[HN Gopher] Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it's boring
___________________________________________________________________
Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it's boring
Author : tonystubblebine
Score : 401 points
Date : 2022-09-24 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (clivethompson.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (clivethompson.medium.com)
| [deleted]
| synu wrote:
| I must have been unlucky, I battled what felt like endlessly with
| sound and video card issues until I just switched back to Mac.
| boredemployee wrote:
| I miss the old slackware days where nothing works
| londons_explore wrote:
| I have the reverse...
|
| _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.
| ssivark wrote:
| 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)
| chickenimprint wrote:
| 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.
| trelane wrote:
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| What is "Windows hardware"?
| codewiz wrote:
| Hardware sold with Windows preinstalled, by vendors who
| won't support anything else than Windows. I simply avoid
| them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| > 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| After 20 years of luck with Linux on many laptops, I couldn't
| get any Linux to Microsoft Surface 3 Laptop.
| tomrod wrote:
| Aren't those just surfaces with a keyboard -- like, same
| bespoke hardware and similar?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've got a Zenbook flip, I'm really impressed with the Linux
| performance. It even doesn't suck too badly as a tablet,
| which exceeds my expectations.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| 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.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > but even having to install new firmware when you are using
| Linux can cause major headaches and worries.
|
| I thought lvfs ( https://fwupd.org/ ) had fixed that.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| 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.
| odysseus wrote:
| 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.
|
| A good post on why Linux has so much trouble waking is:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25386605
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I've also had a recent Thinkpad X1 with Ubuntu and had
| several major issues, for example no working microphone for
| the first 6 months.
| teawrecks wrote:
| 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.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| 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...
| mod wrote:
| I have an HP gaming laptop. Zero issues running ubuntu.
| Detects my SD card reader and everything.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Recent Asus zenbooks seem to have a decent reputation.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Not in term of reliability from what I understood.
| chickenchicken wrote:
| Thinkpad T400 G2: the fan keeps running in full speed
| randomly.
| vetinari wrote:
| I had the original T400; the issue was Intel Turbo Boost.
|
| At the time, the workaround was to disable Turbo Boost, but
| as far as I remember, it was fixed eventually and the
| workaround was not needed anymore.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I mean, that's getting near the age where it's a miracle it
| even turns on any more...
| wolfram74 wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| jolmg wrote:
| > Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware,
| you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box
|
| Well, I can share that it works out of the box with Panasonic
| toughbooks, at least.
| just_boost_it wrote:
| I got a Lenovo and it worked with no issues with pop os.
| fithisux wrote:
| It is good it works well so that you can design hardware with the
| FOSS that is free as in "freedom"
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| The laptop: "It's an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol' thick
| brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for
| $200."
| idealmedtech wrote:
| My old workhorse T530 is now a home media center, and it's
| snappier than ever, even with KDE and all the window effects!
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
| loeg wrote:
| The T420 is old enough that even FreeBSD works well on it.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| 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.
| bxparks wrote:
| 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.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Could there be a more correct choice?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Sure, but it also works perfectly on modern equipment like the
| Zenbook I bought last year.
| noirbot wrote:
| Meanwhile, my Framework Laptop that the Fedora OS team is
| specifically developing for has had busted microphone drivers
| for months.
|
| It's all a little random on how well different internal
| components decide to play nice.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Is it because of their switch from a realtek chip to tempo?
| It's broken on Windows too ...
| https://community.frame.work/t/no-driver-for-tempo-audio-
| chi...
|
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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.
| f1refly wrote:
| So it's the best kind of laptop available on the market!
| LoganDark wrote:
| That's cool, tell it to Linux 5.18.11 which will not detect my
| ELANTECH i2c trackpad even if I use allyesconfig
| mid-kid wrote:
| 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.
| iaaan wrote:
| 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).
