3 ms·

I know I'm preaching to the choir here at HN, but I feel like there is a very important point that the author has skipped over: Part of why the install process

by mohn 8y ago

I know I'm preaching to the choir here at HN, but I feel like there is a very important point that the author has skipped over: Part of why the install process and general use experience went so well is all the time and effort Dell put into explicitly developing Linux support for this exact model. They likely made hardware choices (e.g. Intel wifi chipset instead of Qualcomm/Atheros) based on existing Linux driver availability. And in cases where a driver wasn't available, or didn't work perfectly off the shelf, Dell probably put coders to work customizing that driver to suit the configuration of the XPS. In a way, this is a bit like buying a Microsoft Surface and then being thrilled at how Windows installs and runs on it. For the sake of people who read this article and try installing Ubuntu 18.04 on an arbitrary laptop, I think the author should mention that there was already a ton of bigco effort to make this configuration of HW/SW work smoothly. In my experience, Ubuntu gets more polished and newbie-friendly with every release, but I do think some readers might try to follow in the author's footsteps with their own miscellaneous laptop, get discouraged, and then be soured on Linux again for a while. I don't want that to happen. I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share. If that means the population needs to homogenize a bit on the hardware front, so be it.

webbrahmin 8y ago
You have hit the nail on the head. I moved from Windows to Ubuntu many years back. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my windows machine in 2010 and by chance everything worked like magic. I purchased a new machine in 2015 without much thought and installed Ubuntu. To my horror it would not detect my Qualcomm wifi and AMD Radeon Graphics. Banged my head around to find a solution to Qualcomm wifi. But the 2gb graphics card is just a piece of silicon on my motherboard which does not work.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- greenhatman 8y ago
  Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't out in 2010.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I'm sure they meant 10.04. As I recall, 10.04 was the first time I ever thought Linux might actually have a shot at the desktop, it was that much of an improvement. Had Canonical not gone crazy a few years later, who knows if that would have panned out or not.
boomskats 8y ago
I don't agree that this is such a big deal any more. I've been running Thinkpads for a little over a decade, and and almost every single Fedora release has worked flawlessly out of the box (with the exception of proprietary fingerprint sensors or S0i3 sleep states). I've got mates with the developer edition Ubuntu XPSs and actually consider Thinkpad+Fedora to be a better, more stable choice. Maybe the number of RH devs with Thinkpads has something to do with it.
- __sr__ 8y ago
  You said it yourself — you’ve been running ThinkPads with Fedora. So essentially, you have restricted yourself to one particular line of laptops and one distribution. That is probably why you havn’t felt the pain of having to figure out why the trackpad stops working once in a while — or why the sound card went all mute — or why the battery life suddenly went from being decent to downright horrible.
  - sverige 8y ago
    While I have had some problems running OpenBSD on random hardware, I have not had any trouble running certain recent Linux distros on a wider variety of hardware, including various laptops from Dell, Compaq, Lenovo, and HP. (Let me hasten to add that OpenBSD's hardware support has improved significantly in the last two years and runs flawlessly on most of these machines as well, though sometimes there's some bit of fiddling required.)
    - __sr__ 8y ago
      Well, my experience has been drastically different - although I haven’t tried to use Linux as my daily driver in the last 4-5 years when I switched to macOS after having used one or the other Linux distribution as my main OS for about 12 years. Maybe Linux has improved since then, but I am not buying a Dell XPS or a Thinkpad to find out. Nor do I have no desire to spend all my free time playing the sysadmin. PS. I make a living out of working on massive mission critical Linux deployments on the server side. So I am very well aware of how to fix the issues — I just don’t care anymore.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share. Then encourage developers to agree on a standardized and long-term supported base system and promote AppImage as the primary means of distributing non-system software. A stable driver ABI wouldn't hurt either, but if there's something more difficult than getting the community to agree on a base system it'll be convincing the kernel devs to help proprietary drivers work properly. Seriously, Linux Desktop evangelists have supposedly been trying to woo users for decades now and somehow they are unable to grasp the simple concept that it is a pain in the ass for developers to target their platform, and without developers targeting their platform they won't have the applications the user needs to do their work. Lately they've been hailing the coming WebAppocalypse as a way to free them from having to build a real platform, but sadly for them that means any web kiosk will do and Linux Desktop is still irrelevant.
- mohn 8y ago
  I agree that such standardization would be valuable, and I will try to agitate for that. For the average person, however, it seems that a web browser is practically the whole OS to them. I bet a media player, and office productivity software round out the top three applications. Any OS that offers a stable platform for running those could theoretically satisfy a huge chunk of the population. For this hypothetical average user, if a browser is the only interface they use and have familiarity with, what difference does the underlying OS make to them? In this regard, mobile devices have already filled much of that niche. With all the news stories lately about data collection and misuse, I hope that opposition to surveillance is growing among the population. Maybe one day they'll see it like this: I can run my browser here, pay Microsoft for the privilege, make it easy for them to surveil me, and accept their pushy updates with unwanted restarts. Or I can run it on this other OS that costs $0, and doesn't send data back to Microsoft. Maybe I'm misjudging the population and they actually don't care at all, but I hope that's changing with the past few years of data scandals, and the recent deluge of ToS update emails from companies preparing for the GDPR. The phrase "data collection", and some idea of its consequences, should now be more prominent in the collective consciousness. It strikes me as a great time for FLOSS software to try riding the wave of that attitude.

