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.
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.
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.
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.
Until there is no NVidia's legacy GPU/video card inside that laptop.
so long as one doesn't need a working fingerprint reader, otherwise too bad
It is: Pop!_OS
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.
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.
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.
Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...
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!
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).
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.
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.
Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's all a little random on how well different internal components decide to play nice.
I've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/
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.
Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
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.
Love this lol
Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly.
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.
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
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.
Buying a laptop that came with windows and installing linux is not the way we should do it these days.
Give me 5' with such an OS and I will find at least 20 things which are broken.
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.
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.
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.
BT is a trainwreck.
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.
The worst seem to be gaming laptops, non-Lenovo Chinese brands, Asus, etc...
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.
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.
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.)
Well, I can share that it works out of the box with Panasonic toughbooks, at least.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
I love it because these days I have less time to fiddle with it every six months.
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.
Instead, there should be an actual list of well supported devices and people should buy only them.
I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.
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.
It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.
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]
I thought lvfs ( https://fwupd.org/ ) had fixed that.
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.
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.
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)
Hah Acer's actually work pretty great. No funky hardware, BIOS, etc...
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.
- 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Trackpoint sideways scrolling not working (works fine with libinput), inexplicably high power usage, wifi disconnects...
Notably, the latest Dell XPS is certified.
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..?
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).
- 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.
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...
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.
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.
Try MX Linux on old hardware, it's awesome.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.
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
Wubi installed the whole distro into a local file on your drive + it worked natively.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
(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)
I can’t even windows, it just doesn’t anymore
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.
https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...
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?
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.
[1] - https://www.aircrack-ng.org/
[2] - https://www.kali.org/
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" .
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.
Do you know if that situation has improved in the last year or so?
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
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.
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.
I run debian stable on my headless desktops/television and testing on my laptops. It's so easy it's boring.
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.
Been coding on my Linux VM for the past two years without a single hitch.
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.
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.
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.
ROFL
I dumped my recent dell Linux laptop for a M1 Mac. Not my preference but at least the Mac works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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
- 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.
The title of this post is "Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>?
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)
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.
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.
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.
...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?
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."
* 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.
As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
Evidence: 1 data point, my own 11-year old laptop
This article is not notable.
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.
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.
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.
Note: do not expect bleeding edge hardware to work 100% well, it takes some time (~3-6 months).
The solid experience on modern laptops is there, you just have to spend 10 minutes researching compatibility on the laptop before you buy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not the users fault. Every other major OS handles this situation.
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.
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.
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.
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...
The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.
- 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.
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.
"The Linux works in a 11 year old ThinkPad, so it works easily in any computer" is a quantum jump to conclusion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I only used Void Linux on it; maybe it's different with other distros.
(Side note: intel refers to the sound card, not the CPU.)
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.
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.
All OSes have these issues. Windows and MacOS are no exception.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, I have a problem with too much sound. The damn thing has a pc speaker that I cannot completely get rid of.
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.
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
Work Sony Vaio also worked perfectly. But seen quite a few people with other that had problems.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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".
Sure? This is exactly the thing that Wayland was supposed to solve. Only X has one DPI for all screens.
I still use X because I'm on FreeBSD and I even got multi-screen multi-dpi scaling to work there, with xrandr settings but indeed it was not fun. In Wayland it should be click & play though.
It's also pretty amazing that there are now some major-vendor Linux-out-of-the-box laptops. But the pool is still not all that large.
I was just looking at an Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Google suggests ... nah. Very un-boring.
E.g.
https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/63549/linux-on-zenboo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wv2c28/anyon...
Fun shit like "keyboard doesn't work yet" plus various other nothing-surprising-to-me-after-doing-this-for-20-years stuff like weird audio driver patch crap.
It's not real multi-DPI no but effectively it does work. Does require a pretty decent GPU to render all screens at 200% before it scales them down though.
