14 ms·

RedHat is hiring to make Linux run better on laptops

245 points by soulbadguy 10y ago

dovdov 10y ago
better (10 years) late than never, right? :D
- jwildeboer 10y ago
  I am now close to 11 years at Red Hat and I have always used Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the various laptops the company gave me. So we're not late. We're just ramping up a bit more in this space :-)
  - sevensor 10y ago
    While I personally run Arch, I recognize that many of the projects that make the Arch experience so nice are supported by Red Hat. (Not least because you have Lennart on the payroll.) Thanks for what you do!
- kondor6c 10y ago
  I think what RedHat does for the community is absolutely fantastic and they've contributed a lot to Linux and open source technology.
  - akerro 10y ago
    But do they <3 open source same as MS does?
- teh 10y ago
  I know it's meant to be a joke but Red Hat have done an amazing amount of good for desktop Linux. I really appreciate their work.
cpach 10y ago
Neat! Munich seems like a nice city to live in.
CptMauli 10y ago
My ex colleague is now at Read Hat, and he told me one anecdote. The card reader of his ThinkPad didn't work. He created a bug in the bugtracker, got personally contacted by the guy who apparently does card reader stuff, and a day later he had a kernel, where the bug was fixed.
- favadi 10y ago
  > who apparently does card reader stuff, You mean the guy wrote codes for card reader or the card reader manufacturer? :)
  - blitzkrieg3 10y ago
    > I've worked at RHT and based on the turnaround, it's the guy that writes codes for the card reader. I'm still impressed but not surprised by the level of service he got. Red Hat has a great hacker culture.
- jordigh 10y ago
  Yeah, RH support is absolutely AWE-maze-zing! I had the pleasure of using it at a former company. You got a problem and nobody tells you to turn the thing on or off. As far as I could tell, there were no script readers. It's like shibboleet come true: https://www.xkcd.com/806/ https://www.xkcd.com/806/
arvinsim 10y ago
Power Management should be top priority I think.
walterbell 10y ago
Is RedHat interested in contributing to Qubes, which uses Fedora? This would help advance the state of the art in desktop security and seamless UI compositing.
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Fedora's bleeding-edge kernel support usually means better hardware support for newer laptops, which is great. One potential drawback, however, is the decision not to include any non-FOSS drivers in the installation package. I completely understand why they do it, but it throws a wrench into the idea of loading Linux onto a laptop and having everything "just work". For instance, getting the Broadcom wifi card that comes with my Dell XPS 13 to work on Fedora has been such a pain in the ass (proprietary driver only) that most people recommend tearing it out and replacing it with an Intel card that has a more Linux-friendly driver. If Redhat really wants better Linux penetration in the laptop world, at some point they're probably going to have to make a decision to either go the Linux Mint route and include proprietary drivers by default, or try to engage some of the hardware manufacturers to open-source their drivers.
- IntelMiner 10y ago
  FWIW, I recall the last time that Broadcom tried engaging the Linux kernel community was back when there was an open source (b43?) Broadcom driver, it "sort of" worked if you were lucky and didn't use too complex a network setup (If I recall it'd break on certain security modes?) Broadcom showed up suddenly, dumped a badly written set of kernel patches and then disappeared into the ether, frustrating just about everybody involved
- dublinben 10y ago
  Laptop manufacturers could also just avoid this problem by using modems that don't require proprietary drivers or firmware, like those from Intel or Atheros. This is an entirely avoidable problem.
  - syshum 10y ago
    The side effect is the Intel and Atheros are better anyway, BroadCom Wifi is utter crap IMO
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Android and the first wave of Netbooks with GNU/Linux prove what manufacturers actually think of it.
jamespo 10y ago
I find the Arch derived distribution Apricity runs very well on my HP Spectre X360
- brightball 10y ago
  Does it handle the pen/touch well? That's a nice looking machine.
  - jamespo 10y ago
    Not really used the pen on the linux side much but touch works fine. double finger scroll & pinch to zoom works in chrome (but not firefox, or at least I can't get it working). The graphics are fairly snappy with wayland too. I do have a few annoyances, eg the insert key is shared with prt sc and there is no right hand ctrl key (I remapped "menu" in gnome shell). Actually I do miss my x220 keyboard layout quite a bit :)
brightball 10y ago
As much as I like Ubuntu, I have a significantly higher level of trust in Red Hat to get this right for some reason. Maybe it's just confidence in the company's core principles. I've hit a point where I'm ready to move on from my Macbook Pro after about 10 years and I've been looking at Linux laptop options. It's mind boggling that it's so hard to find good options. Everything seems to revolve around "get a Windows laptop and wipe it" or "buy some flavor of old Thinkpad" with warnings about EFI and compatibility. Then there are company's like System76 who have what looks like a good offering on the surface but I keep seeing threads about bad experiences with them. If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  You don't need to buy an old ThinkPad; current-generation ThinkPads work fine, as long as you avoid nVidia GPUs. All the other hardware (including power management) Just Works.
  - brightball 10y ago
    Looking on the site, they seem to all have Nvidia?
    - stinkytaco 10y ago
      Look at the T and X series. Unless you are buying the very high end with discrete GPUs, they all have Intel.
  - brynx97 10y ago
    Do you have any suggestions? I'm currently leaning towards the Lenovo X260 or an older X220.
    - dman 10y ago
      Get a T450s / x250 - they are very well supported.
