This thing is pretty low spec, starting with a dual-core 1.3Ghz processor. It comes with Win8 and I would personally never tolerate that on any of my computers. While I am capable of helping my clients set theirs up and to fix a few minor issues, Win8 seems to be the final ultimate breaking point for me. I even tried downgrading to the Win7, as that would have been tolerable to me, but the drivers were simply not capable of sustaining life on this cranky hardware.
Linux to the rescue: I tried four distros. Those that should have booted in UEFI could not get past hardware detection. They all simply hung and did nothing. And frankly, all the 64-bit versions were noticeably slower than the 32-bit version of the same distro, so there was no reason to stay with 64. Also, please note I refuse to use any DE except XFCE.
Debian Wheezy: You’ll need the RealTek firmware package on a thumb drive before you start, and it has to be in the top directory. The installer will ask for it; with that, everything works out of the box. The stock radeon drivers produces really slow display changes on some items, so you’ll want the Catalyst driver (AKA fglrx). However, you won’t be able drop into console mode. With Wheezy, the system seems overall snappy enough, but when you run stuff like Iceweasel, you’ll notice it bogs down a lot. It’s no better if you build Firefox optimized from source or install the official tarball. Seamonkey isn’t quite as bad.
Xubuntu 12.04: Everything installs nicely, but there has been a long-standing issue with the rtl-8188ce wifi chipset. Canonical elected not to fix it, but you can install the kernel backports for the wifi. At this writing the specific package name is linux-backports-modules-cw-3.8-precise-generic-pae. Otherwise, your wifi will never stay connected. (No, I don’t mess with anything except LTS releases.) The automatically offered Catalyst driver works fine and is better integrated; I got a console. You have to chase down the instructions for re-enabling hibernate. Overall, it runs somewhat slower than Debian Wheezy.
OpenSUSE 13.1: This is the winner. Everything works out of the box. The built-in radeon driver is much better these days and I never felt the need for Catalyst. It’s very snappy, so that dropping in and out of hibernate is relatively quick. Naturally, SUSE is very observant of the legal niceties about the font rendering patents, so you’ll need to hunt down the muzlocker repo and procedure. At this writing, there are no packages for 13.1, but the Factory branch works well enough. For now, this one is the keeper. It’s also the only distro where Midori as supplied was worth using, which is pretty light and quick against the other standard web browsers. One other oddity: There is a USB port on the left side of the machine on which the other distros kept choking, but SUSE handles it just fine.
I tested Scientific Linux 6 (latest release) and it would run okay, but fared poorly overall. That is, the screen paints were painfully slow with the bundled radeon driver but if you use the fglrx supplied by ElRepo it tends to lock up the GUI quickly and often, requiring a hard reset. I didn’t try the build-your-own route using the download from AMD/ATI. I would wait until RHEL 7 comes out and either use that or wait for the clones to build their free versions.
I horse-traded for this laptop; it’s not something I would go out and buy even if I had the money. The only serious redeeming quality is the battery life, easily hitting 5 hours without recharging running on any Linux I tested.
Update: Perhaps I could waste a lot of time listing all the things about SUSE that require me to relearn just about everything I do on a daily basis, but after trying to get used to, I decided it simply wasn’t worth it. Now, while Xubuntu 13.10 does run as fast on this thing as SUSE did, it’s just too darned buggy and fixes for some important stuff aren’t going to happen. I checked the buglist of known issues and the attitude seems to be lack of interest on the things that bother me most. I’ll go back to Xubuntu 12.04 because I know it works and it’s less work than just about anything else.
Update 2:Xubuntu choked, refusing to use the PAE kernel and thus losing me a half-gigabyte of RAM. Dear readers, I have been slapped upside the head by learning some things I had missed previously. It changes everything. I found out the reason there is no console when running Wheezy is because of a package I needed called “firmware-linux-nonfree” — something not easily discovered when chasing Debian information. A ton of drivers, but in the typical Debian politics, has to be separate. It includes some firmware for Radeon. Once installed, I had no need for the fglrx driver. This means I’ll also have to rewrite the draft of my book on Debian for newbies.
Debian Wheezy is the winner.
