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IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - a

by sk1pper 10y ago

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It's gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn't reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I've NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot. Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it's worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability. Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I've tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course. Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol

throwaway729 10y ago
Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years. The really dramatic improvements happened prior before 2010, and things have only gotten better since then. Bluetooth is still a damned mess. That, and battery life, and GPUs "just working", are the big differentiators IME. Of course YMMV.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  My experience matches yours. Wifi has worked for me for ages now, with various chipsets, but battery life has been very hit-and-miss, GPUs are almost a lost cause, and function keys/backlighting/cameras/other non-essentials are hairy. That said, the sibling comment has it right. Why am I buying laptops that don't support Linux if I'm going to use Linux on them? From now on, I'll only buy things that have Linux support as a first-class objective.
- autoreleasepool 10y ago
  > Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years Same experience here. My guess lingering reputations take more than 3 years to die off. Everything has surprisingly worked well out of the box me with my two Xubuntu installations I've done the last week. This is coming from a FreeBSD-land, where I'm used to setting up configurations files to load drivers and installing Xorg, xfce and it's plugins from scratch.
- nextos 10y ago
  With some powertop tweaks battery life can be as good as in OS X. I do in fact get a bit more juice from Arch than from OS X in my MBA. My setup is a very minimal on Arch, so the comparison is slightly unfair but it shows my point. OS X doesn't do any special magic. Linux can achieve equally low power consumptions with decent drivers and correct setup.
  - weavie 10y ago
    I think that is a very fair comparison. With OSX a minimal setup is not even an option.
- hobarrera 10y ago
  > Bluetooth is still a damned mess You can say that again. If you ever get a mic working, that is. Through the years, my headset has switched back and forth between "works flawlessly" and "I've no fucking idea why it won't work or how to make it work". My current status is the latter, and there seems to be no clear understanding on why it fails. Even though my setup is the exact same (except for OS updates, of course). Meanwhile, nothing else has failed. Ever.
- kagamine 10y ago
  ah, Bluetooth still involves a lot of googling and trial and error. I have no BT devices with a mic, but have achieved streaming audio to speakers. My set up is currently stable but after a reboot I have to repair the speaker (like an iPhone does, whereas OS X remembers and I can just choose the speaker from a list even after pairing it with another device) The first time I got it working I wrote it all down, step for step, repeated the steps after a reinstall and it failed. Second time I did it differently and wrote it up on the distro forum,you can see it here http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.php?/topic/14043-bluetooth-streaming-audio/ http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.php?/topic/14043-bluetoot... Seems like it got a lot easier between Bodhi Linux 3.x and 4.0 (Ubuntu 14 vs 16).
viraptor 10y ago
I guess you can still find weird wireless cards, but in practice, I've gone a decade or so (3 upgrades) without issues. A really minimal research will likely give you a fully compatible choice. Anecdata: I have a wifi extender at home just so a MacBook doesn't disconnect every few minutes. ThinkPad with Intel wifi and Linux didn't need it.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Even that little bit of having to research is enough to deter mainstream users, and so we're back to OS X or Windows. A Linux distribution or two has to get to the point where it's stable, doesn't have some sort of possible compatibility issue with hardware, and is strongly supported and encouraged for mainstream use by a large PC manufacturer.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    We're still far away for mainstream users. I mean, people on HN still seem to skip the quick component check. A big shift takes time.
    - muninn_ 10y ago
      I agree, but I think that big shift doesn't happen without big support from somebody.
      - viraptor 10y ago
        That's why I did my research, bought compatible hardware, and spend money on software and services which support Linux. Raise the stats, vote with money, write Linux software - what else can we do?
        muninn_ 10y ago
        Nothing, you need one of the large manufacturers to slowly divorce itself from Windows and offer well-designed, well-suported linux machines.