I was using microk8s (a kubernetes distribution) on the wsl side, and I had python scripts (also on the wsl side) which would deploy things into it, run tests until there was a problem, forward a port from the broken service to "localhost:8080", and then instruct the user to open a browser to explore the UI post-test-failure.
On bare metal Linux this was no big deal because "localhost" was unambiguous. But on windows you end up with the browser on the windows side and the forwarded port on the wsl side, so when the browser opened there was nothing at "localhost:8080" even though I could "curl localhost:8080" from the wsl side and get a response.
Presumably there is a way to further forward the port so that it is available to both Windows browsers and wsl python scripts, but I never found it.
It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.
To be clear, the OP of this thread stated the following with regards to Linux:
>...Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken...
These things are what is being discussed, and they are not broken on macOS and Windows. You could not easily find 20 of these things "broken" in 5 minutes on a random setup given to you.
Most Linux threads inevitably derail into people complaining that macOS/Windows don't work exactly how they want, and then go on to label those platforms as "broken". That is not "broken" though, and simply nitpicking. You can throw a rock on this site and find plenty of examples of it.
Supposedly upstream electron has fixed this but I'm yet to see a single electron app that works. Maybe they just haven't updated electron.
For example when I move my mouse from my 192 DPI screen to my 96 DPI screen, the mouse position translates in physical pixel, not in physical location. So at the bottom it matches but near the middle of the 192 DPI screen it stops going to the left (it already ends up on the top of the 96 DPI screen going from the middle of the 192 DPI screen) and becomes an 'invisible wall'. Even in Windows 11 they didn't bother to fix this :(
The only OS that had a good transition to multi-DPI capabilities was macOS and that's really because Apple doesn't care about legacy and forces app devs to update their stuff. But it's not just Linux that's having a hard time with this.
But I didn't know this was a specific problem. I'm not using Wayland yet and won't for the foreseeable future. I'm on FreeBSD and KDE on Wayland has been broken a long time. When I hear this it sounds like a good decision anyway :)
I think largely these days people just plug less stuff in, printers, scanners, other odd gadgets are less common so its really just USB mass storage devices and video outputs getting physically plugged in. Otherwise everything else is controlled over wifi with a phone app.
Running Linux on laptops since the late 90's. In the beginning I had to tinker a lot, compile custom kernels, etc.
Now - for the past 10 years or so - it (especially Redhat's Fedora) just works without doing anything, even with the newest laptops.
Wayland is not quite there, yet (IMHO), so I'm still running X11 (thankfully Fedora let's me do that).
And all the time, I have to fight the Microsoft way of doing things ... Worse the Apple, Microsoft push really hard to force me to do things their way. Eg. initially and after upgrade, it defaults to save everything on the MS cloud - NO, I have a perfectly good cloud of my own and don't want to pay MS extra.
What examples do you have of this?
Even sharing with the help of various 'portals', e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-gnome or xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
It 'simply' takes some arguments at runtime. Below are what I use -- taken from my Sway 'start on login' script [some is superfluous]:
ElectronThingHere --silent --enable-gpu --use-gl=egl --enable-features='VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiVideoEncoder,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer,UseOzonePlatform' --ozone-platform=wayland
You can also replace --ozone-platform=wayland with --ozone-platform-hint=auto for less strong-handed encouragement
I use quite a few different Electron-driven things on Wayland. Discord is the only one seemingly refusing to update their Electron base... and getting free Wayland support
If not for them I'd remove XWayland support entirely from my Sway configuration
KDE's upcoming release in October should hopefully be addressing this by allowing you to disable the bitmap-based scaling.
If you want the "works so well it's boring", go with X11. The one exception, as you note, is multi-DPI, which has native support in Wayland.
For Wayland, there are (depending on DE/compositor) some specific issues or inconsistencies, like the scroll speed you are mentioning. Personally, I also have qt5 apps being all over the place with window placement under wlroots. There are times when you'll need to look up some environment variable to make an application or toolkit behave properly.
