Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.
Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.
With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed.
In 2022.
That is the kind of basic thing that does not work.
In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.
Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had...
They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...
If we are talking about desktop Linux, a lack of config files is not a problem. If you expect people to edit files to get their desktops to work properly, you have already lost.
The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.
Config files are far preferable to some random database dug somewhere in registry of DE blob of stuff. Because you can make a simple program that just "does the right thing" for user then include it in distro
The storage mechanism is not the interaction mechanism, and Linux config files are not user friendly. All other desktop operating systems have a control pane for this stuff.
Configuration files are a developer-friendly and user-friendly way of supporting customization. It allows more conventional Linux users to do their customization using their favorite text editor, in the familiar interface that they already like. And, if somebody decides they want to write a GUI for configuration (maybe to chase users who are more familiar with consumer OSes), all the GUI has to do is write to a file (an easy task in most languages).
I'm a user and I don't find being made to directly edit config files user-friendly at all. Why on earth would I want to use a text editor to configure my printer? I don't use Powerpoint to edit photos either, even though in theory I probably could, but what a hassle. That sort of paradigm is fine for applications intended for professional use to be deployed to servers etc., but config management systems exist for those uses and the people managing these applications tend to be paid quite well, which is no coincidence. Targeting ordinary users? If there is no (decent) config UI, then it may be developer-friendly, but it's definitely not user-friendly. Yes, that can be a valid trade-off for resource-strapped hobby projects, and yes, it's fine if there is a config file in the back, but that shouldn't be the only way to configure an application. No other platform tolerates this sort of thing, and with good reason, given that most people find configuring software to be both intimidating and annoying even under the best of circumstances. I think devs actually believing that all users are just like themselves for decidedly non-dev applications plays a sizable part in why desktop Linux fails to break out of its tiny hardcore technical people and sometimes their parents niche year after year. Most people's favorite (i.e. only) text editor likely will be Microsoft Word, and I'm not sure how many of those people would say they like it.
You can check into git so you have a history of changes?
So you can copy the config to another machine?
There are lots of reasons why text files are the preferred format to store configuration in.
Other than perhaps a slight performance boost, why do we want settings in a non-human readable database?
Hell, even Microsoft are starting to use json config files for stuff like Windows terminal because they know people like to be able to quickly copy and edit settings.
You are talking about the configs being stored in text files. The comment you are responding to was talking about being forced to edit text files to configure.
Yours is about the format of data representation and theirs is about UX.
The first step of not forcing users to edit text files is having sensible well thought out defaults. If I have to think about configs the designers of the app failed me.
The second way to not force the users to edit text files is by having a well thought out gui for the kind of changes you might want.
The format of how the config settings are stored is almost orthogonal to this questions. And yes, you are right, a text based format is preferable over a properitary binary one.
It is a community-developed project, so it only really needs to appeal to developers. What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy. Other platforms do this sort of thing because their entire reason for existing is to satisfy customers.
> What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy.
First of all, adjusting scrolling speed is not an "uninteresting polishing related task," it is a basic standard of usability.
Secondly, if you don't think Linux on laptops should be broadly usable by the general population, you are in the wrong thread. The central point of the HN post we are all commenting on is the usability of the Linux desktop ecosystem on commodity laptops.
Except on Linux usually most environments stop at the config file part. And if a GUI tool happens to exist, it isn't kept in sync with the file format.
A convention for writing JSON, YAML, or whatever config files that standardized types of options, their default, and something about their types (is it a toggleable boolean, a bounded continuous value, an integer, etc etc) could be nice. It might be possible to provide enough info automatically generate the GUI (draw the first as a button, the second as a slider, and the third as a number box), and that sort of info would be helpful to have if you were writing the file by hand anyway.
Adjustable scrolling speed is useful (I mean, I haven't used it, but I can see why one might want it). Creating a GUI to adjust it is an uninteresting polishing task.
Swaywm has the ability to set this (you have to edit the config file). It seems weird that gnome or whatever you use lacks this option. Although, gnome has a lot of t's to cross and i's to dot, maybe they just haven't gotten around to it.
To add in the fancy slider you want so much, there needs to be a corresponding tunable in Wayland. MacOS does this with plists, it's not some radical or hated design pattern.
If you think that is a "fancy slider" you lack perspective. It is a basic, expected feature that is supported by Windows and macOS for laptop users. And I'm pretty sure it used to work on Linux too, before Wayland.
> In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.
Sure? This is exactly the thing that Wayland was supposed to solve. Only X has one DPI for all screens.
I still use X because I'm on FreeBSD and I even got multi-screen multi-dpi scaling to work there, with xrandr settings but indeed it was not fun. In Wayland it should be click & play though.
Wayland supports it quite well but any app that uses the legacy XWayland compatibility layer does not work. Which is basically everything using Electron.
It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.
It doesn't even require multi dpi. High dpi with XWayland is simply Broken in every compositor today: you have to choose between not scaling you Wayland windows and accepting super pixelated X windows (due to applying bitmap based scaling that almost no one would want with no option to disable it).
KDE's upcoming release in October should hopefully be addressing this by allowing you to disable the bitmap-based scaling.
You'll find they're basically identical to what you'd use to enable/force Wayland on Chrome. Also VAAPI {en,de}coding and pipewire based sharing
You can also replace --ozone-platform=wayland with --ozone-platform-hint=auto for less strong-handed encouragement
I use quite a few different Electron-driven things on Wayland. Discord is the only one seemingly refusing to update their Electron base... and getting free Wayland support
If not for them I'd remove XWayland support entirely from my Sway configuration
Well, it took a long time for all Windows programs to work somewhat decently, and even now the OS still does not have great multi-DPI support.
For example when I move my mouse from my 192 DPI screen to my 96 DPI screen, the mouse position translates in physical pixel, not in physical location. So at the bottom it matches but near the middle of the 192 DPI screen it stops going to the left (it already ends up on the top of the 96 DPI screen going from the middle of the 192 DPI screen) and becomes an 'invisible wall'. Even in Windows 11 they didn't bother to fix this :(
The only OS that had a good transition to multi-DPI capabilities was macOS and that's really because Apple doesn't care about legacy and forces app devs to update their stuff. But it's not just Linux that's having a hard time with this.
But I didn't know this was a specific problem. I'm not using Wayland yet and won't for the foreseeable future. I'm on FreeBSD and KDE on Wayland has been broken a long time. When I hear this it sounds like a good decision anyway :)
Windows' HiDPI does have some glitches (like the mouse positioning thing), but most apps work seamlessly (including browsers, Electron, and IDEs) or reasonably well (Microsoft Office). Also, Windows supports any scaling level, whereas macOS only supports 100% and 200%, which makes it easier to mask any sort of issues or bugs (pixel-doubling looks less blurry than scaling things up by 125%). Many (most?) 13-15 inch Windows laptops ship with a 1080p screen, which works best with a 150%-125% scale.
MacOS supports intermediary DPIs, it has multiple "looks like resolutions". You may have to press ALT while clicking "scaled". But you can't (easily?) set any arbitrary scaling, like 123%. You can on Windows, but it recommends against it. And I've noticed that most apps work fine at 150%, but many feel weird at 125% (which is also "standard").
The Windows mouse thing has been somewhat fixed in Win11 22H2, where you can now even move your mouse to the side "above" the other screen and it will still move there.
As for apps working seamlessly, I'm really not convinced. Not even the taskbar works well. If you change the DPI while it's running, the taskbar icons become blurry. The initial start menu (on first click) adapts fine, but then if you start typing to search something, the results are a blurry mess. Edge has weird artefacts in the tab animation after a DPI change, where half of the icon moves at a different speed. IntelliJ has funny fonts, with some of them huge, others tiny.
To me, the killer feature of MacOS when it comes to multi-DPI setups is that it remembers the per-screen-per-setup DPI. In my case, my PC has a 14" 1920x1080 screen. When I use it alone, it's much closer than with an external screen. I like it in 100% mode. When I plug in the screen, a 32" 4k, they're both much further away. They have roughly the same DPI (by design - I mostly use Linux) so there's no "matching" to do, but I'd like both of them to be at say 125%. Tough luck. If I change the laptop's screen to 125% while the external screen is plugged in, it will stay at 125% when on its own, too. MacOS would remember that with this screen it's 125%, alone it's 100.
> MacOS supports intermediary DPIs, it has multiple "looks like resolutions". You may have to press ALT while clicking "scaled".
The “looks like resolutions” work by setting your screen to the resolution it claims to be multiplied by two, and then downsampling the image to your native size. Depending on the resolutions involved, the screen might feel a bit blurry. On Windows, setting an intermediary scale changes the way the UI is drawn, while keeping your native resolution.
Do you honestly expect users to swap out the window system to solve a simple problem like a lack of scroll speed adjustment?
Most users won't even know the difference between Wayland and X.org and X11 unless they are already the kind of tinkerers who used Linux on the desktop despite its drawbacks. Normal people have no idea what any of it means, and they should not need to know.
I'm talking specifically about OPs complaint - they've identified it's a Wayland specific issue, so yes? If using Gnome, it's a single click from GDM, and your preference will be remembered.
X is purely worse for this case. Wayland supports live switching window scaling as they drag across monitor boundaries. X does not. The issue is that electron apps do not support Wayland yet so they run in the X compatibility layer which can not live switch. So reverting to X means you go from some of your windows not working to all of them not working.
Supposedly upstream electron has fixed this but I'm yet to see a single electron app that works. Maybe they just haven't updated electron.
Though it has nothing to do with Wayland before the flamewar starts, it’s just libinput and gtk maintainers not agreeing upon whose responsibility is it to handle scroll events (it is gtk’s though, libinput doesn’t have enough context to implement kinetic scrolling, so it really should be the framework that adds semantic meaning to an event stream)
>it has nothing to do with Wayland before the flamewar starts, it’s just libinput and gtk maintainers not agreeing upon whose responsibility is it to handle scroll events
Sure, but for me as an end user, it's irrelevant who's fault of this bazaar engineering endeavor it is that very basic quality of life features from Windows/MacOS do not work on Linux.
As a dev I understand the struggle why this and many other stuff doesn't work right on Linux, but as a consumer/end user I don't care about their internal feud and I expect the product I use to have basic stuff like this working out of the box.
Sure, I target it more specifically to the anti-Wayland group. I don’t really care whether they continue to use X indefinitely, or use another OS or whatever, but don’t attack an open-source project, and at least not on false claims.
Also, unfortunately the bazaar style of development sort of begets this kind end-user experience. Some people like it, others don’t. I change between OSX and Linux quite often nowadays, what I prefer in the latter is that I actually have a chance of fixing problems, not just wait around and pray to the Apple/Microsoft gods that they may have fixed the issue in the next multi-GB update. Also, piece-by-piece, free software often beats out proprietary offerings’ alternatives, it is usually the experience together with the whole stack that is lacking. E.g. pipewire may well be a better sound stack than that of the other two OS’s.
>but don’t attack an open-source project, and at least not on false claims
What did I attack and which false claims did I make?
>what I prefer in the latter is that I actually have a chance of fixing problems
What I and most consumers want is a product that does not require fixing or learning how to fix things. I and most other people don't want to play sys-admin at home despite having cut my teeth in it and making it a career.
I work in cybersecurity so all our workforce is fluent in linux which we daily drive at work and yet at home everyone of us only uses Windows and/or MacOS on our personal machines with only one guy using Linux religiously at home.
When even experienced linux users don't want it in their personal lives that says something. Even though we know how to fix things but our free time is much more valuable. Nobody likes a desktop that stutters and ruins your immersion and productivity, especially if you're running a system that costs several grand.[1]
Maybe when the hardware manufacturers can work with the bazaar engineers and finally agree on something and work together with the desktop environment devs on how to make Wayland a fully feature complete drop in replacement for X11 with no rough edges, quirks or issues and have feature parity, smoothness and polish to Windows/MacOS, we can finally have the "year of the (polished) Linux desktop". Until then, I and most consumers will continue to use whichever OS provides the best experience with least amount of friction.
You certainly know what you're talking about because from a lot of experimentation, my take on the state of 2022:
If you want the "works so well it's boring", go with X11. The one exception, as you note, is multi-DPI, which has native support in Wayland.
For Wayland, there are (depending on DE/compositor) some specific issues or inconsistencies, like the scroll speed you are mentioning. Personally, I also have qt5 apps being all over the place with window placement under wlroots. There are times when you'll need to look up some environment variable to make an application or toolkit behave properly.
So if you're in the high-DPI+low-DPI scenario, yeah, it still takes some effort. For anyone else, I think OP holds.
My pick for a "boring stable desktop" stack:
* Dist: Your preference of Fedora/Debian/Arch. (Mint, Pop, and Endeavour acceptable derivatives)
I can’t imagine not being in the “multi DPI” scenario though? It’s not some edge feature that affects a minority of power users, it’s just plugging an external display into a laptop. The DPIs almost never line up - not since high DPI displays became mainstream about 10 years ago.
I think this is more niche to care about than you might imagine. First off, a huge % of the population barely knows what an HDMI cable is and just doesn't plug their laptop into anything. Second, office workers might have a nice docking station setup, but in that case you are probably basically turning the laptop into a desktop (with a keyboard, mouse, and nice monitor) -- why bother with the laptop screen at all? Finally, perfect DPI matching isn't really required -- a 1080p laptop with a 1440p monitor should probably be fairly reasonable looking for most normal screen sizes.
Arch should not be listed as a boring stable desktop. In fact, just the other month it had a black screen outage involving grub that affected every user that did an update. If the distro requires the users to monitor an email list to avoid this kind of gotcha before doing an update, then it is neither boring nor stable.
It's not. I've managed to do it in xrandr. I have my main screen (and thus all screens) rendered at 200% and then scale down the other 2 back down to 100. Basically how macOS does fractional scaling.
It's not real multi-DPI no but effectively it does work. Does require a pretty decent GPU to render all screens at 200% before it scales them down though.
At one point I was using two 24" screens, one 1920x1080, one 3840x2160. I've tried messing around with settings, until I ended up on xrandr scaling as being, basically, the only solution. Five minutes later, the low-dpi display was in the closet, because I couldn't stand the blurry fonts.
It's ok for me but I used macOS before which also uses similar font anti-aliasing (macOS tries to preserve the look of the font in contrast to Windows which tries to align to pixel boundaries).
But indeed YMMV here.. There is no way to use non-anti aliased fonts at small sizes this way. For me it is fine, I would set it up the same way anyway but I forgot it's not for everyone.
For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480.
But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bit.
I kind of expected the A485 to have similar issues to the T480, since it's the same laptop except for the cpu and graphics. I did some preliminary searching and the listing of the laptop as "ubuntu certified" gave me too much confidence, I guess.
I forgot to mention in the parent post that the SD card reader can't detect insertion/removal at times, yeah, so I have a script to reload the rtsx_pci_sdmmc kernel module to force it to recheck.
The A485 has really terrible support
! To the point I'm wondering if Lenovo didn't do it on purpose ... Very disappointed with mine to this day. Time definitely did not improve support.
same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.
old IBM Thinkpads were pretty solid, but now they're made by Lenovo who has a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors, usually in exchange for money. They've even been caught stuffing malware into UEFI so that users reinstalling their OS would be infected over and over again. However nice their laptops are, I could never trust them. They have already proved that they are perfectly willing to compromise your security and privacy to line their own pockets.
All the builtin radios, cameras, microphones, and sensors in modern laptops make them ideal for stealing your private data. I already have an untrusted cell phone, I want my personal laptop to be something I can feel comfortable keeping my data on. Because I can't personally audit every chip, that means I need some level of trust, and Lenovo has demonstrated over and over and over again that they cannot be trusted.
every once in a while there's a lenovo default windows image/hardware security controversy, but never one that has affected me directly.
i don't care what they put on the default windows partition (i replace it on arrival) and the uefi issue was a production mistake where they imaged with a nonproduction image.
they're still used widely by serious people in academia, open source and security sensitive industry.
i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.
if you're truly paranoid, a pine arm machine or fully open source risc-v may be your jam. everything else is going to be loaded up with proprietary blobs everywhere along with overcomplicated supply chains and overzealous marketing departments cross selling adware onto that default image you should be tossing anyway.
> i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.
No, it's really just them. They worked hard to earn that bad press. It's not even that they keep pre-installing malware, but how they've handled it when they're caught speaks volumes.
When the truth about superfish came out first they fiercely denied there was any security risk to anyone ("we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns”), then eventually they admitted it was a problem and said they'd stop shipping devices infected by it, but continued to anyway more than a month later (https://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/information-technology/20...) and the instructions they gave users for removing the offending software still left systems vulnerable while giving people a false sense of security. When they were caught doing that they issued new instructions and those still left users vulnerable!! (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/lenovo-ap...)
I had a Framework and really liked it. Unfortunately the components just degraded really quickly for me, and now can't work but 20 minutes at a time until it freezes completely. Swapped out for a Thinkpad last week.
Even swapped out the Framework mainboard after a long back and forth with support. Just some poor battery unloading or similar causing shorts. I was very close to committing my company to using them until this started happening to my tester unit and my lead engineer's tester unit.
I hope the best for Framework -- I really love their repairability promise -- but before I can commit my company to them I need them to not be lemons.
Right now I'm liking System76. Expensive, but I like that they come with linux working out of the box. They're specifically designed/tested to work well with linux so no worries about the hardware not being supported. Like many other companies they are basically selling re-branded laptops made by the Taiwanese company Clevo. I still can't audit every chip in them, but at least I don't have clear documentation of repeated abuses (so far).
System76 is looking into making their own hardware now too so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with in-house.
I got a Meerkat mini desktop 6 months ago, and I love it.
They do make their own desktops and minis now. I think they use Clevo for laptops, and those do get more complaints here on HN than the desktops (but I think the consensus is they are getting better). They have more laptop models, so making their own would be a huge task.
