Dell Latitude 2100 w/Ubuntu: Thumbs Down

My wife and I wanted to try out the new tiny netbooks and I'm a Linux guy so we bought a Dell Latitude 2100 w/Ubuntu installed. We upgraded a few things, including a touch screen which I was pretty psyched about using. I think Touch Screens will rock the world. I am probably wrong.

I have used Linux off-and-on for about 10 years, first at work in about 1996, then for myself with a variety of desktop computers and a Sony Vaio in 1998. That Vaio was an early attempt at using Linux full time and it mostly went well, but I had to resort to Windows for a lot of my work. Browsers weren't very good on Linux then, and there was little to no multimedia support.

The ensuing years everything got better and I have 4 Linux laptops in the house right now (not including the Dell we are shipping back today). Linux works. It's awesome. Unfortunately, Dell isn't doing the Linux movement any favors by sending out this netbook.

My first gripe when I saw it was that this netbook was too thick. We got a 10" screen and couldn't get a solid state drive. We upgraded to a longer battery pack. The result was an ugly wedge-shaped device with a battery bar sticking out the back. Not exactly "stick it in your purse" size for my wife. Still, she was okay with it, and I liked the idea of a small computer - with a touch screen, oh yeah, baby!

Then we started it up. The screen resolution was set to an intolerable 720x480. Most of the configuration windows would spill off the screen, with no way to scroll down to them. Ugh. After hitting google for an answer, I editing the xorg.conf file, commenting out the erroneous default, which prevented us from even selecting the 1024x586 option. Reboot... and good resolution. Problem? No way a Linux newbie figures that out especially because I had to know where xorg.conf was and how vi worked. Yeah, there is always grep, but given that so many people don't even know what a browser is, do you think they'll even be able to find "terminal" and use it without a panic attack? And, when they get into vi, would you bet they could get out without have to reboot? Me either.

Next: the touchscreen wouldn't work about an inch from the edges. After finding the config tool -- not in the admin menu but in the programs menu where you wouldn't necessarily think to look -- we recalibrated and it worked. It worked okay, but it was tough to hit some of the links or programs you wanted. There was a lot of "going back and trying again". My wife pretty much settled on using the mousepad. Dang.

Now, though, it was all there. The screen resolution worked fine, web sites looked good. But, the touch screen locked the sucker up a lot and it was pathetically slow. It had to be rebooted - hard rebooted - regularly. I *know* that Linux can work on your average 486 from 1995 just fine so there was something besides the decent speed (Atom 270N) and 1 gig of memory as the cause of the problems. Still don't know what it was. As I said, it's going back to Dell today.

Dell is good about taking it back, though, and I bet that we soon see Dell's Linux option going away. Maybe it was just the touch screen, I don't know. But, I do know that we couldn't upgrade Firefox (the "update" was greyed out -- not even an option to click, enter admin password and upgrade) [edit: this must be an Ubunutu 9.04 thing, I just found the same problem on another computer, installed 3.5 via Synaptic but had to redirect the softlink in /usr/bin. No newbie is going to figure that out. Come on Ubuntu!]. We were stuck with FF 3.0.x. Ugh. We couldn't get Opera or Flock to install, either. It was all too much, especially since we have a lot of computers and I wanted this one to be easy for my wife to use.

So, I give the 2100 a resounding "don't buy it" vote. It's just not worth it. We'll probably get one of the thinner ones with a solid-state drive and maybe even resort to - gasp - Windows again. Me no want to, believe me. But I do want a computer my wife is comfortable with, and that means all the crap that goes with Windows, I guess. Maybe it's Mac time?