Comments on: I’ll Call Him Mini Something Something Mutter

By: mhoye

mhoye — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:29:08 +0000

As sad as it makes me, Jamie’s right. The X people sat on their thumbs for the better part of a decade while their competitors just kept getting better and better, and it really shows. They’re getting better fast, but they’ve got a long way to go before they’re in the same area code as their competitors.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:04:54 +0000

jeg:

I’m sorry, but you’re on crack if you seriously think ANY X wm/theme combo can remotely play against Win7, and I say this as a long time Unix bigot (I’ve been running *BSD on my home boxes since 94 and I have SGI and Sun hardware at home, but I live under no illusion that X is even remotely comparable to modern Windows and Mac GUIs).

By: jeg83

jeg83 — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:47:42 +0000

I did a lot of netbook shopping and comparing in the beginning of the year, and to my surprise, the best netbooks I found available were all manufacturers that were either unheard of to most consumers, or held in somewhat low esteem. The Asus EEE is a solid candidate usually for price, features and usability. The Acer netbooks, I found, were also some of the most highly recommended. I also looked at MSI’s Wind series of netbooks, but they were new entries into the market and didn’t have a lot of customer feedback yet.

Ultimately, I went with the Acer Aspire One 8.9″ and I have been very pleased. The keyboard layout of the Dell Mini series was, at first, plain awful, and the HP Mini Note line had the worst finish, too many proprietary features, and a keyboard with big, flat keys that made it very difficult to touch type.

I’ve used both 9.04 Desktop and 9.04 UNR, and I was very pleased with UNR for casual use, but I eventually went back to the Desktop release because the maximumizer (or is it Maximus?) package that UNR uses for window management interfered with some of my applications.

Does 9.04 audio not work out of the box on your HP Mini? If not, I’m sorry to hear that. 9.04 was a significant improvement over 8.x in that, on all of the systems I tried, audio and wireless networking just work out of the box. I think one of your frustrations with Ubuntu, the scrolling issues, may be caused more by the relatively low horsepower processor. I experience the same thing on my netbook, but not my desktop or VM with Ubuntu.

I totally agree that Ubuntu has borrowed, even ineffectively, many of the window/program management concepts from OS X. I find that it’s still a lot more flexible and intuitive than even Windows 7, and if I didn’t need a Windows environment for work, I’d likely be a Linux/Ubuntu convert for good.

Glad to hear you’ve picked up a netbook, all the same. It’s a fun addition.

By: Mike Kozlowski

Mike Kozlowski — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:34:27 +0000

Ah, I see what you’re saying now. Yeah, that’s HP for you. They REALLY REALLY want to always do something proprietary and “value-added.”

By: mhoye

mhoye — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:03:09 +0000

See, that’s not what I’m saying at all – I’m saying that even though it’s designed to be cheap, HP has made deliberate, expensive, and counterproductive design decisions that have both driven up the cost and made it less good. I’m saying that _even at this price point_, or at least at the whatever the price point on this thing was new, a little bit of extra thought (and not even all that much) could have improved this device immensely.

By: Mike Kozlowski

Mike Kozlowski — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:55:18 +0000

Just to inject a note of fairness here, you’re comparing a laptop specifically designed to be as cheap as possible to a freakin’ Macbook that costs like, what, ten times as much?

If you’re willing to spend Macbook money, you can get something that’s a lot closer to Macbook quality, albeit maybe not from HP. As silly as I think Dell’s Adamo is, if you’re really a design fetishist looking to spend $1500, hey, there you are.