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| 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.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| 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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > 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.
| uluyol wrote:
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Ubuntu with the HWE kernel is basically rolling release for
| drivers, which seems like the best of both worlds.
| the8472 wrote:
| you also want recent userspace for some components, e.g.
| mesa or libinput
| spadros wrote:
| 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.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| If you are using a converter to change HDMI to your DVI
| monitor then that is probably why.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| 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.
| vanviegen wrote:
| 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.)
| marcodiego wrote:
| My Inspiron-3421 bought in 2013 never had a single issue
| with HDMI.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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).
| doubled112 wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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).
| nijave wrote:
| 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)
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| Well the distro push to use wayland isn't helping the case.
| abrouwers wrote:
| Well, Wayland is "new.". Why not use X if it doesn't yet fit
| your needs?
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| Koshkin wrote:
| To be fair, "normal people" do not run Linux on their
| laptops...
| oefnak wrote:
| Except that this is exactly what the post is implying.
| Koshkin wrote:
| No, the post is talking about the "windows system," not
| Windows :)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Wayland just generally is missing config files...
|
| 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...
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| 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
| bee_rider wrote:
| Generally those config panels write to files for you (how
| else would their changes be persisted?)
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It indeed used to be supported before Wayland. I don't
| develop Wayland though, and if I did then it would look
| very different from how it exists now.
| joombaga wrote:
| Agreed. It's a sad state of affairs. And unfortunately
| Wayland is the only way to get mixed-DPI with proper scaling.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| 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
| EUR10). 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.
| mid-kid wrote:
| 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.
| mbreese wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't think that Linux should support any hardware,
| especially if its vendors do not provide drivers and
| documentation.
|
| Instead, there should be an actual list of well supported
| devices and people should buy only them.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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.
| SyrupThinker wrote:
| 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).
| andix wrote:
| 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.
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| Isn't the developer xps sold through their website?
| wooque wrote:
| 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.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| 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.
| meibo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Definitely not going for Dell hardware again.
| Delk wrote:
| 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.
| stormbrew wrote:
| 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.
| koofdoof wrote:
| Snappy Driver Installer has an offline driver package made
| just for that situation that I've found quite useful.
| ccouzens wrote:
| > 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.
| emkoemko wrote:
| 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>?
| [deleted]
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| 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.
| vjk800 wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| I only buy laptops with official OEM Linux support these days.
| Loic wrote:
| 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.
| a-dub wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Disagree, used to use Dell Inspiron and some cheap HPs,
| found nothing extraordinary.
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's more of a chance than the norm, then.
|
| My Dad's Lenovo Ideapad comes with a soft-raid of two
| SSDs for example, since a faster and twice bigger would
| be much more pricey.
|
| Also, I've seen non-standard GPUs, tons of broken BIOS
| tables, vendor specific devices with weird quirks and
| whatnot over the years.
|
| Maybe these things still happen but newer kernels know
| how to deal with this better, I don't know.
| dapids wrote:
| Cheap HPs are not elitebooks for one, and two an inspiron
| is not an XPS. I've used both elitebook and XPS with zero
| issues.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| a-dub wrote:
| 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.
| petra wrote:
| What laptops brands do you buy? Why?
| teva wrote:
| Framework laptop is a good option as well.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| EFreethought wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mid-kid wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| Being an AMD instead of Intel, the motherboard is different
| which means the whole laptop is different.
| daliusd wrote:
| X230 meanwhile requires turning some exotic feature in BIOS
| if you want suspend to work properly
| andrewshadura wrote:
| I don't think it does, maybe only some builds, as my X230
| worked with no issues and no extra settings anywhere.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Ubuntu: Except for Bluetooth and audio, and sometimes it
| forgets there's a wired Ethernet port I have to down/up the
| interface with `ip`.
|
| BT is a trainwreck.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| 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.
| vlunkr wrote:
| 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.
| geniium wrote:
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Yeah, no. My XPS13 which I bought basically when it came out
| works great with the pre installed Ubuntu 20.04.
