
RedHat is hiring to make Linux run better on laptops - soulbadguy
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/08/12/want-make-linux-run-better-on-laptops/
======
brightball
As much as I like Ubuntu, I have a significantly higher level of trust in Red
Hat to get this right for some reason. Maybe it's just confidence in the
company's core principles.

I've hit a point where I'm ready to move on from my Macbook Pro after about 10
years and I've been looking at Linux laptop options. It's mind boggling that
it's so hard to find good options.

Everything seems to revolve around "get a Windows laptop and wipe it" or "buy
some flavor of old Thinkpad" with warnings about EFI and compatibility. Then
there are company's like System76 who have what looks like a good offering on
the surface but I keep seeing threads about bad experiences with them.

If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.

~~~
JoshTriplett
You don't need to buy an old ThinkPad; current-generation ThinkPads work fine,
as long as you avoid nVidia GPUs. All the other hardware (including power
management) Just Works.

~~~
shahbazac
Is it really very difficult to get nVidia GPUs working with linux?

I wanted to buy a laptop with a GPU for CUDA experiments.

I was looking at Lenovo Yoga 710 (14 inch with nvidia gpu). Am I going to have
a bad time dual booting a linux distribution?

~~~
wjoe
For desktop PCs, not at all, Nvidia GPUs are very easy to get working and will
give the best performance.

In modern laptops, you usually have the complication of 'optimus' which allows
you to switch between the onboard Intel graphics and the Nvidia GPU. This can
be a bit awkward to get working, but it's improved recently. I've had plenty
of issues getting it working right on Windows too.

~~~
marcoperaza
On my T530, there's a firmware option to set the graphics to discrete-only,
integrated-only, or optimus. The downside to discrete-only is the power usage.
The downside to integrated-only is that the displayport won't work.

All three work great in Windows of course. For Linux, integrated-only is best,
followed by discrete-only, and I've never had success with optimus.

~~~
jlgaddis
I have a W530 that allows you to set it the same way. In my experience, you
are _ALWAYS_ better off to pick one or the other and leave it there. Some
folks have had success with Bumblebee [0], however.

It's my understanding that newer Thinkpads don't have the BIOS option to
switch and that this is much more of a PITA to get working.

[0]: [http://bumblebee-project.org](http://bumblebee-project.org)

------
CptMauli
My ex colleague is now at Read Hat, and he told me one anecdote. The card
reader of his ThinkPad didn't work. He created a bug in the bugtracker, got
personally contacted by the guy who apparently does card reader stuff, and a
day later he had a kernel, where the bug was fixed.

~~~
favadi
> who apparently does card reader stuff,

You mean the guy wrote codes for card reader or the card reader manufacturer?
:)

~~~
blitzkrieg3
> I've worked at RHT and based on the turnaround, it's the guy that writes
> codes for the card reader. I'm still impressed but not surprised by the
> level of service he got. Red Hat has a great hacker culture.

------
technofiend
RedHat seems to be trying to make their OS more accessible and mainstream
friendly through their $0 developer license
[http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-
de...](http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-
subscription-now-available). Not that there's anything wrong with CentOS. So
it's cool that effort extends to commodity hardware, too.

Sample size of one but as part of working down the Redhat certifications track
I purchased an Intel NUC [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-
nuc6i5syk...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-
nuc6i5syk.html) for a low power lab machine; it's really just a laptop
squeezed into a cube but everything I've needed to use it for works fine.
Admittedly I have not tried wireless or bluetooth.

Hopefully that means laptops built off reference Intel designs will also Just
Work. Interestingly NUCs are showing up now in the Hackintosh community
because despite moderate specs next to a modern desktop, they're still
competitive with Apple's current hardware. No doubt Apple will refresh this
year; they seem to be overdue.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Fedora's bleeding-edge kernel support usually means better hardware support
for newer laptops, which is great. One potential drawback, however, is the
decision not to include any non-FOSS drivers in the installation package. I
completely understand why they do it, but it throws a wrench into the idea of
loading Linux onto a laptop and having everything "just work".

For instance, getting the Broadcom wifi card that comes with my Dell XPS 13 to
work on Fedora has been such a pain in the ass (proprietary driver only) that
most people recommend tearing it out and replacing it with an Intel card that
has a more Linux-friendly driver.

If Redhat really wants better Linux penetration in the laptop world, at some
point they're probably going to have to make a decision to either go the Linux
Mint route and include proprietary drivers by default, _or_ try to engage some
of the hardware manufacturers to open-source their drivers.

