11 ms·

WiFi, battery, and sleep. Have these problems been fixed with Linux on laptops?

nixpulvis 7y ago
My thinkpad X1 carbon works just fine with Arch Linux. Though you do occasionally need to refer to the wiki to fix things. It's usually pretty painless.
garmaine 7y ago
Yes. Buy a Lenovo and these work out of the box as you expect. In fact I get better battery life than under windows.
pojntfx 7y ago
Yes. Since ~5 years I haven't had a single problem with any Laptop (I'm mostly using ThinkPads, the newer ones, here even the Multi-Touch-Trackpoint and touchscreens perform better than under Windows).
ohazi 7y ago
Wifi: The advice from five years ago was to select/buy the Intel wifi card. Those are the only ones I've used, and they've all Just Worked. Intel cards are the only option if you're buying a Thinkpad. Sleep and hibernate: Works on every Lenovo I've used. Battery: My most recent laptop gets around 8-9 hours with a new battery on a normal workload, and when it drops to 3 hours, I buy a new battery.
- haspok 7y ago
  On newer kernels (4.8+) and latest Ubuntu my Thinkpad L390 freezes consistently when I try to suspend. It's gotten a bit better with 5.0.0.31, now suspend works 50% of the cases when I select it manually from the menu, and the laptop is connected to power. Otherwise, 90% freeze. Even my old trusty XPS 13 started not to go to sleep 1 out of 10 times. There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care. For this reason alone, I started to seriously consider giving up Linux on the desktop.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care If the feature used to work reliably in older kernels, you could try and bisect the issue. There's a bit of work involved, but it's quite doable.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    No Linux distro has ever just worked with Sleep and/or WiFi. My last Linux machine (Ubuntu) would never be able to connect to WiFi after sleep mode. Believe me, I tried everything you can think of and find in various StackExchange posts. When a GRUB update destroyed my dual-boot setup and made my system completely unrecoverable, I ditched Linux and never looked back. Using OpenOffice or LibreOffice was also more akin to self-punishment usually seen in medieval monks. As a student, all these problems were okay, but nowadays I don't have the time to constantly fight against my own OS to finally figure out that I have to adjust my fan speed rotation coefficient to make the third party WiFi driver work.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > Intel cards are the only option if you're buying a Thinkpad. Not true. My Thinkpad E485 from late 2018 has either a Broadcom or a Qualcomm chip, but definitely not Intel. It works like a charm though. The bigger issue is the Realtek Ethernet NIC which has an annoying driver bug where it does not detect the carrier except when the cable is already inserted at boot time. Never buy Realtek if you can avoid it.
- hakfoo 7y ago
  Tell my E585 and its craptacular Realtek card that. I ordered an Intel card but it's been in weird foreign shipper hell for weeks.
viraptor 7y ago
Unless you buy the most recently released hardware, yeah. (For example latest ryzen has issues) Hardware and sleep pretty much works for an average consumer. Even HDR support is almost there. "Battery" is not one thing, so can't answer. Does idle draw count as an issue? Do services you can switch on/off count as a battery issue? In comparison, does MacOS indexer out iCloud sync going crazy count as a battery issue?
- jhasse 7y ago
  Latest Ryzen issues have been fixed btw.
deltron3030 7y ago
Depends on the hardware manufacturer. But if you're a regular laptop user the bigger issue is trackpad feel, if you're used to Apple devices or the new Windows drivers for trackpads, it's not acceptable. You're better off switching the way you work to using a window manager and shortcuts, like most hardcore linux users do at some point.
- wyclif 7y ago
  I really wouldn't want to use a Linux laptop for work unless I had a WM installed like i3 or dwm, so I could completely ignore the awful trackpad. Apple may be bad at some things, but trackpads are not one of those things.
  - ohazi 7y ago
    Can't argue with that! Lenovo trackpads seem to alternate between almost usable and utter trash every few years. I usually just plug in a mouse...
    - test1235 7y ago
      I just got a t480s and I feel the trackpad is my main complaint ... it feels kinda plasticky and the responsiveness isn't quite there (e.g. phantom dragging). Overall, the quality doesn't compare to my 2013 macbook air, but it does have some newer features which're nice.
    - vetinari 7y ago
      Lenovos have trackpoint; why would you want to use trackpad, when you have the nub?
      - deltron3030 7y ago
        Trackpoints slow you down, a lot. They're good for more precise work like dragging bezier handles, not so good if you want to navigate UI's imo.
bengalister 7y ago
I didn't have any issue with Wifi and sleep on my home Dell XPS 13 9380 running Arch. As for the battery, well I followed the arch wiki recommendations (add a kernel startup parameter, and use tlp) and it is ok now but it does not just work out of the box. It is still not on par with Windows (I kept it just in case). I get around 8-9 hours of battery life on Windows while on Linux it is more like 6-7 hours. But it is mostly due to the fact that Chrome/Chromium and Firefox don't support hardware acceleration on Linux and I watch quite a lot of youtube videos. There is a Chromium that uses the video acceleration API (VAAPI) but it comes from the user arch repository, there is now also a snap package (I haven't yet fully tried them).
