Sick and tired of hardware.

There are days when I long for the time when I used proprietary software.

Aahh. Noo. Don't!

Really. I love Debian; it's a wonderful system. The fact that it is so cross-platform allows me to choose my hardware platform based on my actual requirements, rather than on the available software for that platform. The fact that it's Free Software allows me to modify the system the way I want it to, and also gives me peace of mind that nobody is silently subverting my system and sending my private data to some secret database somewhere. Or so.

But when it comes to vendor support, you're essentially stuffed.

Not that I really need vendor support. This laptop is my third; all three have had a Debian installation on it, and they all worked, at least to the extent that I could do some serious work with it. But there was always something.

  • The first laptop's video interface wasn't properly supported when it came out. As a result, it was dog slow. I also had some weird problems with keyboard mapping under X. I eventually found a way to work around them, but never actually fixed the issue.
  • The second laptop's video interface worked perfectly; and most of its hardware worked to satisfaction, too. I didn't get the internal wireless to work reliably, however, and there were some issues with the backlight as well. But overall, I was satisfied with the thing.
  • My current laptop's internal wireless simply doesn't work. I need to get myself a USB wireless interface, but that still needs to happen. I got the LCD backlight controls to work (resulting in an enourmous reduction of battery use), and bluetooth, and everything; essentially, apart from sleep support, wireless, external video, and the modem, everything worked perfectly.
Until last weekend. I needed a wireless interface for just a short while, so I temporarily installed MacOS on the 10G partition which I keep around to play with (and accidentally wiped out my main partition in the process), with the intention of removing it when the need was over. As the system would boot up, I received a message that there were security updates available. I installed them; never take any chances on that one.

Much to my surprise, however, I now find that the LCD backlight controls don't work anymore under Debian. When I boot the system, it will put the backlight intensity to whatever was set when Mac OS was running, and leave it at that. Pbbuttonsd seems to think the screen's intensity is set at 0 all the time, rather than at what it actually is. So bye-bye, long battery life.

I'm so sick of all this. If there were anyone who would start a company that would

  1. Manufacture laptops
  2. Write drivers for them
  3. Preload them with Debian
  4. Give support afterwards, and
  5. Be Europe-based,

I'd quite likely buy my next laptop there. Not that I couldn't install Debian on a laptop myself (I've already done that more than enough to be able to do this), but I really just want to get a laptop out of its box, flip it on, enter my name and a password, and start working. Potentially by running apt-get install something

Why do I need to use proprietary software to be able to do that?