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s/font rendering/wifi s/font rendering/bluetooth s/font rendering/sleep mode s/font rendering/battery life I've been using Linux for 15 years now (started o

s/font rendering/wifi s/font rendering/bluetooth s/font rendering/sleep mode s/font rendering/battery life I've been using Linux for 15 years now (started on Mandrake), but those issues haven't been fixed in a decade. I really want to support free software, so I keep using it, reporting bugs and donating again and again. Many do. We hope that like with Firefox, if we support it consistently, it will eventually overcome the situation. But damn it's hard sometimes.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Font configuration is user solvable with configuration. Some of the options were literally forbidden from being distributed by parents but could be installed by the user. Google infinality. Exact advice depends on distro. Sleep is legitimately a pain.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I've read the same comments since 2004. It doesn't help to solve the problem at all. At best, sometimes, it encourages you to spend a lot of time trying to find a solution that may work, or wreck your system (Exact result depends on distro).
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    I've never spent more than 5 minutes setting up font rendering on a new distro using the package manager and the configuration gui. I cannot imagine how I could break my system. It's probably true that there is a ton of bad advice a quick Google away especially since it's easy for advice to persist for many years after it's use by date. I guess the lesson is don't enter random commands you don't understand from guides from 2008.
ubercow13 8y ago
When I got my 2015 Windows laptop, sleep mode and wifi worked much better on Linux than Windows, where they were basically broken. It seems simply incorrect to say these things are broken in any real general way in Linux. It just depends.
- sametmax 8y ago
  It's crazy how consistently I, and thousand of people launchpad.net, have been all unlucky for so long. We really should start to take this karma thing seriously, because I keep getting answer like yours saying I'm just not seen things properly. So I surely must be wrong.
  - addicted 8y ago
    It’s not that you’re wrong. And it’s almost certain Linux has additional issues with IO stuff due to manufacturers not prioritizing Linux drivers. However, Windows and OSX have their fair share of problems as well. One of the differences is that in the Linux world folks largely try and find fixes the,selves, so they have more postings on the internet, whereas in the OSX/Windows world the discussion basically ends at “wait for an update”.
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    What are you comparing it to? Every Windows tech support forum, and every driver/hardware vendor support forum? There isn't a centralised equivalent for Windows so what are you using to get a sense of how many people have equivalent issues with it?
eropple 8y ago
Wifi and Bluetooth seem largely solved to me, at least on Intel chipsets. Sleep mode has been rock-solid on every Intel chipset I've had in the last decade. Battery life has been a consistent problem, historically. However, I've moved to Thinkpads again and my T480, with the big external battery, gets a solid nine hours when working (running dev stuff in Docker, VSCode, a browser with a ton of tabs, etc.). It get maybe ten and a half or eleven hours doing similar on Windows, and that delta isn't perfect but it's not that bad anymore.
- sametmax 8y ago
  There is always somebody to pop in to say "x works in my case". Like those "oh my zsh" users that never ever had their prompt broken or those vi lovers that "just sync their config file on github and that's it".
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    And when talking about other platforms, you'll get plenty of "x doesn't work in my case" posts. What's your point?
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      That "it works on my machine" is quite possibly the most useless, middlebrow-dismissal comment that could be made when discussing problems. It working for you doesn't make it work for the other guy.
  - eropple 8y ago
    "My case" is "my current company deploys thousands of Linux notebooks" and what I am saying is that while there are certainly problems with the Linux end-user experience, it's not generally the baseline stuff anymore. Desktops have been fine--not great, depending on your DE and your preferences, but fine--for a while now. (I'd say that Ubuntu 14.04 was the first widely stable Linux distro I ran into.) Laptops are getting there. There's room to improve, but a lot of these complaints are getting stale.
  - 8y ago
addicted 8y ago
I have suffered from all those issues on non-Linux OSes as well (Linux has never been my primary OS. I’ve split between Windows and OSX). While I’m sure the fix in Linux may be a little involved, the fix on the Mac/Windows side can sometimes mean waiting months for an update. So it’s not all that bad and all OSes have their warts.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Yeah, yeah, I know the song. I'm always in dual or triple boot. This month I had 5 laptops just in my home. The last time I had wifi problems on Windows was with XP, my friends with macs always have better battery, wifi and sleep than I, and autonomy on the same machine is always better on the Windows partition. You are just repeating what you can read on so many forums. Something that I used to repeat to encourage people to keep trying. But it's dellusional. And if we want to solve those problems, we need to aknowledge they exist.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Try a laptop with Linux installed/supported at the factory. Return when it doesn't work. Repeat.
lallysingh 8y ago
I don't use BT so I can't speak to it, but I've been dual Linux/Mac for ~20 yrs, and the linux laptop situation is spectacularly good if you use thinkpads. At least it has been for me. Dell ships some good ones too, but I haven't tried them. On non-thinkpad/xps machines (which I'm not saying you're using or talking about, I'm just gonna assume), it's a crapshoot. But I think it's no better than running macos on a pc laptop or windows on a mac laptop (at least the last time I tried years ago, via their dual-boot thing).
- sametmax 8y ago
  Like the others, jumping around shooting "it's fine" is not going to help. I'm writting this from an Ubuntu 16.04 on an XPS 13. Sometime it wakes up from sleep modes with no wifi or bluetooth, and I have to force a reboot. Bluetooth doesn't work out of the box, I have to use blueman just to have a working mouse. But even with these, headphones won't work. I had a XPS 15 before. It was not better.