timtadh 10y ago
Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don't want to devote lots of time to a "project" buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well. Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the "windows tax" and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn't just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  Can anyone point me towards the new Dell XPS 15 Developer Edition (does it exist)? I'm able to find the Windows version [0], as well as the XPS 13 Developer Edition [1], but no XPS 15 Developer edition. I just want my 15 inches. I did 13 for years and the pain still haunts me. [0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9560-laptop/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9560-laptop/pd [1] http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...
  - gingernaut 10y ago
    It's the Dell Precision 5510. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstation/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...
    - hvis 10y ago
      I've looked at it, and they include a pretty useless NVIDIA Quadro instead of a video cart you could use for occasional gaming. Granted, the last 3D game I've ran on my XPS 15 was Half-Life 2, and it's pretty fast even on the integrated Intel video card.
  - nikatwork 10y ago
    I've heard the XPS13 has a nearly-15 usable screen size because of the tiny bevel, any owners care to verify?
thekevan 10y ago
>I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. I've installed Ubuntu on probably at least 20 computers (conservative estimate) and have only had wireless suck once or twice. I'm currently typing on an old Dell Inspiron N1440 running Ubuntu 16.04 and if I remember correctly, this is the one where wireless didn't work when I installed the OS, but I ran some updates while hardwired before I got to address the wireless issue and the updates fixed it for me. Also special function keys work as well.
colemickens 10y ago
Does anyone ever try to install Windows from scratch on these new laptops? They have far more problems than Linux out of the box - no Wifi drivers, no correct display driver so everythings stuck at 1024x768. No touchpad driver on one of them. Meanwhile, I've installed Arch and NixOS on a Chromebook Pixel 2013, Chromebook Pixel 2015, Lenovo X1 Carbon and a 2015 Macbook Pro in the last 18 months. Never had a significant issue, other than sound not working on the Pixels until I ran `yaourt -S linux4-samus`. When these threads pop up, I often get the impression that people are relaying experiences from 5+ years ago and assuming nothing's changed since then. Meanwhile, I don't have to deal with OS X's obnoxious behavior: the fact that I can't have a touchpad be natural scroll with an external mouse that is normal scroll. The fact that PageUp/Down/Home/End act completely inconsistently when using a "Windows" external keyboard with OS X. The feature-less window manager. Finder. Etc. If I have to spend 20 minutes tweaking Linux on my laptop, it's a small price compared to bending to OS X's quirks. In my opinion, of course.
- Theodores 10y ago
  I think you are onto something with running linux on a Chromebook. For years I have struggled with deaf wi-fi on laptops running Ubuntu, I spend half my evenings reconnecting the wifi on a Lenovo laptop, and that is with an external wifi dongle as there is no chance of getting the internal wifi working. I am writing this on a Chromebook Pixel 2013 variant, the wifi on this machine and every other Chromebook I have used is rock solid. I like the 'design classic' aspect of the Pixel (original flavour) and I didn't want to take it to pieces or leave it broken. Therefore, new Chromebook. My new cheap (£250) Chromebook is the Asus one with the HD screen, zero moving parts and a tough aluminium case. Everything on it works except for the internal speakers (sound is on HDMI) but I don't need sound to read my emails and write stuff in 'vi'. Rather than go for an esoteric linux I went for the ease of Gallium OS. This is an XFCE Ubuntu with all the hardware sorted except that HDMI sound problem... Now for ports... I presume next-gen Chromebooks will be USB-C, I just wanted a glorified keyboard/screen with wifi that worked, however, the ports are proper ones on the Chromebook, no fiddly mini HDMI or other leads that restrict the movement of the laptop. Battery life - realistically I can go all day but I get range anxiety if I do that so I carry the brick. I run DHCP on the cheap Chromebook complete with a reverse proxy so that my dev environment (still on the old laptop) can be worked on via the Chromebook (which runs keyboard/mouse sharing via Synergy) and via the phone/tablet for testing. I believe that the next generation Chromebooks are going to solve a lot of problems for me, my cheap chromebook doesn't do sound, the screen is non-touch but HD, the keyboard is not backlit (I use an external keyboard now) and I am not sure it has a CPU... I wonder if the android running next-gen Chromebooks will eat into the non-pro, non-developer market that Apple are trying to make their own, if this does happen then the Apple market share will start to diminish.
