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
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.

>>Teknom+17
I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers, but you mentioned that you do kernel dev, so it makes sense. 5.15 is "stable", at least on gentoo.

>>genewi+4G4
> I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers

Distro maintainers certainly, unless you're Gentoo, Arch, or one of the other mostly-bleeding-edge rolling release distros. The "stable" kernel is whatever the current release is and "longterm" kernels are typically the last major kernel version released in a given year.

https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

Most distributions pick whatever the latest longterm kernel is when they cut releases. Sometimes they don't and things get strange, such as when Canonical chose kernel 4.15 for Ubuntu 18.04, requiring them to maintain an unsupported kernel themselves. IIRC that was because a bunch of AMD CPU and GPU support was added in 4.15.