dxxvi 10y ago
I always had both Windows and Linux (Arch) on every computer in my house (now only a few of them have Windows because I use Windows in VirtualBox in Linux). It seems to me that wifi speed in Linux is always slower than that in Windows. Drivers are the culprit? If you want people to use Linux laptops, I think you should make them really really fast (esp. at boot) so that everybody has to wow when they just try it. No need to use gnome or kde, openbox is fine as long as it's not ugly. Then wifi spped must be faster or at least as fast as in Window. Next is printing. In summary, most of the issues are related to drivers.
- anthk 10y ago
  >. It seems to me that wifi speed in Linux is always slower than that in Windows. Firmware. Install it.
  - krzyk 10y ago
    It is possible to use wifi driver without firmware?
- soperj 10y ago
  The boot speed was the main reason I even considered switching full time to Fedora. I had a windows 7 dual boot. I'd tried dual booting other machines in the past, but the boot up into fedora is just so quick that I've used my windows 7 partition to do my taxes, and once get a adobe illustrator file saved as a svg so i could work with it in inkscape. That's it.
yobo 10y ago
the year of linux on the laptop they said.
soulbadguy 10y ago
While this is indeed a great news, Are just two people enough for the wide range of laptop and devices out there in the wild ? What i would really love to see is a cross distribution effort in the same direction : People from the main distribution coming together, identifying the main experience pain point a fixing them upstream. I really think there is an under served (from both hardware manufacturer and distros) market of people who wants a better linux desktop/laptop experience. But until someone figure out a way to monetized that (like linux is on the server side), it will be hard to build on the desktop side the same kind of momentum that linux is enjoy on servers.
- trhway 10y ago
  > Are just two people enough for the wide range of laptop and devices out there in the wild ? because it is RedHat i'd guess they would target enterprise deployments and that would allow to focus on narrow set of hardware. Making good on those would allow the stuff to trickle down into the open wilderness.
technofiend 10y ago
RedHat seems to be trying to make their OS more accessible and mainstream friendly through their $0 developer license http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-de.... Not that there's anything wrong with CentOS. So it's cool that effort extends to commodity hardware, too. Sample size of one but as part of working down the Redhat certifications track I purchased an Intel NUC http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i5syk.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i5syk... for a low power lab machine; it's really just a laptop squeezed into a cube but everything I've needed to use it for works fine. Admittedly I have not tried wireless or bluetooth. Hopefully that means laptops built off reference Intel designs will also Just Work. Interestingly NUCs are showing up now in the Hackintosh community because despite moderate specs next to a modern desktop, they're still competitive with Apple's current hardware. No doubt Apple will refresh this year; they seem to be overdue.
boynamedsue 10y ago
The problem with Linux on laptops is Linux itself. The notion of Linux on anything other than servers turns most consumers off. Imagine if Android were called Linux Phones instead. It would be a disaster. Linux should be used incidentally to the device or laptop itself. Or it should be spared for those who really want to know and understand more about it. I used Linux on a laptop for a couple of years and, mostly, loved it. I hope Red Hat doesn't brand it as such.
- bertiewhykovich 10y ago
  The fact that you've been downvoted is, I think, actually indicative of a major impediment to Linux's spread. Linux is not a consumer OS. There's no way around this: it is not designed to be user-friendly, it's designed to provide power to power users. Using Linux as a consumer is a miserable experience and the vast majority of people who have a choice will choose otherwise. Unfortunately, the Linux community has such faith in their project that they're ill at ease with hearing about its failings. It's not clear why they should be, though: Linux is a (relatively) great OS for its intended purposes, and there's no need for it to extend to every possible use case. Linux on the desktop is a somewhat pointless goal, and the community would benefit from embracing that fact.
  - executesorder66 10y ago
    > Linux on the desktop is a somewhat pointless goal, and the community would benefit from embracing that fact. Please no. Linux works great on the desktop, even for casual users. I have installed Linux on a few friends old laptops and they've all loved it. Distro's like Elementry, Manjaro, Mint and Ubuntu make it easy for casual users. There are only 2 problems with Linux on the desktop remaining. 1) Games. A lot of gamers would love to switch but love their games that are currently Windows only at the moment. This situation is slowly improving. 2) The fact that almost everyone uses MS Office. MS works hard at making sure it doesn't follow standards so LibreOffice et al. won't be 100% compatible with it, so most businesses/people just revert back to MSOffice due to compatibility reasons. But if they all just switched to LibreOffice they'd get just as much shit done.
  - 10y ago
Zenst 10y ago
Wouldn't be nice if there was a universal driver that you could use upon any operating system that supported universal drivers. Alas not aware of any initiative or indeed reason that such drivers could exist, even in binary blobs it would be a step forward.
- oldsj 10y ago
  Like an api/abi drivers would target that OSs could use?
- rwmj 10y ago