jjawssd 10y ago
It is very dishonest to claim that Linux is 100% usable when wireless drivers crash frequently and wireless throughput never matches that of proprietary drivers. Not to mention battery life is almost always worse. Sad, but true.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  The irony is, I have far more problems on my 2015 MBP with the Wifi drop-out rate than I ever did on Linux.
  - jjawssd 10y ago
    What chipset and OS are you using with Linux?
noobermin 10y ago
I have two laptops, the 2015 macbook and a yoga 13 with linux on it. The yoga 13 was refurbished and has hardware issues and freezes from time to time[0] on both linux and windows(hence why I bought the macbook)...but the wireless on the macbook drops so frequently I've stopped using the macbook and use the glitchy hardware laptop. The laptop is heavier, a few years older, and uglier (missing screws at this point), but is a more pleasant usage experience over that macbook any day. Ready for the kicker? When running Linux on the macbook, the wireless doesn't drop, but the macbook does not have a linux keyboard driver so I can't use it outside my house. Sample of one, etc. [0] It crashes every few days while running continuously, to give a sense of time. The macbook's wireless drops at least once every hour or so. Hence why the laptop is better for me than the macbook.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  I have to flap my macbook's wifi and/or reboot several times a day. I can't find out how to fix it from their joke of online support - just a load of people bitching about the same thing and deleting the plist file, IIRC, which is a temporary fix. Very frustrating.
agibsonccc 10y ago
I've owned 3 laptops over the last few years and have struggled to have problems like this save 1 example where the wifi took a bit of work (this has since been fixed). I have found the newer asus zenbooks pretty well, I had a thinkpad, and even an asus gaming laptop (I do deep learning work) and haven't had the problems people report with things like the nvidia drivers. I use fedora though. A few things here: Don't worry about being on the bleeding edge with linux. I'm sticking with fedora 23 for a while. I still update the kernel and the like. Other than that, things have by and large worked for me. I would love to hear contradictory stories though. I'm not sure where the gotchas are. I'm definitely not so starry eyed about linux that I know there are problems, but I've found I can't use stand windows or osx.
nextos 10y ago
Given not all manufacturers are friendly with Linux, you just need to cherrypick a bit. For example if you get a laptop that has only Intel components, or all Intel plus an Atheros wireless card, everything will just work. You might only experience issues in the latest Intel iteration, while they fix some glitches. But Macs have also had teething problems. ARMs will also become more an more a great option. For example Chromebook Asus C201 can be run with free software and firmware. And it's great & cheap. The general rule of thumb is, if there are free drivers, it will work well. If not, it won't. Or at least, you might suffer the effects of planned obsolescence.
Sophistifunk 10y ago
Linux or not, I'd personally stick with Mac or Surface hardware for laptops, because they're the only good touchpads you can buy, everything else is just junk in comparison.
shmerl 10y ago
> and god forbid, wirless Stick to Intel WiFi chips, and you'll be OK. They provide an open driver (iwlwifi). Second best is probably Qualcomm Atheros (ath10k), also open driver. Stay away from the rest. Intel 802.11ac cards work really well on Linux. The only problem with laptops can be nasty blacklisting (Lenovo is notorious for that). I.e. if you buy a WiFi card separately and it's not from the "approved" list, the UEFI firmware will reject it preventing computer from booting, and there is almost nothing you can do about it, except buying a card with correct ID from the "approved" list. Not sure if other manufacturers are as nasty, but I encountered this with Lenovo.
- lorenzfx 10y ago
  You can often install a hacked BIOS wich do not contain such a blacklist, which you can find on the internet, installing which may or may not be a good idea though.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    It is possible for some older models. But not for recent ones. Or at least so far no such method was published.
pjmlp 10y ago
> Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Unless one is into proper UI/UX design experiences, game and graphics programming specially with multi-GPU and all those nice buttons on the laptop.
- kagamine 10y ago
  There are so many desktop environs for Linux, some mimic OS X, some Windows (XP, 7, 8/10), some unique that if you can't find a UX experience on Linux that is acceptable then the problem isn't Linux, but it might be you! Game and graphics programming - fair point. Nice buttons, assuming you mean that row of lights and so on that laptop designers seem to love, always just work for me. Volume, wi-fi, etc work. What doesn't work is the "open a calculator" type button, but I could fix that with a bit of customizing key bindings. As it's so easy to open the "everything finder" in the DE I use ( Moshka/E17) it is easier than reaching for those off-keyboard buttons. Maybe you need to distro hop a bit more?!
