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> tune and configure it to work You really don't have to do that. For example: I put Ubuntu Mate on a 2009 Macbook that could not run MacOs anymore (too slow).

> tune and configure it to work You really don't have to do that. For example: I put Ubuntu Mate on a 2009 Macbook that could not run MacOs anymore (too slow). I had to install a wifi driver, and that was it. Everything else worked out of the box. My current Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop is running the same OS, and needed 0 drivers installed. I put Antergos on an Intel Nuc (that I later switched to Ubuntu Server). Again, no configuration, and no issues with drivers. I will mention that Mate has some font scaling problems if you're running two monitors with different resolutions (spoiler: you can't), but I know that other distro's handle that just fine.

noxToken 8y ago
Another legacy hardware user here. I have a HP laptop from early 2008 that pretty much can't run anything. I no longer have Linux on my daily driver, and I'll need to occasionally break out that laptop for dev purposes. Ubuntu has been a godsend for that laptop. Unfun fact: although the Wi-Fi spec is backwards compatible, a lot of places only serve 802.11n and forward making legacy hardware impossible to use on their network.
rayiner 8y ago
If you don’t have to tune Linux to get it to work, then why does every single complaint about Linux’s battery life in laptops get met with “install TLP?” Of course Windows is shit in this respect too these days. I got two extra hours of battery life from my X1 Carbon by wiping the disk and installing Windows LTSB. But even then I still have to police things, watching for driver updates or software installs that randomly leave some service running that keeps the CPU from sleeping. It’s like nobody tests these things.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  > If you don’t have to tune Linux to get it to work, then why does every single complaint about Linux’s battery life in laptops get met with “install TLP?” That's evidence that there exists something that Linux users recommend to people who complain about having battery problems on Linux, not evidence of widespread problems with Linux that require expertise to get the operating system to "work" at all.
- mcguire 8y ago
  The only thing I have had to configure on the last two laptops I've installed is, weirdly, to go to sleep when I close the lid. The battery life on the X1 Carbon is about one and a half to two hours, which i think is acceptable given that the battery is reporting less than half of its original capacity.
  - epmaybe 8y ago
    If the battery is reporting less than half, wouldn't that also be something that really needs to be configured?
    - mcguire 8y ago
      It's old, I got it used, and I haven't replaced the battery yet.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    So just 4 hours with a new battery? For light usage, the minimum is 8 hours. (Even my first-gen Macbook got that much, 12-13 years ago.)
    - mcguire 8y ago
      This guy has a Windows 7 sticker, so I believe it is a 2012-2103 gen 1. 4-5 hours seems to be reasonable.
  - pimeys 8y ago
    I just installed OpenBSD to my ThinkPad X200. 5 hours of battery life, everything worked out of the box, and closing the lid suspends the machine, opening it up brings it awake. Every time. I tend to go with older laptops, but they are definitely fast enough and I like how robust the experience is.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  > It’s like nobody tests these things. What's really happening is perverse incentive structures. Ideally all energy use of every app would be accounted for and, somehow, relayed back to the original "responsible agent" (e.g. a signed app being responsible for all its subprocesses). This then needs to be tied to some valuation.. in an app store, you could say e.g. lower commission based on energy efficiency, or just a higher ranking score. Currently, resource usage suffers from the tragedy of the commons, and it will remain that way until we fix the incentives. OSX is starting on that road, as you can see with the Energy tab in activity monitor. I wonder if they will take further steps with it, but it's a good start. (You'd then want e.g. browsers to allow push the accounting down to invidual sites; now we're suddenly attacking death-by-JS as well.) One day! But until that day, you are right: nobody tests those things. Why would they? Honestly, if you're creating drivers for something, worrying about energy use is... is so inconsequential it's borderline altruistic. Who will ever, really notice? It's basically charity work. That needs to change.
  - dwaite 8y ago
    Apple has public and private metrics for battery life that at least incentivize the internal teams. There are also orders of magnitude difference between a sleeping device and an idle device, and an idle device to a fully loaded device. We are talking three weeks to 20 hours to 35 minutes. And that gap will only continue to get larger
noelsusman 8y ago
I tried putting Linux on my 2015 Macbook Pro and found that sleep was totally broken with no workaround, which is a dealbreaker on a laptop. It was a known bug for a year before a patch hit the kernel to fix it, and that kernel didn't come with a standard Ubuntu install until a year after that.
crispinb 8y ago
> You really don't have to do that. Actually you don't have to do that, which is not the same thing at all. I find this one of the oddest moves of those who (for reasons mysterious to me) find OS's worthy of advocacy. When you say to them 'with Linux I find X', their response is "no you don't". Where is the conversation supposed to go from there? I install a couple of distros on every new laptop I buy, and perhaps once again during its lifetime. I have in reality found it a tremendous pain and time-suck, with each attempt taking a few days reading and fiddling, more than in total I've spent 'administering' desktop OS X or Windows over a couple of decades. I've persevered out of a combination of nostalgia (I did run Slackware full-time for some years), wistfulness about some gnu/linux goodies (i3 etc), and ethical preferences. But on every occasion I just find it to be more time than it's worth. I have many more important things to do with my precious and limited time on this planet than mess with OS's
- crispinb 8y ago
  [ as an aside, I was prompted after writing the above to try again, and added a Fedora 29 partition to play around with. I'm pleasantly surprised by how much immediately works. Early days as yet ]

noxToken 8y ago

Another legacy hardware user here. I have a HP laptop from early 2008 that pretty much can't run anything. I no longer have Linux on my daily driver, and I'll need to occasionally break out that laptop for dev purposes. Ubuntu has been a godsend for that laptop. Unfun fact: although the Wi-Fi spec is backwards compatible, a lot of places only serve 802.11n and forward making legacy hardware impossible to use on their network.

rayiner 8y ago

If you don’t have to tune Linux to get it to work, then why does every single complaint about Linux’s battery life in laptops get met with “install TLP?” Of course Windows is shit in this respect too these days. I got two extra hours of battery life from my X1 Carbon by wiping the disk and installing Windows LTSB. But even then I still have to police things, watching for driver updates or software installs that randomly leave some service running that keeps the CPU from sleeping. It’s like nobody tests these things.

pessimizer 8y ago
> If you don’t have to tune Linux to get it to work, then why does every single complaint about Linux’s battery life in laptops get met with “install TLP?” That's evidence that there exists something that Linux users recommend to people who complain about having battery problems on Linux, not evidence of widespread problems with Linux that require expertise to get the operating system to "work" at all.
mcguire 8y ago
The only thing I have had to configure on the last two laptops I've installed is, weirdly, to go to sleep when I close the lid. The battery life on the X1 Carbon is about one and a half to two hours, which i think is acceptable given that the battery is reporting less than half of its original capacity.
- epmaybe 8y ago
  If the battery is reporting less than half, wouldn't that also be something that really needs to be configured?
  - mcguire 8y ago
    It's old, I got it used, and I haven't replaced the battery yet.
- rayiner 8y ago
  So just 4 hours with a new battery? For light usage, the minimum is 8 hours. (Even my first-gen Macbook got that much, 12-13 years ago.)
  - mcguire 8y ago
    This guy has a Windows 7 sticker, so I believe it is a 2012-2103 gen 1. 4-5 hours seems to be reasonable.
- pimeys 8y ago
  I just installed OpenBSD to my ThinkPad X200. 5 hours of battery life, everything worked out of the box, and closing the lid suspends the machine, opening it up brings it awake. Every time. I tend to go with older laptops, but they are definitely fast enough and I like how robust the experience is.
nothrabannosir 8y ago
> It’s like nobody tests these things. What's really happening is perverse incentive structures. Ideally all energy use of every app would be accounted for and, somehow, relayed back to the original "responsible agent" (e.g. a signed app being responsible for all its subprocesses). This then needs to be tied to some valuation.. in an app store, you could say e.g. lower commission based on energy efficiency, or just a higher ranking score. Currently, resource usage suffers from the tragedy of the commons, and it will remain that way until we fix the incentives. OSX is starting on that road, as you can see with the Energy tab in activity monitor. I wonder if they will take further steps with it, but it's a good start. (You'd then want e.g. browsers to allow push the accounting down to invidual sites; now we're suddenly attacking death-by-JS as well.) One day! But until that day, you are right: nobody tests those things. Why would they? Honestly, if you're creating drivers for something, worrying about energy use is... is so inconsequential it's borderline altruistic. Who will ever, really notice? It's basically charity work. That needs to change.
- dwaite 8y ago
  Apple has public and private metrics for battery life that at least incentivize the internal teams. There are also orders of magnitude difference between a sleeping device and an idle device, and an idle device to a fully loaded device. We are talking three weeks to 20 hours to 35 minutes. And that gap will only continue to get larger

noelsusman 8y ago

I tried putting Linux on my 2015 Macbook Pro and found that sleep was totally broken with no workaround, which is a dealbreaker on a laptop. It was a known bug for a year before a patch hit the kernel to fix it, and that kernel didn't come with a standard Ubuntu install until a year after that.

crispinb 8y ago

> You really don't have to do that. Actually you don't have to do that, which is not the same thing at all. I find this one of the oddest moves of those who (for reasons mysterious to me) find OS's worthy of advocacy. When you say to them 'with Linux I find X', their response is "no you don't". Where is the conversation supposed to go from there? I install a couple of distros on every new laptop I buy, and perhaps once again during its lifetime. I have in reality found it a tremendous pain and time-suck, with each attempt taking a few days reading and fiddling, more than in total I've spent 'administering' desktop OS X or Windows over a couple of decades. I've persevered out of a combination of nostalgia (I did run Slackware full-time for some years), wistfulness about some gnu/linux goodies (i3 etc), and ethical preferences. But on every occasion I just find it to be more time than it's worth. I have many more important things to do with my precious and limited time on this planet than mess with OS's

crispinb 8y ago
[ as an aside, I was prompted after writing the above to try again, and added a Fedora 29 partition to play around with. I'm pleasantly surprised by how much immediately works. Early days as yet ]