- tluyben2 7y ago
  All my Linux devices do a lot better under Linux than under Windows; Lenovo X220, MS Surface and GPD Pocket all run both but battery life is miles ahead of Windows for my use (programming and browsing for programming). I use Ubuntu with i3wm. i3wm is, I think, where most of the difference comes from; it is very light. And, imho, much easier to work with than mouse driven stuff.
tgv 7y ago
People here seem to have had positive experiences, which may be due to a bit of fanboyism or Apple hate, but a relatively technically capable colleague tried to install Ubuntu onto a Dell recently, and failed: grahpics and network issues; no idea if it could sleep. Two days of work lost, so now he has a mac.
- jhasse 7y ago
  For a fair comparision he should have bought one of Dell's laptop which come preinstalled with Ubuntu.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Sounds to me like your colleague did not use a laptop supporting Linux (did he try to ask Dell directly?), in which case it would not be "work" but amateur "tinkering". Even if it does install and seem to work well at first, a non-supported device can break the OS install any time due to some driver / firmware change etc., and you'd have no one to blame but yourself — no promise was ever made by Dell or Linux that this particular device+OS would work. It's just not what you should do in a business / work setting. We use supported devices — for Ubuntu, for RHEL, for ZFS, for pfSense, for VMware or Xen or HyperV, etc. — because we need someone to call when things don't work, and we need to be sure they just won't fail or break 99.99% of the time. Short of that, you're on your own, and it's no revelation that Windows works on all laptops but Linux simply doesn't — it works "most of the time", "with some caveats quite often". Blame manufacturers who don't write drivers for Linux (looking at you, Qualcomm, Nvidia...), blame OEMs who select those parts for their machines, but don't blame Linux itself — you get it for free with more than 4,000 drivers included last I checked.
Lio 7y ago
The only real problem I have left with my XPS13 is with sleep/hibernate. I’d like it to work like macOS. It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. As far as I can tell that means enabling virtual memory which is a no no on SSD. Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot.
- phoe-krk 7y ago
  > It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. Has macOS solved this issue differently? Do they save RAM state to some non-SSD non-volatile memory, or do they just not care and dump it to SSD anyway?
  - eknkc 7y ago
    I believe they favour sleep mode where the ram is powered on and the state is kept alive on ram. Only when the sleep time goes too long or battery starts running low, they dump into SSD.
  - Lio 7y ago
    It's not the swapfile that's the issue it's having the swapfile also be used for virtual memory. If it was only used for suspend that would be fine because it would only be written to when you suspend the laptop, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty rare compared to writes caused by virtual memory swapping.
    - chungus_khan 7y ago
      Mac OS does the same in this regard though, but in my experience neither Mac OS or Linux are particularly aggressive at using swap anyway.
      - seba_dos1 7y ago
        Yup, macOS dynamically allocates swap files on disk when they're needed - that's why you may see 0 swap space in htop, which doesn't mean that it doesn't use swap.
mfontani 7y ago
I switched to a t480 w/Debian from a macbook pro due to battery. Same apps, I get 8h vs 1.5h with VirtualBox running a VM, or 12h (vs ~2h?) without. WiFi works. Sleep is "meh" compared to the Macbook, but that's on me for not having a swap partition. Happy with my switch so far, and it's been 1y3mo
mav3rick 7y ago
Chromebooks. You can now run a full linux distro securely on a Chromebook too (alongside the Play Store).
davedx 7y ago
Regarding sleep: Windows still doesn’t get it right - my daughter plays Roblox on my wife’s Dell laptop, as she’s 5 she just closes the lid with the game running when she’s done. I sometimes hear the fan going before I go to bed later, because apparently a “slept” windows laptop is still merrily letting whatever game was running render 60 fps with the lid shut. Bit silly, and probably awful for her battery life
bwat49 7y ago
That's a bit of a loaded question given the huge variety of hardware configurations out there, and the fact that most vendors only test with Windows. Linux hardware compatibility has improved vastly over the years, but I don't think it will ever be 'fixed' for all possible hardware configurations. For wifi, anything with intel wifi will work fine. Atheros and Killer generally work fine as well. Basically, just stay away from Broadcomm and Realtek. For battery, ymmv. the 2 most recent laptops I've used with linux (a dell xps 13 and a system76 darter pro) get decent battery life (8-10 on the dell, 5-8 on the system76). On the dell, the battery life wasn't much different than windows 10 on the same machine. For sleep, this usually works fine, but can be broken on certain hardware. On the dell laptop sleep worked, but there was an annoying issue where sometimes upon resume the cpu would get stuck at the lowest frequency. On the system76, I initially had an issue with a 10-20 second delay resuming from sleep but that was fixed with a firmware update. Presently, sleep/resume works without issue 100% of the time for me on that machine
seba_dos1 7y ago
Never had such issues in any laptop I bought over past 15 years. It's just a matter of choosing good hardware.