~~~
dublinben
Laptop manufacturers could also just avoid this problem by using modems that
don't require proprietary drivers or firmware, like those from Intel or
Atheros. This is an entirely avoidable problem.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I debated calling out the manufacturers as well, but it seemed unfair with the
example of my Dell XPS 13. The laptop is installed with Windows by default,
and the Broadcom card works just fine there. The XPS 13 Developer Edition
(which is pre-loaded with Ubuntu) actually takes your advice and packages an
Intel wifi card instead.

Certainly they can try to push the "Sell laptops with Linux preloaded and make
sure everything works" approach (because let's face it, that's pretty much the
only reason why Windows laptops are pervasive), but if you're trying to
increase the number of people using Linux, I'd suggest that they might get
better results as the thing one uses to repurpose their existing laptop.

~~~
passiveincomelg
Why didn't you buy the developer edition?

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Because I saw someone selling a barely-used i7/8GB/512gb SSD of the non-dev
edition on Craigslist for $800. Similar specs new would've been around the $2k
mark.

Additionally, I was fine running Windows 10 at first and doing all my dev work
in a Fedora VM, but the Anniversary Update has pissed me off considerably,
leading me to want to migrate to a bare-metal Linux installation.

~~~
mwcampbell
Just curious, what pissed you off about the Windows 10 Anniversary Update?
That update hasn't made it to my PC just yet.

~~~
naibafo
I think what pissed of many users was that the update messes with your
settings once again, and that Cortana cannot be disabled anymore without
messing around in the registry. Another point was that they forgot to turn off
some debugging option they had presumably activated for their developers which
opened up a big vulnerability.

------
dxxvi
I always had both Windows and Linux (Arch) on every computer in my house (now
only a few of them have Windows because I use Windows in VirtualBox in Linux).
It seems to me that wifi speed in Linux is always slower than that in Windows.
Drivers are the culprit? If you want people to use Linux laptops, I think you
should make them really really fast (esp. at boot) so that everybody has to
wow when they just try it. No need to use gnome or kde, openbox is fine as
long as it's not ugly. Then wifi spped must be faster or at least as fast as
in Window. Next is printing. In summary, most of the issues are related to
drivers.

~~~
anthk
>. It seems to me that wifi speed in Linux is always slower than that in
Windows.

Firmware. Install it.

~~~
krzyk
It is possible to use wifi driver without firmware?

------
hinkley
I have a lot of mixed emotions about RedHat and to what degree they are a net
positive or negative, but I'm glad someone is taking this on.

It was so frustrating for me that the 'Linux on the Desktop' effort started
right after the numbers showed that everyone was trading in their desktops for
laptops.

I wanted to program ON my laptop, not program my laptop.

After spending almost 18 months trying to get all of the hardware on my laptop
to work with linux (this included swapping out the wifi card and learning ACPI
scripting so I could cobble together partial fixes from four other sources,
and learning Crusoe CPU registers to contribute a power saving fix back to
Transmeta, both things I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever), I said
screw it and bought a Macbook. I'm on my fourth now, and aside for some
difficulty installing command line tools, it's entirely removed hardware as a
source of stress and procrastination.

------
cm3
Please focus on reducing and avoiding regressions in the Intel gpu stack. It's
gotten pretty bad in the last two years. Major regressions were introduced
beginning with kernel 4.2's atomic modesetting changes, across the board.

~~~
TingPing
Try removing the Intel DDX driver and using the default modesetting driver. It
seems to be far less buggy for most people.

~~~
cm3
Two issues with that, the atomic modesetting regressions are in the DRM part.
Also, I've tried the generic modesetting X11 drivers, and that one's very bad,
does heavy tearing and is unusable on my machines. The best setup right now is
to use the intel ddx with TearFree enabled plus vsync forced with compton. If
you don't enable TearFree plus vsync via glx via a compositor, there will be
heavy tearing.

New issues since Arch Linux's update to Mesa 12 are some weird drawing bugs
that surface as flickering of the content for a few cycles (redraws) a couple
times during the day. It's not screen flickering. The content is sometimes
displayed partially and then, say, you type something, content flicker on each
event for a few redraw cycles until it cures itself. If I had to guess, I'd
guess something in mesa 12 and/or current X11 intel stack is very buggy.

How bad is this with the binary nvidia drivers? I couldn't use Wayland with
that, but if there's zero tearing with nvidia, there's less incentive to use
Wayland anyway.

