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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 distrib

by __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.
  - sverige 8y ago
    I'm totally with you in not wanting to spend free time fiddling with a system for a laptop that is used for really basic stuff. The interesting thing is that in the last couple of years, some of the Linux distros are now pain-free to the point that I have had no problems installing them for my wife and then leaving the rest to her. She has zero interest in anything beyond getting stuff done. I guess my point is that certain distros have actually sort of quietly gotten to that place where it's better as a consumer laptop OS than Windows. So for very little money compared to a Windows or especially an Apple laptop, it's easy to buy her a well-equipped machine and get her up and running quickly, and it's very easy to maintain. That is a good thing.

by __sr__ 8y ago

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.
- sverige 8y ago
  I'm totally with you in not wanting to spend free time fiddling with a system for a laptop that is used for really basic stuff. The interesting thing is that in the last couple of years, some of the Linux distros are now pain-free to the point that I have had no problems installing them for my wife and then leaving the rest to her. She has zero interest in anything beyond getting stuff done. I guess my point is that certain distros have actually sort of quietly gotten to that place where it's better as a consumer laptop OS than Windows. So for very little money compared to a Windows or especially an Apple laptop, it's easy to buy her a well-equipped machine and get her up and running quickly, and it's very easy to maintain. That is a good thing.