> a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors,
Lol thats rich. They did it like 2 or 3 times for the windows laptops they sold most of the time not part of the thinkpad line. So yeah. Long history it is. You also have a long history of making bad comments then?
HP Elitebooks and Thinkpads are designed and built with Linux in mind. I never came across an HP Elitebook or Thinkpad which failed to run Linux out of the box.
Dell XPS is the latest addition to this group.
Consumer laptops come with a lot of trickery analogous to WinModems of the era, which require Windows specifically. Hence these cost saving measurements create a lot of problems.
They never fail, true, but there is always some special model capabilities that can only be made available after the usual weekend and late nights fine tuning.
This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers.
At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint sensor, light sensor, mute LEDs, etc. On Windows, to this day, the webcam isn't recognized because of some USB chip along the line. There's also a lot of lag when adjusting the display backlight, for some reason.
I also have its cousin, an EB 840 g8 (intel 11th gen). A few days ago I installed Win11 22h2 on it. I was lucky to have had an external mouse, since neither the touchpad nor the track point could be used for setup. And it absolutely needs the latest Intel GPU drivers to correctly output 4k@60 through its HP dock (DP pass-thtough, not DisplayLink). On Linux, the same display setup has worked well since day one. But the mute LEDs are still broken.
Both laptops don't come with integrated wired network, so I have an HP USB dongle (Realtek chip). This works quite well on Linux. On Windows, it initially works well, but then, for some reason, Windows figures it needs to update the driver. Then it gains some interesting failure modes, where from the terminal I can do whatever I want, but Edge keeps thinking the connection is lost.
> At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint sensor, light sensor, mute LEDs, etc. On Windows, to this day, the webcam isn't recognized because of some USB chip along the line. There's also a lot of lag when adjusting the display backlight, for some reason.
Had an experience like this several years ago, but with hackintoshing.
On a Dell workstation laptop with a Quadro FX770M GPU (basically a relabeled Geforce 8800M GT), the Nvidia drivers had an issue under XP, Vista, and 7 where if the card downclocked when idle it'd cause Windows to bluescreen. The only fix for this for many years was to disable power saving features on the card, turning the laptop into a furnace even when it was doing nothing.
The proprietary Linux drivers for the card worked better (at least it could idle properly) but occasionally they'd cause your WM to lock up for no apparent reason.
The only thing that ran the card for extended periods without issues, of all things, was hackintoshed OS X. The built-in Nvidia drivers recognized it as an 8800M GT (which had been used in real Macs at some point) and it ran beautifully with power saving and everything. I even used that setup to play WoW on for several years.
The bug in the Windows driver was finally fixed at some point during the Windows 8/10 era, and so now I can run Windows on that laptop without problems, but holy cow it shouldn't have taken a decade (it was manufactured in 2008) for that to happen.
Arch is a rolling release distro. So it gets hardware support faster than other distros that stick to older kernels and userspace. Most users are not on rolling releases.
I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.
Arch/Fedora are fine if you are OK with rolling release, but there are options for newer hardware support in stable distributions. E.g., you can install your kernel and firmware from backports (or even unstable) on Debian, so you get a stable distribution with bleeding edge kernel (currently 5.19 in the repos). Or, you can go the other way and run Debian testing/unstable, and pin some packages from stable. And, Redhat backports new drivers into its frozen shipping kernel version, so some popular new (server) hardware will work with their old kernels.
HWE is not a rolling release, it's just backported kernels from newer non-LTS Ubuntu into an LTS version, releases every 6 months, so still very much a time-based release..., Ubuntu calls them "rolling" because when using HWE you get new kernel versions through regular "apt upgrade" once it gets released. But rolling release usually means that packages get upgrades as soon as possible after they are released upstream.
btw HWE isn't even the best "ubuntu flavored kernel" in terms of hardware support.., there are the OEM kernels designed for Ubuntu certified laptops (such as XPS 13 Developer Edition) which get newer kernel versions and drivers faster than HWE, you can install them on any Ubuntu with regular apt ("apt install linux-oem-22.04" for example) ...
Oh, my mistake; you're quite correct that it's not a proper rolling release. I still think that it's a step forward for drivers, but yeah that's still a significant lag especially when Arch is in the running. Didn't know about the OEM kernels, either; that's a nice touch for what hardware it supports.
I was looking at the new EliteBook g9 that has a i7-1280p and 64GB RAM DDR5 2TB, only $2500 (ouch). I would be surprised if Linux runs great OOTB. It is best to wait a gen before trying.
In all my years I have yet to see HDMI output from a laptop to a monitor work on the first try in Ubuntu. Always need to install the proprietary drivers for that to work at all. If it can't even do that without a headache, after 10+ years of Linux use, I would call that a Linux problem, not a hardware problem. My colleagues seem to run into the same issue frequently as well. This article seems kind of ignorant. I'm glad it worked on the first try on his ancient ThinkPad. That doesn't mean Linux is stable enough for most normal use cases on most hardware for me to recommend it to any of my non-tech proficient family.
What Laptop is this? I never had an issue with the external outputs on any laptop I owned (and I've been running Linux since the 90s). I also don't know anyone who had these issues. The main issues I had were typically docking stations and suspend (but that has been super stable for my last 3 laptops).
Laptops with iGPUs usually work pretty well. The ones with built-in discrete graphics cards can become kind of a mess to configure. A friend had one where, if I remember correctly, he'd gotten the built-in screen working with (I think) the iGPU, but anything into the HDMI port switched it over to the dGPU, which had some of those crappy NVIDIA drivers, causing both screens to shut off or something like that. (I didn't debug it so this is just an outline of the problem).
This was a long time ago, but I had an HP Envy 14-1000. It had an Intel iGPU with a separate AMD card.
It was a muxed setup. The screen was switched back and forth between GPUs and one would power off as needed (assuming everything went well). The HDMI port was only connected to the discrete GPU. T here was no way to get video out on the Intel card. By default, Linux would power on both, but use the Intel.
This was well before any AMD cooperation, and I had the laptop much longer than the FGLRX setup was supported. The open source Intel driver and simply turning off the AMD card was eventually the only way I could get it to run.
Even in Windows it was a strange setup. You had to manually switch, and when you did the screen would turn black, you'd wait a few seconds, and now you were on the other GPU.
I'm sure the situation is better these days, but after that experience I just stick to integrated.
Windows 10 fixed this sometime around the end of 2020, where you have igpu and a discrete - prior to whatever patch they pushed, if you alt tabbed out of a fullscreen game, there was a good chance that the game window would be a 1" square when you alt tabbed back, if it didn't crash in the meantime.
The "black screen for a couple seconds" thing is still there, you just don't notice it, and once a game has "started" the discrete GPU, you can seamlessly switch back and forth.
some people are mentioning that "i can't believe it took 10 years for this to get fixed" - however back in the late 90s this exact scenario was the most common power gaming setup, with 3dfx cards you'd have 3 cards, two 3d cards with SLI, and a 2D card, usually an intel. The same black screen for a couple seconds, and switching between the desktop and a game had the potential to break things.
The "automatic" switching between igpu and discrete was managed on windows before 2011, because i had a laptop with that setup in 2011 and it would detect 3d applications and use the discrete for that, or you could force one gpu or the other, if you wanted.
I've never had any issue with HDMI or DP output. But it's true that my only laptop with a dedicated GPU was an MBP, all the others have or had integrated graphics.
Intel seems to have the best GPU support. My Dell XPS from a few years ago works fine with Thunderbolt dual monitor dock and USB-C to HDMI adapter.
My desktop with a AMD Vega 64 crashes weekly (with occasional stable months) running Fedora (usually about 1 minor version behind mainline) since I've gotten it (maybe 3-4 years ago now)
If you had problems with the HDMI output, I suppose that it must depend on the GPU model.
I have used Linux on many laptops and I never had problems with the video outputs, but most of them had NVIDIA GPUs and a few used the integrated Intel GPU. I have no recent experience with AMD GPUs on laptops.
I do not normally use Ubuntu, so that might matter, but when I bought a Dell Precision, it came with Ubuntu preinstalled and it worked fine until I wiped Ubuntu and I installed another Linux distribution.
I used once a Lenovo on which I had to waste a couple of days until I made the GPU work properly in Linux, because it was an NVIDIA Optimus switchable GPU, but even on that laptop there were no problems with the video outputs, but only with the OpenGL acceleration, until it was configured in the right way.
Your laptops have Nvidia GPUs, I suppose? In my experience, that's the one brand to avoid when shopping for laptops to put Linux on. (Though you can usually get things to work, with some of effort.)
It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices.
It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years.
Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the stuffed-full-of-garbage oem installs I've found it way more likely that I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.
I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done. Stuff like finger print readers and often web cams not working is borderline expected. On OLED monitors you can expect brightness adjustment and often sleep/wake to not work quite right if at all, etc.
> I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done.
For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most. On Linux I get better window tiling than on Windows, and shortcuts for navigating directly to a virtual desktop, and no shenanigans with WSL2 having a separate memory pool from the rest of the OS. And I don't feel like the entire OS is antithetical to how I use a computer like with macOS.
But a bunch of more mundane things become a lot more fiddly or flaky. E.g., this week openSUSE Tumbleweed pushed out Gnome 43 before any of my extensions got marked as compatible and now they just won't work for a little while. That's easier for me to live with when the OS is well suited for me most of the time.
> For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most.
+1 if you're looking for some anecdata. The thing that finally pushed me from Windows to Linux was a privacy setting not actually being persisted (after a long battle to find the relevant settings). The fact that some wireless network cards don't work yet is definitely a rough spot, but I can also just buy a new one or write a driver, whereas getting Windows to care about my privacy or MacOS to care about basic usability with respect to keyboard remapping or window positioning seems unnecessarily daunting.
> I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.
If you've got an Android phone and a USB cable, you should be able to USB tether to your phone's WiFi connection. This should work out the box on Linux and Windows.
man i remember those days when you had to go and find all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place.
how do people on windows figure out what driver has updates? do you guys check the version installed and go to each manufacture to see if there is a new version>?
Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available? It's an impossible expectation, and also one that no other OS would have a chance of fulfilling unless hardware vendors specifically catered to them.
It's like asking for a book review of a book that hasn't been published. Yes, other people have published reviews, but they got advance copies and a supplementary synopsis from the publisher six months ago.
>Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available?
The title of this post is "Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring".
Because that is there experience and has been my experience too. Except we can't predict when a user wants to go install a old disto with a 7 year old kernel and say "no it doesn't"
Linux users don't have to either. (Linux devs do.) Another thing they don't have to do is searching vendor site for drivers which may not even be installed correctly.
It's very rare to have to search for drivers these days on Windows. Last time I had to do so a few years ago, it was for an old IrDA receiver - and I doubt many people these days even know what that is.
Almost any hardware you get today will have standard components with Linux support. Can you give some more examples of which companies and what components you're referring to?
There's a long list of devices that have problems with linux. The hardware I think I've seen the most complaints about are wifi/ethernet chipsets, printers/scanners, and spotty support for specific features like sensors, LED lights, and fan/cooling controls. Problems with video cards are far less common now than they used to be but I still see people having weird issues from time to time and sadly most of the firmware still contains closed source binary blobs.
RGB control is quite spotty. Finger print readers are almost entirely non functioning. Often webcams on brand new laptops do not work. Brightness control for OLED often doesn't work. Suspend and sleep still seems to be an issue, especially with something relating to "modern sleep" where the OS remains functional for things like internet access while sleeping.
I think largely these days people just plug less stuff in, printers, scanners, other odd gadgets are less common so its really just USB mass storage devices and video outputs getting physically plugged in. Otherwise everything else is controlled over wifi with a phone app.
I don't expect it. Which is why I switched from buying Windows laptops to install Linux and now buy MacBooks where I can expect that absolutely everything will work on day one.
My wife's Macbook can't even go to sleep when it's plugged into a Dell monitor via USB-C. The act of sleeping wakes it up, sounds a ding, then it goes idle and soon will sleep again.
My older Mac Mini can't do the HDMI handshake after booting. If the AV receiver isn't on when the computer boots, it will never use full display resolution or play audio over HDMI.
The idea that Apple products do anything "absolutely" is silly fanboyism.
Not doubting that situation but its pretty rare. Currently use a Macbook for work and home use and can't list a single thing that doesn't work. Which is a first for me from a laptop.
Dell Latitudes have been relatively painless for years with Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS, probably because Dell sells a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Still, Dell doesn't have fingerprint reader support in Linux, and the built-in card reader needed additional setup, but other than that it just works on a fresh install. Even my favorite Windows games work on Steam with Proton, if you accept minor texture glitches, which I gladly do to avoid dual booting.
I love it because these days I have less time to fiddle with it every six months.
My main issue with my current laptop is that the synopsis touchpads connect over i2c, and there has been a lot of ongoing work in the kernel that keeps requiring me to change my kernel config (PINCTRL_AMD needing to be selected for the 5.18 to 5.19 kernel update).
My last laptop (an AMD version of the HP Envy 13) was also rough at the beginning. A BIOS update updated the AMD GPU firmware or microcode or something and broke compatibility with the current kernel stable kernel at the time. Had to switch to an -rc kernel to get video to work.
Admittedly, my day job is basically Linux kernel development so I'm intimately familiar with most of this stuff. Not exactly your typical user.
I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers, but you mentioned that you do kernel dev, so it makes sense. 5.15 is "stable", at least on gentoo.
> I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers
Distro maintainers certainly, unless you're Gentoo, Arch, or one of the other mostly-bleeding-edge rolling release distros. The "stable" kernel is whatever the current release is and "longterm" kernels are typically the last major kernel version released in a given year.
Most distributions pick whatever the latest longterm kernel is when they cut releases. Sometimes they don't and things get strange, such as when Canonical chose kernel 4.15 for Ubuntu 18.04, requiring them to maintain an unsupported kernel themselves. IIRC that was because a bunch of AMD CPU and GPU support was added in 4.15.
For new laptops, if you have the option, go for something that has some official support out of the door. Something like System76 or your local equivalent. Otherwise yes, it can still be a bit of a lottery. Everything could be smooth, or you might become your own Linux support guy. Some people enjoy that.
I've mentioned this in a different subcomment, but I should note that the laptop I mentioned in the parent post is "ubuntu certified"[1]. I realize now that this means much less than having "official" support from the manufacturer, but there's certainly a lot of misleading bits about the way these things are marketed.
Pop has gone from something that was expected to "just work" to deciding it's more of a developer or enthusiast product.
Linux still needs an 'it just works' version. I really thought pop would be it, but the last year of development has been very disappointing with system breaking updates being pushed (I'm on system 76 hardware).
My Ubuntu LTS "just works" until the laptop decides it needs to have an heavier connection to download big data, then its wlan infrastructure dies and needs to be restarted.
It "just works" until I decide to view videos online, and despite all my hacking efforts, keeps using software decoding for videos.
It "just works" until I try some 3D stuff that requires GL 4.1, but the AMD open source driver for the GPU only does hardware acceleration up to GL 3.3.
Sleeping "just works" until I wake it up and is in such a frozen state that only taking the battery out makes the booting process work again.
I am pretty disappointed with System76. On my Galago with PopOS suspend doesn’t work properly , the fan sometimes goes into super speed mode overnight, the screen flickers when it wakes up from sleep so I have to reboot. It’s definitely not a smooth experience. Support couldn’t help either.
Yep, my 2 year old Ryzen laptop still doesn't have properly functioning sleep without tweaking kernel parameter, and that workaround got broken on 5.19 kernel release and I had to find out new parameter to tweak.
Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
Out of curiosity, what laptop? My samples in the last 6 years are:
- Thinkpad Carbon X1 14" (i7-5600u). Everything worked out of the box with Arch Linux at the time. Best experience I've ever had.
- HP Envy 13z (R5 2500u) everything works today but the out of the box experience was very poor. Windows update installed an APU microcode update that broke the Linux AMDGPU driver and had to run an -rc kernel for awhile. Took a year to get a touchscreen driver and years to get the driver for the tablet sensors (rotation, etc.). Total wait of 3 years for all features, but I never had the desire to use it as a tablet so I was okay with it. Sleep works but this laptop had awful battery drain issues in sleep (30% per day).
- Dell XPS 15 7590 (i9-9980hk) - Sleep is broke in both Linux and Windows. Everything else works well, including, notably, NVIDIA Optimus / DRI PRIME.
- Asus ZenBook 14 (R7 5800U) - second best out of box experience. Touchpad is connected via i2c and my Gentoo install didn't have it enabled. I'd never bumped into i2c hid devices other than touchscreens.
> Dell XPS 15 7590 (i9-9980hk) - Sleep is broke in both Linux and Windows.
Yes! How can they sell these like that? My XPS 13 will never go to sleep correctly, either the screen stays on or it doesn't shut off correctly, in Windows or Linux. You'd think that this is the basic feature a laptop has to have. And it's not just me, their forums are full of people having problems and their support has no idea. They were sending me guides for latitudes from 2012.
Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 (Ryzen 7 4700U), old laptop was Dell Latitude 7xx0 (or something, don't remember exact model), with Intel i5-5300U CPU, Linux worked perfectly on that machine.
These kinds of things probably still depend a lot on the brand and the product line.
The post is really only an anecdote about a ThinkPad, and a relatively old one at that, which is probably as good as it gets in terms of Linux compatibility.
I personally more or less agree with the title, though, assuming a suitable hardware choice. I have a new-ish Ryzen ThinkPad for work and the only issue I've had is Gnome occasionally semi-hanging, and I don't know if that's just because of Ubuntu being a bit flimsy or because of something more general such as an issue with the AMD graphics driver.
Also, the Teams client the post mentions is about to be dropped by MS and it was never really that good to begin with, but having seen about two decades of desktop Linux, I'd rather be surprised that it's been available and worked somewhat reliably at all without hit-and-miss with Wine.
I tend to agree. If you pick a random new laptop, you will probably have a bad time running Linux.