  There is UEFI Byte Code (EBC) which at least in theory can be used to write drivers. http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver_Presentation.pdf http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver... Anecdotally, cards come with EBC drivers which flat out don't work. There was also Forth Fcode used in Open Firmware. It was never widely adopted. Basically any universal driver framework is going to be compromised in some way that you won't like. Either it'll be too slow because it cannot use specific features of the operating system. Or it will annoy OS developers by tying them to an ABI which they don't want to support forever. Or (like EBC) it won't be widely supported and/or won't work at all because in reality no one cares about this.
asteriskdelete 10y ago
Yeah, two people will fix it.
cm3 10y ago
Please focus on reducing and avoiding regressions in the Intel gpu stack. It's gotten pretty bad in the last two years. Major regressions were introduced beginning with kernel 4.2's atomic modesetting changes, across the board.
- TingPing 10y ago
  Try removing the Intel DDX driver and using the default modesetting driver. It seems to be far less buggy for most people.
  - cm3 10y ago
    Two issues with that, the atomic modesetting regressions are in the DRM part. Also, I've tried the generic modesetting X11 drivers, and that one's very bad, does heavy tearing and is unusable on my machines. The best setup right now is to use the intel ddx with TearFree enabled plus vsync forced with compton. If you don't enable TearFree plus vsync via glx via a compositor, there will be heavy tearing. New issues since Arch Linux's update to Mesa 12 are some weird drawing bugs that surface as flickering of the content for a few cycles (redraws) a couple times during the day. It's not screen flickering. The content is sometimes displayed partially and then, say, you type something, content flicker on each event for a few redraw cycles until it cures itself. If I had to guess, I'd guess something in mesa 12 and/or current X11 intel stack is very buggy. How bad is this with the binary nvidia drivers? I couldn't use Wayland with that, but if there's zero tearing with nvidia, there's less incentive to use Wayland anyway.
    - TingPing 10y ago
      Anecdotally most people seem to have a much more stable experience with modesetting, distros like Debian have even been promoting over Intel for a while. I use Arch myself and have had no issues. Also DRI3 is a far better solution than the various TearFree hacks, less performance overhead, better integration with the compositor, and not hardware specific. Nvidia drivers don't support DRI3 but they have their own double compositing hack that work as well as any other.
satysin 10y ago
My main machine is an oldish ThinkPad T420s. It runs Fedora 24 flawlessly. Sadly not many machines seem to run Linux (any distro) perfectly. Part of the reason I haven't upgraded to a newer machine is because this machine just works and I am very lazy so trying to get a newer machine to run as well is more work than I care for. It isn't like performance has improved massively since SandyBridge.
- snowwindwaves 10y ago
  I have a t420s also. In fact I bought a second as a spare. With 16gb ram and ssd it is a great machine. The one thing I love about it that I can't find on any new laptops is that all the ports are on the back; power, Ethernet, displays USB etc. I can show up at a plant and plug in to the network and power and have a mousepad beside the laptop keyboard and binders and notebooks on the other side without getting tangled up in cords. For bigger stays at a site I bring a 27" monitor too but still no cords out the side. No new laptops have all ports on the back!!
  - satysin 10y ago
    YES! I love that also. I can deal with power on the left but when the hell do so many device makers put the damn power on the right side where my mouse will be?! The only ports I want on the side are USB and only on the left side please.
crudbug 10y ago
Please improve GNOME multi-display support anybody. I have triple monitor setup, GNOME always crashes. I am using XFCE with some success on F22.
known 10y ago
Sounds like RedHat is after https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
cs702 10y ago
This is great, because all distributions will benefit from it eventually, not just RedHat/Fedora. The folks at Canonical, in particular, seem to be very adept at leveraging the work of others for the benefit of Ubuntu. I would hope these kinds of efforts lead to better collaboration and coordination between the different distros for improving compatibility with desktop, laptop, tablet, and even phone hardware... ...but Unfortunately I don't think we should expect better collaboration and coordination, due to the usual political and quasi-religious barriers between distros.
hinkley 10y ago
I have a lot of mixed emotions about RedHat and to what degree they are a net positive or negative, but I'm glad someone is taking this on. It was so frustrating for me that the 'Linux on the Desktop' effort started right after the numbers showed that everyone was trading in their desktops for laptops. I wanted to program ON my laptop, not program my laptop. After spending almost 18 months trying to get all of the hardware on my laptop to work with linux (this included swapping out the wifi card and learning ACPI scripting so I could cobble together partial fixes from four other sources, and learning Crusoe CPU registers to contribute a power saving fix back to Transmeta, both things I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever), I said screw it and bought a Macbook. I'm on my fourth now, and aside for some difficulty installing command line tools, it's entirely removed hardware as a source of stress and procrastination.
hyperion2010 10y ago
I'm currently running Gentoo on a T30, T60p, and X1 Carbon (1st gen). For the X1 Carbon I actually switched because Windows 7 was causing periodic freezes. Power managment and drivers are always what is missing, and getting drivers written in a timely fashion is hard. That said, if they focus on a subset of laptops then they could show some major improvements. I do wonder about the old M$ ACPI manoeuvring though, if vendors still aren't documenting features then there will be problems.
digi_owl 10y ago
Welcome back, Red Hat Linux... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux

245 points by soulbadguy 10y ago

dovdov 10y ago

better (10 years) late than never, right? :D

jwildeboer 10y ago
I am now close to 11 years at Red Hat and I have always used Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the various laptops the company gave me. So we're not late. We're just ramping up a bit more in this space :-)
- sevensor 10y ago
  While I personally run Arch, I recognize that many of the projects that make the Arch experience so nice are supported by Red Hat. (Not least because you have Lennart on the payroll.) Thanks for what you do!
kondor6c 10y ago
I think what RedHat does for the community is absolutely fantastic and they've contributed a lot to Linux and open source technology.
- akerro 10y ago
  But do they <3 open source same as MS does?
teh 10y ago
I know it's meant to be a joke but Red Hat have done an amazing amount of good for desktop Linux. I really appreciate their work.

cpach 10y ago

Neat! Munich seems like a nice city to live in.

CptMauli 10y ago

My ex colleague is now at Read Hat, and he told me one anecdote. The card reader of his ThinkPad didn't work. He created a bug in the bugtracker, got personally contacted by the guy who apparently does card reader stuff, and a day later he had a kernel, where the bug was fixed.

favadi 10y ago
> who apparently does card reader stuff, You mean the guy wrote codes for card reader or the card reader manufacturer? :)
- blitzkrieg3 10y ago
  > I've worked at RHT and based on the turnaround, it's the guy that writes codes for the card reader. I'm still impressed but not surprised by the level of service he got. Red Hat has a great hacker culture.
jordigh 10y ago
Yeah, RH support is absolutely AWE-maze-zing! I had the pleasure of using it at a former company. You got a problem and nobody tells you to turn the thing on or off. As far as I could tell, there were no script readers. It's like shibboleet come true: https://www.xkcd.com/806/ https://www.xkcd.com/806/

arvinsim 10y ago

Power Management should be top priority I think.

walterbell 10y ago

Is RedHat interested in contributing to Qubes, which uses Fedora? This would help advance the state of the art in desktop security and seamless UI compositing.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

Fedora's bleeding-edge kernel support usually means better hardware support for newer laptops, which is great. One potential drawback, however, is the decision not to include any non-FOSS drivers in the installation package. I completely understand why they do it, but it throws a wrench into the idea of loading Linux onto a laptop and having everything "just work". For instance, getting the Broadcom wifi card that comes with my Dell XPS 13 to work on Fedora has been such a pain in the ass (proprietary driver only) that most people recommend tearing it out and replacing it with an Intel card that has a more Linux-friendly driver. If Redhat really wants better Linux penetration in the laptop world, at some point they're probably going to have to make a decision to either go the Linux Mint route and include proprietary drivers by default, or try to engage some of the hardware manufacturers to open-source their drivers.

