Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.
Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.
With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
I have yet to find a device it doesn't work on. I've never had to mess about with the kernel params or do anything clever with fans except install the sensors package and run it.
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.
I had a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and still had many of the problems you mention and more:
- 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.
Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters.
Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing.
Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX on commodity Windows hardware.
From everything I've read, ThinkPads (IBM/Red Hat devs seem to use them), Acers (have pretty standard parts, nothing funky), Dells and HPs (both have Linux dev laptops) all seem to run pretty well.
The worst seem to be gaming laptops, non-Lenovo Chinese brands, Asus, etc...
That has been my experience too. Even then if you get a next generation thinkpad that is slightly newer than what has been "blessed" by the community, there is a good chance that a lot of essential hardware won't work. Fortunately, in the case of Lenovo they do actively track issues with hardware and issue new bios versions that fix compatibility but even having to install new firmware when you are using Linux can cause major headaches and worries.
But isn’t that basically “good enough” if you know you want Linux and can either afford the latest thinkpads or are okay with a slightly bulkier older Thinkpad?
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)
I slapped Arch Linux on a new HP 2 in 1 and everything except for the fingerprint reader worked out of the box, including the stylus. Not even a single controller of my weird Chinese 10-port USB-C dongle refused to work.
I've been running manjaro on a dell xps 15 2-in-1 without issue for about 3 or 4 years.
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.
I have an Acer Aspire and a self-built PC and both of those work just fine with Linux. All the hardware drivers work on both of them no problem. I didn't even build the desktop FOR linux, it just works when I run it.
Good catch. The traditional problem (from the era before T420) is waiting for the kernel to catch up with the new hardware, for any kinks to be shaken out.
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.)
Had it not died I would still have used my 2013 MacBook Pro. For many use cases computers stopped being slow a decade ago.
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.
I find the comments so strangely defensive. How can one even start to compare MacOS, which needs to support exactly one (1) vendor with less than 10 models with a kernel with the widest hardware support on the planet? Noone would test-drive a new car and expect all the buttons and dials to still be at the same exact positions, but when it comes to trying out a different OS, it sure seems like lots of folx assume it's going to be just as their old one.
The immense improvement in documentation provided by ArchWiki, ThinkWiki, Gentoo Wiki and wiki.instalgentoo.org shouldn't be understated. Almost all models are documented to the point where 30 minutes of research will teach you everything you need to know about the hardware and its capability to run whatever distro you want to.
Going from a ton of older Dell models, then to a T420, to a T450s, to a T530, most of the features I ever needed as a developer and netadmin have always been readily available, with the rest of them being delegated to cloud services and/or remote (sometimes virtualized) machines running a Linux distro or a BSD.
Windows has the definite advantage of being a market leader with the longest run in the history of personal computing, but there is definitely something to be said for the immense development that the *nix side of things has been exhibiting compared to 15, 10 or even just 5 years ago.
The year of Linux desktop and laptop is still far away, but at least we're seeing goodwill both from software and hardware vendors, and it would be a real shame we throw the good trends away at this point in time.
No one is arguing that Mac has an advantage in the game, that people are working hard on *nix. It's just irrelevant if your goal is to have a laptop that just works.
No it does not. Give it to me for 5’ and I will find at least 10 things that are broken. Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken.
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.
I recently streamed some OuterWilds (great Myst style mystery / puzzle game) on Linux with Wayland and OBS. The game is only officially available for Windows, but Steam's work on emulation has done a lot for Linux. Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. 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. I was quite amazed it all worked so well. But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.
I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices.
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.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn't have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there's numerous speakers, some of which aren't active under Linux, and/or a similair issue with woofers. I've tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I'm running 5.19...
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.
I just received my Framework laptop recently, installed Fedora 36 + KDE Plasma, and even though it took some tweaking to get a close to my Mac behaviour, it works perfect. I had 0 driver problems. So it looks like Linux on the desktop seems to be getting there.
And the best part, with this laptop, no shop needed to replace the battery, I can do it myself.
Yeah, even a broken clock is right twice a day. OP got lucky with some crusty laptop and drew a wildly expansive and inaccurate conclusion.
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 indeed, I've been using Linux full-time since 2012, with a brief exception in 2016-2017 when I was working for a company that was all-in on Apple.
