As much as I admire Alienware computers' design, craftsmanship, speed, etc., and as much as I appreciate the company's interest in linux, I hardly think there's any sense in Alienware linux-based computers, since they're designed for gaming and gaming only.
As much as I admire any manufacturers interest in linux, I hardly think there's any sense in anybody shipping with it. Few people who want to use linux are incapable of spending the 20 minutes to install it themselves, and no matter what distro you pick you'll never satisfy a large portion of your linux using customers.
Just sell me a computer with a blank harddrive. That would be swell.
I want hardware support. I want a set of open specs on a laptop. That way FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware could all possibly run on it. I don't want to purchase a system in which if you use their preinstalled version of Ubuntu it works but anything else your hosed.
So when I look at a 'Linux' laptop that is what I'm looking at it for. Can I run FreeBSD with working sound/sleep/wireless?
How common are laptops that don't work well with linux these days? With graphics you're golden: either it's AMD (uncommon) and it has working FOSS drivers out of the box, or it's Nvidia where you have working FOSS drivers sufficient for work needs, and proprietary drivers sufficient for whatever gaming you could possibly be doing on linux. With wifi, you're almost always golden these days. Most laptops seem to have intel or atheros chips, but even the traditionally hellish broadcom cards don't provide much of an issue from what I understand. If anything else in a laptop could cause you any real showstopping trouble I'd be very surprised.
Note also that both of these potential hangups are something you can easily access beforehand. Every site I've used lets you pick your wifi chip from one of a few choices and will at least tell you what the GPU is.
This is wonderful in theory but I've purchased laptops pretty recently (Thinkpad x200e) which I didn't fully vet before I purchased. This laptop had lots of issues. Non Working Wifi, couldn't sleep correctly and had issues with sound.
Having everything work out of the box is not guaranteed. Ubuntu is generally better about it but not all distros have the level of workarounds that Ubuntu does. As far as ACPI is concerned not even Ubuntu is decent.
I wanted an off the shelf consumer RAID1 one desktop. Only Alienware offered something like that. It came with Win7, I am still trying to get Ubuntu to recognize the RAID.
It's not hard to put together your own system including a dedicated hardware RAID card. You should even be able to specify the components and have your local computer shop do the assembly.