IntelMiner 10y ago
FWIW, I recall the last time that Broadcom tried engaging the Linux kernel community was back when there was an open source (b43?) Broadcom driver, it "sort of" worked if you were lucky and didn't use too complex a network setup (If I recall it'd break on certain security modes?) Broadcom showed up suddenly, dumped a badly written set of kernel patches and then disappeared into the ether, frustrating just about everybody involved
dublinben 10y ago
Laptop manufacturers could also just avoid this problem by using modems that don't require proprietary drivers or firmware, like those from Intel or Atheros. This is an entirely avoidable problem.
- syshum 10y ago
  The side effect is the Intel and Atheros are better anyway, BroadCom Wifi is utter crap IMO
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Android and the first wave of Netbooks with GNU/Linux prove what manufacturers actually think of it.

jamespo 10y ago

I find the Arch derived distribution Apricity runs very well on my HP Spectre X360

brightball 10y ago
Does it handle the pen/touch well? That's a nice looking machine.
- jamespo 10y ago
  Not really used the pen on the linux side much but touch works fine. double finger scroll & pinch to zoom works in chrome (but not firefox, or at least I can't get it working). The graphics are fairly snappy with wayland too. I do have a few annoyances, eg the insert key is shared with prt sc and there is no right hand ctrl key (I remapped "menu" in gnome shell). Actually I do miss my x220 keyboard layout quite a bit :)

brightball 10y ago

As much as I like Ubuntu, I have a significantly higher level of trust in Red Hat to get this right for some reason. Maybe it's just confidence in the company's core principles. I've hit a point where I'm ready to move on from my Macbook Pro after about 10 years and I've been looking at Linux laptop options. It's mind boggling that it's so hard to find good options. Everything seems to revolve around "get a Windows laptop and wipe it" or "buy some flavor of old Thinkpad" with warnings about EFI and compatibility. Then there are company's like System76 who have what looks like a good offering on the surface but I keep seeing threads about bad experiences with them. If I could order a laptop direct from Red Hat I'd do it without hesitation.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
You don't need to buy an old ThinkPad; current-generation ThinkPads work fine, as long as you avoid nVidia GPUs. All the other hardware (including power management) Just Works.
- brightball 10y ago
  Looking on the site, they seem to all have Nvidia?
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    Look at the T and X series. Unless you are buying the very high end with discrete GPUs, they all have Intel.
- brynx97 10y ago
  Do you have any suggestions? I'm currently leaning towards the Lenovo X260 or an older X220.
  - dman 10y ago
    Get a T450s / x250 - they are very well supported.

dxxvi 10y ago

I always had both Windows and Linux (Arch) on every computer in my house (now only a few of them have Windows because I use Windows in VirtualBox in Linux). It seems to me that wifi speed in Linux is always slower than that in Windows. Drivers are the culprit? If you want people to use Linux laptops, I think you should make them really really fast (esp. at boot) so that everybody has to wow when they just try it. No need to use gnome or kde, openbox is fine as long as it's not ugly. Then wifi spped must be faster or at least as fast as in Window. Next is printing. In summary, most of the issues are related to drivers.

anthk 10y ago
>. It seems to me that wifi speed in Linux is always slower than that in Windows. Firmware. Install it.
- krzyk 10y ago
  It is possible to use wifi driver without firmware?
soperj 10y ago
The boot speed was the main reason I even considered switching full time to Fedora. I had a windows 7 dual boot. I'd tried dual booting other machines in the past, but the boot up into fedora is just so quick that I've used my windows 7 partition to do my taxes, and once get a adobe illustrator file saved as a svg so i could work with it in inkscape. That's it.

yobo 10y ago

the year of linux on the laptop they said.