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > some unique that if you can't find a UX experience on Linux that is acceptable then the problem isn't Linux, but it might be you! Nice way to welcome outsiders into the GNU/Linux world, then don't complain non-geeks don't feel welcome. I use GNU/Linux since Slackware 2.0 and have used quite a lot of UI managers, probably all the most known ones. My remark of UI/UX was from the point of view of someone that also does it, creating software for people that want to know as little as possible from computers, regarding their actual work.
- zaph0d_ 10y ago
  IIRC macOs does not support OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan. Also there is currently no high performance Apple Hardare to do things like CUDA or other GPGPU programming. CUDA on Linux is really an easy thing to do. For Game programming tools like Unreal Engine 4 are afaik alreasy supported on Linux, which gives you multiplatform support. For graphics, music or 3D modelling windows is currently the only solution.
indeyets 10y ago
> all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol I wonder why there's such lack of belief in everyone. I think this touchbar is just a temporary transition-time solution and we'll have a decent replacement in a year (tactile feedback, retina-resolution, etc.)
majewsky 10y ago
> Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. Still? When I bought a new notebook in 2012, the particular model had been out for 3 days. Yet there was a very detailed installation guide in the Arch Wiki for that particular model, and the only issues I had were with the brightness keys on the notebook (both for screen and keyboard backlight). The backlight control via UI worked, but not via keys. Was fixed a few months later.
- metafunctor 10y ago
  It can be a huge PITA on Linux. You need to study the hardware and Linux support before you buy. Walk in a store, and buy a random laptop, chances are good something in it won't work very well.
thewhitetulip 10y ago
I never had any complaints with Linux on laptop except battery life, it sucks. MacBooks have a battery life of at least 8hrs, my 2012 model has a battery life of 8hrs, I have to charge it once a week, since I don't use it for more than 2hrs daily.
- innocenat 10y ago
  I cannot compare to Mac, but my laptop running vanilla Ubuntu with default config of tlp is at least as good as, or better than, Windows 10.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Of course, Ubuntu's UI and basically everything is superior to Win10, but I am yet to see equivalents of 8hrs battery :-) (except if you buy a very costly Windows Laptop)
tyfon 10y ago
I replaced my work laptop last friday with a new IBM x260. Everyting just works. The wireless range is insane too. Even the built in LTE modem "Just works" with networkmanager/modemmanager.. it's awesome. I had to install one piece of software though, and that was fprintd (to use the fingerprint reader) and add a line to a pam.d file to use it. The _only_ thing that has not worked yet is the Fn+F4 to sleep however it is a keyboard scancode thing as the laptop immedately goes to sleep when i close the lid and wakes when I open it again (without _any_ issues). Oh.. and in bios I swapped the control and Fn keys as not having control all he way to the left was driving me insane!
iSnow 10y ago
I just bought a laptop to switch my aging mother from Windows Vista to something I could remote administer more easily. Bought one of the laptops from the "Ubuntu certified" site and most everything just worked out of the box, including audio and Wifi. I'll probably be switching from Macs to either Linux Mint or Elementary OS once the new XPS 15" are out.
Kostic 10y ago
>As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. You aren't doing a fair comparasion. You are comparing macOS on a Macbook with Linux on a generic laptop. I have a wonderful, hassle-free experience with Fedora 25 on a ThinkPad X240. For anyone else, if you want Linux on a laptop without having to do additional work to enable hardware support, use Ubuntu or Fedora on a ThinkPad from X, T or W series.
mcone 10y ago
Could anyone suggest some resources for building a Linux desktop computer from scratch? I've been a Mac user forever and I'm interested in building my own desktop computer, but I honestly have no idea how to select components, much less how to tell if they're compatible with Linux or Fedora. Any help would be appreciated.
- mrsernine 10y ago
  As pointed somewhere in this thread, the Arch linux wiki is a good resource for hardware compatibility issues. It doesn't really matter if it focus in one particular distro, it's the same kernel after all. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Hardware https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Hardware To my limited knowledge, intel hardware has excellent linux support. If you need a little more muscle in the GPU go for nvidia rather than AMD.

