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[return to "Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring"]
1. mid-ki+H5[view] [source] 2022-09-24 17:38:51
>>tonyst+(OP)
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.

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2. ASalaz+J9[view] [source] 2022-09-24 18:04:29
>>mid-ki+H5
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.

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