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I recently _really_ tried adopting Linux on a hobby development machine that I built back in 2016 (hardly new hardware -- and desktop not laptop). Sleep never w

I recently _really_ tried adopting Linux on a hobby development machine that I built back in 2016 (hardly new hardware -- and desktop not laptop). Sleep never worked, graphics sometimes borked, UI felt janky and inconsistent, icons are super fugly and often too theme-y to the point of being undifferentiated at a glance, HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag (in 2020), machine would randomly freeze (mostly elementOS; Ubuntu didn't freeze as much), Hauppage drivers rarely worked consistently and often required reboots, I hated the mouse acceleration curves and was horrified to learn they were effectively hardcoded in X (I'm not talking just speed which is tweakable), gstreamer was nightmare to develop for, the Ubuntu & elementaryOS stores are a joke, and the mix of apt/snap/nix was very frustrating and the opposite of user-friendly. I switched back to my 2012 MBP and it's predictably gone well since, plus I get iMessage integration with my iPhone. YMMV

bproven 6y ago
Yeah - the hw really has to be curated. I havent tried using a machine cobbled together from various parts (custom desktop), but off the shelf quality laptops work fine for me last 2 years or so and have none of the issues you mentioned. Emphasis on quality - not cheapo models. I think if you treat Linux same as OSX and run it on known good hardware supported well by Linux you are fine today IME >HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag I will say that this is still a thing, although with experimental gnome fractional support it works pretty well now. Honestly I have a 2019 macbook pro 15 and have more problems with it than I do with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen with Fedora 32.
kristopolous 6y ago
See, that's the response I was used to and the one I expected to get from everyone. The crazy thing is that I haven't heard it yet from the people I helped. Times may actually be changing now, just not swiftly. Perhaps it's the "decade" of desktop linux. It's also not because linux is so great but because windows and apple are constantly stumbling over their own shoelaces and shooing customers away.

bproven 6y ago

Yeah - the hw really has to be curated. I havent tried using a machine cobbled together from various parts (custom desktop), but off the shelf quality laptops work fine for me last 2 years or so and have none of the issues you mentioned. Emphasis on quality - not cheapo models. I think if you treat Linux same as OSX and run it on known good hardware supported well by Linux you are fine today IME >HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag I will say that this is still a thing, although with experimental gnome fractional support it works pretty well now. Honestly I have a 2019 macbook pro 15 and have more problems with it than I do with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen with Fedora 32.

kristopolous 6y ago

See, that's the response I was used to and the one I expected to get from everyone. The crazy thing is that I haven't heard it yet from the people I helped. Times may actually be changing now, just not swiftly. Perhaps it's the "decade" of desktop linux. It's also not because linux is so great but because windows and apple are constantly stumbling over their own shoelaces and shooing customers away.