Send your $200/yr to the free OS that comes the closest to "just works" for you, even if you don't use it. If everyone did that, our free OSes would be far better than any other alternative.

It's hard to decide to give them something with this list of options - really what can you choose here http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=1... the alternatives are:

1. Ubuntu for personal and mobile computing - I want convergence now! - really? I'm just afraid it will push the desktop version to suck more like Unity.

2. Ubuntu for cloud computing - I want Ubuntu running my cloud and as a guest in my cloud of choice. - well I'd rather have Ubuntu be my desktop choice and have them more focused on that.

3.Ubuntu for things - I want a secure, upgradeable Internet of Things, powered by Ubuntu. - Well, Raspbian lite has got that covered, will ubuntu further strip down a debian or where do they think they want to improve for IoT?

4.Community projects I support LoCo teams, UbuCons and other events, upstream projects and all the good work the community does. - well I'm afraid the money will mostly go into t-shirts and beer conferences. If you guarantee the money goes to upstream projects I'm down for that option at least.

5.Tip to Canonical - Hats off for making Ubuntu possible. Keep it up. - Well yeah, but what does that mean considering from the other options(convergence, cloud, iot) does a tip mean I endorse this new path instead of desktop focus?

At least before they had some option about addressing driver incompatibilities.. Someone please help me/us choose.. I want to spend money for an open source OS for my desktop as to to not make me feel naked in front of Microsoft employees when I browse the internet.

"If everyone did that", yes, but everyone isn't. That's where marketing is important. I wish Elementary.io were a fully-assumed for-profit able to trigger a snowball effect of customers around a Mac-level quality. Especially as Mac OS X quality is decreasing.

Just buy a Macbook Air and install Ubuntu on it. It will Just Work. Wifi, screen brightness buttons, volume buttons, suspend on lid close... everything will Just Work.

This! but YMMV, here's my journey so far...

Using Ubuntu on a 2016 MBP Retina 15"

1. First 14.x: mostly functional, trackpad was buggy. Brightness wont work. No Bluetooth. Blame on kernel 3.x

2. Then 15.x: almost functional! mostly everything worked great wth kernel 4.x, but no bluetooth nor camera. That's ok, I can live without that

3. Now 16.10: almost perfect. Bluetooth works again. Still no camera, but I have trust it will soonish :)

Also the machine never shutdown nor suspend correctly. I need to restart the machine, press ESC, write "exit" at grub, and then pick "poweroff" form the UEFI menu.

But even with all this drawbacks, I don't regret and full recommend to try this setup. This is the best hardware/software combo. And even the battery last more than 12 hours with linux!

16.04?

yes! ..but edit window is closed

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How does the trackpad feel? How's the battery life?

Trackpad is great, battery life probably a bit less than os x, Im using a mid 2012 and get 3 hours, want to upgrade to the next model with the 9-12 hour life.

Em...that's just half of what OS X can do. I have the same model, but my laptop can last at least 7hours in a coffee shop.

This is the 11" mid 2012, 13" has larger battery -- I was lucky to get 4 hours with os x when I first bought the machine, the battery is now 4 years old and gives me 2:30-3 hours under latest Ubuntu.

You don't have to pay anyone for something that just works, take that 200$/yr and pay it to yourself as you investigate if your hardware is well supported by Linux.

Alternatively, go for System76 or Entroware hardware. That hardware ships with Linux.

Time is money- plenty of people would trade $200 for not having to spend time doing that. That's the sort of thing that's really fun and cool and interesting if someone's a hobbyist and/or student and/or in the larval hacker stage, but at some point in life after spending decades having to make sure their hardware is supported by Linux/FreeBSD/whatever, the bloom can come off that rose pretty hard and it's a blessing to just give someone money to worry about something you don't want (or don't have the time) to spend time doing.

Of course, plenty of people do have plenty of time to read HOWTOs and hardware compatibility lists and so on and still enjoy doing so- more power to them. Especially if $200 (or whatever) is still a meaningful amount of money to them that they need for other things. But I've always felt that a big reason why so many people advocate that approach and present it as a rational choice is because they themselves enjoy doing that and would do it anyway regardless of the time/money tradeoff.

I don't think Linux has that much of a hardware compatibility problem these days.

I've built several intel PCs over the last few years without ever researching hardware compatibility and every one Just Worked with a basic Ubuntu install.

Integrated wifi, and even AMD graphics cards are supported out of the box.