So if you're in the high-DPI+low-DPI scenario, yeah, it still takes some effort. For anyone else, I think OP holds.
My pick for a "boring stable desktop" stack:
* Dist: Your preference of Fedora/Debian/Arch. (Mint, Pop, and Endeavour acceptable derivatives)
* DE: Budgie/XFCE/MATE/Cinnamon
For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most. On Linux I get better window tiling than on Windows, and shortcuts for navigating directly to a virtual desktop, and no shenanigans with WSL2 having a separate memory pool from the rest of the OS. And I don't feel like the entire OS is antithetical to how I use a computer like with macOS.
But a bunch of more mundane things become a lot more fiddly or flaky. E.g., this week openSUSE Tumbleweed pushed out Gnome 43 before any of my extensions got marked as compatible and now they just won't work for a little while. That's easier for me to live with when the OS is well suited for me most of the time.
Perhaps, it's a hardware issue?
btw HWE isn't even the best "ubuntu flavored kernel" in terms of hardware support.., there are the OEM kernels designed for Ubuntu certified laptops (such as XPS 13 Developer Edition) which get newer kernel versions and drivers faster than HWE, you can install them on any Ubuntu with regular apt ("apt install linux-oem-22.04" for example) ...
I've had multiple Thinkpad T-generations from T410 to the latest. Sometimes it does works flawlessly out of the factory at purchase.
This time, it did not. The 12th gen Intel CPUs have a heterogeneous design with traditional "P-cores" and low-power "E-cores". I'm suspecting the reason I see terrible performance is that the CPU scheduler does not handle this efficiently and assigns the wrong task to the E-cores.
Also the Intel WiFi does not even get detected. Have not dug deeper into that yet.
Anything > ~6(Intel) ~12(AMD/Realtek) months old tend to work smoothly out of the box, IME.
Our experience with local k8s dev is the issues are more on the k8s distro side. So at least for local dev, I'm guessing the happier path is sticking with KinD approaches wrt WSL2. Our wsl2 docker testing was successful, even w GPUs, and bc of the file system seperation, felt more like native Ubuntu docker's imperceptible overheads vs the painfully slow OS X docker overheads (ex: npm run watch taking minutes vs seconds)
I don't like Windows, but that statement seems incorrect.
Seriously, going back from a performant arm64 to x86 feels like going back to the POWER architecture all over again. Big bloated chips where every little computation generates a lot of heat and you need big fans to dissipate all of it.
I wish I could do the same, although in the lower end, with my Raspberry Pi 4. Sadly, those laptop cases for the RPi are too expensive, if you include shipping, to justify them.
No, it's really just them. They worked hard to earn that bad press. It's not even that they keep pre-installing malware, but how they've handled it when they're caught speaks volumes.
When the truth about superfish came out first they fiercely denied there was any security risk to anyone ("we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns”), then eventually they admitted it was a problem and said they'd stop shipping devices infected by it, but continued to anyway more than a month later (https://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/information-technology/20...) and the instructions they gave users for removing the offending software still left systems vulnerable while giving people a false sense of security. When they were caught doing that they issued new instructions and those still left users vulnerable!! (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/lenovo-ap...)
Decades ago one of the most important benchmarks of Linux distributions was they were all higher performance using less resources than the original Windows that came with the PC.
If you have a PC with only 1GB of memory which still works fine with XP or W7, most distros are now unusable.
How do people typically learn to debug kernel issues on their hardware? It seems like actively promoting widespread knowledge of the practical methods would benefit the community.
It is a community-developed project, so it only really needs to appeal to developers. What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy. Other platforms do this sort of thing because their entire reason for existing is to satisfy customers.
Yet, I'm still occasionally struggling with hardware compatibility and Ubuntu package manager issues. And I won't even complain about that one time I was foolish enough to set-up ZFS on a laptop: after all, it was offered in "Advanced Settings" tab and I should've known better. Suffice to say, that buying basic consumer-grade hardware I still cannot assume that it will work reasonably well with Linux.
