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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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)
You certainly know what you're talking about because from a lot of experimentation, my take on the state of 2022:
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)
For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480.
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.
I kind of expected the A485 to have similar issues to the T480, since it's the same laptop except for the cpu and graphics. I did some preliminary searching and the listing of the laptop as "ubuntu certified" gave me too much confidence, I guess.
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.
same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.
This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers.
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.
> 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.
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.
Arch is a rolling release distro. So it gets hardware support faster than other distros that stick to older kernels and userspace. Most users are not on rolling releases.
I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.
I was looking at the new EliteBook g9 that has a i7-1280p and 64GB RAM DDR5 2TB, only $2500 (ouch). I would be surprised if Linux runs great OOTB. It is best to wait a gen before trying.
In all my years I have yet to see HDMI output from a laptop to a monitor work on the first try in Ubuntu. Always need to install the proprietary drivers for that to work at all. If it can't even do that without a headache, after 10+ years of Linux use, I would call that a Linux problem, not a hardware problem. My colleagues seem to run into the same issue frequently as well. This article seems kind of ignorant. I'm glad it worked on the first try on his ancient ThinkPad. That doesn't mean Linux is stable enough for most normal use cases on most hardware for me to recommend it to any of my non-tech proficient family.
It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices.
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.
I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done. Stuff like finger print readers and often web cams not working is borderline expected. On OLED monitors you can expect brightness adjustment and often sleep/wake to not work quite right if at all, etc.
> 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.
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.
man i remember those days when you had to go and find all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place.
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>?
Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available? It's an impossible expectation, and also one that no other OS would have a chance of fulfilling unless hardware vendors specifically catered to them.
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.
>Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available?
The title of this post is "Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring".
I don't expect it. Which is why I switched from buying Windows laptops to install Linux and now buy MacBooks where I can expect that absolutely everything will work on day one.
Dell Latitudes have been relatively painless for years with Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS, probably because Dell sells a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Still, Dell doesn't have fingerprint reader support in Linux, and the built-in card reader needed additional setup, but other than that it just works on a fresh install. Even my favorite Windows games work on Steam with Proton, if you accept minor texture glitches, which I gladly do to avoid dual booting.
I love it because these days I have less time to fiddle with it every six months.
My main issue with my current laptop is that the synopsis touchpads connect over i2c, and there has been a lot of ongoing work in the kernel that keeps requiring me to change my kernel config (PINCTRL_AMD needing to be selected for the 5.18 to 5.19 kernel update).
My last laptop (an AMD version of the HP Envy 13) was also rough at the beginning. A BIOS update updated the AMD GPU firmware or microcode or something and broke compatibility with the current kernel stable kernel at the time. Had to switch to an -rc kernel to get video to work.
Admittedly, my day job is basically Linux kernel development so I'm intimately familiar with most of this stuff. Not exactly your typical user.
I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers, but you mentioned that you do kernel dev, so it makes sense. 5.15 is "stable", at least on gentoo.
For new laptops, if you have the option, go for something that has some official support out of the door. Something like System76 or your local equivalent. Otherwise yes, it can still be a bit of a lottery. Everything could be smooth, or you might become your own Linux support guy. Some people enjoy that.
I've mentioned this in a different subcomment, but I should note that the laptop I mentioned in the parent post is "ubuntu certified"[1]. I realize now that this means much less than having "official" support from the manufacturer, but there's certainly a lot of misleading bits about the way these things are marketed.
Pop has gone from something that was expected to "just work" to deciding it's more of a developer or enthusiast product.
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 am pretty disappointed with System76. On my Galago with PopOS suspend doesn’t work properly , the fan sometimes goes into super speed mode overnight, the screen flickers when it wakes up from sleep so I have to reboot. It’s definitely not a smooth experience. Support couldn’t help either.
Yep, my 2 year old Ryzen laptop still doesn't have properly functioning sleep without tweaking kernel parameter, and that workaround got broken on 5.19 kernel release and I had to find out new parameter to tweak.
Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
Out of curiosity, what laptop? My samples in the last 6 years are:
- 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.
These kinds of things probably still depend a lot on the brand and the product line.
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.
I tend to agree. If you pick a random new laptop, you will probably have a bad time running Linux.
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.
> Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues.
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.
Interesting; I got a A485 two years ago and everything except Bluetooth worked out of the box without problems (BT kind-of works but with a lot of problems, so I just got a USB one for €10). Never needed any kernel parameters, graphics work fine (including for some games), sleep always worked fine. Never tried AP mode or fingerprint scanner. Only reason I got a different laptop was due to hardware issues (some issue with the mainboard).
I only used Void Linux on it; maybe it's different with other distros.
I'll be honest, aside from the FnLock LED issue, most of the issues I've mentioned were probably fixed by 2020. I got this laptop in january 2019, and none of the stable distros (ubuntus and such) would even boot without kernel parameters back then. 5.1 became the golden kernel version for me for a while, where everything worked as later kernels would break suspend/hibernate a few times before stabilizing properly. It was a rocky few years but by kernel 5.10 (december 2020) everything worked fine, probably earlier like you've mentioned.