by sk1pper 10y ago

throwaway729 10y ago

Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years. The really dramatic improvements happened prior before 2010, and things have only gotten better since then. Bluetooth is still a damned mess. That, and battery life, and GPUs "just working", are the big differentiators IME. Of course YMMV.

StavrosK 10y ago
My experience matches yours. Wifi has worked for me for ages now, with various chipsets, but battery life has been very hit-and-miss, GPUs are almost a lost cause, and function keys/backlighting/cameras/other non-essentials are hairy. That said, the sibling comment has it right. Why am I buying laptops that don't support Linux if I'm going to use Linux on them? From now on, I'll only buy things that have Linux support as a first-class objective.
autoreleasepool 10y ago
> Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years Same experience here. My guess lingering reputations take more than 3 years to die off. Everything has surprisingly worked well out of the box me with my two Xubuntu installations I've done the last week. This is coming from a FreeBSD-land, where I'm used to setting up configurations files to load drivers and installing Xorg, xfce and it's plugins from scratch.
nextos 10y ago
With some powertop tweaks battery life can be as good as in OS X. I do in fact get a bit more juice from Arch than from OS X in my MBA. My setup is a very minimal on Arch, so the comparison is slightly unfair but it shows my point. OS X doesn't do any special magic. Linux can achieve equally low power consumptions with decent drivers and correct setup.
- weavie 10y ago
  I think that is a very fair comparison. With OSX a minimal setup is not even an option.
hobarrera 10y ago
> Bluetooth is still a damned mess You can say that again. If you ever get a mic working, that is. Through the years, my headset has switched back and forth between "works flawlessly" and "I've no fucking idea why it won't work or how to make it work". My current status is the latter, and there seems to be no clear understanding on why it fails. Even though my setup is the exact same (except for OS updates, of course). Meanwhile, nothing else has failed. Ever.
kagamine 10y ago
ah, Bluetooth still involves a lot of googling and trial and error. I have no BT devices with a mic, but have achieved streaming audio to speakers. My set up is currently stable but after a reboot I have to repair the speaker (like an iPhone does, whereas OS X remembers and I can just choose the speaker from a list even after pairing it with another device) The first time I got it working I wrote it all down, step for step, repeated the steps after a reinstall and it failed. Second time I did it differently and wrote it up on the distro forum,you can see it here http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.php?/topic/14043-bluetooth-streaming-audio/ http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.php?/topic/14043-bluetoot... Seems like it got a lot easier between Bodhi Linux 3.x and 4.0 (Ubuntu 14 vs 16).

viraptor 10y ago

I guess you can still find weird wireless cards, but in practice, I've gone a decade or so (3 upgrades) without issues. A really minimal research will likely give you a fully compatible choice. Anecdata: I have a wifi extender at home just so a MacBook doesn't disconnect every few minutes. ThinkPad with Intel wifi and Linux didn't need it.

muninn_ 10y ago
Even that little bit of having to research is enough to deter mainstream users, and so we're back to OS X or Windows. A Linux distribution or two has to get to the point where it's stable, doesn't have some sort of possible compatibility issue with hardware, and is strongly supported and encouraged for mainstream use by a large PC manufacturer.
- viraptor 10y ago
  We're still far away for mainstream users. I mean, people on HN still seem to skip the quick component check. A big shift takes time.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    I agree, but I think that big shift doesn't happen without big support from somebody.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      That's why I did my research, bought compatible hardware, and spend money on software and services which support Linux. Raise the stats, vote with money, write Linux software - what else can we do?
      - muninn_ 10y ago
        Nothing, you need one of the large manufacturers to slowly divorce itself from Windows and offer well-designed, well-suported linux machines.

timtadh 10y ago

Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don't want to devote lots of time to a "project" buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well. Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the "windows tax" and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn't just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.

leesalminen 10y ago
Can anyone point me towards the new Dell XPS 15 Developer Edition (does it exist)? I'm able to find the Windows version [0], as well as the XPS 13 Developer Edition [1], but no XPS 15 Developer edition. I just want my 15 inches. I did 13 for years and the pain still haunts me. [0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9560-laptop/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9560-laptop/pd [1] http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...
- gingernaut 10y ago
  It's the Dell Precision 5510. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstation/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...
  - hvis 10y ago
    I've looked at it, and they include a pretty useless NVIDIA Quadro instead of a video cart you could use for occasional gaming. Granted, the last 3D game I've ran on my XPS 15 was Half-Life 2, and it's pretty fast even on the integrated Intel video card.
- nikatwork 10y ago
  I've heard the XPS13 has a nearly-15 usable screen size because of the tiny bevel, any owners care to verify?

thekevan 10y ago

>I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. I've installed Ubuntu on probably at least 20 computers (conservative estimate) and have only had wireless suck once or twice. I'm currently typing on an old Dell Inspiron N1440 running Ubuntu 16.04 and if I remember correctly, this is the one where wireless didn't work when I installed the OS, but I ran some updates while hardwired before I got to address the wireless issue and the updates fixed it for me. Also special function keys work as well.

colemickens 10y ago

Does anyone ever try to install Windows from scratch on these new laptops? They have far more problems than Linux out of the box - no Wifi drivers, no correct display driver so everythings stuck at 1024x768. No touchpad driver on one of them. Meanwhile, I've installed Arch and NixOS on a Chromebook Pixel 2013, Chromebook Pixel 2015, Lenovo X1 Carbon and a 2015 Macbook Pro in the last 18 months. Never had a significant issue, other than sound not working on the Pixels until I ran `yaourt -S linux4-samus`. When these threads pop up, I often get the impression that people are relaying experiences from 5+ years ago and assuming nothing's changed since then. Meanwhile, I don't have to deal with OS X's obnoxious behavior: the fact that I can't have a touchpad be natural scroll with an external mouse that is normal scroll. The fact that PageUp/Down/Home/End act completely inconsistently when using a "Windows" external keyboard with OS X. The feature-less window manager. Finder. Etc. If I have to spend 20 minutes tweaking Linux on my laptop, it's a small price compared to bending to OS X's quirks. In my opinion, of course.

Theodores 10y ago
I think you are onto something with running linux on a Chromebook. For years I have struggled with deaf wi-fi on laptops running Ubuntu, I spend half my evenings reconnecting the wifi on a Lenovo laptop, and that is with an external wifi dongle as there is no chance of getting the internal wifi working. I am writing this on a Chromebook Pixel 2013 variant, the wifi on this machine and every other Chromebook I have used is rock solid. I like the 'design classic' aspect of the Pixel (original flavour) and I didn't want to take it to pieces or leave it broken. Therefore, new Chromebook. My new cheap (£250) Chromebook is the Asus one with the HD screen, zero moving parts and a tough aluminium case. Everything on it works except for the internal speakers (sound is on HDMI) but I don't need sound to read my emails and write stuff in 'vi'. Rather than go for an esoteric linux I went for the ease of Gallium OS. This is an XFCE Ubuntu with all the hardware sorted except that HDMI sound problem... Now for ports... I presume next-gen Chromebooks will be USB-C, I just wanted a glorified keyboard/screen with wifi that worked, however, the ports are proper ones on the Chromebook, no fiddly mini HDMI or other leads that restrict the movement of the laptop. Battery life - realistically I can go all day but I get range anxiety if I do that so I carry the brick. I run DHCP on the cheap Chromebook complete with a reverse proxy so that my dev environment (still on the old laptop) can be worked on via the Chromebook (which runs keyboard/mouse sharing via Synergy) and via the phone/tablet for testing. I believe that the next generation Chromebooks are going to solve a lot of problems for me, my cheap chromebook doesn't do sound, the screen is non-touch but HD, the keyboard is not backlit (I use an external keyboard now) and I am not sure it has a CPU... I wonder if the android running next-gen Chromebooks will eat into the non-pro, non-developer market that Apple are trying to make their own, if this does happen then the Apple market share will start to diminish.

jjawssd 10y ago

It is very dishonest to claim that Linux is 100% usable when wireless drivers crash frequently and wireless throughput never matches that of proprietary drivers. Not to mention battery life is almost always worse. Sad, but true.