  - maccam94 8y ago
    I have the 2018 XPS 13, running Ubuntu. It worked pretty well on 16.04, until I upgraded past kernel 4.15. Now there's a bug where it either won't stay asleep, or when it wakes up the WiFi and Bluetooth devices are non-functional (even reloading the modules does nothing). I have recently discovered that disabling BT+WiFi via the keyboard function key before suspending avoids the problem, but it's annoying. I think it's also related to Intel making firmware changes for a Windows sleep mode that stays connected to WiFi. I think this bug report is tracking the issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Precision 5520 (similar to XPS 15), 18.04.2, everything working perfectly.
  - whalabi 8y ago
    I often use Linux on various laptops and have never had Bluetooth, wifi, or suspend problems. And I'm not even using ThinkPad or Dells. People talk about those issues like they happen to everyone or are very common but they aren't in my experience.
shmerl 8y ago
I haven't encountered issues with WiFi in years. But that depends on the driver. Intel are quite good with their iwlwifi. If you are using some garbage driver on the other hand - then your WiFi experience will be very miserable. This has nothing to do with Linux, but with WiFi makers who can't make drivers. So pick your hardware with doing some research first.
- sametmax 8y ago
  > So pick your hardware with doing some research first. The big linux fallacy. Firstly there is no hardware that can guaranty that everything will work. None. No dell. No system76. There are just some that have less problems than others. I've many friends saying they never have any problems. I also know they lie, because I come to their home, and I see them using workarounds every time for issues they don't even see anymore as they became part of their workflow. Secondly, there is no hardware that is guaranty that everything will keep working. Each update may break your machine in some imaginative way. The last time it did, I lost ethernet support on thunderbolt. It's like a personnal chaos monkey, checking my work ethic is resilient to random havock. And lastly "This has nothing to do with Linux, but with WiFi makers who can't make drivers" is not true anymore, with most phones using linux and having a wifi chip. The problem comes back with different chip anyway.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    If you buy hardware of those who make junk drivers - you are shooting yourself in the foot. Same applies on any OS without exception. No point to complain, if you don't want to do any research before buying.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      If the drivers are so junk, why were they accepted into the Kernel? Isn't part of the point of forcing all drivers to be open source so that they can be kept to a certain standard?
      - 8y ago
eikenberry 8y ago
These things have been slowly improving over time. Pretty much ever item you mention (as well as font rendering) has improved over the last 15 years. 15 years ago it was common for laptops to just not wake up at all from sleep, now the problem is some functionality doesn't wake up correctly. Not perfect, but better. Battery life has also improved a lot, though still has room for improvement. Etc. The problem is a combination of priorities, server functionality takes precedence, and that it is good enough to get work done. It will continue to slowly improve over time and the only way that will change is if someone decides its important enough to spend the time to work out all the issues with each of these subsystems. Given how much fun that sounds (not much) it will probably have to wait for someone with $$$ to pay to have it addressed. Either way Linux still does the best out of the competition that I've seen. The BSDs don't do as well as Linux and there are no other real non-Proprietary options at this point.
chmln 8y ago
> but those issues haven't been fixed in a decade. This is far too broad of a statement to make, hence why you get all the "works on my machine" posts. Your post is just as anecdotal as others', with no actual numbers or anything to back up the claim. Anecdata - I own a Lenovo y50-70 running arch with an Intel igpu, hidpi display, and Intel wifi. Everything worked flawlessly from day one. Surprisingly, the hidpi display worked far better than on Windows and I could leave behind the telemetry, updates, and poor input latency.
- sametmax 8y ago
  No I get those comments because linux users are driven by an ideology and wants to defend it. The thing is, even among all those comments authors, I know all of them are only talking at best about "that times where it worked for them". They all lived the problems I'm talking about, and are filtering. Taking arch for example. 3 years ago, I was at a friend's flat. He was using arch because "it just works, never have a problem". And of course, when we set for watching a video, it didn't work. "Codec problem. Just a quick fix he had to do later. Usually it works fine.". I do training all the time. Half of my job is training people, so I see many laptops with many OSs. I always see the same issues. It feels like a recurring joke in a TV show.
  - chmln 8y ago
    As I mentioned above, a particular Linux kernel version not supporting your hardware well doesn't mean that other hardware is equally poorly supported. That's the reason you get rebuttals, because your "doesn't work for me" is no more valid than someone else chiming in with "just works for me". > Taking arch for example. 3 years ago, I was at a friend's flat. He was using arch because "it just works, never have a problem". And of course, when we set for watching a video, it didn't work. "Codec problem. Just a quick fix he had to do later. Usually it works fine.". This has nothing to do with Arch. And presumably if that codec issue even happened, if you want everything under the sun installed for you out of the box you should be using something like Mint or Ubuntu. I've had zero codec problems myself, things always just worked with VLC and mpv. > They all lived the problems I'm talking about, and are filtering No one's saying that Linux works perfectly for all hardware. But it's not broken for everyone either as you claim. Besides, I'd much rather spend extra 5 minutes installing tlp and tweaking sysctl for battery life than sit through hours of Windows Update installing candy crush and blocking me from doing work.
whalabi 8y ago
I had Ubuntu giving me 10 actual hours including heavy IDE, browser with lots of tabs, docker composer with rails app and postgres, etc. (This was a gigabyte aero 15x with a 94(?)Wh battery) I was stunned.