soulbadguy 10y ago

While this is indeed a great news, Are just two people enough for the wide range of laptop and devices out there in the wild ? What i would really love to see is a cross distribution effort in the same direction : People from the main distribution coming together, identifying the main experience pain point a fixing them upstream. I really think there is an under served (from both hardware manufacturer and distros) market of people who wants a better linux desktop/laptop experience. But until someone figure out a way to monetized that (like linux is on the server side), it will be hard to build on the desktop side the same kind of momentum that linux is enjoy on servers.

trhway 10y ago
> Are just two people enough for the wide range of laptop and devices out there in the wild ? because it is RedHat i'd guess they would target enterprise deployments and that would allow to focus on narrow set of hardware. Making good on those would allow the stuff to trickle down into the open wilderness.

technofiend 10y ago

RedHat seems to be trying to make their OS more accessible and mainstream friendly through their $0 developer license http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-de.... Not that there's anything wrong with CentOS. So it's cool that effort extends to commodity hardware, too. Sample size of one but as part of working down the Redhat certifications track I purchased an Intel NUC http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i5syk.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i5syk... for a low power lab machine; it's really just a laptop squeezed into a cube but everything I've needed to use it for works fine. Admittedly I have not tried wireless or bluetooth. Hopefully that means laptops built off reference Intel designs will also Just Work. Interestingly NUCs are showing up now in the Hackintosh community because despite moderate specs next to a modern desktop, they're still competitive with Apple's current hardware. No doubt Apple will refresh this year; they seem to be overdue.

boynamedsue 10y ago

The problem with Linux on laptops is Linux itself. The notion of Linux on anything other than servers turns most consumers off. Imagine if Android were called Linux Phones instead. It would be a disaster. Linux should be used incidentally to the device or laptop itself. Or it should be spared for those who really want to know and understand more about it. I used Linux on a laptop for a couple of years and, mostly, loved it. I hope Red Hat doesn't brand it as such.

bertiewhykovich 10y ago
The fact that you've been downvoted is, I think, actually indicative of a major impediment to Linux's spread. Linux is not a consumer OS. There's no way around this: it is not designed to be user-friendly, it's designed to provide power to power users. Using Linux as a consumer is a miserable experience and the vast majority of people who have a choice will choose otherwise. Unfortunately, the Linux community has such faith in their project that they're ill at ease with hearing about its failings. It's not clear why they should be, though: Linux is a (relatively) great OS for its intended purposes, and there's no need for it to extend to every possible use case. Linux on the desktop is a somewhat pointless goal, and the community would benefit from embracing that fact.
- executesorder66 10y ago
  > Linux on the desktop is a somewhat pointless goal, and the community would benefit from embracing that fact. Please no. Linux works great on the desktop, even for casual users. I have installed Linux on a few friends old laptops and they've all loved it. Distro's like Elementry, Manjaro, Mint and Ubuntu make it easy for casual users. There are only 2 problems with Linux on the desktop remaining. 1) Games. A lot of gamers would love to switch but love their games that are currently Windows only at the moment. This situation is slowly improving. 2) The fact that almost everyone uses MS Office. MS works hard at making sure it doesn't follow standards so LibreOffice et al. won't be 100% compatible with it, so most businesses/people just revert back to MSOffice due to compatibility reasons. But if they all just switched to LibreOffice they'd get just as much shit done.
- 10y ago

Zenst 10y ago

Wouldn't be nice if there was a universal driver that you could use upon any operating system that supported universal drivers. Alas not aware of any initiative or indeed reason that such drivers could exist, even in binary blobs it would be a step forward.

oldsj 10y ago
Like an api/abi drivers would target that OSs could use?
rwmj 10y ago
There is UEFI Byte Code (EBC) which at least in theory can be used to write drivers. http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver_Presentation.pdf http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/EBC_Driver... Anecdotally, cards come with EBC drivers which flat out don't work. There was also Forth Fcode used in Open Firmware. It was never widely adopted. Basically any universal driver framework is going to be compromised in some way that you won't like. Either it'll be too slow because it cannot use specific features of the operating system. Or it will annoy OS developers by tying them to an ABI which they don't want to support forever. Or (like EBC) it won't be widely supported and/or won't work at all because in reality no one cares about this.

asteriskdelete 10y ago

Yeah, two people will fix it.

cm3 10y ago

Please focus on reducing and avoiding regressions in the Intel gpu stack. It's gotten pretty bad in the last two years. Major regressions were introduced beginning with kernel 4.2's atomic modesetting changes, across the board.