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.
I would add that the linux-ready boutique vendors like system76, tuxedo computers, framework are also options if you don't want to fuss with drivers and what not, but still want to run linux. I definitely agree that linux doesn't run super smooth on all hardware, but it's not hard to find hardware these days where it does run smooth.
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).
We burned an evening just last week tracing an Intel wifi driver issue to missing kernel headers that required upgrading the kernel to a new, non-LTS version. And only then did we move on to Nvidia drivers.
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.)
To make a long story short: I bought a laptop to run Microsoft Office a couple of years back. Being a Linux user, I quickly became frustrated with Windows. Being a slightly rabid Linux user, I bit the bullet and installed Linux on a machine that was not purchased with Linux in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked well. Office was a dual boot away, but that was the price to maintain my sanity.
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.
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.
I don’t know about that but I appreciate some things about Linux, specially the fact that the OS is not creepily trying to sell you something. I have an Asus G513 that I bought specially for Linux. It a Ryzen laptop with a discrete Radeon card. Nice performing machine, although its easy to thermal throttle it so tunning thermal profiles is often necessary. Its not perfect but it works.
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.
In 2018 I was in college, working on a Linux degree, and studying for certifications such as CompTIA Linux+. I had allocated some funds to purchase a new machine; my desktop was already over 8 years old and I obviously wanted a good machine I could bring to campus.
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!
After years of Linux and Mac, I was issued a Win 10 machine at work. I don’t know how anybody voluntarily uses that. It’s like instead of fixing bugs over the last 30 years, they just keep adding new ones. And also make the whole experience more bloated, more confusing, more slow and still kinda ugly.
I've been running Linux on Dell XPS laptops with only very minor issues since 2016. Currently on an XPS 13 9310, everything works perfectly.
...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?
I've been using Dell hardware with Ubuntu for... sheez almost 15 years now? Once in a while there's some little oddity, but it mostly just shows up working out of the box and lets me do what I need to without all the annoying MacOS crap. I had to use a Mac at my last job and I absolutely hated it. I couldn't configure it the way I wanted. Stuff like 'brew' is a necessity, but not a core part of the system like apt. Keys are not where I expect them... which isn't really their fault, but when you've been using something for 20+ years, switching suuuuucks.
Just an anecdote: got my Framework laptop the other week. Installed Pop!_OS. That was the only step. Everything works. Suspend/resume. WiFi. Audio. Webcam. Funky dongle ports.
This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.
How does your suspend battery life work out for you? I'm running Ubuntu with Framework and even though I've done tweaked some settings I still end up with a dead battery after I reopen my laptop a day later.
[+] [-] mid-kid|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _skel|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] londons_explore|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ratherbefuddled|3 years ago|reply
I've had it work first time, perfectly on:
I have yet to find a device it doesn't work on. I've never had to mess about with the kernel params or do anything clever with fans except install the sensors package and run it.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.
[+] [-] odysseus|3 years ago|reply
- 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
[+] [-] trelane|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|3 years ago|reply
The worst seem to be gaming laptops, non-Lenovo Chinese brands, Asus, etc...
[+] [-] onetimeusename|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssivark|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] jolmg|3 years ago|reply
Well, I can share that it works out of the box with Panasonic toughbooks, at least.
[+] [-] chickenimprint|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teawrecks|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danjoredd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] just_boost_it|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReactiveJelly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] mrweasel|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwaway09223|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loeg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idealmedtech|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EamonnMR|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f1refly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristjank|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatever1|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Buttons840|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufmace|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stoplying1|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gregmolnar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbayes|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] tmtvl|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rhyn00|3 years ago|reply
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/...
[+] [-] Klonoar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmeyerov|3 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] II2II|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] habibur|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pharmakom|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wazoox|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] avl999|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] irusensei|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Eleison23|3 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] ant6n|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] number6|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howenterprisey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcalvinowens|3 years ago|reply
...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?
[+] [-] davidw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcodiego|3 years ago|reply
Buying a laptop that came with windows and installing linux is not the way we should do it these days.
[+] [-] cdata|3 years ago|reply
This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.
[+] [-] nsilvestri|3 years ago|reply