On 06/26/18 11:03, Marco van Hulten wrote:
Robert,On 25 Jun 22:01 Robert Gilaard wrote:I am just researching this as well and have settled on the Dell laptops because they come pre-configured with Ubuntu and therefore I assume they will be opensource friendly.It could be fine, but I would not just assume this. The pre-configured Ubuntu may contain proprietary drivers, which you may not want to use, and are not included in OpenBSD.
There are no proprietary drivers included in Ubuntu by default, as best as I can remember. There are two things that may lead you to believe that:
1. You can install proprietary drivers easily, if needed. There's even an option in the system settings menu: "Additional Drivers".
2. Contrary to Debian, from which it is derived, Ubuntu installation disks include binary "blobs", closed-source firmware needed by some hardware such as network cards. With Debian you are expected to copy the needed firmware to an additional floppy disk or USB drive, to be manually picked during installation.
AFAIK some Dell Inspirons of "Ubuntu version" vintage come with a discrete Nvidia GPU in addition to the Intel one, but even those are shipped with the open-source drivers and it's up to the user to setup Bumblebee to support Nvidia Optimus.
Would like to hear if things changed though!
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