michaelmrose 8y ago

Font configuration is user solvable with configuration. Some of the options were literally forbidden from being distributed by parents but could be installed by the user. Google infinality. Exact advice depends on distro. Sleep is legitimately a pain.

sametmax 8y ago
I've read the same comments since 2004. It doesn't help to solve the problem at all. At best, sometimes, it encourages you to spend a lot of time trying to find a solution that may work, or wreck your system (Exact result depends on distro).
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  I've never spent more than 5 minutes setting up font rendering on a new distro using the package manager and the configuration gui. I cannot imagine how I could break my system. It's probably true that there is a ton of bad advice a quick Google away especially since it's easy for advice to persist for many years after it's use by date. I guess the lesson is don't enter random commands you don't understand from guides from 2008.

ubercow13 8y ago

When I got my 2015 Windows laptop, sleep mode and wifi worked much better on Linux than Windows, where they were basically broken. It seems simply incorrect to say these things are broken in any real general way in Linux. It just depends.

sametmax 8y ago
It's crazy how consistently I, and thousand of people launchpad.net, have been all unlucky for so long. We really should start to take this karma thing seriously, because I keep getting answer like yours saying I'm just not seen things properly. So I surely must be wrong.
- addicted 8y ago
  It’s not that you’re wrong. And it’s almost certain Linux has additional issues with IO stuff due to manufacturers not prioritizing Linux drivers. However, Windows and OSX have their fair share of problems as well. One of the differences is that in the Linux world folks largely try and find fixes the,selves, so they have more postings on the internet, whereas in the OSX/Windows world the discussion basically ends at “wait for an update”.
- ubercow13 8y ago
  What are you comparing it to? Every Windows tech support forum, and every driver/hardware vendor support forum? There isn't a centralised equivalent for Windows so what are you using to get a sense of how many people have equivalent issues with it?

