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And why do you think that a lot of people who are painfully aware of all the issues you mention still refuse to use Linux on a laptop while happily using it on

And why do you think that a lot of people who are painfully aware of all the issues you mention still refuse to use Linux on a laptop while happily using it on servers? There is a riduculous repetitiveness about this debate. For me and many others, Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. Many specific issues can be fixed if you put in the effort, but on almost every dist-upgrade something essential breaks and you're back to square one. And the response to these issues has always been a mixture of disbelief, denial, accusations of incompetence and pointers to ridiculously convoluted and brittle workarounds. There are bound to be people on every message board claiming to have run Linux for years if not decades without any of the issues I'm seeing on a daily basis and have been seeing for decades on scores of different laptops. So where do we stand on this? Will we ever get out of this unproductive loop of claims and counter claims while an oligopoly of corporations builds ever higher walls around more and more restrictive gardens?

Jedd 8y ago
> There is a riduculous repetitiveness about this debate. For me and many others, Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. > Will we ever get out of this unproductive loop of claims and counter claims... Sounds like a no.
AsyncAwait 8y ago
> For me and many others, Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. I've successfully converted many people with similar claims over to Linux and here's what I've found; most of them were trying Linux on a subpar, non-standard laptop, (Like an old MacBook or a slow Celeron), to lower their investment if they don't like it, which is fine, but then comparing the experience to their high end MBP running macOS, (try installing macOS to the same set of low-end machines most try to put Linux on, see how that goes). All it took is for them to get good, solid hardware, (like a recent Intel stack, or a Ryzen with a GPU compatible with the AMDGPU driver), and all was good. Not saying that is your case, but it is shockingly common, which is unfair to Linux, I'd say.
- admg 8y ago
  I'd agree with that, I run stock ubuntu on a thinkpad t460p. I have only one issue which is that display scaling is not fractional, its in set values which doesn't play well with resolutions above 1080p. Thats a gnome issue though and doesn't stop the screen working perfectly when the resolution is set to 1080p instead of 2550x1440 or whatever it is.
  - pedrocr 8y ago
    This is trivial to fix actually. Ubuntu 16.04 had "fractional" scaling by default but in reality all it did was between 1x and 2x use 1x with larger fonts. 18.04 lost that with the gnome transition but you can just change the font scaling manually. Less convenient and polished but still there in the tweak tool. Firefox also includes a scaling option in the configs. With those two settings my T460s with the 2560x1440 screen looks great. It does suck that the Gnome transition in the new LTS has been so bad. For all its quirks the Unity on Xorg experience was actually very stable and polished for years now.
    - admg 8y ago
      Thats interesting to know, thanks for the tip!
      - noir_lord 8y ago
        FWIW I do the same as suggested and it's great, font scaling set to 1.4 on a 14"@2560x1440 T470P running @2560x1440 looks nice, the only very slight snag is that font scaling doesn't scale the window decorations but a few themes do work (Numix window decorations).
    - nobleach 8y ago
      What happens when you plug in a second monitor?
      - pedrocr 8y ago
jacquesm 8y ago
I'm running linux on all my machines, including a Macbook Air and it works very well. Unstable, insecure, hot and noisy would not be words I would use to describe my setup. The only noisy machine here is parked in another room and given its size and processing power it is noisy but that goes with the territory. Apple doesn't make anything that is even remotely equivalent. Which means I can run the same software on all my machines which is another benefit. And yes, I've been doing this for decades. As for 'dist-upgrade', I don't normally do that, I go for long term stable releases and upgrade when the hardware gets replaced, which is once every few years.
- DoritoChef 8y ago
  May I ask what distro you're running? I tried Ubuntu 16.04LTS some time ago, and it didn't seem to get along very well with my mid-2015 MBP.
  - paulsmal 8y ago
    I was a happy user of Arch+i3wm on MBP 2015.
mirchibajji 8y ago
It boils down to what kind of trade-offs we are willing to make. I might have been one of those Linux users that didn't have many serious issues for decades. Tried OSX for a while (2013-14), but didn't like how OSX gets in the way, though Mac hardware seemed decent. I would rather put up with an unusable fingerprint reader under Linux (Thinkpad Carbon X1), rather than OSX idiosyncrasies. There are other issues with the current Thinkpad (screen mirroring doesn't work reliably), but that is not a deal breaker for me