| otikik wrote:
| 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.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| 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.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| 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).
| pessimizer wrote:
| Debian? Ubuntu? Mint? Linux is mostly it just works
| versions unless you're only looking for the trendy new
| thing.
|
| I run debian stable on my headless desktops/television and
| testing on my laptops. It's so easy it's boring.
| mafuy wrote:
| I run debian stable on my headless desktop and I could
| not get sound to work
| mid-kid wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://ubuntu.com/certified/201808-26387
| Tozen wrote:
| 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.
| lozf wrote:
| What's the other >5%?
|
| Surely not *BSDs?
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| Windows users don't have to reverse engineer anything before
| their hardware works.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No shit. The hardware vendors do all the work for them.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Users don't care who did the work, they only care if the
| device functions or not.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Then they should buy a Mac and have the Mac store
| associate explain how to change their diapers
| pxmpxm wrote:
| 2022 YOLD right there
| autoexec wrote:
| that's because new hardware is made to work for windows.
| Few companies care about linux drivers
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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?
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| matthewrobertso wrote:
| >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".
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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"
| lostmsu wrote:
| IMHO, the fact that you need a kernel patch for a key LED is
| what holds Linux back.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I am assuming the above is sarcasm, but... for the record,
| for the HP Mic Mute LED, the "Windows" driver was:
|
| 1. Crashing regularly for most of the early Windows 10 era,
| leaving users with a frozen mute LED,
|
| 2. Was found to contain an actual keylogger. Yes, the driver
| as shipped by HP and signed by MS had malware.
|
| Google "mictray64.exe" .
| ollien wrote:
| 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.
| pxeboot wrote:
| 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.
| rtpg wrote:
| yeah seconding the X1 thing. The battery life is a bit
| wanting but I have more issues on my desktop than on my
| laptop at this point
| caskstrength wrote:
| With TLP installed and properly configured? Strange,
| battery life of my x1c tends to be as good or better as on
| Windows.
| nobiggie457 wrote:
| The battery life of hidpi monitors is often much worse
| than the same machine with a lower resolution monitor.
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| csdvrx wrote:
| 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.
| snemvalts wrote:
| 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.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| Agreed. That's why I turn to r/unixporn to vicariously live
| through alternate setups.
| afroisalreadyin wrote:
| 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.
| j7ake wrote:
| How's the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| My System76 lemur pro gets 14 hours.
|
| https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
| mdeepwell wrote:
| Lemur has really great battery life in my experience. For
| example, 1 hour of watching a video stream in a browser uses
| < 10% of the battery.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > 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).
| sayitenough wrote:
| eddieroger wrote:
| 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".
| csdvrx wrote:
| > 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?
| aarpmcgee wrote:
| 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.
| JoeQuery wrote:
| PopOS is wonderful. I highly recommend.
| delta1 wrote:
| Pop!_OS
|
| Very annoying to type
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> PopOS (I know there's some absurd punctuation involved in
| the name but I don't remember what it is)
|
| It is: Pop!_OS
|
| https://pop.system76.com/
|
| It basically a customized Ubuntu with perfect driver support
| for System76 hardware.
|
| I use it on a 2015 Meerkat
| (https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat) and it works great.
| brightball wrote:
| I just bought a Meerkat and it's incredible. I love this
| thing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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!
| brightball wrote:
| Really?