by mohn 8y ago

webbrahmin 8y ago

You have hit the nail on the head. I moved from Windows to Ubuntu many years back. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my windows machine in 2010 and by chance everything worked like magic. I purchased a new machine in 2015 without much thought and installed Ubuntu. To my horror it would not detect my Qualcomm wifi and AMD Radeon Graphics. Banged my head around to find a solution to Qualcomm wifi. But the 2gb graphics card is just a piece of silicon on my motherboard which does not work.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
greenhatman 8y ago
Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't out in 2010.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I'm sure they meant 10.04. As I recall, 10.04 was the first time I ever thought Linux might actually have a shot at the desktop, it was that much of an improvement. Had Canonical not gone crazy a few years later, who knows if that would have panned out or not.

boomskats 8y ago

I don't agree that this is such a big deal any more. I've been running Thinkpads for a little over a decade, and and almost every single Fedora release has worked flawlessly out of the box (with the exception of proprietary fingerprint sensors or S0i3 sleep states). I've got mates with the developer edition Ubuntu XPSs and actually consider Thinkpad+Fedora to be a better, more stable choice. Maybe the number of RH devs with Thinkpads has something to do with it.

__sr__ 8y ago
You said it yourself — you’ve been running ThinkPads with Fedora. So essentially, you have restricted yourself to one particular line of laptops and one distribution. That is probably why you havn’t felt the pain of having to figure out why the trackpad stops working once in a while — or why the sound card went all mute — or why the battery life suddenly went from being decent to downright horrible.
- sverige 8y ago
  While I have had some problems running OpenBSD on random hardware, I have not had any trouble running certain recent Linux distros on a wider variety of hardware, including various laptops from Dell, Compaq, Lenovo, and HP. (Let me hasten to add that OpenBSD's hardware support has improved significantly in the last two years and runs flawlessly on most of these machines as well, though sometimes there's some bit of fiddling required.)
  - __sr__ 8y ago
    Well, my experience has been drastically different - although I haven’t tried to use Linux as my daily driver in the last 4-5 years when I switched to macOS after having used one or the other Linux distribution as my main OS for about 12 years. Maybe Linux has improved since then, but I am not buying a Dell XPS or a Thinkpad to find out. Nor do I have no desire to spend all my free time playing the sysadmin. PS. I make a living out of working on massive mission critical Linux deployments on the server side. So I am very well aware of how to fix the issues — I just don’t care anymore.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share. Then encourage developers to agree on a standardized and long-term supported base system and promote AppImage as the primary means of distributing non-system software. A stable driver ABI wouldn't hurt either, but if there's something more difficult than getting the community to agree on a base system it'll be convincing the kernel devs to help proprietary drivers work properly. Seriously, Linux Desktop evangelists have supposedly been trying to woo users for decades now and somehow they are unable to grasp the simple concept that it is a pain in the ass for developers to target their platform, and without developers targeting their platform they won't have the applications the user needs to do their work. Lately they've been hailing the coming WebAppocalypse as a way to free them from having to build a real platform, but sadly for them that means any web kiosk will do and Linux Desktop is still irrelevant.

mohn 8y ago
I agree that such standardization would be valuable, and I will try to agitate for that. For the average person, however, it seems that a web browser is practically the whole OS to them. I bet a media player, and office productivity software round out the top three applications. Any OS that offers a stable platform for running those could theoretically satisfy a huge chunk of the population. For this hypothetical average user, if a browser is the only interface they use and have familiarity with, what difference does the underlying OS make to them? In this regard, mobile devices have already filled much of that niche. With all the news stories lately about data collection and misuse, I hope that opposition to surveillance is growing among the population. Maybe one day they'll see it like this: I can run my browser here, pay Microsoft for the privilege, make it easy for them to surveil me, and accept their pushy updates with unwanted restarts. Or I can run it on this other OS that costs $0, and doesn't send data back to Microsoft. Maybe I'm misjudging the population and they actually don't care at all, but I hope that's changing with the past few years of data scandals, and the recent deluge of ToS update emails from companies preparing for the GDPR. The phrase "data collection", and some idea of its consequences, should now be more prominent in the collective consciousness. It strikes me as a great time for FLOSS software to try riding the wave of that attitude.