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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

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).

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).