zlacker

>>tonyst+(OP)
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.

>>london+E5
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.

>>trelan+Y6
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.

>>pessim+fm
> Companies that sell laptops with preinstalled Linux are far more often than not just selling rebranded "windows hardware."

What examples do you have of this?

>>trelan+pQ
Dell did that.

>>p4bl0+wj1
Which models did they do that with? I'd heard the xps with Linux was pretty good, at least for a while.

>>trelan+8C1
Yes, most XPS and Latitude laptops.

>>p4bl0+AZ2
What were the equivalent white box vendors and did they ship with the same firmwares? Citation to read up in this?

>>trelan+iq3
I don't understand what you mean by "white box".

Just look for yourself it's really not hard to find: https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/linux-systems

>>p4bl0+W36
Sure, I can look up Dell Linux products. However, the assertion was that they're just branded white box computers, so Im asking what the white box equivalents are, and to what extent they're really equivalent.

>>trelan+ii6
I didn't understand it that way at all. The assertion, as far as I understood, was that the Linux machines were the same ones that were sold with Windows on them otherwise. Which is true, Dell sell the same hardware with Windows or Linux.

>>p4bl0+KP7
Ah, I see your claim.

Is the firmware confirmed to be the same? Even with the same chips, the firmware would likely diverge between Windows and Linux (ACPI code, BIOS, EC, etc)