys, and thus I can't function at
>             all in X. I can't open new applications, because typing in
>             them crashes the app. I can't use keyboard shortcuts, I
>             can't function in existing shells. The only way to fix that
>             is to go to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, change it to
>             something else (without typing anything, or I'll crash the
>             Keyboard applet), then change it back again. It happens a
>             few times a day, every day. VERRRRY frustrating. I don't
>             know if this is hardware-driven or some bug in Ubuntu.
> 

I have  similar behviour with debian unstable, although not that often and the
only solution is to restart X. At some point the keys go crazy, pressing d with
just switch apps, q minimizes everything, etc.

I guess that this is a software thing though.

>  	4. X is wildly unstable. I can reproducably get GNOME + X to
>             completely crash back to a shell, recycling gdm, by simply
>             trying to run anything in Wine. Sometimes if I just leave
>             the machine idle with X running and walk away, I'll come
>             back and be at a gdm login prompt, because at some point X
>             dumped and recycled gdm again. This may be due to the
>             unstable, proprietary NVidia drivers or something else. It
>             was a huge mistake selecting NVidia as my graphics chipset
>             for a laptop in Linux.
> 
>  	5. Wireless is only enabled via shell scripts. NetworkManager
>             in Ubuntu does absolutely nothing, except take up
>             resources. In Gutsy on my T42p, wpa_supplicant would start
>             at boot time, read its config, and wireless would be
>             enabled without logging in. With Hardy + NetworkManager, I
>             have to physically log into the machine, open a shell, run
>             a script to start wireless (basically modprobe, iwconfig,
>             ifconfig commands), and then it starts.
>

At least for me and from google and debian bug reports, some more people,
network manager is rather broken in the last two months or so. One report
attributed it to libglib2.0 version 2.6 something. Wired network is only
recognized on dbus restart and wireless only through command line. wlassistant
is better, but it can't seem to get wpa_manager to fire up properly (for as
long as I have this laptop actually). Worked initially with wpa_gui running at
the same time, but now even this doesn't help.
 
>             That isn't a Lenovo issue, of course. It's an Ubuntu issue.
>             With each new Ubuntu release, more features are removed in
>             favor of replacing them with broken applications which
>             serve no logical purpose. Gutsy had no need for
>             NetworkManager and networking worked flawlessly there.
> 
> I'm about to give up 14+ years of working with and developing 
> on Linux because it seems that with each new year, it gets more and 
> more unstable, more and more things cease functioning, and I spend 
> more time fighting the configuration of my own environment than using 
> it to increase my productivity.
> 

It does fill that way lately. Before I had a system that went up from debian
2.0 to 3. something (don't recall) over the course of 7 years or so and 3
computers. Now I'm thinking of reinstalling to see if things work better after
4 months. I'm starting to feel like windows here.

> I'm probably going to just cut bait and buy a Mac soon. At least I can 
> still run all of my FLOSS packages there, and not ever have to worry 
> about the hardware or functioning drivers/support.
> 

Afraid that that is out of my budget, but there is always the option of
downloading a cracked version of osx
> </rant state="end">