[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... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-24 23:00 UTC)