eropple 8y ago

Wifi and Bluetooth seem largely solved to me, at least on Intel chipsets. Sleep mode has been rock-solid on every Intel chipset I've had in the last decade. Battery life has been a consistent problem, historically. However, I've moved to Thinkpads again and my T480, with the big external battery, gets a solid nine hours when working (running dev stuff in Docker, VSCode, a browser with a ton of tabs, etc.). It get maybe ten and a half or eleven hours doing similar on Windows, and that delta isn't perfect but it's not that bad anymore.

sametmax 8y ago
There is always somebody to pop in to say "x works in my case". Like those "oh my zsh" users that never ever had their prompt broken or those vi lovers that "just sync their config file on github and that's it".
- lallysingh 8y ago
  And when talking about other platforms, you'll get plenty of "x doesn't work in my case" posts. What's your point?
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    That "it works on my machine" is quite possibly the most useless, middlebrow-dismissal comment that could be made when discussing problems. It working for you doesn't make it work for the other guy.
- eropple 8y ago
  "My case" is "my current company deploys thousands of Linux notebooks" and what I am saying is that while there are certainly problems with the Linux end-user experience, it's not generally the baseline stuff anymore. Desktops have been fine--not great, depending on your DE and your preferences, but fine--for a while now. (I'd say that Ubuntu 14.04 was the first widely stable Linux distro I ran into.) Laptops are getting there. There's room to improve, but a lot of these complaints are getting stale.
- 8y ago

addicted 8y ago

I have suffered from all those issues on non-Linux OSes as well (Linux has never been my primary OS. I’ve split between Windows and OSX). While I’m sure the fix in Linux may be a little involved, the fix on the Mac/Windows side can sometimes mean waiting months for an update. So it’s not all that bad and all OSes have their warts.

sametmax 8y ago
Yeah, yeah, I know the song. I'm always in dual or triple boot. This month I had 5 laptops just in my home. The last time I had wifi problems on Windows was with XP, my friends with macs always have better battery, wifi and sleep than I, and autonomy on the same machine is always better on the Windows partition. You are just repeating what you can read on so many forums. Something that I used to repeat to encourage people to keep trying. But it's dellusional. And if we want to solve those problems, we need to aknowledge they exist.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Try a laptop with Linux installed/supported at the factory. Return when it doesn't work. Repeat.

lallysingh 8y ago

I don't use BT so I can't speak to it, but I've been dual Linux/Mac for ~20 yrs, and the linux laptop situation is spectacularly good if you use thinkpads. At least it has been for me. Dell ships some good ones too, but I haven't tried them. On non-thinkpad/xps machines (which I'm not saying you're using or talking about, I'm just gonna assume), it's a crapshoot. But I think it's no better than running macos on a pc laptop or windows on a mac laptop (at least the last time I tried years ago, via their dual-boot thing).

sametmax 8y ago
Like the others, jumping around shooting "it's fine" is not going to help. I'm writting this from an Ubuntu 16.04 on an XPS 13. Sometime it wakes up from sleep modes with no wifi or bluetooth, and I have to force a reboot. Bluetooth doesn't work out of the box, I have to use blueman just to have a working mouse. But even with these, headphones won't work. I had a XPS 15 before. It was not better.
- maccam94 8y ago
  I have the 2018 XPS 13, running Ubuntu. It worked pretty well on 16.04, until I upgraded past kernel 4.15. Now there's a bug where it either won't stay asleep, or when it wakes up the WiFi and Bluetooth devices are non-functional (even reloading the modules does nothing). I have recently discovered that disabling BT+WiFi via the keyboard function key before suspending avoids the problem, but it's annoying. I think it's also related to Intel making firmware changes for a Windows sleep mode that stays connected to WiFi. I think this bug report is tracking the issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Precision 5520 (similar to XPS 15), 18.04.2, everything working perfectly.
- whalabi 8y ago
  I often use Linux on various laptops and have never had Bluetooth, wifi, or suspend problems. And I'm not even using ThinkPad or Dells. People talk about those issues like they happen to everyone or are very common but they aren't in my experience.

shmerl 8y ago

I haven't encountered issues with WiFi in years. But that depends on the driver. Intel are quite good with their iwlwifi. If you are using some garbage driver on the other hand - then your WiFi experience will be very miserable. This has nothing to do with Linux, but with WiFi makers who can't make drivers. So pick your hardware with doing some research first.

