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So what's wrong with Linux if you want a Linux based system? I don't remember the last time I got a Linux desktop which didn't "just work"; of course I try to a
by severino 6y ago
So what's wrong with Linux if you want a Linux based system? I don't remember the last time I got a Linux desktop which didn't "just work"; of course I try to avoid exotic hardware components, but the truth is that you can run into driver problems and issues too when running operating systems you pay money for, like Windows.
- milankragujevic 6y agoI would say that these days the exotic components are the ones that DO work on Linux, and various common components just don't, or work "on paper" but with debilitating bugs.
- willis936 6y agoI really feel this. I manage about a hundred computers for scientists/students. Total free reign. Some want to use linux. I’m sorry, you will never have working audio. Oh. It looks like the available linux drivers don’t play nice with this sandy bridge mobo and the dm will fail to initialize. The list goes on. Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here.
- tomrod 6y agoWeird. Outside of wifi Debian and Fedora always just work for my exotic configs.
- willis936 6y agoUbubtu is almost exclusively requested. I wouldn’t say most of these configs are exotic, just legacy.
- jacquesm 6y agoYou must be filing a lot of tickets then.
- mindcrime 6y agoYep. In my experience, Linux (mainly Fedora) has been a "just works" experience for a good 15 or so years now. Wifi, sound, hibernate, etc, all work fine for me on a variety of hardware.
- matkoniecz 6y ago"you will never have working audio" - what you mean by that? Some specific software not working on Linux or complete lack of audio? I run into some cases of software refusing to run on Linux (though curiously, I switched to Linux due to software refusing to work on Windows). I run into wifi/printer issues (but both on Linux and Windows) and I managed Linux to Work, while Windows remained resistant to debugging and kept failing with contentless errors.
- Acinyx 6y agoOne example I found recently is bluetooth headsets: On Windows it by defaults uses the high quality audio output profile, but switches to "headset" profile when an app requires a microphone and picks the headset. On Linux (Ubuntu to be precise) you have to manually pick the profile somewhere deep in Pulse, making the usage of the microphone pretty hard as you first have to figure out how to change it and secondly need to manually change it every time you get into and out of a call. I quickly gave up and now use a separate mic. Its all kind of small things like this that make Linux grind just a little bit more for me than Windows, not saying Windows doesn't have its issues though, just a lot less.
- wkearney99 6y agoWith the advent of more people working at home, with a greater variety of headphone/headset devices it's even more of a hassle to use linux for daily work tasks. Not that you can't, obviously, but if you're not a developer or sysadmin-inclined, it's a mess trying to get a linux desktop lashed together.
- fomine3 6y agoBluetooth audio in Linux is strangely good in a point: LDAC support. Windows/macOS doesn't support LDAC but (GNU/)Linux has ported LDAC support from Android.
- Filligree 6y ago> Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here. Ever since the 2004 windows update, the dGPU in my windows laptop randomly turns on after sleep. If I try to force it off, it bluescreens. Battery life has gone from 10 hours to 3. Tell me again about how good Windows' drivers are?
- milankragujevic 6y agoThat is not due to drivers, and nobody negates how bad Windows 10 is and that it becomes worse with every update. Still doesn't address the fact that you dGPU probably wouldn't work on Linux at all, or, more probable, would stay on all the time.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoThe only laptops that old I know still run just fine are all Macs, props for keeping that thing alive, I usually give laptops about 6 years tops before I consider them dead (they usually die on their own for various reasons).
- mastax 6y ago"2004" means a build of Windows 10 originally built in April 2020.
- Sangeppato 6y agoI agree, if you just want to use Linux a classic Thinkpad/XPS will play well with it
- somedude11 6y agoUnless you want your built in cellular modem to work properly.
- Sangeppato 6y agoSorry to hear that, I always assumed that at least the ThinkPads were 100% compatible
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoFingerprint Drivers have never worked, outside the Lenovo specific spin.
- shock 6y agoMy Dell Latitude's fingerprint sensor worked under Ubuntu in 2014.
- bubblethink 6y agoOld fingerprint readers were reversed. Newer stuff is more tightly locked down. People have reversed the communication protocol, but various other bits are harder to get around due to signatures or other DRM like mechanisms.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoNot sure how this is relevant to a discussion about Lenovo laptops
- jasonlotito 6y ago
- nicoburns 6y agoLack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It was actually workable with wine a few years back, but that was before everything went to an auto-updating subscription model.
- de_watcher 6y agoSo make these apps work on Linux. They go instead inventing VMs and hypervisors to extend their walled gardens.
- throw_m239339 6y agoExactly. All these software companies could probably make their apps run on Linux at a minimal development cost. They just don't want to. Microsoft because they want people to use Windows, Adobe for whatever reason.
- colejohnson66 6y agoHow does this extend their walled garden? The kernel doesn’t just accept patches willy nilly.
- de_watcher 6y agoHow does this extend their walled garden? They want to capture Linux/MacOS users with that development.
- colejohnson66 6y agoEnticing developers to use their platform isn’t “extending their walled garden.” In a healthy free market, competition is good. Microsoft is encouraging using Linux, just through a VM instead of dual booting (or even removing Windows). Vendor lock-in, OTOH, would be a valid criticism. But again, this is not that.
- tester34 6y agobut they did afaik? there's Excel online.
- baq 6y agoWindows drivers for GPUs have at least an order of magnitude more people working on them than Linux drivers.
- severino 6y agoI don't know for other vendors, but at least for nvidia, there's parity with the Windows drivers, according to the benchmarks and the general stability. In fact, I remember when sometimes a feature had to be removed from the Linux version of the nvidia drivers just to keep "parity with the Windows one".
- dooglius 6y agoIIRC most of the nVidia codebase is platform-agnostic with small bits that shim to the underlying OS, rather than developing two entirely separate codebases.
- Kaze404 6y agoAnd yet I use mine to play video games all the time with zero performance loss that I can tell.
- x87678r 6y agoLast two jobs I've had you can only connect to work from MacOS or Windows. They've had some custom virus scanner.
- jacquesm 6y agoFair point, corporate IT can be a nightmare in that sense. Even if the OS is intrinsically safer the fact that a particular band-aid can not be installed could easily be a dealbreaker.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> I try to avoid exotic hardware components My exotic hardware can only run on linux (wifi hacking dongles, SDR bits, very old data devices). One of the big reasons I switched to linux as a kid was so that I could play around with tools that windows hates, like enabling monitor mode on a wifi card.
- pjmlp 6y agoMy laptop AMD card begs to differ.
- jasonlotito 6y ago> I don't remember the last time I got a Linux desktop which didn't "just work"; I can. I have a laptop with a high-DPI screen. It can output to a second monitor. Setting that second monitor up is relatively easy (though not as simple as it is on Windows or Mac), though getting the desktop to play nicely with a high-DPI screen and a non-highDPI screen doesn't just work. It basically becomes unusable at that point. The laptop was sold with Linux installed by default. > but the truth is that you can run into driver problems and issues too when running operating systems you pay money for, like Windows. Yes. Though, I haven't had that problem in years. And when I last had that problem, my solution was literally just upgrading the driver. Listen, I've hand coded XFree86 config files back in the day to get three monitors up and running on a Slackware system. It's gotten better. But it doesn't "just work."
- DashAnimal 6y agoGPU decoding support for video streaming in Chrome/Firefox was enough for me to switch back. I know this JUST got added to Firefox but afaik, this Nvidia proprietary drivers don't support this.
- h0h0h0h0111 6y agoAs a Kubuntu use (and I appreciate this isn't strictly a Linux problem), I've found most of the window managers quite buggy on Linux - system clock freezes, menus crash, settings occasionally reset themselves randomly. You allude to driver issues which certainly can happen on Windows, but I've had quite a few in Linux - particularly with network adapters. Let's not even get into gaming on Linux... I do it, but it certainly doesn't 'just work' for many things. I think there's something to be said for the consistent experience that Apple and Microsoft achieve by being the arbiter of their entire stack.