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.
My daily driver is a Thinkpad x230 running Linux and I also vehemently disagree with his author's claim. Yes, things are certainly better than they were 10 years ago, yet I still have a lengthy to-do list of things that are broken, but low-impact enough to work around that I don't want to waste the hours of dicking around with poor documentation, noxious forum threads and command line fiddling to sort them out. Circumstance do force me to finally tackle one of these issues regularly, yet the list never seems to get shorter...
Like what? Must be things I do not use I guess, which definitely can be the case as I never plug in external monitors etc, but everything I use works very well for dev work.
Unfortunately this seems inevitable. Hardware manufacturers have to support windows or they won’t survive, so that support is going to be there day 1. Some of them have spotty support for Linux, most have none. So it falls on the community to buy the hardware and iron out the issues.
Can confirm, my god how terrible BT support can be.
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.
This has also been my experience with a new ThinkPad P1 G5. Wifi didn't work out of the box with stable releases of any of the distros I wanted to use, I had to use the testing release, and even then the wifi is unusably bad unless I'm sat right in front of the AP (all other wifi devices in my home work perfectly fine from any room).
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).
My Vostro 1400 (Core 2 Duo) has kernel bugs on sleep-wake related to the Ricoh xD media reader (remember those? I don't either), and my Inspiron 15R SE (Ivy Bridge) randomly disconnects from all external USB devices until I use the internal keyboard to remove and reload the xhci_hcd kernel module. And my Ideapad Flex 4 models have a bug where you can press Page Up, release Fn, and release Up, which on Windows stops sending Page Up events but on Linux results in a stuck Page Up key (technically a laptop bug but affects Linux far worse). So older laptops are by no means trouble-free either.
How do we fix this? It seems like most people in the community have the mentality that these issues work themselves out eventually, so it's no problem. And there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of people really really want better hardware support for new hardware, and fewer regressions in drivers for older hardware. Perhaps we need a special-interest group that keeps track of ongoing hardware issues, and generates kernel patches.
As a user of the E485 (basically a budget version of the A485) I can confirm, and agree with, everything but one thing here.
Regarding your Bluetooth issue, what chipset do you have?
I picked a Qualcomm one on mine because I had bad experiences with Realtek before. Never had an issue like yours with it.
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).
Well, the reality is that Linux consists of less than 5% of the market (desktops and laptops), where Windows OSes make up around 75% and macOS around 15%. So, that is going to dictate the priorities of companies supplying drivers.
These numbers are always so skewed. I wish just one time we could get market share numbers for new sales WITHOUT corporate purchases, but Microsoft has made this a "thing" for 30 years now. On the one hand manufacturers would still want to target numbers, even if that includes corporate "fleets." On the other, they'd see that Linux makes up a larger portion of the market where people are spending their own money.
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.
To be fair, this is also an issue with servers. I bought a server from a Linux server vendor and the chip was too new that it wasn’t supported on their custom Linux OS (same company, but the hardware and software sides didn’t communicate). Thankfully, it was supported on CentOS at the time, so I was able to switch pretty easily.
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 an E15 from work and have a myriad of just _strange_ issues. When I first got Fedora installed, the integrated mouse/keyboard didn't work without some kernel parameter tweaks. This was eventually fixed. Right now I'm dealing with some random crashes(?; there's no stacktraces, it's kind of annoying) of XFCE that I'm blaming on the 12th gen intel GPU firmware, but I have no evidence to back that up yet.
The annoying thing is that it's quite unpredictable. You can sometimes find information on the internet on which laptops Ubuntu is going to work on out of the box, but usually it's a gamble. Sometimes you notice something's not working a month after buying the laptop just because you never happened to try the feature before.
Old laptops & desktops too have been left in the dust for some time now.
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.
Thanks for honesty. During my studies I really tried using Linux on my laptop for a few years. It was amazing to tinker around. But when I finally switched to Mac OS, I felt I became instantly more productive.
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.
Did Lenovo classify the device as Linux compatible? A lot of laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell have Ubuntu or RedHat as an optional pre-installed operating system. Those devices usually work with Linux.
As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
> sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions
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.
That and he says “most software has migrated to the browser.” Maybe most of what he uses, but if that’s the case then you’re basically doing a DIY Chromebook.
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.
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.
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.
Sleep has become less of an issue recently, at least in my experience. Modern laptop CPUs idle in such a low power state. I just set up my built-in display to disable when the lid is closed. Seems sufficient.
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.
Or just look up your "windows hardware" before you buy and check compatibility. Companies that sell laptops with preinstalled Linux are far more often than not just selling rebranded "windows hardware." The benefit is that you get a support number, and that they have paid attention to the Linux compatibility of the models in their range.
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...
Corroborating this on the asus, I got one back in 2020 when my laptop gave up the ghost. Tried trudging through but I couldn't get comfortable with opensuse, things like on boot the mouse not responding, spontaneously rebooting when I tried to change volume, wifi card being throttled or just useless. All of it failing just enough I never quite trusted it.
Less than the brand, I think it is the line and components manufacturers that counts more.
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.