Honestly, I'm almost for real offended by someone daring to say not having to spend my life solving Linux problems should be qualified as "boring" — especially when it's not the case, and when I still often find out that stuff that had me struggling with it for hours, days, or even turned out to simply not work on Linux at all — is basically plug-and-play on Windows. I mean, if you think about it, there's no reason to expect it not to be the case, but it is exactly the headlines like that, that trick you into believing this and buying stuff before meticulously googling everything and making sure it can be used with Linux in the first place (which is often not Google-able as well, when it comes to a bit less common items, than, let's say, top-100 products on Amazon).
That does not matter. If they have one really good model, that's enough for everyone.
>Dell has been shipping linux for decades now
I'm an Apple hater, like a vegan hates rare steak. Yet, I'm much more likely to buy my next gear from Apple than Dell. Where do I begin? For starters, everything I've bought from Dell starting with a Latitude D850, all the way to the Xps 13 I bought in 2020 and a 32 curved monitor in 2022, they were all faulty. In a large organization that with 30,000 laptops used by their employees, the IT department loves Dell's support: anything breaks, they will fix/replace it in 24 hours or a few hours depending on your guaranty level. But for me? I prefer it to work well to begin with. My Asus N550 worked for me for 7 years and it was top notch until the bed broke and destroyed it. I've never had a dell product that had zero problems. The latitude would flicker for minutes if for whatever reason screen went off and on. The xps's webcam stopped working and would randomly connect in certain angles of the lid. The laptop was advertised to support linux, but there was no fingerprint reader and when they released it, it was Ubuntu only. The monitor starts to flicker randomly and the replacement they sent me has a corner with ~100 pixels showing whatever they like, waiting for a second replacement.
Never Dell again.
Gotta say this issue sounds minor compared to not being able to set the scroll speed.
Always kind of aggravating to see posts like OP saying how great linux is as a desktop, ignoring how horrible it is in general across a broad range of hardware. And apparently even direct from dell, in my case.
edit: BTW experienced dev using linux VMs, baremetal, and WSL for 15 years. I love linux as a dev, but I will never touch it again as a desktop OS.
Both the VM and the host runs Docker and containers. The host also runs k3s (Kubernetes single cluster) continuously for me to do various container running comparisons vs plain Docker.
With me logged in watching Netflix in a browser full screen it gets around 1.5 - 1.75 hours.
I guess if I were to just stream full screen without the VM running it'd run somewhat longer.
Lol thats rich. They did it like 2 or 3 times for the windows laptops they sold most of the time not part of the thinkpad line. So yeah. Long history it is. You also have a long history of making bad comments then?
MacBook laptops feel great to use, their Keyboards, their trackpads, their screens, their battery lives are unparalleled - but MacOS is such a compatibility nightmare. No Vulkan support makes gaming difficult, no kernel support for containerisation makes using development tools like Docker cumbersome.
Apple are total dicks for locking down their hardware so tightly and refusing to support efforts to extend support to other OSes.
+1 if you're looking for some anecdata. The thing that finally pushed me from Windows to Linux was a privacy setting not actually being persisted (after a long battle to find the relevant settings). The fact that some wireless network cards don't work yet is definitely a rough spot, but I can also just buy a new one or write a driver, whereas getting Windows to care about my privacy or MacOS to care about basic usability with respect to keyboard remapping or window positioning seems unnecessarily daunting.
The future for linux on the laptop is here, just unevenly distributed.
Both on Fedora 36 KDE.
First of all, adjusting scrolling speed is not an "uninteresting polishing related task," it is a basic standard of usability.
Secondly, if you don't think Linux on laptops should be broadly usable by the general population, you are in the wrong thread. The central point of the HN post we are all commenting on is the usability of the Linux desktop ecosystem on commodity laptops.
Emulating graphics hardware (GPU passthrough) with qemu is a pita.