When I decided to switch to Linux as my main OS, I researched well supported models and settled on the X1 Carbon. I bought it a large discount right after a new generation was released and the Linux support has been near perfect. Really only one or two minor issues in the past ~3 years, which is similar to what I have experienced with most Windows and macOS devices.
I had a X1C bought early 2018 and it had great battery life. And I generally was happy with it. Unfortunately it got stolen (luckily I had full disk encryption). Without much investigation I took a X1C again. This time it was a 7th gen. It had HiDPi display which was a bit of pain to have all apps working with a satisfactory resolution and the battery life is much poorer than before. I would take my older one back right away if I could.
Edit: The author uses an 11 year old machine. Not a surprise it works well. With all the new stuff the vendors introduce difficulties are much more common. I hear a lot of complaints from colleagues with Thunderbolt docks, the newest Intel camera generation has no Linux support, not that much has changed. Whether it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back or the other way round is debatable.
> Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues.
Even "Linux works damn well on your ancient laptop" is a great selling point. Want to run Windows or macOS on an ancient machine? You can run an insecure ancient version, or, if the up-to-date version can even be installed, it'll run at a crawl. Linux makes those machines still usable.
Interesting; I got a A485 two years ago and everything except Bluetooth worked out of the box without problems (BT kind-of works but with a lot of problems, so I just got a USB one for €10). Never needed any kernel parameters, graphics work fine (including for some games), sleep always worked fine. Never tried AP mode or fingerprint scanner. Only reason I got a different laptop was due to hardware issues (some issue with the mainboard).
I only used Void Linux on it; maybe it's different with other distros.
I'll be honest, aside from the FnLock LED issue, most of the issues I've mentioned were probably fixed by 2020. I got this laptop in january 2019, and none of the stable distros (ubuntus and such) would even boot without kernel parameters back then. 5.1 became the golden kernel version for me for a while, where everything worked as later kernels would break suspend/hibernate a few times before stabilizing properly. It was a rocky few years but by kernel 5.10 (december 2020) everything worked fine, probably earlier like you've mentioned.
Graphics always worked fine except for random full system lock-ups/kernel panics in amdgpu which have been fixed at some point I don't remember when. I have no idea what caused them but a kernel option (something with iommu) made them go away until it was properly fixed, and I think that wasn't exclusive to this laptop. Graphics are still scrambled when waking from sleep though, but they take a split second to restore. The rest of the problems (bluetooth, fingerprint), still persist.
My daily driver is a Thinkpad x230 running Linux and I also vehemently disagree with his author's claim. Yes, things are certainly better than they were 10 years ago, yet I still have a lengthy to-do list of things that are broken, but low-impact enough to work around that I don't want to waste the hours of dicking around with poor documentation, noxious forum threads and command line fiddling to sort them out. Circumstance do force me to finally tackle one of these issues regularly, yet the list never seems to get shorter...
Like what? Must be things I do not use I guess, which definitely can be the case as I never plug in external monitors etc, but everything I use works very well for dev work.
Unfortunately this seems inevitable. Hardware manufacturers have to support windows or they won’t survive, so that support is going to be there day 1. Some of them have spotty support for Linux, most have none. So it falls on the community to buy the hardware and iron out the issues.
Can confirm, my god how terrible BT support can be.
So much for things working on older laptops, my 6ish years old Asus as some weird Intel BT chip that has completely broken drivers on Ubuntu. Not as in that they can't be built or installed, but the damn thing keeps fucking disconnecting and reconnecting every few seconds. It literally would've been better if they hadn't bothered.
But also like in general, at least anyone making any new protocol or standard can rest easy knowing that they cannot possibly fuck up worse than IEEE making the bluetooth spec.
This has also been my experience with a new ThinkPad P1 G5. Wifi didn't work out of the box with stable releases of any of the distros I wanted to use, I had to use the testing release, and even then the wifi is unusably bad unless I'm sat right in front of the AP (all other wifi devices in my home work perfectly fine from any room).
Putting the OS or even just the display to sleep causes the whole thing to completely freeze, forcing me to hold the power button until it shuts off.
Other than that, usable, but some really bad quirks that would make me switch back to Windows if I didn't have workarounds (use an ethernet cable, never let the display sleep, never close the lid while the laptop is running).
My Vostro 1400 (Core 2 Duo) has kernel bugs on sleep-wake related to the Ricoh xD media reader (remember those? I don't either), and my Inspiron 15R SE (Ivy Bridge) randomly disconnects from all external USB devices until I use the internal keyboard to remove and reload the xhci_hcd kernel module. And my Ideapad Flex 4 models have a bug where you can press Page Up, release Fn, and release Up, which on Windows stops sending Page Up events but on Linux results in a stuck Page Up key (technically a laptop bug but affects Linux far worse). So older laptops are by no means trouble-free either.
How do we fix this? It seems like most people in the community have the mentality that these issues work themselves out eventually, so it's no problem. And there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of people really really want better hardware support for new hardware, and fewer regressions in drivers for older hardware. Perhaps we need a special-interest group that keeps track of ongoing hardware issues, and generates kernel patches.
As a user of the E485 (basically a budget version of the A485) I can confirm, and agree with, everything but one thing here.
Regarding your Bluetooth issue, what chipset do you have?
I picked a Qualcomm one on mine because I had bad experiences with Realtek before. Never had an issue like yours with it.
For me its quite a usable machine now. But I'm currently giving a M1 Macbook a shot and it certainly is convenient not to have hiccups like this (yet).
Well, the reality is that Linux consists of less than 5% of the market (desktops and laptops), where Windows OSes make up around 75% and macOS around 15%. So, that is going to dictate the priorities of companies supplying drivers.
These numbers are always so skewed. I wish just one time we could get market share numbers for new sales WITHOUT corporate purchases, but Microsoft has made this a "thing" for 30 years now. On the one hand manufacturers would still want to target numbers, even if that includes corporate "fleets." On the other, they'd see that Linux makes up a larger portion of the market where people are spending their own money.
I've had multiple Thinkpad T-generations from T410 to the latest. Sometimes it does works flawlessly out of the factory at purchase.
This time, it did not. The 12th gen Intel CPUs have a heterogeneous design with traditional "P-cores" and low-power "E-cores". I'm suspecting the reason I see terrible performance is that the CPU scheduler does not handle this efficiently and assigns the wrong task to the E-cores.
Also the Intel WiFi does not even get detected. Have not dug deeper into that yet.
Anything > ~6(Intel) ~12(AMD/Realtek) months old tend to work smoothly out of the box, IME.
To be fair, this is also an issue with servers. I bought a server from a Linux server vendor and the chip was too new that it wasn’t supported on their custom Linux OS (same company, but the hardware and software sides didn’t communicate). Thankfully, it was supported on CentOS at the time, so I was able to switch pretty easily.
I just mention this to say, this can be an issue with any recent hardware. With Linux (the the most part) drivers are built-in and vendors do often ship drivers, so we have to wait sometimes for compatibility.
I have an E15 from work and have a myriad of just _strange_ issues. When I first got Fedora installed, the integrated mouse/keyboard didn't work without some kernel parameter tweaks. This was eventually fixed. Right now I'm dealing with some random crashes(?; there's no stacktraces, it's kind of annoying) of XFCE that I'm blaming on the 12th gen intel GPU firmware, but I have no evidence to back that up yet.
The annoying thing is that it's quite unpredictable. You can sometimes find information on the internet on which laptops Ubuntu is going to work on out of the box, but usually it's a gamble. Sometimes you notice something's not working a month after buying the laptop just because you never happened to try the feature before.
Old laptops & desktops too have been left in the dust for some time now.
Decades ago one of the most important benchmarks of Linux distributions was they were all higher performance using less resources than the original Windows that came with the PC.
If you have a PC with only 1GB of memory which still works fine with XP or W7, most distros are now unusable.
Thanks for honesty. During my studies I really tried using Linux on my laptop for a few years. It was amazing to tinker around. But when I finally switched to Mac OS, I felt I became instantly more productive.
That was 15 years ago in 2007. I never went back. Now macOS has its struggles, but I can work and focus on a clean UI.
Did Lenovo classify the device as Linux compatible? A lot of laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell have Ubuntu or RedHat as an optional pre-installed operating system. Those devices usually work with Linux.
As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
> sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions
How do people typically learn to debug kernel issues on their hardware? It seems like actively promoting widespread knowledge of the practical methods would benefit the community.
That and he says “most software has migrated to the browser.” Maybe most of what he uses, but if that’s the case then you’re basically doing a DIY Chromebook.
Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features.
For example, power saving features, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness controls, fingerprint readers, keyboard hotkeys and backlights, etc. rarely work. Prepare for broken external hdmi ports or USB stuck at USB 2.0 speeds. Have fun with the fan stuck on either max or zero, or the CPU stuck at the lowest clock speed.
There are still lots of things you have to go hunting for the right old firmware version for.
I think Linux is only great if you have whatever hardware distro developers have, because that will be all that works out of the box.
> Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features.
I've had it work first time, perfectly on:
- Tongfangs, 3 different models
- Lenovo, many different models
- Clevos, 2 different models
- Asus Zenbooks, 2 different models
- Too many Dells to count
- Asus Zen2 desktop
I have yet to find a device it doesn't work on. I've never had to mess about with the kernel params or do anything clever with fans except install the sensors package and run it.
The only shortcoming I've noticed is it the fingerprint readers were hit and miss, but this is mostly because the device manufacturers didn't bother with drivers.
In my world, running perfectly means, runs at least as good as windows.
Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.
And I doubt that.
Not because windows is so awesome, but because hardware manufacture write and optimize their drivers for windows.
And linux is a way smaller market and one with intentional no stable driver ABI (to force the vendors to open source their drivers).
That is the situation. And it sucks, because I do not like to use windows, but I need my mobile devices to be reliable.
There are often things that do not work under Linux on different laptops and it depends on what you need and expect. However, consistently over many laptops (I am a computer hoarder and have 100s of laptops), after running my post install script, battery life always easily beats windows. For old and new laptops.
Recent example; someone gave me a cf19 which had a dodgy battery; it had the official Panasonic windows install with the Panasonic drivers and optimiser and the battery went from full to 0% in about 15 minutes; I did a windows 10 install, again with the official drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did a windows 10 install without drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did Ubuntu install with my post install script and get consistently 3.5 hours. Yes, I know this is a weird case; I bought a new battery by now and still get the same behaviour; no clue what’s up. I thought it was funny though because ‘windows better battery life’ people.
And this always happens; my x220 runs 8+ hours under Linux while barely getting to 4 under windows for the same work. GPD pocket 1 runs over 10 while under windows getting not even 4. And these are the ones I use all the time for work. I consistently see this and have no clue what people are doing who claim windows has better battery life; must be much different workloads. I use i3wm (which I believe makes all the difference; with Unity, battery life gets slashed by up to 80%), code in vscode and vim and browse in Firefox; but I do that under windows as well.
You are free to have a look at my devices, but I did manual optimizing, tld, thermalD, optimized grub settings, allmost bricked devices with it and still even stock windows is better.
But a proper installed windows, without bloatware and updated drivers, always won by a large margin.
And the bigger showstopper are standby/hibernation. Touchscreen glitches etc.
So I have 2 devices, one lightweight chromebook. A bigger windows laptop and manjaro on the desktop.
Yeah, the things like standby and hibernation and touchscreen are major issues especially in new laptops. But I never use these features myself. Guess I got used to it. Which devices (specifically) do you have? I might have one or both or know someone who has.
Out of the box linux experience is actually quite good. Performance loss I can handle, but standby-resume reliably introduced touch screen bugs and other annoyances. Or did not wake up at all. I actually just recently gave up with linux on it and installed windows.
(which was surprisingly a big huzzle, I had to resort to third party software to get the right windows drivers. But now it runs way better - and more importantly, more stable.)
I get that; a computer is a tool; it might be a love but mostly it’s a tool and it just has to work. That is really why I installed Linux in the first place back in the day but maybe things did reverse. I have a script which just makes any apt machine into mine; it is something I cannot do on Mac and win anyway and that is enough reason; I can get a laptop and run that script giving me a full working station in about 10 minutes. That is already nice. But then I don’t have much wishes; if it’s very heavy, I will offload to servers and I don’t need a lot of graphical stuff outside a modern browser.
" I can get a laptop and run that script giving me a full working station in about 10 minutes"
I even made my own manjaro (arch linux) version. So I have a USB stick with all my setup and programms, I can plugin and go hacking on any computer.
Or directly install it. Takes only 3 minutes ;)
> Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.
Other hardware can be sketchier, but I've found power handling much more reliable on Linux than Windows. It just works on my Linux boxes, whereas my Windows machines I would regularly notice that my previously suspended laptop was 130F+ roasting its bag and emptying its battery, or I'd find it completely dead after the same thing had happened and I didn't catch it in time.
I had a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and still had many of the problems you mention and more:
- Barely ever waking from sleep, especially with external monitor connected
- Screen brightness keyboard controls didn't work (needed to use a CLI tool to control gamma as a hacky workaround)
- Had to power cycle repeatedly to get to a desktop when booting
- Not working reliably in clamshell mode
- Randomly forgetting external monitor scaling
- Accessibility features like screen zooming are very poorly done compared to Mac's Ctrl-MouseWheel (which zooms entire screen without crashing)
Things actually got worse as I upgraded to newer kernels. The wake from sleep problem is the #1 productivity killer I had. I had to leave the machine running all the time just to do my job.
Sleep has become less of an issue recently, at least in my experience. Modern laptop CPUs idle in such a low power state. I just set up my built-in display to disable when the lid is closed. Seems sufficient.
If you leave it anywhere in a bag not plugged in, then you have to be constantly thinking 'I only have 30 hours left till the battery dies and I lose everything I had open'.
I'm not 30 hours away from electricity very often, to the point where it wouldn't be a big deal to just save and shutdown, since it is a rare occasion. But I live a very predictable lifestyle, I guess if you are exploring London you probably end up in unexpected situations often.
Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters.
Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing.
Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX on commodity Windows hardware.
Or just look up your "windows hardware" before you buy and check compatibility. Companies that sell laptops with preinstalled Linux are far more often than not just selling rebranded "windows hardware." The benefit is that you get a support number, and that they have paid attention to the Linux compatibility of the models in their range.
Sure, I can look up Dell Linux products. However, the assertion was that they're just branded white box computers, so Im asking what the white box equivalents are, and to what extent they're really equivalent.
I didn't understand it that way at all. The assertion, as far as I understood, was that the Linux machines were the same ones that were sold with Windows on them otherwise. Which is true, Dell sell the same hardware with Windows or Linux.
Is the firmware confirmed to be the same? Even with the same chips, the firmware would likely diverge between Windows and Linux (ACPI code, BIOS, EC, etc)
From everything I've read, ThinkPads (IBM/Red Hat devs seem to use them), Acers (have pretty standard parts, nothing funky), Dells and HPs (both have Linux dev laptops) all seem to run pretty well.
The worst seem to be gaming laptops, non-Lenovo Chinese brands, Asus, etc...
Corroborating this on the asus, I got one back in 2020 when my laptop gave up the ghost. Tried trudging through but I couldn't get comfortable with opensuse, things like on boot the mouse not responding, spontaneously rebooting when I tried to change volume, wifi card being throttled or just useless. All of it failing just enough I never quite trusted it.
Less than the brand, I think it is the line and components manufacturers that counts more.
Like pro lines are what most linux devs receive from their employer and better supported than familial and gaming lines. Also intel integrated everywhere is better supported than a mix'n'match of chipset foo, network bar, gfx baz.
That has been my experience too. Even then if you get a next generation thinkpad that is slightly newer than what has been "blessed" by the community, there is a good chance that a lot of essential hardware won't work. Fortunately, in the case of Lenovo they do actively track issues with hardware and issue new bios versions that fix compatibility but even having to install new firmware when you are using Linux can cause major headaches and worries.
ya that service has been very helpful and tracking issues is great, but there can still be issues when installing. For example, I am dealing with a bug found in this list of issues: https://github.com/fwupd/firmware-lenovo/issues on one of my laptops.
But isn’t that basically “good enough” if you know you want Linux and can either afford the latest thinkpads or are okay with a slightly bulkier older Thinkpad?
Seems not worse than different from needing Apple hardware to use Apple software… (though in practice there is a significantly wider array of hardware that has very good support for the software)
I slapped Arch Linux on a new HP 2 in 1 and everything except for the fingerprint reader worked out of the box, including the stylus. Not even a single controller of my weird Chinese 10-port USB-C dongle refused to work.
I've been running manjaro on a dell xps 15 2-in-1 without issue for about 3 or 4 years.
The only oddity is that it has the intel kbl-g gpu, so sometimes you have to manually choose which gpu to use if the app is badly behaving and you don't want it to suck your battery dry in an hour.
I have an Acer Aspire and a self-built PC and both of those work just fine with Linux. All the hardware drivers work on both of them no problem. I didn't even build the desktop FOR linux, it just works when I run it.
Good catch. The traditional problem (from the era before T420) is waiting for the kernel to catch up with the new hardware, for any kinks to be shaken out.
At one point, there was a joke, if you wanted some new hardware to work with Linux, the easiest way was to buy two of them, and give one to Alan Cox or similar.
Then Linux became mainstream, and you had dynamics like Lenovo wanting Linux to work well at launch of a new ThinkPad.
I don't know how that's holding up, now that we're back to a large percentage of developers who are using Windows for development, and all that brings in. Which relieves some of the commercial motivation to honestly support open source, as well as eroding technical savvy about what's secure/sustainable/etc.
(I'm guessing most developers don't understand why there was commercial embrace of open systems, and then of open source. It's partly cost, but also outright abuse and counterproductive dynamics. In some sense, we're coasting, reaping many of the benefits of past battles that got out of abusive situations, while setting up the next generation for abuse. Only, the next generation might have it worse: tech will be vastly more ubiquitous, complex, and mandated -- and perhaps impossible to dig themselves out of.)
