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Although I have experienced that choice on Apple hardware recently (2015 mbp retina), lately Linux seems to, let's say, 95% Just Work on non-apple x86 hardware

by drvdevd 10y ago

Although I have experienced that choice on Apple hardware recently (2015 mbp retina), lately Linux seems to, let's say, 95% Just Work on non-apple x86 hardware for me, WLAN, sound, and suspend/resume. [edit] and this is with any distro, perhaps with more or less setup work

kagamine 10y ago
I find sleep/resume is successful when the proprietary driver is installed, nouveau isn't doing it doing it for me on Ubuntu derived 16.x distros (this month I have tried KDE Neon and Bodhi). The problem though, is that installing the drivers can be a pain. Last time I tried I soft bricked the PC and ended up doing a full reinstall to save time. As someone further down this thread said, what advantage is there these days in Nvidia not open-sourcing the drivers? They are still going to be selling the display cards. The other problem for Linux I have encountered recently that burned through my free time was updateing the bios, there are no bios updates with Linux installers, which is annoying because the bios is update is OS agnostic. I had to create a bootable USB drive from a windows program (luckily I have a Windows PC for work) and boot from that. But the how-to guide from HP was lacking in details, and on one PC the program doesn't allow me to create the drive on one PC for use on another, so no bios update there. The problems I have with Linux never seem to be to do with Linux, it is almost always hardware manufacturers being obstinate and refusing to share their toys with other adults.
- drvdevd 10y ago
  Yeah in the future, I will certainly be buying hardware that is designed to run desktop/server Linux (and support features you mention like BIOS upgrades easily as well) or is otherwise known to support it well. No more random COTS buys for me without research first. I'm done burning hours on this sort of weird crap vendors want to give us. So if a vendor wants to sell me a PC or enterprise anything, it needs to support Linux well. I also don't plan to purchase any brand new Apple hardware. I will only adopt Apple hardware late (and used) and will only run OS X if absolutely necessary for some reason.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  > what advantage is there these days in Nvidia not open-sourcing the drivers? AMD have demonstrated that trying to do the right thing will get you shit from the maintainers and abuse from bystanders, who will then go and buy Nvidia because it gets a better frame rate.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    AMD's been in the news for trying to half-ass the right thing, and asking the community to lower their standards because AMD is too poor to do the job right.
    - antspiders 10y ago
      I never understand this sentiment: AMD is still putting in effort for a token market (Linux is something like 0.3% of computers if you don't count servers/embedded). Would you rather have them do nothing and leave the cards poorly supported?
      - prodigal_erik 10y ago
        They're putting in token effort and trying to create an impediment for Linux kernel development even on other hardware. And they were warned months ago that it wasn't going to fly. Having a driver is good, but putting it in-kernel is bad if the kernel devs can't read it and fix it.
coldtea 10y ago
>95% Just Work on non-apple x86 hardware for me That has been the case for a decade or so now. 95% is not enough (for non-tinkerers)
- drvdevd 10y ago
  Agreed. It's still frustrating -- see my other comment in thread. Even for non-Apple x86 stuff, I'm researching well going forward.
  - drvdevd 10y ago
    This is a really great article I should add and I do wish them luck in their endeavors to support Apple hardware. The developers tone is quite inspirational.
- vetinari 10y ago
  That 100% support includes a research before purchase. You just cannot purchase random hardware and hope for the best. For me, major distributions work out of the box. For example, with my T430s, everything works, including the fingerprint reader and WWAN.

by drvdevd 10y ago

kagamine 10y ago

I find sleep/resume is successful when the proprietary driver is installed, nouveau isn't doing it doing it for me on Ubuntu derived 16.x distros (this month I have tried KDE Neon and Bodhi). The problem though, is that installing the drivers can be a pain. Last time I tried I soft bricked the PC and ended up doing a full reinstall to save time. As someone further down this thread said, what advantage is there these days in Nvidia not open-sourcing the drivers? They are still going to be selling the display cards. The other problem for Linux I have encountered recently that burned through my free time was updateing the bios, there are no bios updates with Linux installers, which is annoying because the bios is update is OS agnostic. I had to create a bootable USB drive from a windows program (luckily I have a Windows PC for work) and boot from that. But the how-to guide from HP was lacking in details, and on one PC the program doesn't allow me to create the drive on one PC for use on another, so no bios update there. The problems I have with Linux never seem to be to do with Linux, it is almost always hardware manufacturers being obstinate and refusing to share their toys with other adults.

drvdevd 10y ago
Yeah in the future, I will certainly be buying hardware that is designed to run desktop/server Linux (and support features you mention like BIOS upgrades easily as well) or is otherwise known to support it well. No more random COTS buys for me without research first. I'm done burning hours on this sort of weird crap vendors want to give us. So if a vendor wants to sell me a PC or enterprise anything, it needs to support Linux well. I also don't plan to purchase any brand new Apple hardware. I will only adopt Apple hardware late (and used) and will only run OS X if absolutely necessary for some reason.
rodgerd 10y ago
> what advantage is there these days in Nvidia not open-sourcing the drivers? AMD have demonstrated that trying to do the right thing will get you shit from the maintainers and abuse from bystanders, who will then go and buy Nvidia because it gets a better frame rate.
- wtallis 10y ago
  AMD's been in the news for trying to half-ass the right thing, and asking the community to lower their standards because AMD is too poor to do the job right.
  - antspiders 10y ago
    I never understand this sentiment: AMD is still putting in effort for a token market (Linux is something like 0.3% of computers if you don't count servers/embedded). Would you rather have them do nothing and leave the cards poorly supported?
    - prodigal_erik 10y ago
      They're putting in token effort and trying to create an impediment for Linux kernel development even on other hardware. And they were warned months ago that it wasn't going to fly. Having a driver is good, but putting it in-kernel is bad if the kernel devs can't read it and fix it.

coldtea 10y ago

>95% Just Work on non-apple x86 hardware for me That has been the case for a decade or so now. 95% is not enough (for non-tinkerers)

drvdevd 10y ago
Agreed. It's still frustrating -- see my other comment in thread. Even for non-Apple x86 stuff, I'm researching well going forward.
- drvdevd 10y ago
  This is a really great article I should add and I do wish them luck in their endeavors to support Apple hardware. The developers tone is quite inspirational.
vetinari 10y ago
That 100% support includes a research before purchase. You just cannot purchase random hardware and hope for the best. For me, major distributions work out of the box. For example, with my T430s, everything works, including the fingerprint reader and WWAN.