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| lioeters wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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!
| jeromenerf wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| 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.
| inamberclad wrote:
| Everything except bluetooth...
| tclover wrote:
| 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.
| sayitenough wrote:
| stoplying1 wrote:
| 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.
| btdmaster wrote:
| Have you checked ArchWiki? For example, it provides the kernel
| command line for enabling all speakers on the y530:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_IdeaPad_y530
| stoplying1 wrote:
| Unfortunately, that didn't help. Fwiw, I have a Ryzen not an
| Intel, not sure if that module name is a misnomer though.
| btdmaster wrote:
| 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.)
| vondur wrote:
| That's usually the case with these types of hardware on Linux.
| Super new or exotic hardware may have little or no official
| support.
| aarobot wrote:
| No audio device at all is detected on my Lenovo IdeaPad 5.
| (running Arch Linux)
| oblak wrote:
| Is it an intel one? I have a 16 inch one with 5800H and audio
| has been working since day. Running Manjaro, since I am just
| a dumb user.
|
| In fact, I have a problem with too much sound. The damn thing
| has a pc speaker that I cannot completely get rid of.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Try setting up Pipewire, that's what's working for me in
| Fedora on the same hardware.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| i'm using linux for the first time after years on an old laptop
| from 2011; it's such a pleasure! everything is so smooth and
| functional
|
| Try MX Linux on old hardware, it's awesome.
| Saris wrote:
| I have the opposite experience, desktop or laptop I've never had
| Linux work well out of the box.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| 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?
| geoffbp wrote:
| Year of the Linux desktop
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| Uhm, how about suspension/hibernate? That was pretty lame even 2
| years ago and I'm not seeing it improve
| hpcjoe wrote:
| 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).
| masklinn wrote:
| 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.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| 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.
| windows_sucks wrote:
| works flawlessly on my X1 carbon
| number6 wrote:
| I so want a X1, got a E13 to travel and I am waiting for an
| upgrade for my work laptop
| csdvrx wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bloaf wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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.
| drdec wrote:
| 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.
|
| I'd appreciate any tips on either issue.
| thomaslord wrote:
| 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...
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| > Linux on the laptop
|
| > 11-year-old Thinkpad T420
|
| This guy better be trolling.
| aborsy wrote:
| I have been running Ubuntu on laptops for over a decade. No major
| issues, at least as of past 8 years. Great hardware
| compatibility.
| blowski wrote:
| 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.
| noirbot wrote:
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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.
| alias_neo wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| jonas-w wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo
| pizza234 wrote:
| To an extent, there is; Ubuntu holds a list of certified
| hardware, including laptops: https://ubuntu.com/certified.
|
| Notably, the latest Dell XPS is certified.
| wyldfire wrote:
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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."
| hpcjoe wrote:
| 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.
|
| [edited to fix HP laptop brand, Omen, not Open]
| KaiserPro wrote:
| The fuck it does.
|
| I have a lenovo t14 something or other. I have to fiddle with the
| bios to get suspend work. This means that the battery lasts about
| 4 days.
|
| However whenever it resumes, the touchpad appears to only work at
| 5 frames per second.
|
| Moreover, its impossible to hibernate with secure boot.
| tadfisher wrote:
| 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.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| 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.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| 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.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| I installed ZorinOS on a laptop from 2010 and it works like
| magic!
|
| It's a bit slow because the software it's running is all new but
| man does Linux feel nice to use on old hardware.
| app4soft wrote:
| > _Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it's boring_
|
| Until there is no NVidia's legacy GPU/video card inside that
| laptop.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| 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
| PS120. 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://www.aircrack-ng.org/
|
| [2] - https://www.kali.org/
| liampulles wrote:
| Bluetooth on linux continues to suck however - it sucks a bit on
| windows too but it has been unusable on a few of my linux
| laptops.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| 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.
| blooalien wrote:
| 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| _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).
| mminer237 wrote:
| The worst thing about broken touchpads is that they're
| impossible to turn off in Ubuntu:
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-dis...
|
| 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.
| wazoox wrote:
| Weird, I'm running Pop_OS which is a Ubuntu fork and the
| trackpad button just works (not that I use it at all anyway).
| jspaetzel wrote:
| 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.
| factorialboy wrote:
| I run Gnome based distros on Thinkpads and Dell XPSs and they are
| the breeze to setup and use.
|
| Nvidia drivers are always a concern, apart from that in all ways
| superior to Windows OSs on these same laptops.