My thinkpad X1 carbon works just fine with Arch Linux. Though you do occasionally need to refer to the wiki to fix things. It's usually pretty painless.

garmaine 7y ago

Yes. Buy a Lenovo and these work out of the box as you expect. In fact I get better battery life than under windows.

pojntfx 7y ago

Yes. Since ~5 years I haven't had a single problem with any Laptop (I'm mostly using ThinkPads, the newer ones, here even the Multi-Touch-Trackpoint and touchscreens perform better than under Windows).

ohazi 7y ago

Wifi: The advice from five years ago was to select/buy the Intel wifi card. Those are the only ones I've used, and they've all Just Worked. Intel cards are the only option if you're buying a Thinkpad. Sleep and hibernate: Works on every Lenovo I've used. Battery: My most recent laptop gets around 8-9 hours with a new battery on a normal workload, and when it drops to 3 hours, I buy a new battery.

haspok 7y ago
On newer kernels (4.8+) and latest Ubuntu my Thinkpad L390 freezes consistently when I try to suspend. It's gotten a bit better with 5.0.0.31, now suspend works 50% of the cases when I select it manually from the menu, and the laptop is connected to power. Otherwise, 90% freeze. Even my old trusty XPS 13 started not to go to sleep 1 out of 10 times. There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care. For this reason alone, I started to seriously consider giving up Linux on the desktop.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care If the feature used to work reliably in older kernels, you could try and bisect the issue. There's a bit of work involved, but it's quite doable.
- neuronic 7y ago
  No Linux distro has ever just worked with Sleep and/or WiFi. My last Linux machine (Ubuntu) would never be able to connect to WiFi after sleep mode. Believe me, I tried everything you can think of and find in various StackExchange posts. When a GRUB update destroyed my dual-boot setup and made my system completely unrecoverable, I ditched Linux and never looked back. Using OpenOffice or LibreOffice was also more akin to self-punishment usually seen in medieval monks. As a student, all these problems were okay, but nowadays I don't have the time to constantly fight against my own OS to finally figure out that I have to adjust my fan speed rotation coefficient to make the third party WiFi driver work.
majewsky 7y ago
> Intel cards are the only option if you're buying a Thinkpad. Not true. My Thinkpad E485 from late 2018 has either a Broadcom or a Qualcomm chip, but definitely not Intel. It works like a charm though. The bigger issue is the Realtek Ethernet NIC which has an annoying driver bug where it does not detect the carrier except when the cable is already inserted at boot time. Never buy Realtek if you can avoid it.
hakfoo 7y ago
Tell my E585 and its craptacular Realtek card that. I ordered an Intel card but it's been in weird foreign shipper hell for weeks.

