zlacker

>>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.

>>mid-ki+H5
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.

>>stormb+8b
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all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place.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>?