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’ve been buying MacBook Airs of the 2011-2013 vintage for 10 years. Love them.
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.
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.
My experience with Windows on my laptop is that color profiles work out of the box, energy management is better on Linux, Bluetooth on Windows barely works and the webcam doesn't even need settings.
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.
> suggesting complex, out-of-date command line solutions for things that have had a GUI for a decade now.
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.
Indeed. I was surprised to install Windows on a two year old Thinkpad recently to use some proprietary hardware and ended up with more random issues than I'd have on Fedora.
Trackpoint sideways scrolling not working (works fine with libinput), inexplicably high power usage, wifi disconnects...
> Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing.
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.
Despite the issues it's the only OS that I'm willing to put up with because it respects the user. I'm not nagged to use <preferred browser> every day. I'm not nagged to login to some cloud junk. I don't have to look at a feed or "recommendations" (ads). The operating system doesn't have an advertising ID or spy on me.
I don't know, any hardware that I've used any big distro on (ubuntu, pop, manjaro) just worked out of the box instantly for all of these. On battery especially for many laptops I found better battery life on Linux since I could manually choose to disable dGPU. My problems come when I need to run windows specific tools like Altium.
There was a recent post about the Frame.work laptop now offering a ChromeOS version. The Linux container support in ChromeOS is excellent, and basically ChromeOS is optimized to work well with all laptops that it runs on.
For my specific hardware (Framework laptop), the hardware is better supported on Windows. Lower battery consumption especially while the device is asleep, better handling of fractional display scaling, brightness keys on the keyboard are functional without needing to disable brightness sensor, etc. Most egregiously for a laptop, Fedora doesn't give any way to adjust the trackpad scroll speed (not sure if that's a kernel limitation tho)
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.
> Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do.
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
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.
The same is very much true for macOS and even Windows. Obvious flaws and mistakes are ignored by statements like "I just bought this $5 app" and "I use this freeware program from yetanotherstartmenureplacement.xyz".
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.
Yeah, well, it's been that way for me for many years now through many machines of varying brands. These Dell machines are just the most recent, and I was shocked at how effortless the whole install process went this time around compared to way back when I first started using Linux. It really was a huge hassle back in the "olden days" of early Linux… Nowadays it's proven pretty "plug and play" all the way around every single time I've installed a new Linux rig.
True though. Half our team runs Linux with minimal issues across a variety of modern hardware. Infosec consulting, so pretty demanding users, but also pretty experienced with Linux. there are caveats and small things, but I will take them over Mac or Win these days.
I have two Dell laptops and a Dell tower, all of which run flawlessly on Linux, all hardware supported out of the box. Everything I've plugged into them (most often via USB) or paired via Bluetooth also works without hassle (and never once did I have to search any manufacturer's websites for drivers).
I bought a very expensive 2018 XPS15 4K Dell 9570 fully loaded - bought for its good Linux support (although not officially supported by Dell).
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).
Different laptop, different issues, similar outcome. I ran into issues with Windows corrupting the EFI boot entries, even on a dedicated install. I have also had Windows fail to enter sleep or come out of sleep when the lid is closed. I have never had these issues under Linux on the same hardware.
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 my desktop at home exclusively for gaming. I had Windows on it, but it would continually crash when trying to use my bluetooth xbox controller with it.
I've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
> I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies.
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.
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.
Could you get them to work properly in Windows? I have a Legion and an IdeaPad both of which have audio troubles because the speakers are just that bad, and no matter how much I messed with drivers, they didn't work. Audio is chopped off, although the 3.5mm audio/HDMI/USB outputs are fine.
I have an IdeaPad Flex 5 running Fedora 36 with zero audio issues - in fact, it is where I run Bitwig (a DAW) and Arturia V Collection 5 (an emulation of classic synths spread across a couple dozen VSTs that I run inside WINE). You may just be out of luck there.
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.
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.
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.
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>?
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.
The title of this post is "Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring".
I love it because these days I have less time to fiddle with it every six months.
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.
[1]: https://ubuntu.com/certified/201808-26387
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).
Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
- 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 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.
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.
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.
I only used Void Linux on it; maybe it's different with other distros.
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.
BT is a trainwreck.
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.
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).
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).
Surely not *BSDs?
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.
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" .
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.
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.
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.
As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
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.
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Instead, there should be an actual list of well supported devices and people should buy only them.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
The worst seem to be gaming laptops, non-Lenovo Chinese brands, Asus, etc...
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.
I thought lvfs ( https://fwupd.org/ ) had fixed that.
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)
Well, I can share that it works out of the box with Panasonic toughbooks, at least.
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.
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.)
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 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.
It's all a little random on how well different internal components decide to play nice.
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.
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.
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.
ROFL
Give me 5' with such an OS and I will find at least 20 things which are broken.
Trackpoint sideways scrolling not working (works fine with libinput), inexplicably high power usage, wifi disconnects...
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.
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All OSes have these issues. Windows and MacOS are no exception.
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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
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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.
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.
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).
Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
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've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
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.
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.
Perhaps, it's a hardware issue?
In fact, I have a problem with too much sound. The damn thing has a pc speaker that I cannot completely get rid of.