TingPing 10y ago
Try removing the Intel DDX driver and using the default modesetting driver. It seems to be far less buggy for most people.
- cm3 10y ago
  Two issues with that, the atomic modesetting regressions are in the DRM part. Also, I've tried the generic modesetting X11 drivers, and that one's very bad, does heavy tearing and is unusable on my machines. The best setup right now is to use the intel ddx with TearFree enabled plus vsync forced with compton. If you don't enable TearFree plus vsync via glx via a compositor, there will be heavy tearing. New issues since Arch Linux's update to Mesa 12 are some weird drawing bugs that surface as flickering of the content for a few cycles (redraws) a couple times during the day. It's not screen flickering. The content is sometimes displayed partially and then, say, you type something, content flicker on each event for a few redraw cycles until it cures itself. If I had to guess, I'd guess something in mesa 12 and/or current X11 intel stack is very buggy. How bad is this with the binary nvidia drivers? I couldn't use Wayland with that, but if there's zero tearing with nvidia, there's less incentive to use Wayland anyway.
  - TingPing 10y ago
    Anecdotally most people seem to have a much more stable experience with modesetting, distros like Debian have even been promoting over Intel for a while. I use Arch myself and have had no issues. Also DRI3 is a far better solution than the various TearFree hacks, less performance overhead, better integration with the compositor, and not hardware specific. Nvidia drivers don't support DRI3 but they have their own double compositing hack that work as well as any other.

satysin 10y ago

My main machine is an oldish ThinkPad T420s. It runs Fedora 24 flawlessly. Sadly not many machines seem to run Linux (any distro) perfectly. Part of the reason I haven't upgraded to a newer machine is because this machine just works and I am very lazy so trying to get a newer machine to run as well is more work than I care for. It isn't like performance has improved massively since SandyBridge.

snowwindwaves 10y ago
I have a t420s also. In fact I bought a second as a spare. With 16gb ram and ssd it is a great machine. The one thing I love about it that I can't find on any new laptops is that all the ports are on the back; power, Ethernet, displays USB etc. I can show up at a plant and plug in to the network and power and have a mousepad beside the laptop keyboard and binders and notebooks on the other side without getting tangled up in cords. For bigger stays at a site I bring a 27" monitor too but still no cords out the side. No new laptops have all ports on the back!!
- satysin 10y ago
  YES! I love that also. I can deal with power on the left but when the hell do so many device makers put the damn power on the right side where my mouse will be?! The only ports I want on the side are USB and only on the left side please.

crudbug 10y ago

Please improve GNOME multi-display support anybody. I have triple monitor setup, GNOME always crashes. I am using XFCE with some success on F22.

known 10y ago

Sounds like RedHat is after https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

cs702 10y ago

This is great, because all distributions will benefit from it eventually, not just RedHat/Fedora. The folks at Canonical, in particular, seem to be very adept at leveraging the work of others for the benefit of Ubuntu. I would hope these kinds of efforts lead to better collaboration and coordination between the different distros for improving compatibility with desktop, laptop, tablet, and even phone hardware... ...but Unfortunately I don't think we should expect better collaboration and coordination, due to the usual political and quasi-religious barriers between distros.

hinkley 10y ago

I have a lot of mixed emotions about RedHat and to what degree they are a net positive or negative, but I'm glad someone is taking this on. It was so frustrating for me that the 'Linux on the Desktop' effort started right after the numbers showed that everyone was trading in their desktops for laptops. I wanted to program ON my laptop, not program my laptop. After spending almost 18 months trying to get all of the hardware on my laptop to work with linux (this included swapping out the wifi card and learning ACPI scripting so I could cobble together partial fixes from four other sources, and learning Crusoe CPU registers to contribute a power saving fix back to Transmeta, both things I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever), I said screw it and bought a Macbook. I'm on my fourth now, and aside for some difficulty installing command line tools, it's entirely removed hardware as a source of stress and procrastination.

hyperion2010 10y ago

I'm currently running Gentoo on a T30, T60p, and X1 Carbon (1st gen). For the X1 Carbon I actually switched because Windows 7 was causing periodic freezes. Power managment and drivers are always what is missing, and getting drivers written in a timely fashion is hard. That said, if they focus on a subset of laptops then they could show some major improvements. I do wonder about the old M$ ACPI manoeuvring though, if vendors still aren't documenting features then there will be problems.

digi_owl 10y ago

Welcome back, Red Hat Linux... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux