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Pretty much everything what you're facing is distro specific. The battery life is solved on Ubuntu by TLP which is installed by default (at least it was on Ubu

Pretty much everything what you're facing is distro specific. The battery life is solved on Ubuntu by TLP which is installed by default (at least it was on Ubuntu Mate) Ubuntu is now shipping with free and proprietary Nvidia drivers and you can choose during the installation which ones you want to use. Gnome hot corners are disabled by default on Ubuntu. Of course if you prefer vanilla Gnome experience you can always use it, it's just a matter of selecting item from dropdown on login screen. As for the light sensors and modem, I'm not sure but I imagine that it's not a big deal under Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. For me Fedora was always ALMOST there. Most of the times it was working but there was many little tweaks that had to be done in order to make everything working. On Ubuntu even things like fingerprint reader login was dead easy to setup (Thinkpad X230).

lars_francke 7y ago
I disagree. I tried Ubuntu us well. I installed TLP on Arch & Fedora. I didn't even test without and the battery life is still abysmal compared to Windows. Light sensor: I eventually figured that out, thanks. Modem: There's just no driver for linux, the distro doesn't matter. My point is: It shouldn't be this hard. I shouldn't have to know what TLP is or what kind of drivers I need etc.
- washadjeffmad 7y ago
  Well, you only have to because your laptop OEM didn't. Almost any time you find something that doesn't work on your laptop, it's because the manufacturer used chipsets that didn't follow spec and/or only worked with Microsoft to produce drivers. So it's unfortunate that your laptop didn't work immediately, but it's also impossible for kernel devs to produce perfect drivers if no one shares hardware specs with them. That's just unreasonable. If you want a laptop made for Linux like the one you own was made for Windows, you can either buy from one of the many vendors that advertise Linux support or you can shop by chipset to make sure they're all supported. Personally, I appreciate the choice, but I know not everyone wants to know how the clock works, just what time it is.

lars_francke 7y ago

I disagree. I tried Ubuntu us well. I installed TLP on Arch & Fedora. I didn't even test without and the battery life is still abysmal compared to Windows. Light sensor: I eventually figured that out, thanks. Modem: There's just no driver for linux, the distro doesn't matter. My point is: It shouldn't be this hard. I shouldn't have to know what TLP is or what kind of drivers I need etc.

washadjeffmad 7y ago
Well, you only have to because your laptop OEM didn't. Almost any time you find something that doesn't work on your laptop, it's because the manufacturer used chipsets that didn't follow spec and/or only worked with Microsoft to produce drivers. So it's unfortunate that your laptop didn't work immediately, but it's also impossible for kernel devs to produce perfect drivers if no one shares hardware specs with them. That's just unreasonable. If you want a laptop made for Linux like the one you own was made for Windows, you can either buy from one of the many vendors that advertise Linux support or you can shop by chipset to make sure they're all supported. Personally, I appreciate the choice, but I know not everyone wants to know how the clock works, just what time it is.