~~~
TingPing
Anecdotally most people seem to have a much more stable experience with
modesetting, distros like Debian have even been promoting over Intel for a
while. I use Arch myself and have had no issues.

Also DRI3 is a far better solution than the various TearFree hacks, less
performance overhead, better integration with the compositor, and not hardware
specific.

Nvidia drivers don't support DRI3 but they have their own double compositing
hack that work as well as any other.

~~~
cm3
No, DRI3 is default in Arch and with that there's also heavy tearing, and I
must enable tearfree plus vsync.

DRI3 actually has a weird bug when opening a video with mpv, where you can
watch for a split second how a small rectangle is resized to the desired video
window's size. This doesn't happen with DRI2 or Wayland.

All of this is most likely very GPU-dependent, so Debian cannot make a
decision like that with confidence. I understand that the simple modesetting
driver relies on Mesa and there's no UXA or SNA code which can introduce bugs,
but I can assure you that when I tried the generic modesetting driver, it was
one big tearing party.

BTW, DRI2 and DRI3 in Glamor mode is pretty much the same as the generic
modesetting driver, because the SNA code isn't used at all.

I've been tyring my best to migrate to Wayland compositors, but Xwayland
integration is still too buggy. But it might be an easier solution than
messing around with xorg.conf.

------
Zenst
Wouldn't be nice if there was a universal driver that you could use upon any
operating system that supported universal drivers.

Alas not aware of any initiative or indeed reason that such drivers could
exist, even in binary blobs it would be a step forward.

~~~
rwmj
There is UEFI Byte Code (EBC) which at least in theory can be used to write
drivers.
[http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver...](http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver_Presentation.pdf)
Anecdotally, cards come with EBC drivers which flat out don't work.

There was also Forth Fcode used in Open Firmware. It was never widely adopted.

Basically any universal driver framework is going to be compromised in some
way that you won't like. Either it'll be too slow because it cannot use
specific features of the operating system. Or it will annoy OS developers by
tying them to an ABI which they don't want to support forever. Or (like EBC)
it won't be widely supported and/or won't work at all because in reality no
one cares about this.

------
satysin
My main machine is an oldish ThinkPad T420s. It runs Fedora 24 flawlessly.
Sadly not many machines seem to run Linux (any distro) perfectly. Part of the
reason I haven't upgraded to a newer machine is because this machine _just
works_ and I am very lazy so trying to get a newer machine to run as well is
more work than I care for. It isn't like performance has improved massively
since SandyBridge.

~~~
snowwindwaves
I have a t420s also. In fact I bought a second as a spare. With 16gb ram and
ssd it is a great machine.

The one thing I love about it that I can't find on any new laptops is that all
the ports are on the back; power, Ethernet, displays USB etc. I can show up at
a plant and plug in to the network and power and have a mousepad beside the
laptop keyboard and binders and notebooks on the other side without getting
tangled up in cords. For bigger stays at a site I bring a 27" monitor too but
still no cords out the side. No new laptops have all ports on the back!!

~~~
satysin
YES! I love that also. I can deal with power on the left but when the hell do
so many device makers put the damn power on the right side where my mouse will
be?! The only ports I want on the side are USB and only on the left side
please.

------
walterbell
Is RedHat interested in contributing to Qubes, which uses Fedora? This would
help advance the state of the art in desktop security and seamless UI
compositing.

------
soulbadguy
While this is indeed a great news, Are just two people enough for the wide
range of laptop and devices out there in the wild ?

What i would really love to see is a cross distribution effort in the same
direction : People from the main distribution coming together, identifying the
main experience pain point a fixing them upstream.

