I can't make up my mind. I used to use ubuntu as my primary OS, but I am familiar enough with linux that I can run any distro (I used to run Gentoo and Archlinux, but at some point of time I realized I actually like the sink included stuff so I switched back to ubuntu, now I experiment less). When I bought my new laptop (Acer Aspire 5742G) it came with two graphics cards, one intel onboard and one dedicated nVidia 540M. Their is a tech, nVidia optimus, which is supposed to switch between these two depending upon my performance needs. But linux (I mean the kernel linux not a specific distro) does not really do that because of some driver issues. So my battery performance drops like 50% and the laptop heats up a lot, which is bad. I tried CPU scaling, I tried that bumblebee package but nothing worked. For now I am working out of windows 7 home edition which came pre-installed. And I must tell you, there isn't much of a difference(in usability and stability that is, battery backup increased 2x). I may switch to windows full time because switching back to linux doesn't have much merit right now. I am thinking of trying out Fedora but I need to know if it would solve the problem before I go through the hassle of installing it.
If anyone else has this kind of laptop and notes similar battery life for each distro and which is actually the battery life the laptop should have, then please tell me.
In the future I would advise using http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/ or some other linux compatibility hardware list before buying hardware. Using linux on a poorly supported device can cause you grief and make you dislike linux for reasons that it does not deserve.
1. I don't dislike linux, it doesn't support my hardware and so I don't use it. As simple as that.
2. There are other more important things I look for in a laptop than if it runs linux or not. No disrespect, if I get a decent graphics card at this price point, I would say hell yeah! (There was a discount in the store on the same day as I blew my last computer. RIP Sophiya)
What about running Linux inside a virtual machine when you do UNIX work? That would certainly add up some CPU overhead (how many is that these days - 10%?) but I doubt that graphics chip would kick in unless it's really needed. I hope you can get your laptop run Linux with a little less overhead that way.
The thing is, I don't really need linux. I started using it since XP was okey and Vista sucked. I needed change and Linux provides room for lots of experiment. We have good WMs and we have a wide range of types. All of that was fine and dandy when I was 15 and loved to experiment. But now I don't really want to experiment much. I just want a stable OS which works great with my laptop. Should integrate well and all the buttons on my laptop should work with it (like I have only one button for both wifi and bluetooth, on windows it brings up a dialog box with options for turning them on or off, in ubuntu there is this [00,01,10,11] sequence. Its annoying).
I am a student and majorly do C programming for microcontrollers. All that works good, sometimes better [looking at you TI MSP430 launchpad debugger] on windows. So the only purpose of having a linux installation is that I am habituated in last 5 years.
"I am a student and majorly do C programming for microcontrollers. All that works good, sometimes better [looking at you TI MSP430 launchpad debugger] on windows. So the only purpose of having a linux installation is that I am habituated in last 5 years."
You may need to return to Linux if you have to deal with running on a microcontroller or require a build environment that utilizes it.
For now, I don't really have to. I work on AVR based chips (mostly the ATmega and ATTiny) serves me well and I think I can get a job with this. But things change and I can adapt. I can still use linux if I want but I don't really want to until damn nVidia releases proper drivers.
Wait till you start dealing with ARM based systems. You'll get a choice of expensive commercial tools or scavenger hunts to find the right libraries to work with gcc...
:)
If anyone else has this kind of laptop and notes similar battery life for each distro and which is actually the battery life the laptop should have, then please tell me.
Edit: Grammar and explanation.