dsuth 8y ago
This. I gave up after several rounds of dist-upgrades broke, then fixed, then re-broke things. If you’re making fundamental architectural changes on a regular (monthly) basis, it’s pretty clear you’re not interested in being taken seriously in the business user world.
- azernik 8y ago
  Stick with LTS releases. Those make no deep changes, and are supported for (with Ubuntu) 5 years.
ceres 8y ago
Exactly! Personally I've been running Debian on my laptop for about 3 years now but come on! You can't deny that it is a pain in the ass to use especially if something breaks and the only way to fix it is to sift through many forums online to find the right commands solve even a simple problem. Also, why is it so painfully slow to copy documents to a thumb drive using Linux as compared to Windows?
- sound1 8y ago
  This is one of the things I am eagerly waiting to see answered :-) Hopefully someone suggests a better way to do this with a utility or something.
dizzystar 8y ago
The problem is that "Linux" is ambiguous. A comment below is agreeing and they use Debian. I've heard of Ubuntu being flakey. I used Fedora and Arch for years with zero issues (this is shocking to people who prefer LTS systems). CentOS is a trainwreck. Take any OS, twist the wrong knobs, and you're looking forward to a long night. Mind that the priorities of the user are different. Most people, including programmers, aren't concerned with using all the utilities of Linux land. Programmers have eyes too, and likewise enjoy aesthetics. For programming, I'd use Linux over MacOS any day of the week, but for music, MacOS is the clear winner.
rbanffy 8y ago
> There are bound to be people on every message board claiming to have run Linux for years if not decades without any of the issues I'm seeing on a daily basis and have been seeing for decades on scores of different laptops. Unless you think they are lying, it's an interesting observation. It could just be you are incredibly unlucky (a few samples in the global population will have problems, just like a few will never experience any, even on Windows). It would seem to me the distribution hump is rather on the relatively problem-free area (my mom is on Linux since the early 2000's and never had serious issues - of course, she doesn't use off-distro repos, doesn't compile her own kernel and isn't running either Sid or Rawhide), considering most people who run Linux are tech-savvy enough to get themselves in trouble. I myself had a couple desktops without sound in the late 90's but, since I switched mostly to laptops without any fancy components (such as multiple GPUs, smart-card readers, fingerprint scanners, stereo cameras...) I haven't seen a machine that doesn't run Ubuntu flawlessly.
gnufied 8y ago
> Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. Wait -- insecure? How? You mean full disk encryption? I am typing this from thinkpad with full disk encryption and SELinux enabled Fedora. Sure there are problems with Linux on laptop but even if you don't have SELinux enabled - security has never been an issue (or no worse than Windows and OSX).
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  What I was specifically referring to there is that Ubuntu's NetworkManager (in combination with Open VPN) had (or still has?) a DNS leak right out of the box for years.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Am I underestimating that or is that are really small thing compared to "press-enter-twice-for-root" on one of the two big commercial OSes?
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      I think you are underestimating the importance of fixing glaring security bugs ASAP when they become public knowledge instead of denying or ignoring them for years. Also, a DNS leak is potentially much more dangerous for a minority of people than any locally exploitable bug.
sanderjd 8y ago
I really believe that what it will take is an actual business that makes actual money selling a laptop with good hardware and an integrated linux install that they maintain. Instead of getting into a flamefest on the ubuntu message board where you have a completely different set of hardware and drivers than the people you're debating, you file a support ticket that the audio on your IntegratedLinuxLaptop 5 seems to have stopped working, and someone at this company figures out what's wrong and patches the exact right driver or system software to fix it. If that doesn't sound like a viable business, well, that's why this is still a problem.
Chlorus 8y ago
Hell, the second article on Phoronix at this very moment is "GNOME Will No Longer Crash If Attaching A Monitor While The System Is Suspended", and if you scroll back further, repeated promises that Linux power management is getting better. OS X and Windows also have broken usability, but at least their users don't run around telling people "it works fine for me! Just make sure you use a LTS distro with 5+ year old packages and without any hardware made since 2005"

