So who's going to step up and become the premier Linux hardware vendor? I was just looking at Linux laptops this morning and the problem is battery life. The System76 Lemur 13 gets... 2-3 hours of battery. That's not going to work. The ZaReason Strata Pro 13 gets... I don't know because they don't advertise it and I can't find a review that mentions it.
The conventional wisdom is to get a Thinkpad, which I might have to come to, but it would be wonderful for one of these Linux vendors to step it up and put out something that's competitive in terms of battery life with the improvements that have come in recent years. Apple, Lenovo, Asus, even Toshiba are all putting out laptops with 8+ hours of battery. I wouldn't consider buying one that gets less than 6.
Asus tried Linux on the EEE PC. They unfortunately tried an odd version called Xandros, with some modifications and a cut down IceWM theme. I'm not sure they enjoyed supporting it.
This article says they've stopped pre-loading Linux: http://www.pcworld.com/article/196987/has_asus_abandoned_net...
Dell have good support. They have some deal with canonical, so it seems most of their laptops work great.
Also, ASUS ones run quite well. ASUS even ship linux on their netbooks. My girl friends netbook runs for ages on it. So much that it has never run out of battery on us.
I am very happy with the XPS 1330m laptop. I don't know if they still make it anymore, but I bought it with ubuntu pre-installed and it has been fantastic.
My Thinkpad T400s runs at 8W/h when tuned with powertop2 (3g disabled, wlan disabled). But as the battery only has a capacity of 43Wh it only comes up to a bit more then 5 hours.
I could however replace the disk drive for another battery and have about 9 hours of run time with it.
The conventional wisdom is to get a Thinkpad, which I might have to come to, but it would be wonderful for one of these Linux vendors to step it up and put out something that's competitive in terms of battery life with the improvements that have come in recent years. Apple, Lenovo, Asus, even Toshiba are all putting out laptops with 8+ hours of battery. I wouldn't consider buying one that gets less than 6.