|
| Personally i find myself more productive with my Linix
| workstation but the M1 Mac I use for official work is also quite
| good.
| kache_ wrote:
| 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.
| cdata wrote:
| 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.
| nsilvestri wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| > _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:
|
| https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/
|
| https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/
|
| https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Love this lol
| mdaniel wrote:
| > works so well
|
| so long as one doesn't need a working fingerprint reader,
| otherwise too bad
| woodruffw wrote:
| I agree largely with this (as another T420 owner). My only
| problem is finding new, high-quality battery packs.
| hotcrossbunny wrote:
| Absolutely this!
| kernelcurry wrote:
| 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.
| fefe23 wrote:
| vander_elst wrote:
| 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.
| khnov wrote:
| 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
| sofixa wrote:
| Evolution worked pretty well last i used it (up until a year
| ago roughly).
| batmanturkey wrote:
| Funny, same reasons why I don't windows and just Linux.
|
| I can't even windows, it just doesn't anymore
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| > 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
| raffraffraff wrote:
| ...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")
|
| - Chromium crashes on YouTube
| (https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640)
|
| - Firefox ESR doesn't play sound on most YouTube videos
| (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/109185/some-...)
|
| - 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| Well, author threw a dice and won.
|
| Work Sony Vaio also worked perfectly. But seen quite a few people
| with other that had problems.
| jagger27 wrote:
| 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?
| major505 wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| > 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)
| lbayes wrote:
| 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
| tmtvl wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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.
| kache_ wrote:
| Get a laptop that is sold with Linux. Don't expect Linux to work
| with literally everything. Drivers.
|
| If you get a modern xps or thinkpad it'll work just fine. But
| your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco. Maybe not :P
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco.
|
| Hah Acer's actually work pretty great. No funky hardware, BIOS,
| etc...
| nichohel wrote:
| 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.
| lucideer wrote:
| Thesis: "Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly
| well these days."
|
| Evidence: 1 data point, my own 11-year old laptop
|
| This article is not notable.
| gigel82 wrote:
| 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...
| Eleison23 wrote:
| 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!
| ant6n wrote:
| 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.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Hello fellow T580 user. Writing this from Arch. Never had a
| single issue.
| number6 wrote:
| Sad to hear that. I hope you will find your way back again.
| lioeters wrote:
| If they're anything like a typical software person, they will
| likely be running Linux on that Windows anyway.
| badrabbit wrote:
| 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.
| marcodiego wrote:
| How to get linux on your laptop without any issue: buy a good
| laptop from a reputable vendor that comes with linux out-of-the-
| box.
|
| Buying a laptop that came with windows and installing linux is
| not the way we should do it these days.
| cjohansson wrote:
| 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
| Snacklive wrote:
| 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
| somecommit wrote:
| The only thing restricting me to use it at home is the lack of
| parental control.
| irusensei wrote:
| 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.
| justinzollars wrote:
| Except it eats battery. I would not recommend Linux on a laptop
| under any circumstances.
| t-3 wrote:
| I was getting 12 hour battery life on a Macbook Air running
| Gentoo a decade ago... things have only gotten better. You're
| way off base here.
| justinzollars wrote:
| I had a System76, and the thing ate battery. Had to sell it
| and go back to a mac because it wasn't usable.
| raisin_churn wrote:
| 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.
| ok_dad wrote:
| 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.
| patrulek wrote:
| Boring because you dont need to waste hours for configuration and
| troubleshooting not working drivers?
| albertopv wrote:
| 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.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| I highly doubt that Microsoft did that and more likely her
| little brother or somebody else who used the laptop and didn't
| told her did it.
| albertopv wrote:
| 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.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| "... she's not tech savvy..." - well, I guess we found the
| culprit. You did let her use it with full admin rights,
| didn't you?
|
| I recommend go to local policy and enable full audit for
| everything. When this happens in the future you'll have a
| clear picture of who/when/what.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| adverbly wrote:
| 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.
| sfvegandude wrote:
| 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?
| mkl95 wrote:
| I love Linux on the laptop. I previously used it on a desktop
| computer for many years and the experience wasn't nearly as good.
| zac23or wrote:
| The most dificult thing to believe is the Ms Teams working
| without problem.
|
| "The Linux works in a 11 year old ThinkPad, so it works easily in
| any computer" is a quantum jump to conclusion.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Linux Teams, _kind of_ worked OK..ish.
|
| 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.
