- Nvidia drivers have no per-app settings (I use that) and few settings in general
- It’s unclear if gsync works
- Window movement and scrolling is 30fps-ish despite the RR is 144hz; tearing
- I hoped for better ui scaling, turned out it only has 1x and 2x(4x) as “clean” options. On a 1440p display everything looked either too small or too big
- Couldn’t set up the mouse pointer to just do what my mouse says (it has metal pads and “precision” rug, all movement is linear) (custom drivers windows-only)
- Sleep function couldn’t deep sleep, only blanked display
- No chance to get random hw like usb wifi to work
- No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools
Ymmw, but when it does not, it’s a rabbithole not worth falling into.
Sad thing is, I’m far from being a newbie. I was an administrator for a whole small office of bsd/linux boxes for few years. You can imagine the volume and the depth of that job. There’s no “can’t do” option. I can solve or at least dig deep into these issues, but after getting this experience and year after year failed attempts to get it right I had to say “no more”. If it doesn’t work as is, for me it doesn’t work at all.
But you’ll probably be fine if your hardware, software and use cases are as standard as can be.
> I hoped for better ui scaling, turned out it only has 1x and 2x(4x) as “clean” options. On a 1440p display everything looked either too small or too big
Mint ships with DEs that aren't great at supporting modern features like fractional scaling. KDE is my preferred choice of DE these days. In fact, I am skeptical on recommending Mint with very new hardware (if this hardware is new).
For me I have a generally opposite experience with my machines, but as you said, it's probably cause of my hardware. I avoid NVIDIA nowadays since I don't trust them with Linux, and generally don't buy unusual or fancy hardware for that same reason.
> No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools
As for fan control, at least on AMD GPUs while I was still still running Mint, I needed a script to get fan control to work. https://github.com/dasunsrule32/radeon-scripts. Bright side is that it isn't proprietary, while dark side is it isn't as intuitive as something like MSI Afterburner unfortunately.
As of now my desktop (which ran Mint) now only runs Windows because I uninstalled Mint thinking it had problems when it was actually RAM. But I also recently got back into Linux with Fedora running KDE Wayland on my ThinkPad since I needed to get a macOS VM working (on the Windows side apparently only Windows 11 can do this properly but I dislike Windows 11), and I am generally pleased with the experience apart from my fingerprint reader not working. Though I don't know if I will stumble into another roadblock again that has nothing to do with the distro itself.
Sleep doesn't work consistently on Windows either, so avoiding Linux won't solve anything. You'd have better luck with Macs.
As for proprietary tools from hardware vendors, that's exactly the kind of software that users don't want. It's literally the whole point of this article. OC / monitoring / fan control should work with standard tooling. It should never require bloatware with flashy "gaming" UIs that advertises its presence in the taskbar and phones home all the time.
Also, as much as I enjoy tinkering with my computer, I'd throw it out the window in frustration if I ever feel the need to manually control the fan while using it.
The specific software I'm using is far from tfa. It help with setting up fan curves and OC settings immediately without rebooting to BIOS and then rebooting again to test these settings under a load. It doesn't even have tray/bg mode.
Same for mouse setup. It's just a bunch of controls that should have been in standard settings of both OSes. Because having a precise pointing device and not being able to turn off some pre-defined "pointer enhancement" bullshit built into an OS is just stupid. These "accelerations" stopped making sense ages ago. I find it ironic that a Proprietary RGB Gaming Mouse Manager actually turns off enhancements and gets off the way.
About sleep, well. Never seen non-working windows sleep myself, neither heard about that from anyone I know. But on linux it is among things that I never even expect to work, regardless of hardware (unless it's an old mid-tier bestseller).
The difference in our experience likely depends on hardware preferences, mainly main board and graphics card. But I'm not going to add another level of insecure pickiness to purchases or to replace around $1-1.5k total in PC parts to maybe please an OS. I know proprietary hardware is not linux'es fault, but if it doesn't work, it does not.
My advice to tfa is to just never buy HP, which is a definition of scam.
- Nvidia drivers have no per-app settings (I use that) and few settings in general
- It’s unclear if gsync works
- Window movement and scrolling is 30fps-ish despite the RR is 144hz; tearing
- I hoped for better ui scaling, turned out it only has 1x and 2x(4x) as “clean” options. On a 1440p display everything looked either too small or too big
- Couldn’t set up the mouse pointer to just do what my mouse says (it has metal pads and “precision” rug, all movement is linear) (custom drivers windows-only)
- Sleep function couldn’t deep sleep, only blanked display
- No chance to get random hw like usb wifi to work
- No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools
Ymmw, but when it does not, it’s a rabbithole not worth falling into.
Sad thing is, I’m far from being a newbie. I was an administrator for a whole small office of bsd/linux boxes for few years. You can imagine the volume and the depth of that job. There’s no “can’t do” option. I can solve or at least dig deep into these issues, but after getting this experience and year after year failed attempts to get it right I had to say “no more”. If it doesn’t work as is, for me it doesn’t work at all.
But you’ll probably be fine if your hardware, software and use cases are as standard as can be.