viraptor 7y ago

Unless you buy the most recently released hardware, yeah. (For example latest ryzen has issues) Hardware and sleep pretty much works for an average consumer. Even HDR support is almost there. "Battery" is not one thing, so can't answer. Does idle draw count as an issue? Do services you can switch on/off count as a battery issue? In comparison, does MacOS indexer out iCloud sync going crazy count as a battery issue?

jhasse 7y ago
Latest Ryzen issues have been fixed btw.

deltron3030 7y ago

Depends on the hardware manufacturer. But if you're a regular laptop user the bigger issue is trackpad feel, if you're used to Apple devices or the new Windows drivers for trackpads, it's not acceptable. You're better off switching the way you work to using a window manager and shortcuts, like most hardcore linux users do at some point.

wyclif 7y ago
I really wouldn't want to use a Linux laptop for work unless I had a WM installed like i3 or dwm, so I could completely ignore the awful trackpad. Apple may be bad at some things, but trackpads are not one of those things.
- ohazi 7y ago
  Can't argue with that! Lenovo trackpads seem to alternate between almost usable and utter trash every few years. I usually just plug in a mouse...
  - test1235 7y ago
    I just got a t480s and I feel the trackpad is my main complaint ... it feels kinda plasticky and the responsiveness isn't quite there (e.g. phantom dragging). Overall, the quality doesn't compare to my 2013 macbook air, but it does have some newer features which're nice.
  - vetinari 7y ago
    Lenovos have trackpoint; why would you want to use trackpad, when you have the nub?
    - deltron3030 7y ago
      Trackpoints slow you down, a lot. They're good for more precise work like dragging bezier handles, not so good if you want to navigate UI's imo.

bengalister 7y ago

I didn't have any issue with Wifi and sleep on my home Dell XPS 13 9380 running Arch. As for the battery, well I followed the arch wiki recommendations (add a kernel startup parameter, and use tlp) and it is ok now but it does not just work out of the box. It is still not on par with Windows (I kept it just in case). I get around 8-9 hours of battery life on Windows while on Linux it is more like 6-7 hours. But it is mostly due to the fact that Chrome/Chromium and Firefox don't support hardware acceleration on Linux and I watch quite a lot of youtube videos. There is a Chromium that uses the video acceleration API (VAAPI) but it comes from the user arch repository, there is now also a snap package (I haven't yet fully tried them).

tluyben2 7y ago
All my Linux devices do a lot better under Linux than under Windows; Lenovo X220, MS Surface and GPD Pocket all run both but battery life is miles ahead of Windows for my use (programming and browsing for programming). I use Ubuntu with i3wm. i3wm is, I think, where most of the difference comes from; it is very light. And, imho, much easier to work with than mouse driven stuff.

tgv 7y ago

People here seem to have had positive experiences, which may be due to a bit of fanboyism or Apple hate, but a relatively technically capable colleague tried to install Ubuntu onto a Dell recently, and failed: grahpics and network issues; no idea if it could sleep. Two days of work lost, so now he has a mac.

