sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Ben Alex <ben.alex@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Best" varies by person and whatever requirements and priorities they have,
but I'm happy to share my experiences with Ubuntu and Arch on Z.

I had used Ubuntu for many years, as had several others in our R&D team at
work. In 2012 we bought some Z Series, but making Ubuntu reliably work with
the Power Media Docks was a lot of work. While you could get it working, an
update would break it or create graphic performance issues or fan noise or
some other new problem. Remember that was a year ago, so things have
probably settled down by now. On the upside, Ubuntu is a very common
platform for developers and therefore many projects will offer Ubuntu
instructions or packages.

One bigger issue I had with Ubuntu was its six monthly release cycle. In my
experience it was always a big time sink to download and run it, often
broke the machine or important software, sometimes introduced unwelcome
changes (eg Unity), and usually had software that's already several months
old to cover their QA period or interop requirements. Therefore I looked at
the rolling releases. While you end up downloading more and running more
upgrades over the course of a year, it's in small doses and at a time
convenient for you (I run mine weekly and it usually takes < 3 mins each
time). Given there's safety in numbers and Arch was the most popular
rolling distro at the time, I made the switch and am very happy. It worked
with the Z Series with no special effort beyond the normal PMD-aware
xorg.conf, and more importantly, keeps working and always gives you the
latest released software. So when the rare bug hits, you'll usually find it
already figured out on the forum (everyone else there is on the latest
version too), any required workaround identified, an upstream bug report
logged, the upstream bug usually active or resolved given the number of
people active on it, and then you get the proper fix as soon as the
upstream re-releases (not six months later if you're lucky). To the extent
you need something that's not already a package, you can almost always find
them in the Arch User Repository or make your own package and share it with
others via AUR. The PKGBUILDs are very simple and just a single text file,
so you can "maintain" packages for the community with negligible effort.
Also Arch sticks with vanilla packages, so as you read the manual for
software you're using, the config file defaults etc are the same. My
suggestion is have a think about whether you want a rolling release distro
or standard release distro. You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release

Cheers
Ben