While I find running Gutsy on my work development desktop workable most of the time (as long as I ignore the font issues), my X60 is still another matter. Perhaps its that there just isn’t enough focus on laptops, or that the open source platform hasn’t really quite gotten there for laptops, or that Lenovo happens to design things in an Linux unfriendly way. Probably a combination of all of the above.
Anyhow, the problems I have remaining:

• The machine gets really hot when plugged in. Right around where the hard drive is. I tried fiddling with some hdparm parameters, but it doesn’t seem to help, and I’m not too psyched about the chance of really piling up the load/unload cycles.
• On a related note, the power management is a little weird too.. I came back after leaving my machine unplugged for a few hours.. I had a warning dialog saying my battery was low, and a panel applet telling me that I had 0:00 left to go.. not quite sure what to make of that. Shouldn’t it have forcibly suspended for me?
• No xrandr 1.2 yet, so no dynamic external monitor hotplug. I guess this is just a matter of time. But its a funamental feature of the hardware that should just work.
• NetworkManager and ethernet device flakiness. NetworkManager isn’t so great when it comes managing profiles. I want something like Apple’s where each profile can turn devices on and off. And I don’t want NetworkManager to freak out when a device doesn’t show up. And I want my wired ethernet device to always show up (for some reason, it doesn’t, more often on warm reboots from windows). Also NetworkManager doesn’t seem to let you be on more than one network at once. Either give me the full apple-like solution, or give me the crappy but flexible XP-like solution. NM seems like some not useful point in between.
• Multiple input devices (trackpoint and external mouse) still have funny interactions. I can’t set the mouse sensitivity parameters such that I’m happy with both at the same time.
• Various hardware settings like volume and screen brightness don’t seem to scale from 0-100 correctly. Probably a hardware quirk, but noticeable none the less. For example, two or three presses of the volume reduction button almost mutes the machine, even though visually, 70% of the bar is still full. Don’t know how you fix this without getting Lenovo involved to some extent, but annoying for the user nonetheless.
• Screen seems darker even on the max brightness setting compared to windows. Don’t know why.

None of these are insurmountable problems. I’m sure in a year or two, they’ll even be solved. But in a year or two, I won’t be using this machine.
Zealots will say open source drivers written by hardware vendors are the answer, but clearly the vendors don’t want to do that (and its unclear even if they are equipped to). And even then, just because a driver is in upstream, how do I know the latest version of Ubuntu that I want to run on my fancy new laptop will have the driver? Surely, even in some utopian vision, hardware vendors aren’t going to synchronize their release cycles with Ubuntu releases. There needs to be a more outside-of-the-box idea to solve this, and nobody’s figured it out yet.
Maybe there will be derivatives like Dellubuntu, and Lenobuntu, and HPubuntu, where it it will be an Ubuntu release plus drivers for that hardware platform. But that still feels inside the box, and also unlikely to happen given Ubuntu’s small share of the market as a whole. That’s where Linux fragmentation really hurts you.
Anyways, just felt like ranting about it.