Dell became a big pile of shit regarding linux. It used to be a company that had great support for this operating system. In fact, you still find them at the top of several lists, in particular for the XPS model, which is the one I use profusely. That is precisely why, years ago, I went from HP to this company instead. But as time passes by, they offer more and more negligent, and now even broken down service for Linux as well as idiotic support (lecturing you on how appropriate drivers are not guaranteed to work on Linux, etc.) I'm speaking here of the wifi problem you get on some XPS models due to their horrid choice of the, aptly named, killer wifi controller.
The paradigm for booting systems changed in 2005 or so. The venerable BIOS increasingly gets replaced by UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) that provides more support to basic functionalities (including advanced graphical/mouse support), which, however, comes at the price of increased complexity for linux systems. We are now back in the era where the boot loading sequence is one of the serious challenges of setting up a linux system (LILO had greatly simplified it and by the time of Grub, it was fairly automatic already).
The battery of the HTC desire HD is notoriously lame.
My SD card doesn't mount and meets with a
mmc0: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
when plugging the card (to see what's going on as you plug and unplug, run a:
tail -f /var/log/syslog
). The error appears three times in a row. It's a registered bug (from the kernel, apparently) and may appear for certain types of card only.
As happens every two years or so (in almost perfect timing with my changing affiliation), my computer crashed.