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| 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.
|
| I don't miss Windows at all.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Surface Pro 2017 trip report:
|
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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".
| mukundmr wrote:
| 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...
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| "Software is exists" and "my camera works" are pretty low bars.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| 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.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Yep, writing this on Linux laptop. And this is not thinkpad.
|
| Note: do not expect bleeding edge hardware to work 100% well, it
| takes some time (~3-6 months).
| trm42 wrote:
| 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.
| ufmace wrote:
| 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.
| Hellion wrote:
| The rallying cry of the Linux desktop enthusiast: "well, it
| works for me!"
| bitexploder wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I prefer it to the MacOS mating call of "you didn't buy the
| right cable!"
| blooalien wrote:
| 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.
| Hellion wrote:
| This comment is exactly what I mean.
| blooalien wrote:
| 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?
| Hellion wrote:
| Still making my point for me, thanks!
| NegativeK wrote:
| 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.
| blooalien wrote:
| 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(tm) 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.
| batmanturkey wrote:
| 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?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Same for Mac users when people are struggling to use MacOS on
| a hackintosh or windows people trying to install windows on
| an android tablet.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| rvdginste wrote:
| > 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.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Anecdote time. I have a gaming laptop from Asus, 2022 model. It
| keeps hard crashing on Windows (both 10 and 11) while working
| fine on Linux.
|
| Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| mdtusz wrote:
| 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...).
| blooalien wrote:
| 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.)
| blooalien wrote:
| 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).
| robocat wrote:
| 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).
| zfxfr wrote:
| 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
| stakkur wrote:
| Ah, cue the long thread of "No because my special combination of
| hardware/special configuration demands caused problems so Linux
| bad!"
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This has not been my experience.
|
| 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.
| habibur wrote:
| Things changed sometime circa 2018.
|
| Previously I had to check and ensure online if the laptop runs
| linux and then buy it.
|
| Now I don't. I just buy it, and know it will run linux.
|
| Fedora distribution is the most compatible one that I have found.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| christophilus wrote:
| Pretty happy with my XPS and Fedora. I switch to X for gaming,
| and use Wayland for day to day usage / programming.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Ooh I'll try Fedora. Thanks!
|
| 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.
| bbertelsen wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| lioeters wrote:
| > every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year)
|
| Haha, nice - I imagine it's satisfying to have a reliable and
| reproducible setup. Just curious, do you sell the used ones,
| or give them away..?
| none_to_remain wrote:
| But can you print?
| [deleted]
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Neat, I haven't read one of these stories since I stopped reading
| Slashdot in 2008'ish.
| rhyn00 wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1] Tuxedo Computer (notebooks)
| https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
| [2] Pulse 15 gen2 : https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-
| Hardware/Notebooks/...
| Klonoar wrote:
| Another vendor to mention is Star Labs, who make the StarBook.
| Unlike most vendors they fabricate their own designs - not
| rebranded clevo shells.
| rhyn00 wrote:
| Wow, I'd never heard of StarBook, but it does indeed look
| like a wonderful machine.
| lukaszkups wrote:
| 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)
| prmoustache wrote:
| WSL do not works well with my company's vpn software and last
| time I checked there was an awful lot of limitations.
| noasaservice wrote:
| 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.
| netmonk wrote:
| 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.
| fredrikholm wrote:
| 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.
