8 ms·

Thank you for writing this! Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which

Thank you for writing this! Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. Having read this -- the custom scripts, the "suspend still doesn't work properly" -- it feels like that's still the case.

shp0ngle 6y ago
do you think computers should just go to sleep when you close the lid? how naive...
bananamerica 6y ago
> it feels like that's still the case. It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes. OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.
viraptor 6y ago
You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop". Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux This is not representative of non-apple brands.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  On the one hand, yes, Apple is generally extremely hostile towards users tinkering with their platforms, be it iOS or macOS, so it theoretically should be harder. On the other hand, on the pre-2016 models, the components in use are largely off-the-shelf components, much like other manufacturers. The major difference between Apple laptops and other vendors laptops is that the variation of components in use is significantly smaller on the Apple range, while 'non-apple brands' encompasses a huge variety of different hardware. I would suspect that if you bought any random laptop, you'd have high odds of picking one that has various components that are not well supported, with even less online support available for you than if you tried it on Apple hardware. If only because the number of people using Apple hardware is so damn high, and the number of people on your particular component configuration is significantly smaller.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Pre-2016 will start dying though. For new hardware, we're pretty much left with macbook which is definitely broken, or literally anything else, which may be broken, but often isn't. If you're going for brands, most Dell, Thinkpad, HP, etc. (not lowest price) laptops will work just fine with linux. Some even come as certified compatible.
    - jhasse 6y ago
      The Dell XPS 13 and soon some Thinkpads [1] even come pre-installed with Linux. [1] https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...
    - gowld 6y ago
      > Pre-2016 will start dying though. I guess, but my 2007 and 2010 laptops still work OK.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  > You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop". It's true that Macbooks are an extreme case, but as far as I can tell, there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary. Let's take another extreme case: I purchased a System76 Galago Pro, which came shipped with PopOS, a Debian-based Linux distro which is maintained by System76 specifically with the intent of providing better hardware support and quality assurance testing. This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop. Two months in, I still haven't figured out how to get my webcam working on Zoom calls, and fonts display pixelated despite having a HiDPI screen (equivalent to MacOS Retina). I had to tinker with settings to get audio to not sound muffled, and connecting to WiFi took more tries than can be attributed to network instability (I'm not sure why it started working, to be honest). To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. Everything else has worked out of the box so far. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. But competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluedays 6y ago
    My thinkpad runs Linux and everything works exactly as intended.
    - Joeri 6y ago
      My t460p suffers from battery drain issues due to nvidia graphics and intel wifi. Also, the fingerprint sensor requires tinkering after every os upgrade and cannot enroll new fingerprints in linux.
einr 6y ago
You're trying to run a generic operating system on a closed platform whose vendor publishes no documentation on anything. Some manual work is to be expected. I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.
rvz 6y ago
Since you even need to 'maintain' scripts on either upgrades or whenever you want to move to another distro, chances are that those scripts will break upon that migration or upgrade. Then more tweaking, digging, googling and more command line testing to fix that simple annoyance for hours or even days. I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.
bitcharmer 6y ago
> it feels like that's still the case Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora. On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.
- weego 6y ago
  Don't forget the new uninformed stick to beat jvm langs with: they're hard to deploy unlike new languages where I upload a single binary.
- sgt 6y ago
  You wish. There's tons of edge cases that make it into a difficult experience. Recently observed a guy plugging his Linux laptop into an external screen to act as a projector during a meeting. That did not go well. I think primarily due to the external screen being HiDPI.
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    I've seen people still have that same issue with both Windows and macOS.
- jki275 6y ago
  Linux on the desktop "works" today just like it did twenty years ago -- painfully and with a lot of work to work around the operating system's inability to be a desktop OS. Same thing with Java. Sure, it's not as slow as it was 20 years ago, but it's still slow and painful in comparison to compiled languages. I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more, and I've never had a "great experience" once with it. It's a tool that I have to beat into submission to get it to do whatever ridiculous workflow someone dreamed up that can't be done on a real operating system.
  - craigsmansion 6y ago
    > I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more "The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991"
UncleEntity 6y ago
> Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux. Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.
Jonnax 6y ago
Buy a Linux certified laptop like the many from Dell or Lenovo and it'll work out of the box.
bluedino 6y ago
It worked pretty well by then. Somewhere around the year 2000 I had RedHat 7 running on my Dell Latitude CPi, everything worked out of the box. You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.
hpcjoe 6y ago
On my multiple Linux laptops, suspend just works. Has for a long time (many years) with no tinkering. In this case, MBP is uncommon HW for Linux users, and things may not work that well. I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.
- o-__-o 6y ago
  > I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there. Microsoft allows resellers to use “supported by windows” marketing material on their hardware they sell only if they pass a stringent set of automated tests. So a windows hw provider wouldn’t “have similar problems here” because their consumer hardware would have been designed and tested for windows. Microsoft set the standard in quality assurance for backwards compatibility
j45 6y ago
Ubuntu works fine on a number of laptops out of the box with zero issues. Lenovo, Dell, HP and more all have plenty of options that just work. Macbooks have become increasingly difficult for Linux to work on, in some cases it has been made more difficult.
naugtur 6y ago
I don't remember the last time I got in a real trouble with Linux on my laptop. Been using it happily for 10 years now. Just took my 7yr old laptop that wouldn't boot windows in reasonable time and installed a brand new Ubuntu to give away to a non technical person. Had another machine, a strong one with i7 and dedicated card running windows8. Wanted to upgrade it to windows10. The installer bricked my bios. After people who actually know what they're doing reflashed my bios, the windows installation was theoretically working but it took literally 10 minutes to start up a browser. Meanwhile Linux was fine booted from pendrive. I gave it to a friend to get the disk replaced. He wiped everything clean and reinstalled and got it working. I guess I'm biased and that's why I'm getting the opposite experience to what should happen... ;)
bwat49 6y ago
depends on the laptop. macbooks are among the worst machines for running linux and require much more tinkering than normal.
muststopmyths 6y ago
Last year I had to use a Dell 7540 (may have the exact model number wrong, but it was one of their enterprise "workstation" laptops) with Ubuntu for work. I was also skeptical for the same reason as you, not having used Linux as a daily driver for a long time. FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption). I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.
1e-9 6y ago
You can configure a new Dell XPS or Dell Mobile Precision laptop with Ubuntu for a no-hassle solution. If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux?category=Laptop https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.
quietdean 6y ago
I was in the same situation. Tried it every few years, and my rule was "If I need to google a CLI solution, I don't want it". But 3 years ago I tried Fedora on an Asus N56VZ and it's been flawless. Well, less issues than Windows anyway. That's my definition of flawless. I will admit it's a bit of a hardware and distro lottery though.