Jedd 8y ago

> There is a riduculous repetitiveness about this debate. For me and many others, Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. > Will we ever get out of this unproductive loop of claims and counter claims... Sounds like a no.

AsyncAwait 8y ago

> For me and many others, Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. I've successfully converted many people with similar claims over to Linux and here's what I've found; most of them were trying Linux on a subpar, non-standard laptop, (Like an old MacBook or a slow Celeron), to lower their investment if they don't like it, which is fine, but then comparing the experience to their high end MBP running macOS, (try installing macOS to the same set of low-end machines most try to put Linux on, see how that goes). All it took is for them to get good, solid hardware, (like a recent Intel stack, or a Ryzen with a GPU compatible with the AMDGPU driver), and all was good. Not saying that is your case, but it is shockingly common, which is unfair to Linux, I'd say.

admg 8y ago
I'd agree with that, I run stock ubuntu on a thinkpad t460p. I have only one issue which is that display scaling is not fractional, its in set values which doesn't play well with resolutions above 1080p. Thats a gnome issue though and doesn't stop the screen working perfectly when the resolution is set to 1080p instead of 2550x1440 or whatever it is.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  This is trivial to fix actually. Ubuntu 16.04 had "fractional" scaling by default but in reality all it did was between 1x and 2x use 1x with larger fonts. 18.04 lost that with the gnome transition but you can just change the font scaling manually. Less convenient and polished but still there in the tweak tool. Firefox also includes a scaling option in the configs. With those two settings my T460s with the 2560x1440 screen looks great. It does suck that the Gnome transition in the new LTS has been so bad. For all its quirks the Unity on Xorg experience was actually very stable and polished for years now.
  - admg 8y ago
    Thats interesting to know, thanks for the tip!
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      FWIW I do the same as suggested and it's great, font scaling set to 1.4 on a 14"@2560x1440 T470P running @2560x1440 looks nice, the only very slight snag is that font scaling doesn't scale the window decorations but a few themes do work (Numix window decorations).
  - nobleach 8y ago
    What happens when you plug in a second monitor?
    - pedrocr 8y ago

jacquesm 8y ago

I'm running linux on all my machines, including a Macbook Air and it works very well. Unstable, insecure, hot and noisy would not be words I would use to describe my setup. The only noisy machine here is parked in another room and given its size and processing power it is noisy but that goes with the territory. Apple doesn't make anything that is even remotely equivalent. Which means I can run the same software on all my machines which is another benefit. And yes, I've been doing this for decades. As for 'dist-upgrade', I don't normally do that, I go for long term stable releases and upgrade when the hardware gets replaced, which is once every few years.

DoritoChef 8y ago
May I ask what distro you're running? I tried Ubuntu 16.04LTS some time ago, and it didn't seem to get along very well with my mid-2015 MBP.
- paulsmal 8y ago
  I was a happy user of Arch+i3wm on MBP 2015.

mirchibajji 8y ago

It boils down to what kind of trade-offs we are willing to make. I might have been one of those Linux users that didn't have many serious issues for decades. Tried OSX for a while (2013-14), but didn't like how OSX gets in the way, though Mac hardware seemed decent. I would rather put up with an unusable fingerprint reader under Linux (Thinkpad Carbon X1), rather than OSX idiosyncrasies. There are other issues with the current Thinkpad (screen mirroring doesn't work reliably), but that is not a deal breaker for me

dsuth 8y ago

This. I gave up after several rounds of dist-upgrades broke, then fixed, then re-broke things. If you’re making fundamental architectural changes on a regular (monthly) basis, it’s pretty clear you’re not interested in being taken seriously in the business user world.