AsyncAwait 10y ago
The irony is, I have far more problems on my 2015 MBP with the Wifi drop-out rate than I ever did on Linux.
- jjawssd 10y ago
  What chipset and OS are you using with Linux?

noobermin 10y ago

I have two laptops, the 2015 macbook and a yoga 13 with linux on it. The yoga 13 was refurbished and has hardware issues and freezes from time to time[0] on both linux and windows(hence why I bought the macbook)...but the wireless on the macbook drops so frequently I've stopped using the macbook and use the glitchy hardware laptop. The laptop is heavier, a few years older, and uglier (missing screws at this point), but is a more pleasant usage experience over that macbook any day. Ready for the kicker? When running Linux on the macbook, the wireless doesn't drop, but the macbook does not have a linux keyboard driver so I can't use it outside my house. Sample of one, etc. [0] It crashes every few days while running continuously, to give a sense of time. The macbook's wireless drops at least once every hour or so. Hence why the laptop is better for me than the macbook.

WalterSear 10y ago
I have to flap my macbook's wifi and/or reboot several times a day. I can't find out how to fix it from their joke of online support - just a load of people bitching about the same thing and deleting the plist file, IIRC, which is a temporary fix. Very frustrating.

agibsonccc 10y ago

I've owned 3 laptops over the last few years and have struggled to have problems like this save 1 example where the wifi took a bit of work (this has since been fixed). I have found the newer asus zenbooks pretty well, I had a thinkpad, and even an asus gaming laptop (I do deep learning work) and haven't had the problems people report with things like the nvidia drivers. I use fedora though. A few things here: Don't worry about being on the bleeding edge with linux. I'm sticking with fedora 23 for a while. I still update the kernel and the like. Other than that, things have by and large worked for me. I would love to hear contradictory stories though. I'm not sure where the gotchas are. I'm definitely not so starry eyed about linux that I know there are problems, but I've found I can't use stand windows or osx.

nextos 10y ago

Given not all manufacturers are friendly with Linux, you just need to cherrypick a bit. For example if you get a laptop that has only Intel components, or all Intel plus an Atheros wireless card, everything will just work. You might only experience issues in the latest Intel iteration, while they fix some glitches. But Macs have also had teething problems. ARMs will also become more an more a great option. For example Chromebook Asus C201 can be run with free software and firmware. And it's great & cheap. The general rule of thumb is, if there are free drivers, it will work well. If not, it won't. Or at least, you might suffer the effects of planned obsolescence.

Sophistifunk 10y ago

Linux or not, I'd personally stick with Mac or Surface hardware for laptops, because they're the only good touchpads you can buy, everything else is just junk in comparison.

shmerl 10y ago

> and god forbid, wirless Stick to Intel WiFi chips, and you'll be OK. They provide an open driver (iwlwifi). Second best is probably Qualcomm Atheros (ath10k), also open driver. Stay away from the rest. Intel 802.11ac cards work really well on Linux. The only problem with laptops can be nasty blacklisting (Lenovo is notorious for that). I.e. if you buy a WiFi card separately and it's not from the "approved" list, the UEFI firmware will reject it preventing computer from booting, and there is almost nothing you can do about it, except buying a card with correct ID from the "approved" list. Not sure if other manufacturers are as nasty, but I encountered this with Lenovo.

lorenzfx 10y ago
You can often install a hacked BIOS wich do not contain such a blacklist, which you can find on the internet, installing which may or may not be a good idea though.
- shmerl 10y ago
  It is possible for some older models. But not for recent ones. Or at least so far no such method was published.

pjmlp 10y ago

> Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Unless one is into proper UI/UX design experiences, game and graphics programming specially with multi-GPU and all those nice buttons on the laptop.