You want to emulate Android apps, the best solution (Waydroid) only works on Wayland. Though this wouldn't be a problem if Xorg wasn't holding out. And Nvidia had played nice with Linux.
Memory and OOM situation management is a sham and another pita just waiting to bite. This could make you lose all your windows and in some cases even data as the solution involves forcing a reboot from your machine.
I could go on and on.
A lot of improvements have however been made in the usability aspect, main one being flatpak packages. But there's a terribly long road ahead to make Linux desktop feel less of a second-class citizen compared to other operating systems.
Though it has nothing to do with Wayland before the flamewar starts, it’s just libinput and gtk maintainers not agreeing upon whose responsibility is it to handle scroll events (it is gtk’s though, libinput doesn’t have enough context to implement kinetic scrolling, so it really should be the framework that adds semantic meaning to an event stream)
Swaywm has the ability to set this (you have to edit the config file). It seems weird that gnome or whatever you use lacks this option. Although, gnome has a lot of t's to cross and i's to dot, maybe they just haven't gotten around to it.
A "poorly designed" MacBook is probably better than a laptop running Linux with a myriad of misbehaving functionality.
Also works on AMD but did get crashes sometime and sometimes need to boot into Windows to reset audio….
Can you produce a HN thread about desktop linux computing without a fair number of complaints about how desktop linux is broken?
I'd love for Linux to be my primary day-to-day OS. I try out several distros every year -- nix, arch, elementary, ubuntu, popos. None of them have been smooth for my use case of:
* Casual gaming
* Web browsing
* Voice/video calling
* Text editing
In my most recent install, some video games would work with Steam's proton, until it suddenly stopped working. I'd have to open my command line and look up `bluetoothctl` docs to connect my headphones. Windows would stop rendering when any window manipulation was occurring. Sometimes my display server's login screen would not appear (my screen would be black), so I'd have to guess when to put in my password when booting up.
It has certainly gotten better in the last few years, but I would not recommend it to anyone unless they are wanting to delve into technical topics.
You can check into git so you have a history of changes?
So you can copy the config to another machine?
There are lots of reasons why text files are the preferred format to store configuration in.
Other than perhaps a slight performance boost, why do we want settings in a non-human readable database?
Hell, even Microsoft are starting to use json config files for stuff like Windows terminal because they know people like to be able to quickly copy and edit settings.
In my world, running perfectly means, runs at least as good as windows.
Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.
And I doubt that.
Not because windows is so awesome, but because hardware manufacture write and optimize their drivers for windows. And linux is a way smaller market and one with intentional no stable driver ABI (to force the vendors to open source their drivers).
That is the situation. And it sucks, because I do not like to use windows, but I need my mobile devices to be reliable.
Recent example; someone gave me a cf19 which had a dodgy battery; it had the official Panasonic windows install with the Panasonic drivers and optimiser and the battery went from full to 0% in about 15 minutes; I did a windows 10 install, again with the official drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did a windows 10 install without drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did Ubuntu install with my post install script and get consistently 3.5 hours. Yes, I know this is a weird case; I bought a new battery by now and still get the same behaviour; no clue what’s up. I thought it was funny though because ‘windows better battery life’ people.
And this always happens; my x220 runs 8+ hours under Linux while barely getting to 4 under windows for the same work. GPD pocket 1 runs over 10 while under windows getting not even 4. And these are the ones I use all the time for work. I consistently see this and have no clue what people are doing who claim windows has better battery life; must be much different workloads. I use i3wm (which I believe makes all the difference; with Unity, battery life gets slashed by up to 80%), code in vscode and vim and browse in Firefox; but I do that under windows as well.
It "just works" until I decide to view videos online, and despite all my hacking efforts, keeps using software decoding for videos.
It "just works" until I try some 3D stuff that requires GL 4.1, but the AMD open source driver for the GPU only does hardware acceleration up to GL 3.3.