Had it not died I would still have used my 2013 MacBook Pro. For many use cases computers stopped being slow a decade ago.
There are certainly things I can do on my new laptop that was a major hassle on the old one, but web browsing, Python development and day to day sys admin stuff was perfectly fine on the old machine.
For me it's all about the screen, an 11 year old ThinkPad most certainly have a terrible screen (it might not, but most do). Getting a clear hi-dpi monitor is more important than having the latest CPU, GPU or 32GB of RAM, at least for my needs.
I’ve been buying MacBook Airs of the 2011-2013 vintage for 10 years. Love them.
I have to disable third party JavaScript, and I have to be careful what software I install, but I love this machine.
I will probably upgrade to an M1/M2 for my next machine, but it’s because of software not hardware. The software, after 10 years, is finally starting to be bloated enough that I feel like I might need more soon.
Installed latest Mint MATE (based on Ubuntu 22.04) on a MacBook Air 11 2015. Linux has a lot of rough edges on the MacBook Air, definitely not boring, it but works well enough for my needs:
* No fan control out of the box, so CPU overheats after a new minutes. Fixed by installing a 3rd party fan control package.
* Broken sleep. Always wakes up 2-3 seconds after putting to sleep. Fixed by a series of hacks to disable the keyboard and lid while sleeping. Only the Power button is able to wake it up now.
* Display brightness setting lost after sleep. Always wakes up at 100%.
* Webcam does not work. There is no compatible driver from what I understand.
* Two-finger scroll is awful on Linux, compared to the buttery smooth scroll of MacOS.
* Poor battery life compared to MacOS, I estimate about 25% less.
* It can be tricky to figure out how the Mac keys are mapped to normal Linux keys: Alt, Option, Command. Also tricky to figure out how to remap them so that they are more usable on Linux.
Weird, I installed Asahi on my M1 Pro and while the two finger scroll isn't butty smooth as MacOS, it works well enough and already better than in any Thinkpad touchpad.
I bought an M1 Pro a month ago. While I kinda miss linux, I do not miss x86 at all.
Seriously, going back from a performant arm64 to x86 feels like going back to the POWER architecture all over again. Big bloated chips where every little computation generates a lot of heat and you need big fans to dissipate all of it.
I wish I could do the same, although in the lower end, with my Raspberry Pi 4. Sadly, those laptop cases for the RPi are too expensive, if you include shipping, to justify them.
All platforms have issues, especially with uncommon hardware combinations. But if you buy any mainstream device odds of it working in linux are probably similar to the odds of it working in windows.
For older hardware the odds are much better that it will work out of the box in linux.
That forum thread you linked does not say microphone drivers are broken on Windows. The first reply sounds on point.
I'll add that all laptops produce noise on the headphone jack as the audio amplifier is preemptively switched on and off. Only difference is that it's normally just barely audible. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say they just choose a crappy IC.
I find the comments so strangely defensive. How can one even start to compare MacOS, which needs to support exactly one (1) vendor with less than 10 models with a kernel with the widest hardware support on the planet? Noone would test-drive a new car and expect all the buttons and dials to still be at the same exact positions, but when it comes to trying out a different OS, it sure seems like lots of folx assume it's going to be just as their old one.
The immense improvement in documentation provided by ArchWiki, ThinkWiki, Gentoo Wiki and wiki.instalgentoo.org shouldn't be understated. Almost all models are documented to the point where 30 minutes of research will teach you everything you need to know about the hardware and its capability to run whatever distro you want to.
Going from a ton of older Dell models, then to a T420, to a T450s, to a T530, most of the features I ever needed as a developer and netadmin have always been readily available, with the rest of them being delegated to cloud services and/or remote (sometimes virtualized) machines running a Linux distro or a BSD.
Windows has the definite advantage of being a market leader with the longest run in the history of personal computing, but there is definitely something to be said for the immense development that the *nix side of things has been exhibiting compared to 15, 10 or even just 5 years ago.
The year of Linux desktop and laptop is still far away, but at least we're seeing goodwill both from software and hardware vendors, and it would be a real shame we throw the good trends away at this point in time.
No one is arguing that Mac has an advantage in the game, that people are working hard on *nix. It's just irrelevant if your goal is to have a laptop that just works.
No it does not. Give it to me for 5’ and I will find at least 10 things that are broken. Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken.
Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing.
The best we can do is to put it in a VM and run it in a OS that has actual hardware support.
My experience with Windows on my laptop is that color profiles work out of the box, energy management is better on Linux, Bluetooth on Windows barely works and the webcam doesn't even need settings.
Nvidia crap works better on Windows (except for CUDA) and more settings have a GUI. Windows's fan profile can be switched between "VTOL takeoff" and "entirely silent but slow as hell". This includes all the firmware updates and driver updates I can find.
That's not necessarily a defence for Linux; Linux has rough edges if you need pretty much anything more than a browser and aren't technically inclined, in part because the online community can't help themselves from suggesting complex, out-of-date command line solutions for things that have had a GUI for a decade now. It's also inherently harder for enthusiasts to get system support than for a company with fulltime paid developers. That's an excuse for much of the poor experience but the end result is still not very attractive for many people.
It's more of an insult to the current state of Windows and its hardware partners. The Linux Foundation doesn't have contracts with its manufacturers and yet its hardware ecosystem is more stable than Windows 11. Whatever the hell Microsoft did to sleep mode is turning laptops into backpack heaters and that's honestly inexcusable.
> suggesting complex, out-of-date command line solutions for things that have had a GUI for a decade now.
I can help somebody on basically any Linux system with most problems they have, but I couldn't tell you how to do that in that particular GUI. Sure, it's not great, but it's what happens when everyone is free to use whichever GUI they want.
Indeed. I was surprised to install Windows on a two year old Thinkpad recently to use some proprietary hardware and ended up with more random issues than I'd have on Fedora.
Trackpoint sideways scrolling not working (works fine with libinput), inexplicably high power usage, wifi disconnects...
It's odd how you can hear two people make the same vague statement about Linux and OSes that aren't Linux, and the statement about Linux registers to you as insightful while the one about Windows/MacOS registers as "trivial nitpicking."
To be clear, the OP of this thread stated the following with regards to Linux:
>...Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken...
These things are what is being discussed, and they are not broken on macOS and Windows. You could not easily find 20 of these things "broken" in 5 minutes on a random setup given to you.
Most Linux threads inevitably derail into people complaining that macOS/Windows don't work exactly how they want, and then go on to label those platforms as "broken". That is not "broken" though, and simply nitpicking. You can throw a rock on this site and find plenty of examples of it.
> Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing.
You seem to be placing the blame with the OS itself instead on the poor stance that hardware vendors have towards releasing proper drivers. It's true that the ecosystem has its own problems, but hardware not being compatible out of the box is not one of them. That's something the can be blamed fully on the vendors in my opinion.
Oh yeah? In Windows 11, try to put the taskbar on the top of your screen.
Try to uninstall Edge. Try to disable ALL of the tracking. Try to disable updates. Try to install it from scratch onto a computer without creating a Microsoft account. Try to remove all of the non-windows mandatory apps without a 3rd party software or a cheat code to run in powershell that you got from some website somewhere.
Windows is user-hostile because in order for it to maintain its business dominance it HAS to treat all of its users as if they are naturally stupid and technically challenged in order to ensure that the most people possible can use their software so that the most businesses will buy their software since their employees can use it.
Despite the issues it's the only OS that I'm willing to put up with because it respects the user. I'm not nagged to use <preferred browser> every day. I'm not nagged to login to some cloud junk. I don't have to look at a feed or "recommendations" (ads). The operating system doesn't have an advertising ID or spy on me.
I don't know, any hardware that I've used any big distro on (ubuntu, pop, manjaro) just worked out of the box instantly for all of these. On battery especially for many laptops I found better battery life on Linux since I could manually choose to disable dGPU. My problems come when I need to run windows specific tools like Altium.
There was a recent post about the Frame.work laptop now offering a ChromeOS version. The Linux container support in ChromeOS is excellent, and basically ChromeOS is optimized to work well with all laptops that it runs on.
For my specific hardware (Framework laptop), the hardware is better supported on Windows. Lower battery consumption especially while the device is asleep, better handling of fractional display scaling, brightness keys on the keyboard are functional without needing to disable brightness sensor, etc. Most egregiously for a laptop, Fedora doesn't give any way to adjust the trackpad scroll speed (not sure if that's a kernel limitation tho)
Windows has pretty terrible hardware support IMO. Comparing the state of Linux Vs Windows on ARM/PowerPC/RISC-V, it's not even a contest.
I think there's a case to be made for the stability of Windows drivers (I should hope vendors don't half-ass support), but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water.
I recently streamed some OuterWilds (great Myst style mystery / puzzle game) on Linux with Wayland and OBS. The game is only officially available for Windows, but Steam's work on emulation has done a lot for Linux. Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time. I was quite amazed it all worked so well. But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.
> Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do.
Was that "permission for OBS to record" or "permission for OBS to record that specific window" ? Coz I can see the second one being pretty annoying...
> While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time.
That worked with composing on X like 10 years ago. Well, aside from the fact that there was no Steam/Proton on Linux back then
> But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.
Huh, my colleague had to do a bit of fuckery to get it working, altho a lot of that was due to 3rd party dock being... weird.
It still randomly makes jet noises when idle... probably user error tho
I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices.
Windows has its faults for sure, but it's much better in my experience as far as just working on any type of hardware and accessories. If it doesn't just work already, drivers are generally easy to find and install.
The same is very much true for macOS and even Windows. Obvious flaws and mistakes are ignored by statements like "I just bought this $5 app" and "I use this freeware program from yetanotherstartmenureplacement.xyz".
People just like what they like and fix their problems in their own way and that's fine. Some people aren't annoyed enough to fix their problems and that's fine too. Just because someone else's fix doesn't fix your problems doesn't mean the fix is bad.
Yeah, well, it's been that way for me for many years now through many machines of varying brands. These Dell machines are just the most recent, and I was shocked at how effortless the whole install process went this time around compared to way back when I first started using Linux. It really was a huge hassle back in the "olden days" of early Linux… Nowadays it's proven pretty "plug and play" all the way around every single time I've installed a new Linux rig.
Whatever… I'm glad to no longer have to fight my operating system to work with my hardware like I always had to on Windows - "Plug and Pray" was a joke for a valid reason. Installing drivers is for rubes. I'd rather plug stuff in and just get to work without going on a freakin' scavenger hunt for drivers… If you hate Linux so much, then just don't use it. Simple, yeah?
I greatly prefer Linux and use Windows when some software forces me to, but I don't feel that your comment is constructive in this conversation.
Windows is generally a smoother experience. Linux is generally not ready for the average user with a randomly picked computer, as much as we'd wish it is.
Yeah, well, I don't really feel that Linux gettin' shit on every single time it's mentioned anywhere is entirely constructive, either. I been using Linux for many years, and over that time it's quite simply continued to improve in areas where Windows was always a huge pain for me (and most all of my family and friends with few exceptions). Most notably, that whole "Plug and Play" hardware thing. In this most recent decade or so of my Linux use, that got to be a total non-issue with hardware I've bought ranging from cheap random Chinese garbage to high-priced high-quality hardware devices. I plug them in, and they work. On rare occasion (like with printers or NVIDIA cards) I'll have to install drivers (direct from my package manager), but even then, it's light-years ahead of any experience I've ever had with drivers on Windows. Is Linux perfect?Hell no! No operating system is. Is it the best operating system for me? Absolutely. It Just Works™ in my personal experience, and that's all I care about. I'll keep using it, and I will keep defending it to those who keep spreading decades old no longer even remotely true FUD. Don't like Linux? Don't use it. Period. Don't gotta keep telling those of us who do like and use Linux (for the billionth time) how much better Windows is. It isn't better - just different, and in some ways decidedly worse than all of it's competitors. But if it's what you need or want to use, then use it FFS. Just don't come to evangelize Windows to people who used it for years and learned to prefer something else because it straight up worked better/more reliably for them than Windows did. It gets beyond old to keep hearing that bullshit after a while.
It's not shit on every time it's mentioned. Only when people post nonsense like this article. Do you expect people to just go "yep, Linux has no hardware issues, you're right".
Of course not! That doesn't mean they hate Linux, just that they aren't delusional about it's level of hardware support.
Except that windows is demonstrably a less smooth solution these days, regardless of Linux even existing. Windows just sort of fell over and started stabbing itself and bleeding all over the floor, so a dead windows is just no use at all. They even removed the start control panel stuff, just gutted and useless now. It really feels like Microsoft went out on a mission to literally destroy everything they built while still mandating OEMS to suicidally preload it on all hardware anyway, and people still buy this stuff.
When are people going to state the braindead obvious that it’s never going to be the year of the windows desktop ever again, as Microsoft has committed to utterly pooping on all its users henceforth forevermore or?
True though. Half our team runs Linux with minimal issues across a variety of modern hardware. Infosec consulting, so pretty demanding users, but also pretty experienced with Linux. there are caveats and small things, but I will take them over Mac or Win these days.
I have two Dell laptops and a Dell tower, all of which run flawlessly on Linux, all hardware supported out of the box. Everything I've plugged into them (most often via USB) or paired via Bluetooth also works without hassle (and never once did I have to search any manufacturer's websites for drivers).
I bought a very expensive 2018 XPS15 4K Dell 9570 fully loaded - bought for its good Linux support (although not officially supported by Dell).
Minuses: Many many issues with 4K support and Linux. 1 year ago hardware fault with screen getting black lines (very very disappointing for a premium laptop treated very well). Suspend never worked great (Windows not much better AFAIK). Some recent WiFi problems - probably hardware - will replace. Needed JackHack96’s patches installed when bought. Noisy coil hum (top problem mentioned for years on forums for many models of XPS, ignored by Dell through many model releases, maybe finally fixed now?).
Pluses: Worked with Linux. Dell kept improving Bios for 2 or 3 years, and many of the fixes were Linux specific.
I wouldn’t buy Dell again.
I would use Linux for a laptop again (Windows gives me hives, Apple pisses me off).
Different laptop, different issues, similar outcome. I ran into issues with Windows corrupting the EFI boot entries, even on a dedicated install. I have also had Windows fail to enter sleep or come out of sleep when the lid is closed. I have never had these issues under Linux on the same hardware.
Having investigated problems with Windows, I think it is fair to say that Linux is more reliable on supported hardware. The main problems with Linux are: some hardware is not supported, and sometimes Linux only supports a subset of the functionality of hardware it does support. If you're careful with what you buy, your experience can be just as good (if not better) under Linux. If you're not careful with what you buy, you can still luck out and have a positive experience.
I use my desktop at home exclusively for gaming. I had Windows on it, but it would continually crash when trying to use my bluetooth xbox controller with it.
I've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
About the only games I've had any troubles with lately have been those which include ridiculous DRM or anti-cheat (and even many anti-cheats work fine on Linux these days). Between WINE/DXVK and Valve's Proton, I find the vast majority of my game library from my Windows days now run fine.
(Of course it should go without saying that all my many Linux native games also tend to run fine as well, although a rare few of them require running in Valve's "Steam Runtime for Linux" container thingy.)
> I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies.
I really think that is the state of the matter.
Personally, I have been using Linux as main OS since 2000, so when I buy new hardware, I know it will be running Linux and I do my research on the hardware before buying anything. When you do that, chances are you'll end up with hardware that is supported and works well on Linux. The last 15 years I have been using high-end Dell Precision laptops through my employer and those run linux just fine; it's already been several years now that you can actually order them with Ubuntu.
Still, I've been on location where they used USB-C docks to access external screens and the network. The network was working fine out of the box, but for the screens I needed to install DisplayLink drivers, which was not a nice experience. It also did not work out of the box with xrandr. And then I got a linux kernel upgrade and it was no longer working. So, while the laptop itself is working just fine on linux, and is working out of the box with external screens connected through a cable (HDMI, DisplayPort), you still don't have good support for something like DisplayLink, which seems to be used more and more because it allows user to project wirelessly on a screen.
I try to avoid depending on closed source drivers in Linux. I did use Nvidia long time ago, but switched to AMD for that reason. In a way, it's nice that companies support Linux and that they are releasing closed source drivers. It is better than not having any driver at all. But depending on closed source drivers is misery sooner or later, so I avoid them.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn't have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there's numerous speakers, some of which aren't active under Linux, and/or a similair issue with woofers. I've tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I'm running 5.19...
From what I can tell, it's a growing issue, affecting laptops from multiple manufacturers often with "Dolby Atmos" printed on them. The result is very poor fidelity, low volume audio.
That was only an example, you want to find the article for your specific laptop (you haven't mentioned the model, so I can't help!) and try the instructions there. If that article does not exist, or is not useful, you could always try this generic PulseAudio virtual device solution: https://askubuntu.com/questions/78174/play-sound-through-two...
(Side note: intel refers to the sound card, not the CPU.)
Not to be dismissive, but I have. I've tried instructions from my laptops "parent" and "brother" units and the instructions don't work. I've spent an hour or two on this at different times and I know everyone says this, but I usually always figure this type of thing out when I get stuck on it. I've tried Arch wiki, Ive been through some LKML threads, some long RH bug, etc. I can actually see in my NixOS config other attempts I've made previously. I've even tried custom snd.conf, doing things in Windows, etc. A bit crushing at this point, I just grabbed a spare set of BT earbuds that are probably just as fine a solution. (Until I accidentally boot to windows and realize how decent it can sound)
Could you get them to work properly in Windows? I have a Legion and an IdeaPad both of which have audio troubles because the speakers are just that bad, and no matter how much I messed with drivers, they didn't work. Audio is chopped off, although the 3.5mm audio/HDMI/USB outputs are fine.
I have an IdeaPad Flex 5 running Fedora 36 with zero audio issues - in fact, it is where I run Bitwig (a DAW) and Arturia V Collection 5 (an emulation of classic synths spread across a couple dozen VSTs that I run inside WINE). You may just be out of luck there.
I just received my Framework laptop recently, installed Fedora 36 + KDE Plasma, and even though it took some tweaking to get a close to my Mac behaviour, it works perfect. I had 0 driver problems. So it looks like Linux on the desktop seems to be getting there.
And the best part, with this laptop, no shop needed to replace the battery, I can do it myself.
For the battery part, any boring Dell Latitude is no worse. As probably are other common business laptops. It’s much easier in most of the world actually – your local dealer might have one in stock, no need to ship overseas.
And Linux support for this machines is pretty decent too, a good trade-off over peculiarities of modern Windows at least. It’s been like this for about 10 years already, in my experience running Ubuntu and lately Mint on mid-range laptops as a tech-savvy user who hates tinkering with OS setup.
Yeah, even a broken clock is right twice a day. OP got lucky with some crusty laptop and drew a wildly expansive and inaccurate conclusion.
Maybe true for old machines, but definitely not true for newish models.
Not even for machines being sold with Linux preinstalled.
My Linux Dell XPS from ~5 years ago required me to buy and install a different radio because the Broadcom one didn't actually work with latest Ubuntu (at that time).
The next XPS I got mostly worked, but had lots of audio issues.
The Inspiron was horrible. Touchscreen fails, audio fails, radio fails, sleep fails.
My custom Ryzen 3900X workstation has ongoing issues with sound and sleep (yes, latest kernel, latest drivers, latest LTS OS).
My most recent laptop purchase from earlier this year either had no wifi in Ubuntu or no Bluetooth in Fedora. I was able to force Fedora to work after a week of messing with it. Still have intermittent sleep and audio issues.
FWIW, I've been running Linux in various roles since the late 90's, so not a noob and definitely not complaining.
It's free, it's open source, package management is awesome. The command line is irreplaceable.
I use Linux on the daily and deeply appreciate all the incredibly hard and thankless work that so many people put into it.
That said, Linux still does not have anything close to the level of polish that MacOS delivers and it definitely doesn't get out of the way to the extent that it can be called boring.
YMMV indeed, I've been using Linux full-time since 2012, with a brief exception in 2016-2017 when I was working for a company that was all-in on Apple.
I used an iMac running Yosemite that year and could reliably get the iMac to hard reboot by launching a Xubuntu VM in VirtualBox.
It kinda made me lose all hope for our industry as Apple is usually hailed as the epitome of quality and yet it still was garbage.
I would add that the linux-ready boutique vendors like system76, tuxedo computers, framework are also options if you don't want to fuss with drivers and what not, but still want to run linux. I definitely agree that linux doesn't run super smooth on all hardware, but it's not hard to find hardware these days where it does run smooth.
I came across tuxedo computers randomly one day, and gave it a shot. Very impressed, and am extremely happy with my tuxedo pulse 15 gen2 - running their supported version of Ubuntu+KDE, that just works out of the box. Only thing I can complain about is that: speakers are not great (but I use headphones 90% time anyways), and KDE doesn't support independent resolution scaling (I need 125% for laptop display but 100% for external monitor), so it's a bit hacky to get scaling the way I want. However, everything else runs perfectly and smoothly.
It's best laptop I've ever owned for linux. It is quite, portable, moderate power laptop, for fair price. I gave my wife my Macbook air M1 over this one. While the M1 CPU/GPU is a little more powerful than Ryzen 5700U (8 core), I get more ram (32gb 3200mhz), bigger and faster disk (1TB 980 pro pci 4), more battery life (18hr idle, 10+ working) for similar price. It's also repairable, w/ removable standard components (not cpu tho). Linux running SMOOTH.
Basically with these type of vendors, you don't need to struggle or sacrifice (much) to run linux anymore. Tuxedo computers [1] has many more models worth checking out, like with high end GPUs or smaller/more portable (even one that support external liquid cooling and an rtx 3080ti lol).
We burned an evening just last week tracing an Intel wifi driver issue to missing kernel headers that required upgrading the kernel to a new, non-LTS version. And only then did we move on to Nvidia drivers.
So no, still not the year of Linux on the desktop. Our entire dev team does it, but largely because Nvidia and Apple stopped working together.
The bigger surprise is Windows WSL2 is just about there for Ubuntu support. We are just blocked on opencl side of Nvidia support (but no ETA.)
I really tried to make wsl work for the windows users on my team, but we kept getting tangled up with networking (I guess there's a virtual switch involved and so when a tool claims to have forwarded a port it's hard to figure out where it forwarded it to and why only half of your stuff can see it).
Do you know if that situation has improved in the last year or so?
We got stuck on the Nvidia opencl drivers before we went deep into k8s networking
Our experience with local k8s dev is the issues are more on the k8s distro side. So at least for local dev, I'm guessing the happier path is sticking with KinD approaches wrt WSL2. Our wsl2 docker testing was successful, even w GPUs, and bc of the file system seperation, felt more like native Ubuntu docker's imperceptible overheads vs the painfully slow OS X docker overheads (ex: npm run watch taking minutes vs seconds)
It's been a year but if I recall it went something like this:
I was using microk8s (a kubernetes distribution) on the wsl side, and I had python scripts (also on the wsl side) which would deploy things into it, run tests until there was a problem, forward a port from the broken service to "localhost:8080", and then instruct the user to open a browser to explore the UI post-test-failure.
On bare metal Linux this was no big deal because "localhost" was unambiguous. But on windows you end up with the browser on the windows side and the forwarded port on the wsl side, so when the browser opened there was nothing at "localhost:8080" even though I could "curl localhost:8080" from the wsl side and get a response.
Presumably there is a way to further forward the port so that it is available to both Windows browsers and wsl python scripts, but I never found it.
To make a long story short: I bought a laptop to run Microsoft Office a couple of years back. Being a Linux user, I quickly became frustrated with Windows. Being a slightly rabid Linux user, I bit the bullet and installed Linux on a machine that was not purchased with Linux in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked well. Office was a dual boot away, but that was the price to maintain my sanity.
Now Windows users would probably find issues with Linux on this machine. That's fine. The thing is, I am not going to miss a feature under Linux that I never even used under Windows. Audio, video, and networking meet my expectations. Sleep and hibernate work, and appear to be more reliable under Linux. I have never felt the need to compare battery life under both operating systems since it is acceptable under both operating systems.
As for that dual boot thing: I ended up giving up on the standalone version of Microsoft Office. Online solutions are better for anything that involves collaboration. LibreOffice documents exported to PDF works perfectly well for anything where the product is what matters. The option to dual boot is gone.
There is one big difference between the article's author and myself: after trying a couple of the boring distributions and finding they didn't meet my esoteric tastes, I settled upon the exciting route. Tweaking my workflows is fun as long as it doesn't interfere with my ability to work.
Can't speak for this as I don't have a device with an FP reader
> - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine
I get ~6hrs on my laptop running Ubuntu + XFCE. I haven't ran windows on it but Amazon reviews claim ~5-5.5 hrs battery life for the same machine so seems to be inline for me.
> - suspend and hibernate doesn’t work
Works for me
> - random freezes
I can think of only 1 freeze I've had in the last year and that was due to me dropping the laptop
> - charging indicator unreliable
Pretty reliable for me except when it comes to the last 5%... my work macbook pro seems to have the same issue though when predicting how long that last 5% will last.
> - boot failures after OS updates
Never had this problem, on the other hand our work macbook pro has nothing but problems when upgrading os major versions. Atleast 1-2 people on our team always end up losing an afternoon whenever we are forced to upgrade it.
> I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon.
> I really tried with Linux for philosophical reasons, but honestly what professional developer has time for all this?
What professional developers have the time or patience to deal with a Mac with:
* It's proprietary hardware without any ability to upgrade components
* Garbage oversized trackpad which registers false positives all the time
* Terrible built in keyboard
* All the nonsense with "we have a physical escape key, now we don't, now we do" actively making it unusable if you use Vim/Vim key bindings
* Whatever nonsense they have done replacing physical function keys with that touchbar thingy
* Actively user hostile decisions like putting the headphone jack on the right side of the laptop
* A complete inability to connect peripherals unless you buy a (often expensive) dock.
* Docker being a complete hog on these machines, yes that is not the fault of the mac but still something developers have to deal with every day
I am forced to use a macbook for work and the only reason I can even bear working with it is connecting it to external keyboard/mouse and using it in clamshell mode.
My point is that Linux is a great desktop environment and people shouldn't write it off based on isolated complaints from people for whom it didn't work for as there are a lot of people who never encounter these issues that keep getting brought up in these threads.
Can you produce a HN thread about desktop linux computing without a fair number of complaints about how desktop linux is broken?
I'd love for Linux to be my primary day-to-day OS. I try out several distros every year -- nix, arch, elementary, ubuntu, popos. None of them have been smooth for my use case of:
* Casual gaming
* Web browsing
* Voice/video calling
* Text editing
In my most recent install, some video games would work with Steam's proton, until it suddenly stopped working. I'd have to open my command line and look up `bluetoothctl` docs to connect my headphones. Windows would stop rendering when any window manipulation was occurring. Sometimes my display server's login screen would not appear (my screen would be black), so I'd have to guess when to put in my password when booting up.
It has certainly gotten better in the last few years, but I would not recommend it to anyone unless they are wanting to delve into technical topics.
The point is that you still have a decent chance of running into issues if you install Linux on any hardware for which you didn't specifically research Linux compatibility beforehand. Whether Linux is great or not in and of itself is a separate point, and kinda moot for anyone who can't get past the broken hardware - which is most non-technical users.
I don’t know about that but I appreciate some things about Linux, specially the fact that the OS is not creepily trying to sell you something. I have an Asus G513 that I bought specially for Linux. It a Ryzen laptop with a discrete Radeon card. Nice performing machine, although its easy to thermal throttle it so tunning thermal profiles is often necessary. Its not perfect but it works.
Out of curiosity I’ve decided to use Windows for a while. Well, anyone here probably knows how Windows became Bonzi Buddy OS but that’s not the worse of it. On Linux I had asusctl to control fans and keyboard lights. For this functionality on Windows I had to install something called Armory Crate from Asus. I shit you not this app sends product offers as system notifications. Things in Windows land also tend to ambush the user at every opportunity to create an account or associate their social media profiles.
When I compare the professional presentation of Fedora or Pop OS default desktops with the hysterical ad show of Windows and its third party tools having to live with one or two things not working correctly is a tradeoff I gladly take.
In 2018 I was in college, working on a Linux degree, and studying for certifications such as CompTIA Linux+. I had allocated some funds to purchase a new machine; my desktop was already over 8 years old and I obviously wanted a good machine I could bring to campus.
I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad T580, because it was on the Red Hat certified list. It came with Windows 10 but I immediately installed CentOS. This turned out to be a minor error on my part; CentOS was too old to support the modern T580's hardware. I struggled briefly and then realized that Fedora would be a better option in this situation. I ran Fedora for 3 years, flawlessly, effortlessly, and yes, boringly.
Due to the vagaries of needing to use something supportable and normal for work, and because this has become not only my "daily driver" but my "BYOD" device for work, I decided to abandon Linux and install Windows 10 on Christmas Day last year.
I may never run Linux again on a personal machine, but I don't regret 30 years of "Linux on my Desktop", and I'd recommend it to any burgeoning hacker type!
After years of Linux and Mac, I was issued a Win 10 machine at work. I don’t know how anybody voluntarily uses that. It’s like instead of fixing bugs over the last 30 years, they just keep adding new ones. And also make the whole experience more bloated, more confusing, more slow and still kinda ugly.
Based on the requirements from my employer, I may be able to spec out a high-end Chromebook instead of a Windows machine for my next upgrade. That is assuming I can weasel out of the requirements to maintain a virtualization environment, which I never use anymore. Of course, that also depends on near-future hardware availability and Google not killing their own high-end Chromebook lines.
I'd be tempted to put Linux on a Chromebook (I don't trust Google...), but Chromebook vendors often sell a windows version of the same laptop, but with a different (standard) BIOS.
I bought one of those once (an Acer Cloud Book), and it was great. Not high end though.
I've been running Linux on Dell XPS laptops with only very minor issues since 2016. Currently on an XPS 13 9310, everything works perfectly.
...and that's with debian sid, a btrfs rootfs, and rebooting into whatever "git pull" in the kernel git repo gives me most weeks. I do that because I want to help fix bugs, but I honestly haven't found anything to fix in years: it just works.
Interesting that everybody with problems in this thread seems to be using thinkpads. Maybe they aren't what they used to be?
I've been using Dell hardware with Ubuntu for... sheez almost 15 years now? Once in a while there's some little oddity, but it mostly just shows up working out of the box and lets me do what I need to without all the annoying MacOS crap. I had to use a Mac at my last job and I absolutely hated it. I couldn't configure it the way I wanted. Stuff like 'brew' is a necessity, but not a core part of the system like apt. Keys are not where I expect them... which isn't really their fault, but when you've been using something for 20+ years, switching suuuuucks.
Just an anecdote: got my Framework laptop the other week. Installed Pop!_OS. That was the only step. Everything works. Suspend/resume. WiFi. Audio. Webcam. Funky dongle ports.
This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.
How does your suspend battery life work out for you? I'm running Ubuntu with Framework and even though I've done tweaked some settings I still end up with a dead battery after I reopen my laptop a day later.
I haven't put it through a rigorous test, but I can confirm that if I leave the laptop suspended without power, it will eventually lose its charge and shut off in what seems like a day. I only did this once by accident over a weekend; I've been using it every day and have the chance to charge it when I need to.
The only laptops I have ever owned that didn't have this problem after some fashion are Apple laptops, so I guess my expectations were fairly low on this topic.
> It was not always thus. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, installing Linux on one's home computer was a rather terrifying affair, requiring a ton of abstruse tweaking using the command line.
For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era:
> CYA Notice: Like all worthwhile activities, messing around with laptop computers is not without risks. You could destroy your display by misconfiguring for the video chipset. You could accidentally corrupt your flash BIOS. You could encounter your potential soulmate in a cafe but then alienate him or her at a crucial flirtation stage by evangelizing Linux to an unhealthy degree. This page is provided without warranty.
That’s a great story, and I’m happy that this is possible today. There is nothing technically limiting Linux desktops from offering a fantastic experience apart from walled gardens trying to keep eyeballs in their corner. Speaking of, unfortunately, Microsoft will be retiring Teams for Linux later this year
In my experience, Linux on laptops is fine if you use it like a desktop. If you want all of the fancy features of laptops, like being able to close the lid and have it go to sleep, a lot of luck is involved. Small differences in hardware have profound effects on Linux usability, so the "just use a Thinkpad from 2008" crowd are naturally the happiest.
Two days ago a friend found Spotify installed on hers Windows 10 laptop, pushed by Microsoft, even on the taskbar. That's insane. Windows 10 will be my last Windows ever.
Windows 7 was my last Windows ever. Ads are unacceptable.
I used to have a Windows 7 system and a Ubuntu system. One day the Windows system broke down, and I switched to using the Ubuntu system for almost everything. Over time, that became "everything". I haven't turned on the Windows system in months.
Not this time, she lives alone, there's no one else who could have done it and she's not tech savvy, not at all, I bought and configured that laptop my self for her.
She barely knows how to open outlook, let alone go to ms store and install a sw.
Please don't try to defend MS, not this time. I found plenty of casual games installed in my work win10 PC. It's MS.
According to duck duck go, multiple people complained about Spotify auto installing on their windows box two days ago.
I completely stopped using windows in the 8.1 days (forced telemetry was the last straw). I can't imagine dealing with the sorts of gaslighting you are experiencing.
Happily, a combination of steam proton and dosbox run dos / windows games on my Linux desktop more smoothly than native ever did, and that was my last missing use case.
Absolutely ... Windows config gets changed with every significant upgrade. The things I've carefully set-up get disabled, other things just stop working, and new garbage appears ... Windows is not a stable work platform. It's become an ad platform :(
And all the time, I have to fight the Microsoft way of doing things ... Worse the Apple, Microsoft push really hard to force me to do things their way. Eg. initially and after upgrade, it defaults to save everything on the MS cloud - NO, I have a perfectly good cloud of my own and don't want to pay MS extra.
So damn well if you don't care about: sleep working reliably, waking from sleep working at all, Bluetooth, high-dpi without flickering, visual artefacts from igpus, vanishing mouse pointer, audio failing mid video call, webcams failing mid video call, no CPU scaling, crashing hard when the battery hits literally zero (without warning) causing BIOS corruption etc etc etc.
I dumped my recent dell Linux laptop for a M1 Mac. Not my preference but at least the Mac works.
Whenever I try, it works 90% great, but little things are problematic enough that I switch back. The power management doesn’t quite work, so fans stay on and it doesn’t sleep when you close the lid. The screen doesn’t quite have the same quality graphics. The trackpad isn’t as smooth.
Yea, hibernate/suspend issues are by far the biggest problem I have with Linux on laptops. Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me.
I essentially have to treat my linux laptop like a small desktop computer and just shut it down fully when I'm not using it and can't leave it plugged in to power or else it loses 5-10% battery per hour.
I use XPSs for home and work, and my understanding is that they don't implement one of the sleep state capabilities properly in hardware so full "deep sleep" , next to zero battery mode isn't possible.
That said, my XPS 13 will suspend for a couple of weeks on battery once it's configured, even given this caveat. I haven't shut it down when I finish using it since I bought it in 2019. I run Ubuntu LTSs.
> Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me.
Funnily that's not at all my experience with an M1 MBP. It either sleeps when lid is closed even with an external screen, or never (even if i explicitly click on the sleep button). And even if I manage to get it to sleep, Bluetooth is always on and battery is at 0% after 2 days.
Similar. The only thing I find problematic is fingerprint readers, which Linux doesn't yet support very well. Literally EVERYTHING else works fine: power-yes, sleep-yes, sound-yes, video-yes, network-yes, tablet keyboard-yes... (My preference is LinuxMint.)
I installed PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) on my 5 year old MacBook Pro and it feels like a brand new machine. The UX feels better to me than MacOS which is starting to feel more and more like Windows imo.
I specifically searched for "Pop" in this thread, because I wanted to give them a thumbs up. In recent years I've been moving on from macOS to Linux, and I'm so pleased with my new Thinkpad running PopOS (and Nordic theme). It just works - quiet technology.
Nordic is lovely. One of the few stylesheets that really solves default usability issues while looking gorgeous at the same time. Props to the maintainers, whoever they are!
You should look into enabling Wayland, which PopOS! disables by default. That should give you silky-smooth 60fps desktop transitions like MacOS, as well as 1:1 trackpad gestures. Happy hacking!
Yep. I'm not a huge fan of Wayland personally, but if you simply want "more Mac-feel" then it's probably perfect. Enabling it in your config allows you to switch between x11/Wayland without a real risk of borking your desktop.
Linux worked out of the box (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu) with:
- Lenovo ThinkPad T41
- Lenovo ThinkPad X61s
- LenovWo ThinkPad X220
- Lenovo ThinkPad X230
- Lenovo ThinkPad X1
- DELL Latitude E7762
- DELL Latitude E7480
- Apple iMac 27"
Problems encountered:
- The touchpad on the Lenovo ThinkPad 240 mad random jumps, not sure if this is a Linux issue since I never tried Windows (I usually wipe it right after unpacking).
- Couldn't install any Linux flavour on the Microsoft Surface 3 laptop. It was painful to get rid of Windows and UEFI boot, and apparently a kernel patch is needed to go further (according to Microsoft support, who didn't provide said patch). Does anyone here have that patch BTW?
Generally speaking it is getting harder and harder to install Linux, due to Microsofts efforts to make PCs "more secure" (which - oops - prevents the installation of competitors' OSes, how convenient).
There's a button to do so, but it's just been broken for months with no fix other than uninstalling part of the last update. Given that Linux typically has no palm detection, it's really a frustrating experience to use on a laptop.
The palm detection problem surprises me. The toggle has has "just worked" for 15+ years of laptops for me. However, palm detection on many of those laptops was garbage in Windows and equally bad in Linux.
Some distros support rejecting touchpad events for N seconds after the last keystroke. That is 100% software, and sort of works for even the worst touchpads.
Edit: Oh, you mention Ubuntu. I gave up on them a long time ago. Devuan works well if you want old-school Debian. Manjaro works well if you want a stable "modern" desktop environment (like Ubuntu used to provide) with menus for hardware configuration, user session switching, etc.
Are you talking about non-Pro MS Surface 3? Interestingly enough on my non-Pro Surface 3 I had no problem installing Ubuntu, Mint and Pop!_OS. With the first two I couldn't make wifi to work after sleep, but with Pop!_OS it worked perfectly.
I think that there should be a list of officially supported laptops and if you bought anything else then it is your problem and you are welcome to write necessary patches.
It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.
That is awesome, I didn't know this existed. I've stuck with xps13 for the last ~3 laptops and that's worked well. I'd like to consider one of those ARM laptops next, maybe I'll find one in here.
So far the first two or three generations of ARM laptops have been just okay. I'm hoping the fact that Apple has jumped all-in on ARM will encourage other vendors to invest more here.
There exist many entries on the ArchWiki. The ArchWiki is (IMO) one of the best sources for linux in general not only archlinux. E.g. this entry for Lenovo[0] has a huge list with Lenovo Laptops and what works/doesn't work. There are also some tweaks you can apply for specific Models.
Boring is good when it comes to tech because it means you're not spending time trying to make things work. Save the excitement for the stuff that pays your bills.
The combination of Mint (Ubuntu) and dwm hovers around ~400Mb RAM when idling, and feels so incredibly nice to work with even on decade old machines.
I only switched from Windows a few years ago after some 20 years, and in retrospect I can't believe how many hours I wasted trying to run things on Windows that 'just work' on Linux.
My experience sharply differs and that was also on a T420 (later a T420s, same difference). In my experience there is a very narrow usage where ChromeOS does not suffice but Linux desktop does. If you fall into this -- and no doubt a lot of people do -- then things are peachy. But step aside and you are toast.
I worked for a company running a certain F5 VPN and their 2FA didn't have a Linux client. I managed to make it work by running an ancient Firefox which still could run old style extensions -- and ran it as root. Very secure.
Used ubuntu on thinkpad for work for the first time.
Just got back to windows as I am x10 more productive there.
Besides the fan's noise, I struggled to find a calendar app that just shows alert for my meetings, and that is not buggy as fuck.
I windows, Ms Mail just works.
then I got the frustration when rust ins installed but not work (should install gcc ...)
Linux is great free software, but I am not using ut just because it is great free, I am using windows because it is consistent and I just need to focus on my job
Also related: Linux Subsystem for Windows works in similar manner (at least for me!) - I've switched couple years ago from Linux -> OSX -> Linux -> WSL (when WSL was in 1.x version at the time and lacking from couple features) and gosh, I've never looked back since then
(disclaimer: I'm a front-end developer (and making games in my spare time using various tools) and for my needs I've never found a serious complain about how WSL works)
I use Arch Linux sway on my Framework laptop. I have 23 virtual screens (one for each digit, one for each function key and an additional one), and they have different scaling. This means on some screens I don't need my reading glasses. For that I wrote a script which is invoked by sway's event handler triggered by virtual screen switches. I find this exciting.
It's not perfect. I still miss the smoothness of Apple's trackpad.
Are you on the 11th or 12th gen Intel? What's your take on Arch -- do you find most things work? I've got a Framework on order coming sometime October and I'm thinking of using Arch for install.
Things that I care about are display/graphics, webcam/mic/audio/video, a working suspend even if I have to resort to hibernate, media keys on the keyboard, and a usable trackpad.
Things I don't really care about is probably the fingerprint reader.
From the ArchWiki this seems to be a go, but I'm still a bit sceptical.
Most things work. I didn't setup mic and audio, because being Deaf I couldn't be bothered. Suspend is very nice. There's hibernate, too and hybrid suspend/hibernate (first suspend and if battery is too low, hibernate). With sway you setup media keys yourself. I didn't bother. I only configured screen brightness and screenshots. Trackpad is okay. Don't expect Apple's smoothness. First it was very jerky till I found out that Firefox fell back to X11.
The good: very configurable and mostly working
The bad: it takes a lot of time to configure everything
The ugly: kinetic scrolling is per application so all applications do this differently
I am disappointed in the number of people hyping up Lenovo/Thinkpads in this thread. Lenovo is not IBM and their quality is not that great. Some models are good, but plenty of others are bad. Dell has been shipping linux for decades now and Lenovo only announced partial support on some models a year or two ago. Don't fall for the hype. Not all Lenovo/Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all).
> Not all Lenovo/Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all)
That does not matter. If they have one really good model, that's enough for everyone.
>Dell has been shipping linux for decades now
I'm an Apple hater, like a vegan hates rare steak. Yet, I'm much more likely to buy my next gear from Apple than Dell. Where do I begin? For starters, everything I've bought from Dell starting with a Latitude D850, all the way to the Xps 13 I bought in 2020 and a 32 curved monitor in 2022, they were all faulty. In a large organization that with 30,000 laptops used by their employees, the IT department loves Dell's support: anything breaks, they will fix/replace it in 24 hours or a few hours depending on your guaranty level. But for me? I prefer it to work well to begin with. My Asus N550 worked for me for 7 years and it was top notch until the bed broke and destroyed it. I've never had a dell product that had zero problems. The latitude would flicker for minutes if for whatever reason screen went off and on. The xps's webcam stopped working and would randomly connect in certain angles of the lid. The laptop was advertised to support linux, but there was no fingerprint reader and when they released it, it was Ubuntu only. The monitor starts to flicker randomly and the replacement they sent me has a corner with ~100 pixels showing whatever they like, waiting for a second replacement.
Perhaps if you leave the defaults alone this is correct. Even defaults aside sleep and hibernate don't work well. Don't even get me started on secure boot.
I've used Linux for over a decade so I am used to turning off random things I don't need, changing defaults, hardening my setup,etc... and it is more unpleasant than ever before. There is less debuggability( if that's a word) and it really does take a while to get things operational.
For example on my debian laptop, I have secure boot and apparmor working. A lot of things broke when I removed software I don't need that is running by default which meant a lot of googling and searching for help but it all works now, I mean, to be fair I only struggled for one whole weekend only on it, which is an improvement, but, regardless of the DE I have to wait for at least 5 minutes after login staring at the wallpaper. I just accepted my fate now. Nothing in X11/xsession logs, dmesg, journalctl, lxdm logs, I have tried everything short of stracing random processes or attaching gdb.
I mean, for personal use it beats windows and isn't locked down and unfriendly like macos.
The most important thing I think when it comes to getting a Linux desktop that just works, is to buy a laptop that has little-to-no issues with Linux in the first place. As someone who struggled with linux on his existing Windows laptop, I made sure that my next laptop had very few issues on the Arch Wiki, and I installed Arch onto it. Works perfectly.
Wifi and suspend stopped working on an LTS release on a Thinkpad X220 for me in 2018, the same generation as the laptop in the article. Moved to macOS shortly after.
They are great $300 computers for when you're between jobs and moving to a place where you can use the work laptop for personal things. Or a pentesting machine. Don't see too much use for them otherwise.
Yes. Until you want to do anything gpu accelerated. You'll be lucky to setup hw video playback, and when you do hevc isn't supported. You want to watch your videos/or game in HDR? ,, banish those silly thoughts from your mind.
Emulating graphics hardware (GPU passthrough) with qemu is a pita.
You want to emulate Android apps, the best solution (Waydroid) only works on Wayland. Though this wouldn't be a problem if Xorg wasn't holding out. And Nvidia had played nice with Linux.
Memory and OOM situation management is a sham and another pita just waiting to bite. This could make you lose all your windows and in some cases even data as the solution involves forcing a reboot from your machine.
I could go on and on.
A lot of improvements have however been made in the usability aspect, main one being flatpak packages. But there's a terribly long road ahead to make Linux desktop feel less of a second-class citizen compared to other operating systems.
Nvidia driver support is indeed garbage, but AMD is great for video games, stable diffusion, etc these days.
The OOM situation is a dumb systemd thing. Presumably some distros will ship working setups.
I haven't had any problems with Majaro. I've been using Linux since the pppd days, but the last time I tried (2019?) it took me over a day to get Ubuntu LTS's DNS client to resolve sites in under thirty seconds. YMMV.
I've had no problems with Nvidia drivers. Running an RTX 3090, doing inferences on stable diffusion and can also fire up steam and play elden ring online
Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly.
I found the article to be very well written and I overall agree with it.
Years ago (2016) I bought a Lenovo Yoga Pro 3, with an Intel M processor.
It had Windows 8, which I almost immediately upgraded to Win10.
It was dreadfully slow with both O.S. from the beginning but I used it for 2 years, just sucking it up and enjoying how small and portable it was.
At some point I installed Ubuntu, and it gave the laptop a whole new life, HOWEVER... for me it always needed some crazy things to be done in the terminal in order to make things work properly, the wifi, the bluetooth or something else, at some point just broke, and it was a little field day everytime to make it work again.
I still have it and it still works OK!
So does Linux on laptop work well? Yes.
It works TOO well? In my opinion, NO, it really depends sometimes.
Intel or AMD? Intel removed S3 support from the platform entirely, and S0ix support was spotty until recent kernels/distros. Lenovo royally screwed up the AMD firmware, so kernel 5.18 includes a hack to force-suspend the NVMe subsystem regardless of what their broken ACPI handler wants to do.
Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown", which most distros leave enabled. I feel like the security people push these patches through and dismiss user needs by waving the "hibernation is impossible to secure and standby is good enough" flag, and we have to live with a broken feature set compared to Windows. It's not a great attitude to have, from the user standpoint anyway.
Intel and S0ix is still spotty, in that out of the box it doesn't work. To make suspend work I need to enable s3 support in the bios. even then it gets me about 4 days, rather than the weeks I expect a modern laptop to last
> Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown"
Which as I can't practically turn it off (the linux laptop is owned by $work) is a massive pain.
Meanwhile the 2014 retina has a standby time of >3 weeks, and if the battery gets too low, it goes into hibernation.
which leads me to my original statement; "the fuck it does"
(I should point out that I've been using linux since the late 90s, and whilst I use it everyday, I still don't really think its good on laptops. Its better, but not good.)
I'm currently running ZorinOS on a GT610, fairly old and obsolete and can be considered legacy but it works great. The drivers came pre-installed in the distro so I had 0 problems installing and using the OS.
Ya know, Linux isn't for everyone, but I like it. I get to do what I want, when I want, and my OS doesn't stop me. I haven't had any issues with hardware so far, because I bought a laptop from System76 and they do a lot of work to make things usable without fuss. I am sure I can't do everything everyone wants to do with a computer, but I don't care because all I do with my laptop (work and home) is read Hacker News and random programming documentation and then program stuff. I guess for me, I could be using a smart toaster from 2012 and probably be happy.
I always enjoy the crapshoot of installing linux on random (recycled) laptops. I've been doing this for decades and I'm always pleasantly surprised at how far we've come. Glitches abound, but so do solutions, and the general robustness is awesome.
So thank you, kernel and other devs, your work is hugely appreciated, even in moments of raging frustration (I just blame the short-sighted CxO's who delegate responsibilty to overworked product managers that are often just over-promoted engineers).
Yay GNU/Linux! Freedom for everyone with a bit of patience and a wilful curiousity :)
Very much so: the Acer Predator gaming laptops have been great for me. They suspend/resume like a champ and have the horsepower for Linux Steam gaming. Their price point is excellent for what you get. Of course they look ridiculous, are heavy, and the battery life is not great but they'll do a couple hours watching a movie in the hot tub, which is all I really care about as far as battery life.
I wish Ubuntu didn't kill Wubi tho. We used that at my first workplace on laptops with Windows and it was so damn good. There is a new fork [0] but it's a hit and miss with modern UEFI and especially with Windows 11 (had to use it for some reason). And other distros never had an option like this afaik, none does as of today. But I know it's all about Docker, VMs, or WSL nowadays yet Wubi covered a niche segment which was pefect.
If you want fun, grab an exotic machine like a X1 Fold with a weird CPU (i5-L16G7 with 1 fast Sunny Cove core, 4 small Tremont cores) and start hacking: even on Windows, everything works more or less (https://csdvrx.github.io/) but the asymmetric CPU architecture gives me ideas about core pinning for some daemons.
On Linux, right now I'm looking at why the i915 style GPU (9840) gives me "Failed to get size of gamma for output default" in xrandr, which prevents redshift from working.
There are though, lots of features that are missing - which might be OK, except they are going to finish supporting Teams on Linux and pushing everyone to use the web version, which is poor.
Your Mileage May Vary, and may vary a lot. Lenovo Yogas, for example, have terrible compatibility (at least, the models released in the last years), which is a shame, because some are very good business machines. The Yoga Gen 7 AMD, on any Linux, has:
- keyboard not working
- speakers 50% not working
- mic not working
- bluetooth not working
- standby not working
And probably something else I'm missing.
I think all the AMD 6x00 mobile CPUs suffer from the non-working keyboard issue, due a quirk (ironically, a compatibility-breaking hardware fix) that is fixed on the not yet released 6.0 kernel.
Linux still can't handle out of memory issues gracefully.
Sometimes I create memory leaks or use too many electron apps and when you hit a low memory situation Linux starts trashing and your system becomes unusable for minutes to hours unless you reboot your machine.
Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems.
This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, multitask too much and your system effectively locks up. Laptops tend to have less ram available.
You mean intensive use of swap memory? You could turn off swap and get OOM errors instead if you like a snappy system, but I don't know if it's fair to criticize an OS for running out of memory. It's the user fault for using software that demands more resources than the equipment has, or for not expanding the RAM when it's clearly needed.
I've experienced this too. Swapping seems very slow and inefficient on Linux. No matter how large your swap is, once you hit the point where you're using twice your physical RAM, the system become unresponsive. My guess is Linux doesn't prioritize processes properly for desktop use, and background threads, despite being from minimized windows (minimized by the user in a desperate and futile attempt to open a terminal so I can kill some processes), are free to demand memory with the same priority as everything else.
I have swap turned off and I don't get OOM errors. System just crawls and is unresponsive. Usually happens because of Chromium. If I manage to kill it, then it comes back to normal.
I was able to crash MacOS 12.5.1 a few weeks ago, by allocating 80+GB more than I had swap/memory space for. Over use/abuse of memory system leading to unstable system is not specific to Linux.
In my case, I was doing development/testing of a data analysis code. Pulling in the data was fine, I just needed to adjust my applications queries to reduce the size of this. I was specifically looking to see what I could get away with in terms of analysis size without adding additional code to handle out-of-core.
MacOS did not respond gracefully to the load. It took it a whole 20 minutes to crash, hard-locking the UI, and eventually rebooting.
My previous experience with a windows laptop (until I traded it in for the mac about 10 months ago), was even worse. I could not use WSL2 for anything approaching real memory utilization, as I'd get all these memory compaction pauses/GCs. These random freezes would often hang the machine for a while, and when it resumed, the interface was very laggy.
Compared to that, my linux experience for systems under horrific load is much better than windows, and on par with MacOS (M1 32GB laptop BTW, not a small system).
Depends on your configuration/distro. OOM killers aren't really used on the desktop because swap makes more sense, but you can certainly add one if you're using a resource-constrained machine.
> Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.
Every Linux system configured for overcommit (every major distribution out of the box) will invoke the kernel OOM killer upon demand. There is no such thing as distributions not "enabling" this thing. You're talking about things like systemd-oomd, which act as a layer on top of the kernel OOM killer.