kagamine 10y ago
There are so many desktop environs for Linux, some mimic OS X, some Windows (XP, 7, 8/10), some unique that if you can't find a UX experience on Linux that is acceptable then the problem isn't Linux, but it might be you! Game and graphics programming - fair point. Nice buttons, assuming you mean that row of lights and so on that laptop designers seem to love, always just work for me. Volume, wi-fi, etc work. What doesn't work is the "open a calculator" type button, but I could fix that with a bit of customizing key bindings. As it's so easy to open the "everything finder" in the DE I use ( Moshka/E17) it is easier than reaching for those off-keyboard buttons. Maybe you need to distro hop a bit more?!
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > some unique that if you can't find a UX experience on Linux that is acceptable then the problem isn't Linux, but it might be you! Nice way to welcome outsiders into the GNU/Linux world, then don't complain non-geeks don't feel welcome. I use GNU/Linux since Slackware 2.0 and have used quite a lot of UI managers, probably all the most known ones. My remark of UI/UX was from the point of view of someone that also does it, creating software for people that want to know as little as possible from computers, regarding their actual work.
zaph0d_ 10y ago
IIRC macOs does not support OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan. Also there is currently no high performance Apple Hardare to do things like CUDA or other GPGPU programming. CUDA on Linux is really an easy thing to do. For Game programming tools like Unreal Engine 4 are afaik alreasy supported on Linux, which gives you multiplatform support. For graphics, music or 3D modelling windows is currently the only solution.

indeyets 10y ago

> all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol I wonder why there's such lack of belief in everyone. I think this touchbar is just a temporary transition-time solution and we'll have a decent replacement in a year (tactile feedback, retina-resolution, etc.)

majewsky 10y ago

> Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. Still? When I bought a new notebook in 2012, the particular model had been out for 3 days. Yet there was a very detailed installation guide in the Arch Wiki for that particular model, and the only issues I had were with the brightness keys on the notebook (both for screen and keyboard backlight). The backlight control via UI worked, but not via keys. Was fixed a few months later.

metafunctor 10y ago
It can be a huge PITA on Linux. You need to study the hardware and Linux support before you buy. Walk in a store, and buy a random laptop, chances are good something in it won't work very well.

thewhitetulip 10y ago

I never had any complaints with Linux on laptop except battery life, it sucks. MacBooks have a battery life of at least 8hrs, my 2012 model has a battery life of 8hrs, I have to charge it once a week, since I don't use it for more than 2hrs daily.

innocenat 10y ago
I cannot compare to Mac, but my laptop running vanilla Ubuntu with default config of tlp is at least as good as, or better than, Windows 10.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Of course, Ubuntu's UI and basically everything is superior to Win10, but I am yet to see equivalents of 8hrs battery :-) (except if you buy a very costly Windows Laptop)

tyfon 10y ago

I replaced my work laptop last friday with a new IBM x260. Everyting just works. The wireless range is insane too. Even the built in LTE modem "Just works" with networkmanager/modemmanager.. it's awesome. I had to install one piece of software though, and that was fprintd (to use the fingerprint reader) and add a line to a pam.d file to use it. The _only_ thing that has not worked yet is the Fn+F4 to sleep however it is a keyboard scancode thing as the laptop immedately goes to sleep when i close the lid and wakes when I open it again (without _any_ issues). Oh.. and in bios I swapped the control and Fn keys as not having control all he way to the left was driving me insane!

iSnow 10y ago

I just bought a laptop to switch my aging mother from Windows Vista to something I could remote administer more easily. Bought one of the laptops from the "Ubuntu certified" site and most everything just worked out of the box, including audio and Wifi. I'll probably be switching from Macs to either Linux Mint or Elementary OS once the new XPS 15" are out.

Kostic 10y ago

>As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. You aren't doing a fair comparasion. You are comparing macOS on a Macbook with Linux on a generic laptop. I have a wonderful, hassle-free experience with Fedora 25 on a ThinkPad X240. For anyone else, if you want Linux on a laptop without having to do additional work to enable hardware support, use Ubuntu or Fedora on a ThinkPad from X, T or W series.

mcone 10y ago

Could anyone suggest some resources for building a Linux desktop computer from scratch? I've been a Mac user forever and I'm interested in building my own desktop computer, but I honestly have no idea how to select components, much less how to tell if they're compatible with Linux or Fedora. Any help would be appreciated.

mrsernine 10y ago
As pointed somewhere in this thread, the Arch linux wiki is a good resource for hardware compatibility issues. It doesn't really matter if it focus in one particular distro, it's the same kernel after all. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Hardware https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Hardware To my limited knowledge, intel hardware has excellent linux support. If you need a little more muscle in the GPU go for nvidia rather than AMD.