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.
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.
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.
For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/
I thought lvfs ( https://fwupd.org/ ) had fixed that.
- 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
Notably, the latest Dell XPS is certified.
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/...
https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...
[1] - https://www.aircrack-ng.org/
[2] - https://www.kali.org/
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.
- 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.
(Side note: intel refers to the sound card, not the CPU.)
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.
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...)
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)
Also works on AMD but did get crashes sometime and sometimes need to boot into Windows to reset audio….
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.
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.
Just look for yourself it's really not hard to find: https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/linux-systems
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.