I've got an AMD laptop with AMD graphics and have to install the Catalyst software to get responsiveness from Ubuntu graphics. If I don't completely uninstall and purge Catalyst before allowing system updates, then reboot using a custom boot command, then shut down and reboot (with the custom command again), and then reinstall Catalyst, I end up with a machine that boots to a black screen and is essentially useless until I wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch. With 15.10 I thought this had changed with a new set of non-Catalyst drivers, but the problem reappeared.

I hadn't expected this, as my previous two Dells with Intel or Nvidia graphics hadn't caused any problems since years ago when wireless issues got sorted out. Linux has made a lot of progress with hardware compatibility, but if you find one of the weird issues it can be damn near intractable and user forums are a maze to sort through.

Home built PCs are generally not a problem since they all use common, fairly generic, parts. Laptops on the other hand tend to rely more on custom hardware and solutions.

> Alternatively, go for System76 or Entroware hardware. That hardware ships with Linux.

In both cases, it ships with Ubuntu, and doesn't necessarily support Linux (or BSD) distros in general.

I was able to install Debian on my old System76 laptop, but the graphics card and wireless networking have never been completely happy. Now that I'm upgrading, I'm going to get a zareason — I've been very happy with the desktop & laptop I've used from them already.

I used to be an Ubuntu user, but it got progressively more difficult to customise my machine to run the way I want it to. I don't want GNOME or Unity: I run stumpwm. Tiling window managers are the future.

Ok, not necessarily but I know for example that for the Entroware Apollo they worked with upstream Ubuntu Mate to get the touchpad working. Everyone benefits from that. In practice, you will have very little problem installing other disto's on System 76 systems from what I have heard.

This assumes the time taken and effort will be worth less then 200 dollars, which may not be true for all.

As an order of magnitude, if I maintained a Linux desktop myself, I'd be in for both ~10 days per year (direct and indirect) = 4500$. I've already tried.

This isn't a press release, it's a review

On #3, I'll just plug Mageia again. I use the KDE version (I know, I know, you didn't want to know) since 2011, and it's the only linux I've ever used that "just works". I've had it on several laptops and a desktop, and haven't once touched a config file by hand. I've more or less forgotten all of my old Linux hand-editing juju.

They're the community-driven spinoff from Mandriva, and they're the only Linux I'd recommend to anyone anymore: https://www.mageia.org/

If you are careful with your hardware selection, #3 is totally doable. For example my work PC (Xeon E5-1650, nVidia Quadro K2000) has had absolutely no compatibility or stability issues. I had the exact opposite experience trying to install Linux on my macbook pro. I have heard good things about the Dell XPS (the one that comes in a 'developer' edition).

You also might try virtualization. With paravirtualized drivers, and VT-x support in the CPU, you run at near native speeds, and it is all very stable.

Word of warning, The XPS DE is definitely _not_ perfect. When I got my XPS 13 DE last year they had a multitude of issues I could go on and on about, but the bottom line is that the laptop was completely unusable out of the box.

Part of the issue is that the Sputnik team has to take the XPS 13 hardware as is (as it was designed for Windows) and try to support it. They are releasing the drivers upstream (at least they were when I last checked) so that's awesome! But it meant I had crazy stability issues until the 3.19 kernel release.

The newer models of the XPS 13 DE seem to have better hardware for linux (Intel vs. Broadcom wireless for example) so it may be better, but I would still encourage anyone looking at the Sputnik projects to consider the Precision M3800 instead (15" workstation version of the XPS 13). There are also some other Dell workstations available now that might have better hardware for Linux.

Edit: Also I have owned a couple of System76 laptops and have had 0 issues with them out of the box. But their drivers are proprietary (AFAIK) and their chassis are Clevo...so definitely not in the same ballpark as the XPS when it comes to build quality.

For 3., I've been interested in the same. How would it work though? Would it include non-free components, or be open source? If it's open source, why would the majority of people pay?

I say this as someone who would definitely pay. I'd love to see something like an XPS developer edition, but with a (relatively) coherent graphics paradigm like OS X.

> If it's open source, why would the majority of people pay?

We could have paid access to the repositories. Yes anyone can redistribute it, but it's cumbersome and it gives you a delay for the bugfixes, so people with the ability to pay will prefer the official method. Especially if they know they're funding open-source and if they get a good service. However, to stay legit in the OSS ecosystem we need to redistribute part of the donations.

> Something like elementary.io, without the installation errors

Or with toolbars in the apps. Or with context menus on the video player. Or with a decent dock that doesn't show three Chrome buttons if you choose to not use their crippled browser.

Yeah, I have also tried elementary.io.