I've been using Linux for decades on workstations, servers and laptops. I love Linux. I'm super grateful for Linux. I can't imagine living in Windows. I don't want to be trapped by Apple. Even through my gratitude-colored glasses, Linux leaves a lot to be desired.
I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile.
Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes. Out of 4 laptops in 7 years, the only one that supported this incredible future technology was my Lenovo Carbon X1, the two Dells and the Asus all repeatedly tried to commit head-death suicide in my backpack.
My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland.
It's the worst operating system in the world, except for all the others.
Long time linux user here. I often hop between my work windows machine, home linux desktop, BSD laptop and macOS laptop.
I can nitpick and find issues with all of these systems. I think there is a bit of a little saying that sometimes go around that, "all OSes just suck." On Windows 11, I've got ads, inconsistency between different windows provided by Windows (some have the newer UI look and some are still stuck with their Windows 7 like when adjusting print settings or advanced settings), and I can never get Bluetooth headphones with a mic to just work consistently (same with my co-workers). On macOS, the reorganization of settings have sucked for a number of settings, clicking with my mouse half the time does the view where it shows all the applications in my virtual desktop view (don't know the proper name of this) and having to augment macOS with Magnet. With Linux, some of the pains you've already mentioned. And of course those are same what even worst on desktop BSD. If I sit down I can probably think of more for all the platforms.
At the end of the day, all of them suck, its just a pick your pain. So just as you said, each one is the worst operating system in the world, except for all others.
Believe it or not, I finally bought an all AMD machine with decent driver support, and everything still works in Debian. Even closing the lid to sleep. Haven't tested hibernate, cause sleep works great and reliably. Even has incredible battery life and performance. I can hardly believe it.
Thank Microsoft for sleep just working, it's using "modern standby" which keeps the CPU and stuff running on lowest power rather than some "special magic mode". You're essentially killing peripherals, killing all but one core and parking it on some low mhz.
Initializing hardware is hard, reinitializing hardware is harder, so now when chips are power focusing we can just ignore the annoying steps :)
Laptops have been successfully closed to sleep, and inserted into backpacks for literally decades.
My 2024 Lenovo X1 Carbon has not ever woken up and tried to commit heat-death suicide.
I am quite sure this isn't a widespread problem with Apple products.
I can't imagine what the hell people are even doing with laptops if they don't consider close-to-sleep, wifi and bluetooth bare minimum functional requirements.
Umm, not that well. I've had audio playing and after closing the lid, the audio continues to play. At times, I wonder if it's really asleep or not. You don't really know until you open the laptop (I guess I could measure power draw).
I totally feel you on this, and have spent a lot of time yak-shaving similar stuff, especially Linux laptops.
IMO one of the best reasons to prefer to buy/use a laptop from a Linux-first laptop company (Framework, Tuxedo, Slimbook, Starbook, System76, etc) is a better chance of sleep/suspend working properly. Even then, though, with the abandonment of S3 and the push for S0ix, it can mean that even "properly" working sleep can basically drain your battery overnight (sleep-to-hibernate can be set, but can be complex). For those interested in characterizing their laptop battery drain in Linux, I wrote a utility to help: https://github.com/lhl/batterylog
For Wifi + Bluetooth, I've found always swapping to an Intel card to be the best bet for stability, although BT still is always hit or miss for me.
I had some crazy intermittent crashes on suspend w/ one of my dev laptops, turns out that was a problem Nvidia introduced w/ their v550 drivers at the beginning of the year that still hasn't been fixed yet. That was pretty maddening: https://mostlyobvious.org/?link=/Reference%2FHardware%2FRaze...
if it makes you feel better, I only use windows, and none of my computers (laptops or desktops) sleeps/hibernates properly. Most of them work most of the time. Some none of the time, and none all the time.
This is the thing that annoys me most about my Windows laptop (the highest end dell "desktop replacement" that cost me more than my MacBook did). I've never had this particular issue with any Mac I've ever had (I've lost count how many these were, but surely double-digit by now).
All of these problems are Windows problems too. I don't get why Linux gets all the hate for it.
> I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile.
I had a Windows laptop that came with broken wifi and bluetooth as well as a BIOS-enforced wifi card whitelist that prevented me from swapping out the wifi card.
> Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes.
Yes, so does my Windows laptop. It's why I always shut it down completely before going anywhere.
> My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland.
An NVIDIA update gave people with my laptop model a blackscreen. NVIDIA only fixed this half a year or so later.
It's pretty unfair to compare Linux to Microsoft. Companies develop their software and drivers for Microsoft Windows. They don't necessarily do the same for Linux. Which means volunteers have to reverse engineer things and sometimes they don't work right. There is just no way around this at 4% marketshare.
Agreed. But if a company is selling a laptop with Linux preinstalled on it (Dell and Asus), they damn sure ought to verify that the basic feature set works (i.e., Wifi, Bluetooth and it sleeps when the lid closes).
I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile.
Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes. Out of 4 laptops in 7 years, the only one that supported this incredible future technology was my Lenovo Carbon X1, the two Dells and the Asus all repeatedly tried to commit head-death suicide in my backpack.
My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland.
It's the worst operating system in the world, except for all the others.