| seqizz wrote:
| Get a new xps, and let's talk about compiling 5 different things
| to make webcam work
| flerchin wrote:
| Precision 5570 is a dream on linux. I have not a single
| complaint.
| pharmakom wrote:
| How nice for OP.
|
| Just a handful of my issues:
|
| - only one speaker works so volume is low
|
| - finger print scanner doesn't work
|
| - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine
|
| - suspend and hibernate doesn't work
|
| - random freezes
|
| - charging indicator unreliable
|
| - trackpad wrist filtering is very poor
|
| - boot failures after OS updates
|
| 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?
| [deleted]
| wazoox wrote:
| > - only one speaker works so volume is low
|
| I had this problem too on my old XPS, it's hardware, not
| software. Linux cannot magically fix broken cables.
|
| > - finger print scanner doesn't work
|
| There is no driver for the common Chinese fingerprint readers.
| That's hardly Linux fault.
| avl999 wrote:
| > - only one speaker works so volume is low
|
| Never had this issue.
|
| > - finger print scanner doesn't 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.
| pharmakom wrote:
| What is your point here? How does you great Linux experience
| help those it didn't work for?
| avl999 wrote:
| 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.
| eointierney wrote:
| 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 :)
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| 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.
| g42gregory wrote:
| 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.
| otikik wrote:
| Better monitor, perhaps? Apple has had exclusivity on retina
| displays for some years, although I think that was over now.
| g42gregory wrote:
| 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.
| _nalply wrote:
| It's not boring.
|
| 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.
| mikece wrote:
| 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.
| bagaswastu wrote:
| Yes, and I don't want to spent my time dealing with bad
| drivers, so that's why I'm using Windows instead.
| batmanturkey wrote:
| Funny, bad drivers are one of the reasons I left windows.
| Even needing drivers for class compliant USB audio was a
| dealbreaker
| stalfosknight wrote:
| I haven't had to concern myself with drivers, kernels, proper
| sleep behavior, or any of that other low level bs since
| switching to a Mac in 2006.
| jb1991 wrote:
| That is in fact exactly the point the article is making, in
| fact it's the subtitle right on the page.
| isodev wrote:
| 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
|
| https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| semiquaver wrote:
| 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.
| trelane wrote:
| 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.
| chx wrote:
| 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_.
|
| MFC devices break all the time.
|
| And so forth.
| jryan49 wrote:
| 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.
| brink wrote:
| ITT: bunch of whiners that didn't pick hardware that was proven
| to be compatible with Linux before buying.
|
| The solid experience on modern laptops is there, you just have to
| spend 10 minutes researching compatibility on the laptop before
| you buy.
| FZ_BA wrote:
| 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.
|
| But I believe it's a great O.S.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| 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.)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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?
| CoolCold wrote:
| I'd like to know on your use case more, if possible. Not sure
| I've ever need to forward port or I probably read your
| description wrong way.
| jay3ss wrote:
| WSL 2 is the only thing keeping me from dual booting Linux on
| my Windows 10 machine. I want to dual boot, but it can be quite
| a pain to get it going
| roboben wrote:
| 2022 is the year for Linux on the desktop.
| eBombzor wrote:
| 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...
| onehair wrote:
| 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.
| kristjank wrote:
| 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.
| onehair wrote:
| 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
| unpopularopp wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0, https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi
| btdmaster wrote:
| UNetbootin[1] still works fine last I tried it.
|
| [1] https://unetbootin.github.io/
| unpopularopp wrote:
| But that sounds like a totally different use case.
|
| Wubi installed the whole distro into a local file on your
| drive + it worked natively.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Wow, I wish.
|
| I've been using a couple of ryzen laptops (an HP with a 2500u,
| then an HP with a 3700u) for about 5 years.
|
| It works pretty well, except:
|
| When the laptop wakes up there's a good chance that the UI shows
| up but I can't click on anything or type.
|
| I can then reboot by holding Alt-SysReq and typing REISUB.
|
| Or: The screen is still black, and nothing works, as above.
|
| I can run games, though if I play something like GTA-V, it will
| eventually get too hot and I have to hard reset.
|
| This is because the fan control doesn't properly work.
| wazoox wrote:
| 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).
| sk1pper wrote:
| 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.
| fyloraspit wrote:
| 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.
| whatever1 wrote:
| 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.
| wormer wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| Can you name a kernel with more robust hardware support?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Windows for starters. Also the title claims that things work
| well not that linux is the best.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Which consumer laptops are there out there with Power or
| RISC-V chips?