I really think there is an under served (from both hardware manufacturer and
distros) market of people who wants a better linux desktop/laptop experience.
But until someone figure out a way to monetized that (like linux is on the
server side), it will be hard to build on the desktop side the same kind of
momentum that linux is enjoy on servers.

~~~
trhway
> Are just two people enough for the wide range of laptop and devices out
> there in the wild ?

because it is RedHat i'd guess they would target enterprise deployments and
that would allow to focus on narrow set of hardware. Making good on those
would allow the stuff to trickle down into the open wilderness.

------
dovdov
better (10 years) late than never, right? :D

~~~
jwildeboer
I am now close to 11 years at Red Hat and I have always used Red Hat
Enterprise Linux on the various laptops the company gave me. So we're not
late. We're just ramping up a bit more in this space :-)

~~~
sevensor
While I personally run Arch, I recognize that many of the projects that make
the Arch experience so nice are supported by Red Hat. (Not least because you
have Lennart on the payroll.) Thanks for what you do!

------
arvinsim
Power Management should be top priority I think.

------
known
Sounds like RedHat is after
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1)

------
cpach
Neat! Munich seems like a nice city to live in.

------
asteriskdelete
Yeah, two people will fix it.

------
cs702
This is great, because all distributions will benefit from it eventually, not
just RedHat/Fedora. The folks at Canonical, in particular, seem to be very
adept at leveraging the work of others for the benefit of Ubuntu.

I would hope these kinds of efforts lead to better collaboration and
coordination between the different distros for improving compatibility with
desktop, laptop, tablet, and even phone hardware...

...but Unfortunately I don't think we should expect better collaboration and
coordination, due to the usual political and quasi-religious barriers between
distros.

------
yobo
the year of linux on the laptop they said.

------
hyperion2010
I'm currently running Gentoo on a T30, T60p, and X1 Carbon (1st gen). For the
X1 Carbon I actually switched because Windows 7 was causing periodic freezes.
Power managment and drivers are always what is missing, and getting drivers
written in a timely fashion is hard. That said, if they focus on a subset of
laptops then they could show some major improvements. I do wonder about the
old M$ ACPI manoeuvring though, if vendors still aren't documenting features
then there will be problems.

------
crudbug
Please improve GNOME multi-display support anybody.

I have triple monitor setup, GNOME always crashes. I am using XFCE with some
success on F22.

------
digi_owl
Welcome back, Red Hat Linux...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux)

------
jamespo
I find the Arch derived distribution Apricity runs very well on my HP Spectre
X360

~~~
brightball
Does it handle the pen/touch well? That's a nice looking machine.

~~~
jamespo
Not really used the pen on the linux side much but touch works fine. double
finger scroll & pinch to zoom works in chrome (but not firefox, or at least I
can't get it working). The graphics are fairly snappy with wayland too.

I do have a few annoyances, eg the insert key is shared with prt sc and there
is no right hand ctrl key (I remapped "menu" in gnome shell). Actually I do
miss my x220 keyboard layout quite a bit :)

------
boynamedsue
The problem with Linux on laptops is Linux itself. The notion of Linux on
anything other than servers turns most consumers off. Imagine if Android were
called Linux Phones instead. It would be a disaster.

Linux should be used incidentally to the device or laptop itself. Or it should
be spared for those who really want to know and understand more about it.

I used Linux on a laptop for a couple of years and, mostly, loved it. I hope
Red Hat doesn't brand it as such.

~~~
bertiewhykovich
The fact that you've been downvoted is, I think, actually indicative of a
major impediment to Linux's spread. Linux is not a consumer OS. There's no way
around this: it is not designed to be user-friendly, it's designed to provide
power to power users. Using Linux as a consumer is a miserable experience and
the vast majority of people who have a choice will choose otherwise.

Unfortunately, the Linux community has such faith in their project that
they're ill at ease with hearing about its failings. It's not clear why they
should be, though: Linux is a (relatively) great OS for its intended purposes,
and there's no need for it to extend to every possible use case. Linux on the
desktop is a somewhat pointless goal, and the community would benefit from
embracing that fact.

~~~
executesorder66
> Linux on the desktop is a somewhat pointless goal, and the community would
> benefit from embracing that fact.

Please no. Linux works great on the desktop, even for casual users. I have
installed Linux on a few friends old laptops and they've all loved it.
Distro's like Elementry, Manjaro, Mint and Ubuntu make it easy for casual
users.

There are only 2 problems with Linux on the desktop remaining.

1) Games. A lot of gamers would love to switch but love their games that are
currently Windows only at the moment. This situation is slowly improving.

2) The fact that almost everyone uses MS Office. MS works hard at making sure
it doesn't follow standards so LibreOffice et al. won't be 100% compatible
with it, so most businesses/people just revert back to MSOffice due to
compatibility reasons. But if they all just switched to LibreOffice they'd get
just as much shit done.