sametmax 8y ago
> So pick your hardware with doing some research first. The big linux fallacy. Firstly there is no hardware that can guaranty that everything will work. None. No dell. No system76. There are just some that have less problems than others. I've many friends saying they never have any problems. I also know they lie, because I come to their home, and I see them using workarounds every time for issues they don't even see anymore as they became part of their workflow. Secondly, there is no hardware that is guaranty that everything will keep working. Each update may break your machine in some imaginative way. The last time it did, I lost ethernet support on thunderbolt. It's like a personnal chaos monkey, checking my work ethic is resilient to random havock. And lastly "This has nothing to do with Linux, but with WiFi makers who can't make drivers" is not true anymore, with most phones using linux and having a wifi chip. The problem comes back with different chip anyway.
- shmerl 8y ago
  If you buy hardware of those who make junk drivers - you are shooting yourself in the foot. Same applies on any OS without exception. No point to complain, if you don't want to do any research before buying.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    If the drivers are so junk, why were they accepted into the Kernel? Isn't part of the point of forcing all drivers to be open source so that they can be kept to a certain standard?
    - 8y ago

eikenberry 8y ago

These things have been slowly improving over time. Pretty much ever item you mention (as well as font rendering) has improved over the last 15 years. 15 years ago it was common for laptops to just not wake up at all from sleep, now the problem is some functionality doesn't wake up correctly. Not perfect, but better. Battery life has also improved a lot, though still has room for improvement. Etc. The problem is a combination of priorities, server functionality takes precedence, and that it is good enough to get work done. It will continue to slowly improve over time and the only way that will change is if someone decides its important enough to spend the time to work out all the issues with each of these subsystems. Given how much fun that sounds (not much) it will probably have to wait for someone with $$$ to pay to have it addressed. Either way Linux still does the best out of the competition that I've seen. The BSDs don't do as well as Linux and there are no other real non-Proprietary options at this point.

chmln 8y ago

> but those issues haven't been fixed in a decade. This is far too broad of a statement to make, hence why you get all the "works on my machine" posts. Your post is just as anecdotal as others', with no actual numbers or anything to back up the claim. Anecdata - I own a Lenovo y50-70 running arch with an Intel igpu, hidpi display, and Intel wifi. Everything worked flawlessly from day one. Surprisingly, the hidpi display worked far better than on Windows and I could leave behind the telemetry, updates, and poor input latency.

sametmax 8y ago
No I get those comments because linux users are driven by an ideology and wants to defend it. The thing is, even among all those comments authors, I know all of them are only talking at best about "that times where it worked for them". They all lived the problems I'm talking about, and are filtering. Taking arch for example. 3 years ago, I was at a friend's flat. He was using arch because "it just works, never have a problem". And of course, when we set for watching a video, it didn't work. "Codec problem. Just a quick fix he had to do later. Usually it works fine.". I do training all the time. Half of my job is training people, so I see many laptops with many OSs. I always see the same issues. It feels like a recurring joke in a TV show.
- chmln 8y ago
  As I mentioned above, a particular Linux kernel version not supporting your hardware well doesn't mean that other hardware is equally poorly supported. That's the reason you get rebuttals, because your "doesn't work for me" is no more valid than someone else chiming in with "just works for me". > Taking arch for example. 3 years ago, I was at a friend's flat. He was using arch because "it just works, never have a problem". And of course, when we set for watching a video, it didn't work. "Codec problem. Just a quick fix he had to do later. Usually it works fine.". This has nothing to do with Arch. And presumably if that codec issue even happened, if you want everything under the sun installed for you out of the box you should be using something like Mint or Ubuntu. I've had zero codec problems myself, things always just worked with VLC and mpv. > They all lived the problems I'm talking about, and are filtering No one's saying that Linux works perfectly for all hardware. But it's not broken for everyone either as you claim. Besides, I'd much rather spend extra 5 minutes installing tlp and tweaking sysctl for battery life than sit through hours of Windows Update installing candy crush and blocking me from doing work.

whalabi 8y ago

I had Ubuntu giving me 10 actual hours including heavy IDE, browser with lots of tabs, docker composer with rails app and postgres, etc. (This was a gigabyte aero 15x with a 94(?)Wh battery) I was stunned.