Re: [gentoo-user] Current Dells and UEFI/secureboot (or other showstoppers)?

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

Sorry if I was terse in my previous reply.

On 30 March 2013, at 22:20, Walter Dnes wrote:
> ...
>  As per the subject line, I'm asking if current Dells have any
> showstoppers for Gentoo.  If not, I'll probably go with a Dell.

I would think Dell would probably be a very good choice.

I know that they support Linux on all their PowerEdge servers (RedHat and I think Suse and now recently they've added Ubuntu certification), and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they offered Linux-supported desktops, too.

I'd be surprised if there was a Dell that Linux didn't run on, TBH.

> My usage patterns may be different from yours, but Dells have lasted more
> years for me than other brands or custom-built machines.

Yeah, I have most always recommended Dell, myself.

Generally speaking they have best, or amongst the best, economies of scale when it comes to off-the-shelf desktop PCs. Gamers are never satisfied with the graphics cards in off-the-shelf desktop PCs, everyone else is.

It's all very well building your own PC - and I'll likely do that myself next time - until you're posting here saying "I'm experiencing random reboots and kernel panics, every 12 hours or so, and I don't know which of these dozen components to return to the supplier". You can spend hours debugging that - I've known such hardware crashes to be caused by RAM, by power supplies and even by floppy drives and CD-ROMs - and it's more than my time's worth, honestly. It's worth a hundred quid to me not to have to deal with that.

I've had amazing service on Dell's business support, even at the bronze level. An acquaintance's son's laptop died with a failed GPU and regular artefacts at 13 months old, warranty expired by a month. One snotty letter later, "sale of goods act, european law, up to 6 years" and a little Dell man was on his doorstep, very helpful.  

http://lists.us.dell.com/

I don't have experience of UEFI/secureboot, but I'll bet that the popular alarm is unwarranted. "Microsoft are trying to make it impossible to boot linux" is the sort of think we've been hearing since Halloween '98.

Stroller.