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > PowerPC/RISC-V
|
| The person you replied to didn't mention those and there
| aren't laptops with those CPUs anyway, so this is just
| goal post shifting nonsense.
|
| > but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow
| Microsoft's analogs out of the water
|
| I don't think that's true at all and you didn't link any
| evidence.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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)
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| They all work on mine. Maybe you've got a terrible laptop.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| > 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.
| sunshinerag wrote:
| >> Windows's fan profile can be switched between "VTOL
| takeoff" and "entirely silent but slow as hell".
|
| ROFL
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > OS that has actual hardware support.
|
| Give me 5' with such an OS and I will find at least 20 things
| which are broken.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Trivial nitpicking is not the same issue as hardware support.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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."
| [deleted]
| hcrean wrote:
| And you can complete this task remotely...
| lima wrote:
| 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...
| prmoustache wrote:
| My gf windows laptop takes 25 min to be usable at boot time,
| same laptop runs well from a live fedora running from an
| sdcard.
| kyruzic wrote:
| You're right, but that doesn't mean it doesn't mostly just
| work.
|
| All OSes have these issues. Windows and MacOS are no exception.
| mariusor wrote:
| > 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| As a Linux user it's important to understand that people
| don't care whose fault it is- they want to use their
| computer. I can respect that.
| mariusor wrote:
| If one feels like they have an opinion to give on the
| matter I would imagine they invest at least a modicum of
| reflection on the subject.
| dgan wrote:
| the "my mum/grandma/grandpa asked me to reinstall their
| Windows" should be meme by now
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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.
| pizza234 wrote:
| 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.
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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.
| eBombzor wrote:
| MS teams works in the browser...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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.
| azangru wrote:
| Medium :-(
|
| Does anyone have a link to the full text of this article?
| jjulius wrote:
| Just slap the URL into the box at archive.is
| mdaniel wrote:
| replace the "medium.com" with "scribe.rip" for a pure(?) html
| version: https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-
| works-s... or evidently 12ft.io also works as submitted by the
| sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606)
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Very nice, Thanks for above / mentioning scribe.rip , today i
| learned, you deserve one
| mdaniel wrote:
| I believe this is where I first learned about it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838053
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Does the link not give you the full text, or is there a
| different problem? I don't know what your frown means.
| semireg wrote:
| Linux on the laptop instantly triggers nostalgia.
|
| 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.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| yakubin wrote:
| OOM killer is a pseudosolution to an artificially created
| problem.
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/
| smoldesu wrote:
| Then don't use it. Most distributors don't enable it by
| default for a reason.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > 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.
| yakubin wrote:
| Yes, but that still leaves the problem, which shouldn't
| exist in the first place (edit: and on Windows doesn't).
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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?"
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Neat thanks for the pointer! I'll definitely follow MGLRU
| with interest.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > Linux starts trashing
|
| 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.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| I've turned off swap, it still happens.
|
| It's not the users fault. Every other major OS handles this
| situation.
| varispeed wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| On the other hand I absolutely can blame an OS for not
| letting me set a minimum amount of memory for the disk cache.
|
| Even if I disable swap, when Linux gets very low on memory
| you get the exact same symptoms when it starts discarding
| increasingly-active program code.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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.
| weberer wrote:
| It sounds like you're running without a swap file. You should
| really enable that.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| 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).
| theomega wrote:
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.c...
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