jhasse 7y ago
For a fair comparision he should have bought one of Dell's laptop which come preinstalled with Ubuntu.
K0SM0S 7y ago
Sounds to me like your colleague did not use a laptop supporting Linux (did he try to ask Dell directly?), in which case it would not be "work" but amateur "tinkering". Even if it does install and seem to work well at first, a non-supported device can break the OS install any time due to some driver / firmware change etc., and you'd have no one to blame but yourself — no promise was ever made by Dell or Linux that this particular device+OS would work. It's just not what you should do in a business / work setting. We use supported devices — for Ubuntu, for RHEL, for ZFS, for pfSense, for VMware or Xen or HyperV, etc. — because we need someone to call when things don't work, and we need to be sure they just won't fail or break 99.99% of the time. Short of that, you're on your own, and it's no revelation that Windows works on all laptops but Linux simply doesn't — it works "most of the time", "with some caveats quite often". Blame manufacturers who don't write drivers for Linux (looking at you, Qualcomm, Nvidia...), blame OEMs who select those parts for their machines, but don't blame Linux itself — you get it for free with more than 4,000 drivers included last I checked.

Lio 7y ago

The only real problem I have left with my XPS13 is with sleep/hibernate. I’d like it to work like macOS. It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. As far as I can tell that means enabling virtual memory which is a no no on SSD. Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot.

phoe-krk 7y ago
> It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. Has macOS solved this issue differently? Do they save RAM state to some non-SSD non-volatile memory, or do they just not care and dump it to SSD anyway?
- eknkc 7y ago
  I believe they favour sleep mode where the ram is powered on and the state is kept alive on ram. Only when the sleep time goes too long or battery starts running low, they dump into SSD.
- Lio 7y ago
  It's not the swapfile that's the issue it's having the swapfile also be used for virtual memory. If it was only used for suspend that would be fine because it would only be written to when you suspend the laptop, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty rare compared to writes caused by virtual memory swapping.
  - chungus_khan 7y ago
    Mac OS does the same in this regard though, but in my experience neither Mac OS or Linux are particularly aggressive at using swap anyway.
    - seba_dos1 7y ago
      Yup, macOS dynamically allocates swap files on disk when they're needed - that's why you may see 0 swap space in htop, which doesn't mean that it doesn't use swap.

mfontani 7y ago

I switched to a t480 w/Debian from a macbook pro due to battery. Same apps, I get 8h vs 1.5h with VirtualBox running a VM, or 12h (vs ~2h?) without. WiFi works. Sleep is "meh" compared to the Macbook, but that's on me for not having a swap partition. Happy with my switch so far, and it's been 1y3mo

mav3rick 7y ago

Chromebooks. You can now run a full linux distro securely on a Chromebook too (alongside the Play Store).

davedx 7y ago

Regarding sleep: Windows still doesn’t get it right - my daughter plays Roblox on my wife’s Dell laptop, as she’s 5 she just closes the lid with the game running when she’s done. I sometimes hear the fan going before I go to bed later, because apparently a “slept” windows laptop is still merrily letting whatever game was running render 60 fps with the lid shut. Bit silly, and probably awful for her battery life

bwat49 7y ago

That's a bit of a loaded question given the huge variety of hardware configurations out there, and the fact that most vendors only test with Windows. Linux hardware compatibility has improved vastly over the years, but I don't think it will ever be 'fixed' for all possible hardware configurations. For wifi, anything with intel wifi will work fine. Atheros and Killer generally work fine as well. Basically, just stay away from Broadcomm and Realtek. For battery, ymmv. the 2 most recent laptops I've used with linux (a dell xps 13 and a system76 darter pro) get decent battery life (8-10 on the dell, 5-8 on the system76). On the dell, the battery life wasn't much different than windows 10 on the same machine. For sleep, this usually works fine, but can be broken on certain hardware. On the dell laptop sleep worked, but there was an annoying issue where sometimes upon resume the cpu would get stuck at the lowest frequency. On the system76, I initially had an issue with a 10-20 second delay resuming from sleep but that was fixed with a firmware update. Presently, sleep/resume works without issue 100% of the time for me on that machine

seba_dos1 7y ago

Never had such issues in any laptop I bought over past 15 years. It's just a matter of choosing good hardware.