azernik 8y ago
Stick with LTS releases. Those make no deep changes, and are supported for (with Ubuntu) 5 years.

ceres 8y ago

Exactly! Personally I've been running Debian on my laptop for about 3 years now but come on! You can't deny that it is a pain in the ass to use especially if something breaks and the only way to fix it is to sift through many forums online to find the right commands solve even a simple problem. Also, why is it so painfully slow to copy documents to a thumb drive using Linux as compared to Windows?

sound1 8y ago
This is one of the things I am eagerly waiting to see answered :-) Hopefully someone suggests a better way to do this with a utility or something.

dizzystar 8y ago

The problem is that "Linux" is ambiguous. A comment below is agreeing and they use Debian. I've heard of Ubuntu being flakey. I used Fedora and Arch for years with zero issues (this is shocking to people who prefer LTS systems). CentOS is a trainwreck. Take any OS, twist the wrong knobs, and you're looking forward to a long night. Mind that the priorities of the user are different. Most people, including programmers, aren't concerned with using all the utilities of Linux land. Programmers have eyes too, and likewise enjoy aesthetics. For programming, I'd use Linux over MacOS any day of the week, but for music, MacOS is the clear winner.

rbanffy 8y ago

> There are bound to be people on every message board claiming to have run Linux for years if not decades without any of the issues I'm seeing on a daily basis and have been seeing for decades on scores of different laptops. Unless you think they are lying, it's an interesting observation. It could just be you are incredibly unlucky (a few samples in the global population will have problems, just like a few will never experience any, even on Windows). It would seem to me the distribution hump is rather on the relatively problem-free area (my mom is on Linux since the early 2000's and never had serious issues - of course, she doesn't use off-distro repos, doesn't compile her own kernel and isn't running either Sid or Rawhide), considering most people who run Linux are tech-savvy enough to get themselves in trouble. I myself had a couple desktops without sound in the late 90's but, since I switched mostly to laptops without any fancy components (such as multiple GPUs, smart-card readers, fingerprint scanners, stereo cameras...) I haven't seen a machine that doesn't run Ubuntu flawlessly.

gnufied 8y ago

> Linux on a laptop has always been unstable, insecure, hot and noisy. Wait -- insecure? How? You mean full disk encryption? I am typing this from thinkpad with full disk encryption and SELinux enabled Fedora. Sure there are problems with Linux on laptop but even if you don't have SELinux enabled - security has never been an issue (or no worse than Windows and OSX).

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
What I was specifically referring to there is that Ubuntu's NetworkManager (in combination with Open VPN) had (or still has?) a DNS leak right out of the box for years.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Am I underestimating that or is that are really small thing compared to "press-enter-twice-for-root" on one of the two big commercial OSes?
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    I think you are underestimating the importance of fixing glaring security bugs ASAP when they become public knowledge instead of denying or ignoring them for years. Also, a DNS leak is potentially much more dangerous for a minority of people than any locally exploitable bug.

sanderjd 8y ago

I really believe that what it will take is an actual business that makes actual money selling a laptop with good hardware and an integrated linux install that they maintain. Instead of getting into a flamefest on the ubuntu message board where you have a completely different set of hardware and drivers than the people you're debating, you file a support ticket that the audio on your IntegratedLinuxLaptop 5 seems to have stopped working, and someone at this company figures out what's wrong and patches the exact right driver or system software to fix it. If that doesn't sound like a viable business, well, that's why this is still a problem.

Chlorus 8y ago

Hell, the second article on Phoronix at this very moment is "GNOME Will No Longer Crash If Attaching A Monitor While The System Is Suspended", and if you scroll back further, repeated promises that Linux power management is getting better. OS X and Windows also have broken usability, but at least their users don't run around telling people "it works fine for me! Just make sure you use a LTS distro with 5+ year old packages and without any hardware made since 2005"