This could be fixed with a little UI work in gnome. Eg. when running a RAM heavy program, if more than 80% of memory gets used, then whatever program is using most gets halted, it's window greyed out, and a popup saying "Your system memory is 80% full, and Google Chrome is using 65%. Would you like to kill Chrome or close some other applications to allow it to use more?"
You're probably using an old version of systemd without oomd. If you can wait a little, MGLRU will soon fix that in the kernel; no other software will need to be installed or updated.
I've had linux on the desktop as my daily driver for 12 of the past 14 years.
Yes it takes a little bit longer to setup. But once I do it it's just so much more comfortable for me than Windows. Faster, easier to maintain, insanely better UI all configured in my dot files.
So yeah, there's a ramp up, and you need to be a bit resourceful. And it's probably not a great strategy to just choose any old laptop.
But I still love it. 2022 is yet another happy year of the Linux Desktop for me.
IDK, maybe it is boring for a guy who has nothing better to do than to fuck with configuring software he uses. But I kinda tricked myself into thinking GNU/Linux is an actually usable OS, like, to live with it without noticing it too much. Now, after 15 years I'm way too attached to it to sell my soul to Microsoft, but I'm still waiting for that "year of Linux on desktop". I don't want to configure anything anymore, I have my life, man. I'm too old and too busy for this shit. I just want it to work, on its own.
Yet, I'm still occasionally struggling with hardware compatibility and Ubuntu package manager issues. And I won't even complain about that one time I was foolish enough to set-up ZFS on a laptop: after all, it was offered in "Advanced Settings" tab and I should've known better. Suffice to say, that buying basic consumer-grade hardware I still cannot assume that it will work reasonably well with Linux.
Honestly, I'm almost for real offended by someone daring to say not having to spend my life solving Linux problems should be qualified as "boring" — especially when it's not the case, and when I still often find out that stuff that had me struggling with it for hours, days, or even turned out to simply not work on Linux at all — is basically plug-and-play on Windows. I mean, if you think about it, there's no reason to expect it not to be the case, but it is exactly the headlines like that, that trick you into believing this and buying stuff before meticulously googling everything and making sure it can be used with Linux in the first place (which is often not Google-able as well, when it comes to a bit less common items, than, let's say, top-100 products on Amazon).
HP laptops are well known for their crappy linux support. I've bought a brand new Lenovo Ryzen laptop in 2020, slapped POP_OS on it and everything works fine ever since (excepting the fingerprint reader, that has no linux driver). It boots quickly, power management, bluetooth and Wifi work fine, I can hot plug screens and stuff to it no problem, and waking it up from sleep just works (OK it's getting a tad long recently, about 5 to 10s -- but it just works).
> I tell this anecdote to make a point that will be obvious to nerds, but may still be news for everyone else: Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days.
Which one? Because you can't download and install "Linux", there is no linux-stable-09-2022.iso that you download from linux.org that you then use to install a full OS that "just works(tm)". In fact, if we're talking about an 11 year old laptop, the actual version of Linux installed on it might not even exist anymore, but happens to have been set up in a way that it can use still maintained PPA. And which laptop, with what hardware? Because it's trivial to support a generic network adapter and an ancient 1200x800 WXGA screen, but good luck getting linux to "just work" with your wifi6e and retina 4k screen.
Downvotes notwithstanding, as an anecdote this post effectively undermines itself, because installing Microsoft teams worked contrary to the author's expectation. They expected this to be hard, so concluding that Linux on a laptop "just works" based on a single activity unexpectedly not being an absolute nightmare is not drawing a reasonable conclusion.
(Not sure I buy the argument that Linux works so nicely, because "Most software has migrated to the browser" either, that feels like a false equivalency routed in anecdotal evidence for what "most" means to the author. Some productivity apps have decent webapp equivalents, but they all suffer from the fact that they run in the browser, and folks aren't going to run dedicated browser processes for each web app, so the regular browsing on the side can, and will, stall or even crash the browser)
Unfortunately have to disagree, connecting to my wireless scanner/printer is way too complicated, no driver frontends for my mouse/keyboard, when multiple sound devices are connected, it's so bad to swap between them. When I connect to my home projector, it didn't allow to change audio output for some reason all in all, linux maybe works on popular laptops with predefined hardware, but it is still bad for desktops.
Sure, the overall "eventually stuff gets supported" story is good. And people hold on to hardware a lot more than they used to. This guy's using a T420. That's an 11 year old machine! Older hardware has always worked much better under Linux than newer hardware (sometimes for longer than it's worked well on Windows).
It's also pretty amazing that there are now some major-vendor Linux-out-of-the-box laptops. But the pool is still not all that large.
I was just looking at an Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Google suggests ... nah. Very un-boring.
Fun shit like "keyboard doesn't work yet" plus various other nothing-surprising-to-me-after-doing-this-for-20-years stuff like weird audio driver patch crap.
I gave up Windows entirely; between unavoidable telemetry, embedded ads, and poor service pack QA (especially printers), I'm done. I'm not paying to rent an O/S and sell my personal habits regardless of what Microsoft thinks I should do.
I use a Macbook Pro for work. I don't really care for MacOS, but they've got a real bash shell at least, and I like the consistency of clipboard handling in MacOS. I don't get to dictate my work environment, but thank goodness it isn't Windows.
I'm running Devuan at home on a recent AMD 550 board with a 3100, and also on an older Macbook Pro. The only real issues I have are around getting wifi working during install on Debian and Devuan, due to firmware open-ness issues. I doubt Ubuntu has these issues.
After install, though, the OP is correct, it's wonderfully boring. Install TLP and a recent 5.x kernel on laptops and power issues just disappear. Install Steam and use Proton, even with games from GoG, and everything that I own works.
It's always jarring to help someone with a normal Windows machine; the ads, the o/s response times, the forced manufacturer bloatware really shocks me.
Is that actually true? What does it say that I immediately recognize that T420 from the image?
Maybe the title should be changed to "Linux on the X220 and T420 ...". Even on these devices I've had some problems. Due to experiences I've made I'm sceptical that there are no issues with Fn keys, Trackpads, Display brightness, power consumption, connectivity... on random laptops - especially the lower-priced ones.
Of course, like many others in this thread I strongly disagree.
We are talking here of 20 years that Linux desktop has been mostly standing in place (and going backwards as well). I’ve used Linux in the 90’ and the early 2000’ so I remember well.
The thing is it might be Microsoft putting sticks in the wheels of open source by planting it’s own people in the industry.
I've had mixed results on laptops. I've never bothered to make the fingerprint reader work, that just isn't my thing. I've had decent luck with all the standard functions video, audio, storage, keyboard, mousepad, wifi on most models of Lenovo and Dell in the last decade. I've had mixed results on Asus laptops, especially the recent ones. The biggest challenge I've had is finding out ahead of time what wifi chipset is used and this has only affected me when using tools like aircrack-ng [1]. The chipset can vary even within the same make/model of laptop depending on when it was manufactured. The way I quickly test how a laptop will behave is to boot Kali Linux [2] into ram. Sometimes a sales person at a computer store would let me do this on a demo model even though they probably should not.
Know where I've had troubles with Bluetooth on Linux? Discord! Stupid Discord keeps forgetting my Bluetooth headset lately. Saddest thing about that? I've heard my Windows using friends cursing Discord over the exact same issue on their Windows 10 and 11 rigs. (Leads me to believe it's not entirely Bluetooth's fault every single time, but sometimes badly written software doing screwy things that confuse the Bluetooth somewhere along the way.)
In my case it's only been Discord doin' this, while everything else that uses the same headset has no troubles with it at all.
My favorite bluetooth issue is with MacOS. On my M1 Mac Mini, my Logitech MX keys and MX Master 3 mouse are not recognized after a reboot. So I have to attach a corded keyboard to my Mini to log in. Because when it goes to sleep after a reboot, it does not wake up for the logitech kit. Which is explicitly supporting MacOS.
Its not just linux where bluetooth sucks.
I opened a ticket with Apple on this, gave them my notes, and they still haven't done anything about this.
Bluetooth on linux sucks. As it does on MacOS. And windows.
It depends on the laptop. I tried with several older machines (2015 era), with several distros and never got it to work right (though my scenario is a bit weird, I have the laptop closed with an external monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up).
Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...
Ludicrous. On some, it does, on others, otherwise there's minor issues, major issues, sometimes regressions. Linux is very clearly a second class citizen on the PC, with hardware only coming with support for the current gen Windows. Some doesn't even work with Windows well, and that's the supposedly supported platform.
I _do_ use Linux on everything, mind you. But I also keep a file where I collect my fixes for the different systems, so that I won't forget them when I reinstall. And I accept that sometimes things don't work, like a fingerprint reader, and I live with that.
One such random thing from the notes is that the touchpad wouldn't come alive after a sleep. The fix is the "i8042.nomux=1" kernel parameter. Hours of duckduckgoing went into that. I like to tinker, but it's not working "so damn well that it's boring".
It depends on the hardware. If you buy one of the certified machines maybe, otherwise you're in for a painful treat. IMO my requirements are pretty low: i3 window manager, chrome (sorry), a terminal, audio and multiple displays. To be honest Linux is not able to provide a fully working experience for those things.
Oh really ? Then you're lucky you don't have one of those "gaming laptop" especially the ASUS TUF models (I am not a gamer at all but yet i decided to get an asus Tuf505d) and believe me setting up Linux on it wasn't boring at all. I actually learnt a lot while doing it.
Because once you'll figure out why the wifi is shutting down every x minutes. You'll then have to find what's wrong with the Bluetooth who doesn't activate.
And of course at some point you'll want to connect an external monitor right ?
If you thought plugging an hdmi cable and pushing some keys would allow you to display your stuff on your projector... Well think again.
Don't get me wrong I love Linux.. I have been using it for the last 12 years (switched to Ubuntu recently)
While it's amazingly easy and smooth on my rpi4 (for my personnal use). It can be boringly complicated on some laptop brands
Dunno, in the last 10 years I've had a ThinkPad T530 and an Acer Swift 3 (AMD), suspend has worked just fine on both (Ubuntu and Fedora). My girlfriend has a Dell running Windows she always manually turns off because suspend is flakey...
At this point whether or not suspend works really depends on the laptop and there's plenty of reports of Windows users having the same issues.
IIRC they changed something about sleep states on newer CPUs. Most people who report issues are on Linux, but I've heard about issues on Windows as well.
I have a modern-but-not-new laptop (a Lenovo Yoga 720 from ~2012) and when I was taking it into work daily before the pandemic it wouldn't even shut down properly. An Ubuntu update in 2019 seemed to pretty much fix that. I was running newer kernel builds (stable but not yet adopted by Ubuntu) so that may have also contributed to the initial issue and/or the fix.
Of course I'm writing this comment in support of "Linux on laptops works better now" but I had to opt in to newer kernel builds to get drivers for the laptop...
Zero issues with Fedora 36 regarding that. I do have a Wi-Fi issue where sometimes I need to re-associate, but that typically happens when I move between two APs with the same SSID and seems to be a known issue for that Wi-Fi driver.
Works on the 4.75 year old machine (Sagar/Clevo) I'm typing this on right now. Worked on my 14 year old machine (Sagar/Clevo) that just died last month. Works on HP Omen 2020 unit.
I've not had hibernate/suspend problems in 7-ish years?
I had them for my windows laptop from work. Close the lid with no power connected, put in my laptop bag, walk back to hotel from office, and the unit was very hot. Profile was set to hibernate/sleep on battery with lid closed. Never got that to work. Replaced that monstrosity with a M1 Macbook Pro (work machine).
I have a laptop from System76 (which is a linux vendor). Suspend usually works, but once in a while the graphical UI does not come back. I can ssh into the laptop and restart gdm and it's fine after that.
I needed to do some additional steps to enable hibernate because the drive is encrypted and the default swap was not big enough to hold the RAM. But after that hibernate doesn't appear to work if I have any USB devices plugged into the laptop.
The HP laptop I was running Fedora on had some kind of low power mode on the CPU that would cause linux to crash and require a hard-reset to recover. That meant no idling/sleeping/hibernating without a kernel crash.
With my 3 years old work Dell, I can't say that it has improved in any way. Suspended laptop basically scrapes over the week-end, a 3 day week-end will see me booting from shutdown on the first morning.
On modern Thinkpads, less that 0.5% of the battery per hour is expected, so if you disable automatic suspend to disk (aka "suspend to both") to save a few TBW from your NVME, expect to lose about 10% per day.
Personally, I like that Windows suspend to disks can be setup to only kick-in if a specific power budget has been exhausted: if the laptop has been sleeping for 5 days while disconnected, with 50% of the battery gone, it's neat to suspend to disk so that a week later (or more) it has enough power to resume work.
I want this to be true very badly. I’ve been a Linux user for nearly 20 years and I’ve never had an install that “just works” to the level of macOS or even Windows.
Although there was a while there in like 2006 where I had a pretty solid install of Ubuntu on some HP laptop I had at the time. That’s the closest I got.
This is of course extremely anecdotal. Everyone’s on different hardware and therefore has pretty different experiences.
I hate Windows as a development OS but I’d rather deal with that than some odd update that breaks my install completely, or spending hours reading forum posts to try to make my Bluetooth driver less shitty, etc etc.
I just use macOS for dev and Windows for gaming and they stay out of my way. I’ll keep trying Linux again once a year or so, but I’m not optimistic on it. It’s a moving target too due to varying hardware support over time.
I see a lot of Windows laptops, and am also a Linux enthusiast, and honestly, Windows does have the issues you are talking about occasionally, same as popular Linux distros. They, for example, sometimes have maddening issues like on default settings delivering driver updates to (Intel) display drivers which are very fiddly to roll back and pin in order to fix. Even the walled garden of Apple has problems depending on whether or not their new M1 line will be compatible with what you want to do. Modern computers and the operating systems that straddle them are complex systems, and sometimes have complex problems. The best we can do is find our own balance of stability given requirements, and be thankful for the technological advancements meaningful to us.
I was 15 in 1998 and had just worked our families root beer and popcorn concession stands for 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair. Every penny I earned was used to purchase a brand new iMac in bondi blue.
A year later I sold the iMac via the newspaper classifieds. I used that money to buy my first used laptop and proceeded to install Linux.
I got my Linux distro, Redhat, from a CD-rom inside a book purchased at Barnes & Noble. I must have reinstalled Linux 100x on that machine. I remember using it to take notes in my PSEO (college in high school) classes at the local tech school. Fond memories.
I’m sure Linux has come a long way. I still use it every day on the server, but switched back to mac on the desktop when apple went to Intel and could just run Linux/Windows in a VM when necessary.
No it doesn't, even on an Asus 1215B that was actually sold with Linux on it.
GL support isn't at the same level as the DirectX 11 for the APU, still has some issues waking up time to time (only fixed by taking the battery out), and is the only device that has issues connecting to my router.
Yeah, I have to second this. As badly as I wish this article were true, even on devices specifically designed to support linux, like the Framework, there are a million tiny glitches and inconveniences with sleep, wifi, power management, webcam, bluetooth, etc, etc. These simply don't happen on windows.
Using linux on a laptop is the same as it has been for the last 20 years: something you only do if you don't mind being forced to be an enthusiast constantly tinkering with configuration files and such.
If you want a tool to actually get work done it can be painfully frustrating. I say this as someone who willingly pays the cost of this frustration because I much prefer linux as a development environment. But the people who write articles like this are either delusional, lying, or very, very lucky.
That sounds like what I'd expect with Framework. Modern hardware is complex enough that you have to specifically target and support an OS, and afaict, framework just kind of doesn't. It's sold either with windows or as-is, then then it's up to you to be the systems integration team.
I bought a a dell developer xps preloaded with ubuntu. It had issues from day 1, related to sleep, related to bluetooth, related to closing the lid and expecting it to do what I wanted. I fixed some of them after messing with it for weeks, but was plagued by kernel panics in the qualcomm wireless driver that was unfixable. Finally had enough BS and switched to windows.
Always kind of aggravating to see posts like OP saying how great linux is as a desktop, ignoring how horrible it is in general across a broad range of hardware. And apparently even direct from dell, in my case.
edit: BTW experienced dev using linux VMs, baremetal, and WSL for 15 years. I love linux as a dev, but I will never touch it again as a desktop OS.
Oh, I forgot to add, I tried to load linux on a different older dell xps 13 laptop since it was nearly dead and useless. No wireless driver out of box for dell wireless. Found some random articles about how to get it working. None of them worked. I actually forgave that since I had a USB network adapter and didn't necessarily need wireless. that wasn't it tho I ran into other random issues. seriously linux is still terrible as a desktop OS. I won't even get into UI .
Most of the comments here report the opposite of the linked article. Using Linux still seems to involve a significant amount of being your own IT department.
I have tried Linux a few times over the years. One test was for almost 2 weeks on vacation, in a developing country, where it wasn't safe to be walking around with a MacBook. Another was for a few days as a Linux home theater. After struggling for hours with the sound drivers I gave up. I was frustrated with the amount of trouble shooting involved with Linux. That combined with preferring the OS has kept me on MacBooks for the past decade+.
I get this article, but I also don't like parts of it.
Sure, everything just works. And that's awesome. But it's also being sold here as "the poor person's OS using janky equipment". Sure, Linux can greatly help with artificial obsolescence.
But the biggest point is that you retain ownership and full power over your data.
I've seen this again and again with stuff like Eagle vs KiCAD, and Autodesk software vs FreeCAD. Sure in some cases the FLOSS software isn't as "polished", but when Autodesk decides to arbitrarily change the policy locking you oout of your content, it's a matter of freedom and your data.
The OS is the "carrier", and the applications are the actual thing.
So many negative comments. Always preferred Linux whether it's Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch to any windows OS. All the laptops I had were: Thinkpad T450s, HP Spectre 15, Acer Nitro 5. All of them work flawlessly. Windows on the other hand...
