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Ubuntu is now really polished, and works great if you cherry pick hardware a bit and avoid components with drivers that are not in the kernel. But I'd go one s

Ubuntu is now really polished, and works great if you cherry pick hardware a bit and avoid components with drivers that are not in the kernel. But I'd go one step further and argue that, as a developer, Linux can give you a unique experience if you stick to its strengths: * Use a minimal distribution with few moving parts -> Things rarely break, and if something does it's usually easy to fix * Try functional package management and administration (NixOS) -> Easy to reproduce setups, trivial to rollback, no dependency hell * Try a simple keyboard-driven desktop -> A tiling window manager (XMonad), a web browser (Firefox) and Emacs (with Org, Magit, Eshell, Dired, Notmuch...) work incredibly well

gigatexal 9y ago
Is there much that doesn’t have a kernel module? I know some can’t be included because of licensing and such like some WiFi hardware but then distros could just compile all drives as modules and hot plug them at boot no? (I bet this is what happens anyway)
- meneame2 9y ago
  For example, many Broadcom network cards do not have decent drivers. These are really common.
ufo 9y ago
I don't think this agrees with the parent post. Niche package managers and window managers are precisely the sort of thing that you need to fiddle for an hour to get the projector to work or install some software that isn't packaged. I do agree that the freedom of choice that you are mentioning is a great benefit of Linux and FOSS software in general, though.
regularfry 9y ago
This in response to an otherwise very positive experience report that singles out a fault in what should be a really, really boring, unexciting, stable subsystem on "known good" hardware that somehow, in 2018, is still not working fluidly. Seriously, if you're cherry-picking hardware, I think you could be forgiven for landing on this laptop, and yet it doesn't work in a fairly obvious way.

gigatexal 9y ago

Is there much that doesn’t have a kernel module? I know some can’t be included because of licensing and such like some WiFi hardware but then distros could just compile all drives as modules and hot plug them at boot no? (I bet this is what happens anyway)

meneame2 9y ago
For example, many Broadcom network cards do not have decent drivers. These are really common.

ufo 9y ago

I don't think this agrees with the parent post. Niche package managers and window managers are precisely the sort of thing that you need to fiddle for an hour to get the projector to work or install some software that isn't packaged. I do agree that the freedom of choice that you are mentioning is a great benefit of Linux and FOSS software in general, though.

regularfry 9y ago

This in response to an otherwise very positive experience report that singles out a fault in what should be a really, really boring, unexciting, stable subsystem on "known good" hardware that somehow, in 2018, is still not working fluidly. Seriously, if you're cherry-picking hardware, I think you could be forgiven for landing on this laptop, and yet it doesn't work in a fairly obvious way.