Hello fello archers..

I've recently been going through a bit of a rough patch with my laptop usage.. I had a 15" macbook pro (dual booted with arch linux), which I recently sold because I thought it was ugly, the mouse didn't work very well, and frankly I was trying to de-appletize myself :)..

I just received my refurbished dell studio 14z and got arch up and running on it, but I can't decide if I like it or not.. I haven't gotten used to the mouse yet. The resolution is less than desirable. (13 something x 7 something). And there isn't a latch on the lid.. but I do like the size, aesthetics, weight, and the keyboard feels nice..

So I'm asking you, if you have a laptop, what kind is it? Does arch run pretty well on it (synaptics, sleep/wake, etc.)? What window manager do you think works best with the touchpad (I'm using gnome now)?

Any input would be appreciated.

------------------------------ -Eric Jacobs

I've dumped OSX and am happily running arch on my macbook 4.1. I'm not suggesting you go spend the money on one, but if you did, you'd be very happy with it. Once I figured out how to get past the EFI boot system, the only thing I've had issues with at all is getting lirc to work correctly, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Tried everything! But, wireless works excellent - broadcom and all. The synaptics simply needed a little tweaking using the instructions gleaned from the ubuntu forum. Sleep and wake worked out of the box. Every window manager I've tried worked great with the touchpad. I used kde 4 for a while, but have settled finally on xfce because it reminds me more of my first linux machine (fvwm on an old pb 486). Plus it's a lot of fun hearing "Oh, how cool, you've got a macbook -- what the heck is that?!?" --Sherry Howell