It is the simple truth. Thinkpads are usually very good and work out of the box, but a lot of other brands just don't. It isn't about hate or being negative, it's seeing a very biased affirmation generalizing a positive one time occurrence and painting it as the actual general fact.
Absolutely correct. Funny coincidence that happened to me:
Got my Steam Deck on the same day I got an email informing my that one of my university supplied Macs had to go back and be surplused because of our end of life policies. Now, I've typically been able to keep pretty much every computer I've been given if I have a reason (and I teach IT so I always have reasons)
Upon informing them that I wiped Mac Os from it and have been running Linux instead, IT services was -- "Ah, okay, fine -- bring it in so we can make sure it's updated and you're good to keep it. Otherwise it would have to come back."
Hoping one day soon I'll be able to use Gnome on my M1 MacBook with full hardware acceleration and unchanged power efficiency/battery life.
MacBook laptops feel great to use, their Keyboards, their trackpads, their screens, their battery lives are unparalleled - but MacOS is such a compatibility nightmare. No Vulkan support makes gaming difficult, no kernel support for containerisation makes using development tools like Docker cumbersome.
Apple are total dicks for locking down their hardware so tightly and refusing to support efforts to extend support to other OSes.
Haha, sounds super boring compared to 2004 when I bought Fujitsu Siemen's cheapest Pentium M laptop and had to build some kernel modules, build custom rules for power saving scenes (as there weren't that much of ready rules) and find the most optimal parameters for every module and CPUFreq configs etc.
Also, figuring out the sequence of disabling modules etc for suspend to disk and suspend to ram sleep modes with more custom scripts was super fun. Managed to squeeze whole 8 hours from a battery that was supposed to work 4-6 hours in Windows XP. Fun times.
When I use Linux for work, I still hit random things that need the command line, and it's much less stable than Windows (hard freezes). I tried to use Linux (specifically Mint) as an HTPC to use with Stepmania, but immediately ran into problems with both audio coming through and the TV resolution, and had to fall back to Windows, which worked with no drama.
This has happened every time I've tried to use Linux at home: I end up running into random problems that are weirdly hard to solve, or things that won't work period.
Reading this post makes me wonder if i'm absolutely lucky or something because linux always worked great out of the box in almost any computer i ever had, even my new Gigabyte laptop
I don’t like the color scheme and general rendering of websites on Linux (all browsers). By contrast, the MacOS renders websites really well. I played with the color settings on my video card and I can see that I could make it better, but I just couldn’t get it right all the way. Does anybody knows how to make Linux website rendering more pleasing to the eye and closer to MacOS? This is the only reason I still stick with MacOS on the front end. I would love to drop MacOS altogether.
Unfortunately no, I use non-Apple monitor for both MacbookPro and Linux box. The difference in rendering web is pretty noticeable to me. Windows used to render full, saturated colors a while back, but now it looks pretty washed out to me as well. So it’s only MacOS that renders well currently (I am sure they will “improve” it in the future, but looks good so far). I think it has something to do with default color profiles for the corresponding OS. I would love to talk to someone who is an expert in this field.
I so wish this were true (and seeing it at the top of HN would make you believe it were true), but my experiences in the last 6 years or so with 4 different laptops speaks otherwise. 2 of those were sold with Linux on them (Dell and Tuxedo), 2 were Thinkpads, and they all had all kinds of issues. The best is the Tuxedo, but even that thing has issues with hybernating. Unfortunately, none of them comparable to the smooth functioning of a Macbook.
Dell XPS 15 9510(11th gen cpu), intel-only with Dell Thunderbolt Dock works with zero issues.
I'm connecting Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and mouse + headphones, external monitors.
Yeah, touchpad is not as good as on mac but I don't care.
I have a few old laptops kicking around still. We're talking 10+ year old laptops here that weren't even top of the line when new.
The differences in OS bloat between the two is night and day. The Windows 8 laptop that I swear takes 15+ minutes to boot and struggles to do simple web browsing. It reminds me of what happens to 5+ year old phones where they seem to get slower for no good reason.
My linux laptops are still going strong like the day they were new.
I thought Linux was often times annoying with Bluetooth connection issues, sleep related bugs … I enjoy how boring stable it is on thinkpad.
Then I bought a Mac m1 second hand for photo related needs and it doesn’t wake up the external monitor on resume from suspend, doesn’t auto switch Bluetooth mic, doesn’t provide volume mixer for hdmi external monitor, can’t manage wifi&Ethernet at the same time …
I stopped worrying and am using both happily, with their flaws.
Funny that, when my beefed up XPS 15 finally died, I went on eBay on got one of those Thinkpads dumped by corporations for like £120.
I put in the NVMe drive from the XPS and... it was working out of the box.
What is surprising that it feels much faster, fans don't make as much noise that despite weaker CPU and 4x less RAM.
I really like it.
I got an M1 Pro as well, but Thinkpad will be a nice backup machine.
No luck with touch screen in Ubuntu so far. It's a combination of the touch screen but not wanting the on-screen keyboard to pop up every time I touch in a text entry widget. I googled all over the place and tried a bunch of things that were suggested. Fortunately I've been trying this while Windows still works on my laptop, so I'm not desperate, and can always try again at asome point.
my experience has been mostly good. I used to work on a beat-up hp low-end laptop from 2012, on which I put arch w/ i3-gaps. It had only one issue, a driver that killed the laptop on any sudden acceleration (to protect the hdd write heads on the original machine, I'd put in a ssd). I found a way to disable it and otherwise had no issues, everything was pretty snappy considering the slow i3 cpu.
On my current 2020 razer blade, I've had to create a workaround script for the intel backlight driver not working properly (on boot it maxes out at 30% backlight, but cat 100 to the correct file and the full range is unlocked). I still don't know how to handle plugging in external screens (e.g. to give presentations) but that's an i3-gaps issue and not the laptop's fault, and the battery life is pretty abysmal since graphics switching from the nvidia gpu to the igpu seems to disable using the gpu for cuda workloads (for which the fix is to have the charger with me at all times).
To be clear, i had to wait from 1998 to 2021 before i install linux Mint on my father Laptop (now in his 70's).
Since this recent move, i never receive a call that something is broken on his old laptop, and i dont need to explain to him that i dont know windows over the air, while he is stressing about printing his latest document to print and send ASAP.
Thanks linux Mint.
Basic laptop functionality works. Battery life is poor compared to when running Windows. Pen and touch required some finicking to get working. No writing apps as good as OneNote. All the ones I tried have enough input latency to make the experience unpleasant.
That was a ~2021 Ubuntu. I was unable to reach the desktop in Mint. Kali couldn't interface with the network chip.
With the caveat that you have to like Gnome or KDE. They’re both better than Windows but Gnome in particular has gone too far with its ultra minimalist UI design. I just wish there was something built on Sway that’s nice to use out of the box that doesn’t require a witch’s cauldron of dot files. Why are all the cool DEs so allergic to GUI configuration tools?
I like to keep one of my personal laptops running Linux, but I won't be using one at work again soon unless I have the rights to pave and reinstall. While I'm more than willing to spend my evenings tinkering issues on my own laptop, I can't spend hours of work time debugging a graphics or audio issue that pops up.
I was suprised when I upgraded my old Thinkpad x250 to the Inspiron 15 from DEll. Installed Pop Os on it and it worked really well. I could even make the fingerprint scanner run without problem.
In the end I endup going back to win 11 because someone wanted me to maintain a vb5 and winform .net aplication, and because Borderlands 3 runs better on win, unfortunally.
I find the headline pretty disturbing because a) no it isn't and b) what would be boring is never being able to do anything because you were forced to spend all day "tinkering" with the OS for stability reasons or dismissing a constant barrage of nagware. Linux easily beats windows in this regard.
Recently installed Linux on my 2011 MacBook Air and loving it. Faster than MacOS and all drivers just worked (Ubuntu 22.04).
The only issue with the setup is me! Daily driving new hardware for work makes it difficult to adapt to an older display, keyboard and trackpad. laptop hardware really has come a long way in the past 11 years.
I have an L14 gen 2 amd thinkpad, and have had a ton of issues with the touchpad and occansional issues with the down key repeating for no reason. My wife has an E14 gen 3 amd thinkpad and absolutely no issues.
The future for linux on the laptop is here, just unevenly distributed.
...unlike the Raspberry Pi. About a year ago I installed a Raspberry Pi 4B+ behind my 40" monitor, with Kodi + some DLNA stuff on it. It almost works, but it has hard fails in enough important areas that I've given up on it.
- No sleep / standby mode (lowest power is 'idle')
- No Wake On Lan, so if you power it off completely, you have to cycle the power on the power supply (not easy, since mine is behind the "TV")
- Can't run Windows apps (eg the amazing MusicBee) because it's ARM
- Shitty disk support (stuck with SD card or USB)
I gave an old ThinkPad T430 to my 9 year old nephews about a year ago, and they've completely trashed it: busted screen hinges, broken backlight and cracked case. I'm gonna remove the faulty screen and permanently hook it up to the TV as a "headless laptop" (https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jt2p8j/i_see_your...). Because guess what? Linux runs boringly well on it. Also: built-in keyboard, low-power standby mode, trackpad, proper SSD and more useful ports than the Pi.
My non-work laptops all run linux, and have for ~20 years. My oldest laptop is a 14 year old Sager (Clevo) notebook, whose display seems to have just died last month. My newest is a 1.75 year old HP Omen with Ryzen 7 4800H AMD and NVidia graphics. All run linux, specifically Mint. Same release. All (apart from the dead 14 year old Sager) work well.
I am typing this on my 4.75 year old Sager (Clevo), running Linux Mint, with an Nvidia GTX 1060/Intel iGPU unit, 1.5 TB of SSD (SATA), 64 GB ram, 4 physical cores. Everything works. It worked when I first installed it.
My personal office deskside unit is an AMD Epyc 16 core, 128 GB RAM, with NVidia RTX3060 workstation, running Debian 11, as a deskside workstation. I have some older units based upon E5-2687W CPU tech, old NVidia cards built cheaply from ebay parts. All running linux in desktop configs, though most don't have a display keyboard attached. I've used all of them as desksides at one point in time or the other, and still use them for larger personal computing projects unrelated to work.
I've been using Linux on laptops and desksides for the last 23+ years. My first laptop, was a 75MHz pentium unit with 16MB of ram, I triple booted DOS, OS2, and Linux on in 1996. I had a tiny 20MB hard disk with it. I wrote lots of my phd thesis on that under linux, and my home SGI Indy (the perks of working at SGI in the 1990s).
Linux was hard for laptops/desktops until about 2004-2005 or so. Then things that were hard to make work, started working out of the box. I didn't have to think about installing most drivers, apart for things like some usb based devices. That got better in 2008 or so.
Over the last 14 years, everything pretty much just worked. As the OP notes, its been boring. For the most part. Occasionally I'll run into a cheap USB peripheral where the driver isn't updated, or its missing updated firmware, but this is, and has been for a while, the exception.
I know there are many who have disdain for linux desktops. That's fine, have your own preferred environment. That noted, please recognize that there are many users out there using linux desktops, successfully, productively, without problems. From installation through normal/intense usage.
My home office has a Mac M1 Mini running MacOS 12.6 , 1x HP Omen 64 GB RAM, 8 core Ryzen laptop with Nvidia 1660Ti gpu running linux mint, a deskside 16 core Epyc, 128GB RAM machine with RTX3060 running Debian 11. All configured with my various monitors and networks. Its productive for me. We do not have an operational, regularly in use, MS Windows installation. And we're happy with this setup. It works. Everything just works. The way it should.
My experience with fresh installs has usually be pretty good on older laptops. However, it always eventually starts to go downhill for me (likely somewhat self inflicted). It would be interesting if the author still feels the same after a year or so.
I had a Dell XPS 13 and tried to get a Linux distributor running on it (not hard) reliably (impossible). This led to hours, days of frustration and I eventually gave it away to someone who spent hours more and eventually put Windows back on it and sold it.
Laptop - I agree, as my Lenovo Thinkpad runs Linux without issues. I'm having trouble on desktop PC with wake up from suspend (when PC goes to sleep automatically after set amount on minutes) and wireless dropping randomly.
Agree. At least ThinkPads work extremely well.
The one thing that keeps me from completely switching is RDP. Is there some solutions that work as good on linux? Tried few but they couldn't match RDP on windows, especially with a bad connection.
Someone show me how to get my xps-15 to run Ubuntu with comparable GPU and battery performance to Windows in less than five hours of work and I will be eternally grateful. I gave up and plugged it in permanently for work and use my Mac for mobile.
Hello! I have been using PopOS which is a derivative of Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia drivers baked in. Setup on every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year), has been about 20 minutes. Dell devices have excellent Linux support. Battery is a problem, I can get 5-7 hours in PopOS vs. 5-9 hours in Windows, depending on what I'm working on by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life (9+ hours on 2021 xps with half cores disabled, running around 6-8 watts). PopOS also offers the ability to turn discrete graphics on or off which can also increase battery life.
Oh wow. I’m grateful you shared this. Wasn’t aware of PopOS and your experience with it sounds promising. I will gladly take 5 hours of battery. Currently I get 60-90 minutes in Ubuntu.
I keep one as a back up and if soneone in my family needs, I'll give it to them. I have another whose motherboard is toast, so it's just sitting there. Can't decide if it's worth $800 to fix it.
Does it handle switching the dedicated GPU on and off when needed? Any tips on how to set up? Mine stays on and kills battery in about 90 minutes. I tried the switching and it would always just crash.
We use several hundred laptops from Dell that run Linux (Ubuntu & CentOS) as the primary developer laptop in our organisation. They work well. Of course every now and then some user comes up with an idea to uninstall default Python…
It's fine. There's also still a lot of tinkering you have to do to fully get the Linux experience. There's way too many applications out there still that may require you to drop into a terminal to get them working.
Today I found out that my wife's 2 y.o. Lenovo IdeaPad reboots Ubuntu so fast that I thought it was just logging out the user session. It was around 3 seconds. It took me two reboots to actually realize what was going on.
The future is a Windows 10 desktop for gaming and most software. VMWare running your flavor of Linux for serious dev work. It works flawlessly and seamlessly.
Been coding on my Linux VM for the past two years without a single hitch.
Okay, does hibernation work? How about palm rejection on the track pad? Hi-Dpi fractional scaling? Do I need to read hostile *nix forums to find the right incantation to make Wi-fi work?
On old niche laptops from Thinkpad, Dell, maybe, probably. Good luck with the other brands and fairly new laptops.
My best non function is a trackpad not working :P Every damn time
I recently looked into buying a linux laptop and it seems like only unattractive laptops were advised (thinkpads) and that you’d have to install linux on them yourself
I couldn't get dpi resizing to work at all. Like when I unplug my laptop from a lower dpi monitor. It was a such a nusance for me I went back to windows and use wsl.
lol, reading this as I'm trying to get the Nvidia driver working on a 2010 mac mini ... if it was an Intel graphics model it would be fine, but non-standard hardware still breaks things, even on relatively common machines
> How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?
Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc.
After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries.
That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life, but I like to carry my laptop in a small bag, so the AC adapter doesn't intrude much.
Actually, I have 2 bags: both feature an AC adapter. I carry either the "big" bag with a regular Lenovo keyboard (I like it) and a 65W GaN adapter from Aohi (a cube about 2cm per side, that's not your grandpa power brick) or a flat 20W adapter (shaped like a 6mm thick credit card, with foldable blades) that's perfect for my Lenovo that barely sucks 10W (I measured).
That's cool, but I don't know if your experience is uniquely yours or common, and for me at least, it's not common. I want a laptop that will last a full day without charging because when I use it as a laptop, I may be moving around, or going between meetings, or walking to lunch or a coffee shop, and I don't want to have to find a power outlet. Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better".
> Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better"
With everything else equal, I'm offered a longer battery life with no tradeoff, I'll take it!
However, if I have to use arm binaries instead of amd64 binaries, I'm far less interested.
If I also have to use a laptop where I have little room to adjust the OS defaults, to the point of being in a walled garden, I start asking myself if I need it, and when.
> I don't want to have to find a power outlet
I agree, but TBH with anything over 5h, I rarely need to look for one. Maybe it happens once every month?
I tested this recently, my 6 year old Dell runs Ubuntu 2022 and has 16G RAM and nVidia with 4G VRAM. It runs a 2G VM running Ubuntu 2022 running Apache, Dovecot, postfix, MySQL and Postgres, for multiple domains. The host also runs all of those for local email.
Both the VM and the host runs Docker and containers. The host also runs k3s (Kubernetes single cluster) continuously for me to do various container running comparisons vs plain Docker.
With me logged in watching Netflix in a browser full screen it gets around 1.5 - 1.75 hours.
I guess if I were to just stream full screen without the VM running it'd run somewhat longer.
I get 15-20 hours of battery on my laptop running Debian, at say 30% brightness, with an open ssh connection or two over wifi. So, there are clearly circumstances where it is fine, though I'm quite sure there are cases where it isn't, too. Use the tools that work for you when they work for you.
I'm not surprised, I've never used a system76 laptop, but they always looked like chunky "portable workstations" rather than mobile computing devices. After dealing with the horrible battery life, weight, and fan noise of a Thinkpad with a discrete GPU and fast CPU, I decided that I would ignore that segment of the market in favor of the small and light category.
Damn threads like this always bring out hordes of certain types of posters. For me though it's OpenBSD, I don't trust Linux any more. PRC's a little too heavily involved in the project. I can only imagine the back and forth between their operatives and the NSA's, sometimes it flares up on the LKML to the point where it glows brighter the sun.
I will never buy a Apple laptop again because Apple stops supporting it after a while and you can't install new version of the OS on it and new software. This is a deal breaker for me, completely a waste of perfectly fine hardware. Installing Ununtu on it solved all problems fortunately. Same thing with Apple AirPort TimeCapsule, such a waste to buy it when Apple stops supporting it after a couple of years. You might as well buy products from Apple and get the delivered directly to the garbage dump
Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.