Sleeping "just works" until I wake it up and is in such a frozen state that only taking the battery out makes the booting process work again.
Yeah it just works.
Not a great feeling.
> Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown"
Which as I can't practically turn it off (the linux laptop is owned by $work) is a massive pain.
Meanwhile the 2014 retina has a standby time of >3 weeks, and if the battery gets too low, it goes into hibernation.
which leads me to my original statement; "the fuck it does"
(I should point out that I've been using linux since the late 90s, and whilst I use it everyday, I still don't really think its good on laptops. Its better, but not good.)
You are talking about the configs being stored in text files. The comment you are responding to was talking about being forced to edit text files to configure.
Yours is about the format of data representation and theirs is about UX.
The first step of not forcing users to edit text files is having sensible well thought out defaults. If I have to think about configs the designers of the app failed me.
The second way to not force the users to edit text files is by having a well thought out gui for the kind of changes you might want.
The format of how the config settings are stored is almost orthogonal to this questions. And yes, you are right, a text based format is preferable over a properitary binary one.
The Windows mouse thing has been somewhat fixed in Win11 22H2, where you can now even move your mouse to the side "above" the other screen and it will still move there.
As for apps working seamlessly, I'm really not convinced. Not even the taskbar works well. If you change the DPI while it's running, the taskbar icons become blurry. The initial start menu (on first click) adapts fine, but then if you start typing to search something, the results are a blurry mess. Edge has weird artefacts in the tab animation after a DPI change, where half of the icon moves at a different speed. IntelliJ has funny fonts, with some of them huge, others tiny.
To me, the killer feature of MacOS when it comes to multi-DPI setups is that it remembers the per-screen-per-setup DPI. In my case, my PC has a 14" 1920x1080 screen. When I use it alone, it's much closer than with an external screen. I like it in 100% mode. When I plug in the screen, a 32" 4k, they're both much further away. They have roughly the same DPI (by design - I mostly use Linux) so there's no "matching" to do, but I'd like both of them to be at say 125%. Tough luck. If I change the laptop's screen to 125% while the external screen is plugged in, it will stay at 125% when on its own, too. MacOS would remember that with this screen it's 125%, alone it's 100.
At one point I was using two 24" screens, one 1920x1080, one 3840x2160. I've tried messing around with settings, until I ended up on xrandr scaling as being, basically, the only solution. Five minutes later, the low-dpi display was in the closet, because I couldn't stand the blurry fonts.
Linux users don't have to either. (Linux devs do.) Another thing they don't have to do is searching vendor site for drivers which may not even be installed correctly.
Of course not! That doesn't mean they hate Linux, just that they aren't delusional about it's level of hardware support.
Things that I care about are display/graphics, webcam/mic/audio/video, a working suspend even if I have to resort to hibernate, media keys on the keyboard, and a usable trackpad.
Things I don't really care about is probably the fingerprint reader.
From the ArchWiki this seems to be a go, but I'm still a bit sceptical.
Some higher end devices of course need it (esp. in the biometrics department), but rest is automagic now, as far as I experienced.
But indeed YMMV here.. There is no way to use non-anti aliased fonts at small sizes this way. For me it is fine, I would set it up the same way anyway but I forgot it's not for everyone.
Sure, but for me as an end user, it's irrelevant who's fault of this bazaar engineering endeavor it is that very basic quality of life features from Windows/MacOS do not work on Linux.
As a dev I understand the struggle why this and many other stuff doesn't work right on Linux, but as a consumer/end user I don't care about their internal feud and I expect the product I use to have basic stuff like this working out of the box.
Most things work. I didn't setup mic and audio, because being Deaf I couldn't be bothered. Suspend is very nice. There's hibernate, too and hybrid suspend/hibernate (first suspend and if battery is too low, hibernate). With sway you setup media keys yourself. I didn't bother. I only configured screen brightness and screenshots. Trackpad is okay. Don't expect Apple's smoothness. First it was very jerky till I found out that Firefox fell back to X11.