shp0ngle 6y ago

do you think computers should just go to sleep when you close the lid? how naive...

bananamerica 6y ago

> it feels like that's still the case. It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes. OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.

viraptor 6y ago

You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop". Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux This is not representative of non-apple brands.

oarsinsync 6y ago
On the one hand, yes, Apple is generally extremely hostile towards users tinkering with their platforms, be it iOS or macOS, so it theoretically should be harder. On the other hand, on the pre-2016 models, the components in use are largely off-the-shelf components, much like other manufacturers. The major difference between Apple laptops and other vendors laptops is that the variation of components in use is significantly smaller on the Apple range, while 'non-apple brands' encompasses a huge variety of different hardware. I would suspect that if you bought any random laptop, you'd have high odds of picking one that has various components that are not well supported, with even less online support available for you than if you tried it on Apple hardware. If only because the number of people using Apple hardware is so damn high, and the number of people on your particular component configuration is significantly smaller.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Pre-2016 will start dying though. For new hardware, we're pretty much left with macbook which is definitely broken, or literally anything else, which may be broken, but often isn't. If you're going for brands, most Dell, Thinkpad, HP, etc. (not lowest price) laptops will work just fine with linux. Some even come as certified compatible.
  - jhasse 6y ago
    The Dell XPS 13 and soon some Thinkpads [1] even come pre-installed with Linux. [1] https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...
  - gowld 6y ago
    > Pre-2016 will start dying though. I guess, but my 2007 and 2010 laptops still work OK.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
kerkeslager 6y ago
> You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop". It's true that Macbooks are an extreme case, but as far as I can tell, there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary. Let's take another extreme case: I purchased a System76 Galago Pro, which came shipped with PopOS, a Debian-based Linux distro which is maintained by System76 specifically with the intent of providing better hardware support and quality assurance testing. This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop. Two months in, I still haven't figured out how to get my webcam working on Zoom calls, and fonts display pixelated despite having a HiDPI screen (equivalent to MacOS Retina). I had to tinker with settings to get audio to not sound muffled, and connecting to WiFi took more tries than can be attributed to network instability (I'm not sure why it started working, to be honest). To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. Everything else has worked out of the box so far. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. But competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bluedays 6y ago
  My thinkpad runs Linux and everything works exactly as intended.
  - Joeri 6y ago
    My t460p suffers from battery drain issues due to nvidia graphics and intel wifi. Also, the fingerprint sensor requires tinkering after every os upgrade and cannot enroll new fingerprints in linux.

