OT: Recommended Linux Laptops, suppliers?

[Brian Quinlan]

> I never said otherwise.  I have no real problem with Apple other than
> their pricing.  I think OSX is a *huge* step forward for them, however
I
> don't see paying twice the price for half the performance (or equal
> performance, for that matter), unless there is a real need for a
> particular application that only runs on Mac.  Python certainly runs
> well enough on less expensive platforms that buying a Mac for Python
> development seems silly (unless the work is specifically for the Mac
> port of Python).

If, as you seem to be suggesting, Macs have a terrible price to
performance ratio, and have no other features that make up for this,
then they are not a reasonable platform. I've been arguing that their
price to performance ratio is reasonable and that they have a lot of
nice features.

> > I think that it would be difficult designing a powerful graphics
server
> > that is also easy to implement. Unless I'm mistaken, X still has
> > problems with anti-aliasing, compositing and 2D transformations (*).
> 
> My entire GNOME2 desktop is AA.  I'm unsure of the others.  I
certainly
> haven't noticed a marked difference in performance on my desktop
> compared to the G4's my gf uses at (art) school.  Well, nothing that
> didn't make mine look faster ;)

Are your fonts antialiased or is every graphic object antialiased? And I
am talking about client graphics, not window manager constructs.
  
> Or use a decent graphics library.  While X may not provide this
> capability natively (it's probably considered outside the scope of X)
> there are enough graphics libraries built on top of X that you
shouldn't
> need to do this sort of thing yourself.

But then:
1. you are doing all of your processing on the client
2. you are sending a huge amount of data across the network

There are OpenGL extensions for X windows. Why do you think that is?
Because it would be way too expensive to convert OpenGL constructs into
X primitives and send those across the network. 

Cheers,
Brian