The good: very configurable and mostly working
The bad: it takes a lot of time to configure everything
The ugly: kinetic scrolling is per application so all applications do this differently
Also, unfortunately the bazaar style of development sort of begets this kind end-user experience. Some people like it, others don’t. I change between OSX and Linux quite often nowadays, what I prefer in the latter is that I actually have a chance of fixing problems, not just wait around and pray to the Apple/Microsoft gods that they may have fixed the issue in the next multi-GB update. Also, piece-by-piece, free software often beats out proprietary offerings’ alternatives, it is usually the experience together with the whole stack that is lacking. E.g. pipewire may well be a better sound stack than that of the other two OS’s.
What did I attack and which false claims did I make?
>what I prefer in the latter is that I actually have a chance of fixing problems
What I and most consumers want is a product that does not require fixing or learning how to fix things. I and most other people don't want to play sys-admin at home despite having cut my teeth in it and making it a career. I work in cybersecurity so all our workforce is fluent in linux which we daily drive at work and yet at home everyone of us only uses Windows and/or MacOS on our personal machines with only one guy using Linux religiously at home.
When even experienced linux users don't want it in their personal lives that says something. Even though we know how to fix things but our free time is much more valuable. Nobody likes a desktop that stutters and ruins your immersion and productivity, especially if you're running a system that costs several grand.[1]
Maybe when the hardware manufacturers can work with the bazaar engineers and finally agree on something and work together with the desktop environment devs on how to make Wayland a fully feature complete drop in replacement for X11 with no rough edges, quirks or issues and have feature parity, smoothness and polish to Windows/MacOS, we can finally have the "year of the (polished) Linux desktop". Until then, I and most consumers will continue to use whichever OS provides the best experience with least amount of friction.
But a proper installed windows, without bloatware and updated drivers, always won by a large margin.
And the bigger showstopper are standby/hibernation. Touchscreen glitches etc.
So I have 2 devices, one lightweight chromebook. A bigger windows laptop and manjaro on the desktop.
I very much prefered to have manjaro only.
I gave a potential explanation to why some people may still prefer Linux, understanding well why others don’t.
How long in months was “really quickly”?
Other hardware can be sketchier, but I've found power handling much more reliable on Linux than Windows. It just works on my Linux boxes, whereas my Windows machines I would regularly notice that my previously suspended laptop was 130F+ roasting its bag and emptying its battery, or I'd find it completely dead after the same thing had happened and I didn't catch it in time.
I completely stopped using windows in the 8.1 days (forced telemetry was the last straw). I can't imagine dealing with the sorts of gaslighting you are experiencing.
Happily, a combination of steam proton and dosbox run dos / windows games on my Linux desktop more smoothly than native ever did, and that was my last missing use case.
I bought one of those once (an Acer Cloud Book), and it was great. Not high end though.
The OOM situation is a dumb systemd thing. Presumably some distros will ship working setups.
I haven't had any problems with Majaro. I've been using Linux since the pppd days, but the last time I tried (2019?) it took me over a day to get Ubuntu LTS's DNS client to resolve sites in under thirty seconds. YMMV.
Also, Devuan isn't bad for single user setups.
Some distros support rejecting touchpad events for N seconds after the last keystroke. That is 100% software, and sort of works for even the worst touchpads.
Edit: Oh, you mention Ubuntu. I gave up on them a long time ago. Devuan works well if you want old-school Debian. Manjaro works well if you want a stable "modern" desktop environment (like Ubuntu used to provide) with menus for hardware configuration, user session switching, etc.
Out of the box linux experience is actually quite good. Performance loss I can handle, but standby-resume reliably introduced touch screen bugs and other annoyances. Or did not wake up at all. I actually just recently gave up with linux on it and installed windows.
(which was surprisingly a big huzzle, I had to resort to third party software to get the right windows drivers. But now it runs way better - and more importantly, more stable.)