einr 6y ago

You're trying to run a generic operating system on a closed platform whose vendor publishes no documentation on anything. Some manual work is to be expected. I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.

rvz 6y ago

Since you even need to 'maintain' scripts on either upgrades or whenever you want to move to another distro, chances are that those scripts will break upon that migration or upgrade. Then more tweaking, digging, googling and more command line testing to fix that simple annoyance for hours or even days. I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.

bitcharmer 6y ago

> it feels like that's still the case Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora. On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.

weego 6y ago
Don't forget the new uninformed stick to beat jvm langs with: they're hard to deploy unlike new languages where I upload a single binary.
sgt 6y ago
You wish. There's tons of edge cases that make it into a difficult experience. Recently observed a guy plugging his Linux laptop into an external screen to act as a projector during a meeting. That did not go well. I think primarily due to the external screen being HiDPI.
- wtetzner 6y ago
  I've seen people still have that same issue with both Windows and macOS.
jki275 6y ago
Linux on the desktop "works" today just like it did twenty years ago -- painfully and with a lot of work to work around the operating system's inability to be a desktop OS. Same thing with Java. Sure, it's not as slow as it was 20 years ago, but it's still slow and painful in comparison to compiled languages. I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more, and I've never had a "great experience" once with it. It's a tool that I have to beat into submission to get it to do whatever ridiculous workflow someone dreamed up that can't be done on a real operating system.
- craigsmansion 6y ago
  > I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more "The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991"

UncleEntity 6y ago

> Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux. Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.

Jonnax 6y ago

Buy a Linux certified laptop like the many from Dell or Lenovo and it'll work out of the box.

bluedino 6y ago

It worked pretty well by then. Somewhere around the year 2000 I had RedHat 7 running on my Dell Latitude CPi, everything worked out of the box. You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.

hpcjoe 6y ago

On my multiple Linux laptops, suspend just works. Has for a long time (many years) with no tinkering. In this case, MBP is uncommon HW for Linux users, and things may not work that well. I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.

o-__-o 6y ago
> I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there. Microsoft allows resellers to use “supported by windows” marketing material on their hardware they sell only if they pass a stringent set of automated tests. So a windows hw provider wouldn’t “have similar problems here” because their consumer hardware would have been designed and tested for windows. Microsoft set the standard in quality assurance for backwards compatibility

j45 6y ago

Ubuntu works fine on a number of laptops out of the box with zero issues. Lenovo, Dell, HP and more all have plenty of options that just work. Macbooks have become increasingly difficult for Linux to work on, in some cases it has been made more difficult.

naugtur 6y ago

I don't remember the last time I got in a real trouble with Linux on my laptop. Been using it happily for 10 years now. Just took my 7yr old laptop that wouldn't boot windows in reasonable time and installed a brand new Ubuntu to give away to a non technical person. Had another machine, a strong one with i7 and dedicated card running windows8. Wanted to upgrade it to windows10. The installer bricked my bios. After people who actually know what they're doing reflashed my bios, the windows installation was theoretically working but it took literally 10 minutes to start up a browser. Meanwhile Linux was fine booted from pendrive. I gave it to a friend to get the disk replaced. He wiped everything clean and reinstalled and got it working. I guess I'm biased and that's why I'm getting the opposite experience to what should happen... ;)

bwat49 6y ago

depends on the laptop. macbooks are among the worst machines for running linux and require much more tinkering than normal.

muststopmyths 6y ago

Last year I had to use a Dell 7540 (may have the exact model number wrong, but it was one of their enterprise "workstation" laptops) with Ubuntu for work. I was also skeptical for the same reason as you, not having used Linux as a daily driver for a long time. FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption). I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.

1e-9 6y ago

You can configure a new Dell XPS or Dell Mobile Precision laptop with Ubuntu for a no-hassle solution. If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux?category=Laptop https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.

quietdean 6y ago

I was in the same situation. Tried it every few years, and my rule was "If I need to google a CLI solution, I don't want it". But 3 years ago I tried Fedora on an Asus N56VZ and it's been flawless. Well, less issues than Windows anyway. That's my definition of flawless. I will admit it's a bit of a hardware and distro lottery though.