The “looks like resolutions” work by setting your screen to the resolution it claims to be multiplied by two, and then downsampling the image to your native size. Depending on the resolutions involved, the screen might feel a bit blurry. On Windows, setting an intermediary scale changes the way the UI is drawn, while keeping your native resolution.
The only laptops I have ever owned that didn't have this problem after some fashion are Apple laptops, so I guess my expectations were fairly low on this topic.
I even made my own manjaro (arch linux) version. So I have a USB stick with all my setup and programms, I can plugin and go hacking on any computer. Or directly install it. Takes only 3 minutes ;)
Of course that is freaking awesome.
Sway is an example of a Wayland compositor, that is an actual piece of software, and has a config file.
> input <identifier> scroll_factor <floating point value>
> Changes the scroll factor for the specified input device. Scroll speed will be scaled by the given value, which must be non-negative.
My older Mac Mini can't do the HDMI handshake after booting. If the AV receiver isn't on when the computer boots, it will never use full display resolution or play audio over HDMI.
The idea that Apple products do anything "absolutely" is silly fanboyism.
The two-finger gesture scroll speed seems to be at a fixed speed, and way too slow for my liking.
I would like it to scroll faster than the mouse movement speed.
Try out Memtest86 - I think it's also usually an option in the boot menu on Ubuntu live-DVDs.
Let it run overnight, I've had crashes like that before where the RAM only starts failing after a few hours of memtesting.
Well, how did it go for you to try and run MacOS on non-Apple hardware?
Maybe, sure you get a better experience with hardware supported by Linux. But that's a lot of bias in your opinion.
Thanks for that, I'll make a note to how to use a computer.
Meanwhile this is Linus Torvalds opinion on Nvidia https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEyMTc
Nvidia driver issues is a public, well-known challenge when it comes to Linux.
I have tried Linux a few times over the years. One test was for almost 2 weeks on vacation, in a developing country, where it wasn't safe to be walking around with a MacBook. Another was for a few days as a Linux home theater. After struggling for hours with the sound drivers I gave up. I was frustrated with the amount of trouble shooting involved with Linux. That combined with preferring the OS has kept me on MacBooks for the past decade+.
The "black screen for a couple seconds" thing is still there, you just don't notice it, and once a game has "started" the discrete GPU, you can seamlessly switch back and forth.
some people are mentioning that "i can't believe it took 10 years for this to get fixed" - however back in the late 90s this exact scenario was the most common power gaming setup, with 3dfx cards you'd have 3 cards, two 3d cards with SLI, and a 2D card, usually an intel. The same black screen for a couple seconds, and switching between the desktop and a game had the potential to break things.
The "automatic" switching between igpu and discrete was managed on windows before 2011, because i had a laptop with that setup in 2011 and it would detect 3d applications and use the discrete for that, or you could force one gpu or the other, if you wanted.
I guess next step would be Memtest! Thanks for the reminder.
Try to uninstall Edge. Try to disable ALL of the tracking. Try to disable updates. Try to install it from scratch onto a computer without creating a Microsoft account. Try to remove all of the non-windows mandatory apps without a 3rd party software or a cheat code to run in powershell that you got from some website somewhere.
Windows is user-hostile because in order for it to maintain its business dominance it HAS to treat all of its users as if they are naturally stupid and technically challenged in order to ensure that the most people possible can use their software so that the most businesses will buy their software since their employees can use it.
Just look for yourself it's really not hard to find: https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/linux-systems
Fingerprint scanner might not be Linux’s “fault” (whatever that means) but fact is I can’t use it on Linux.
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)
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.
UPD: Fedora 36
Lenovo ThinkPad x61s Lenovo ThinkPad x220 Lenovo ThinkPad x230 Lenovo ThinkPad Lenovo ThinkPad x1 DELL Latitude E7450 and similar
Problematic:
Lenovo ThinkPad x240 - hypersensitive touchpad makes mouse pointer jumpt while writing text