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Linux on a desktop is okay, linux on a laptop is bad. I think Linux is cool and grew up playing with different distributions (starting around Fedora Core 4).

Linux on a desktop is okay, linux on a laptop is bad. I think Linux is cool and grew up playing with different distributions (starting around Fedora Core 4). I spent most of my time on Ubuntu because it worked the best, but also used Yellow Dog Linux (my first laptop was a 12in Apple power pc powerbook g4), Arch, and some others. Things that often gave me issues: - Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad. - 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now. - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc. - WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason. - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons. - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general. - Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier. I think a lot of this stuff is better now, but I recently went to install ubuntu on an SSD in my desktop and had to spend a few hours trying to figure out why ubuntu refused to see the SSD in the installer. I eventually had to unplug the HDD to force it to recognize it. The macOS vertical integration of hardware and software is really good. I think the touchbar is a mistake (and hopefully will go away like the butterfly keyboard did), but the OS works well, battery life is good, and the applications are nice. I don't think Linux can compete for personal use, for most people macOS or Windows with WSL is a better experience. This is definitely true on laptops. On desktops I think linux has fewer negatives, but I'd still miss macOS ecosystem stuff (imessage/texting from laptop, things like that).

fsflover 6y ago
All your problems seem to come from the unsupported hardware. Consider a laptop with preinstalled Linux.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  Or a ThinkPad.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    I had to swap out my network adapter to get wifi working on linux on my thinkpad, and libinput still occasionally locks up...everything... processing phantom drift from the mouse nipple (which would be less annoying if the touchpad mouse buttons weren't part of the same device as the mouse nipple).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- lytefm 6y ago
  Yup. Basically comparing apples to oranges. Unless you're looking at a System76 Laptop or at least a Thinkpad/Dell that's certified. I've had a great experience with my XPS 13 so far. Everything (Headphones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi,...) just works, Dell even provides Bios updates. Whereas Windows 10 didn't recognise that my headphones also have a microphone. Only downside is the limited battery management, this is definitely better on ThinkPads.
johnmaguire2013 6y ago
Parent here - I used to say this too, but I am running Arch Linux on a laptop (ThinkPad T470p), and it's actually working great for me. I agree this used to be the case. - Suspend works perfectly fine for me, including hibernating (incl. disk encryption) after a predetermined amount of time, and invoking a screenlock on wait. - Spotify and 1Password X work perfectly fine for me. I have not tried Netflix any time recently, and Flash is dead. - I use two external monitors, with different DPIs and resolutions, and this is working perfectly fine for me. - WiFi works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever. - Sound works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever. - Fonts appear perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever. - The UI is a sore spot for Linux. Linux doesn't tend to have consistent UI, between GTK, Qt, and other frameworks. Furthermore, adding Electron apps and things like Spotify into the mix, and things start to get funky. Some people put a lot of work into making their UI consistent, but it's tough. Many of the big distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have pretty good success with this I believe. For me, this isn't a huge issue. As for iMessage, certainly you're going to miss this on Linux, but that's really Apple's fault for not adding it to icloud.com. I use an Android phone, and messages.android.com works on all my devices. I think the vertical integration used to be a stronger argument, back before messages.android.com. These days, what is it really buying you? A consistent UI? AirDrop? Actually, I believe there's a Linux implementation of that now too.
- berkut 6y ago
  Out of interest, how do you define "works perfectly fine"? :) Obviously you're saying "for me", which I recognise, but from my experience playing around with Linux Mint, Kubuntu and Fedora on a Thinkpad T480S over the past year, while things work technically, getting them perfect (in my opinion) takes a lot longer, and might not even be possible in some cases. Take for example suspend/resume: yes, this works in terms of the machine waking up again, but things like the keyboard and screen brightness get reset (or are at least inconsistent) each time. Googling the problem, there are a lot of suggestions for hooking up scripts to run xbacklight to store / reset it each time, and I did manage to get it almost working "perfectly", but I'm not really sure why I should have to do this from a user's perspective. It's even more annoying in that at least in Linux Mint and Kubuntu's case, controlling the screen brightness isn't possible until you've logged in, so if you resume the laptop and the screen is dark, it's actually sometimes difficult to verify what's going on at the login screen. Same goes for things like Dropbox - it doesn't know it's been woken up (maybe it's a Dropbox issue not listening for events), so doesn't resync - there are hacks to make a script to touch a file to trigger the refresh, and basically get it working, but again, why do I need to have to do this? Even getting decent battery life involves (in my experience) tweaking things and running things like powertop to work out what system services are doing what, etc, etc. Whilst I do agree it's technically possible to get something I'd term "good" with Linux + Laptop, I'm not convinced the average consumer would be that happy with it compared to a Mac or a PC laptop.
billylindeman 6y ago
I bought a lenovo to have a linux laptop earlier this year, and I must say I think it is the best laptop experience I've had. It has fantastic battery life, everything works with very minimal configuration, and with my i3 desktop setup exactly how I like it I'm more productive than I was on my macbook.
- _iyig 6y ago
  Does Lenovo still sell laptops with malware in the firmware? Not a "gotcha" question, I am seriously asking. Considering a Thinkpad for my next laptop, but memories of Superfish give me pause. https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...
  - tempest_ 6y ago
    These issues were only ever with the consumer lenovo laptops. Thinkpads never had an issue and generally work with Linux without issues (I heard this was because Redhat used Thinkpads and so there were lots of contributions to make things work but that could just be scuttlebutt)
    - freedomben 6y ago
      I work for Red Hat, can confirm we get Think Pads and they do work wonderfully with Fedora and RHEL. I don't work with the kernel team but I can't imagine it's a coincidence that we use ThinkPads and it works well on Fedora.
skrtskrt 6y ago
The font rendering is one of the main things that keeps me on Mac. On Linux the font rendering is either far too thin or far too thick, no matter which setting I fiddle with. I don't have the greatest eyes and bleh font rendering is huge pain. I understand others may not be so picky, but acting like the font rendering is on par with Mac is just not true.
Shared404 6y ago
> linux on a laptop is bad. I think it at least partially depends on the hardware. > - Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad. I did experience this a little bit, but it's been 2-3 years since the last time it happened. > - 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now. No comment on this, I haven't really used any of these on my laptop. > - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc. Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen. Everything else has worked great. > - WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason. Haven't had any issues with this, but I would imagine it would be highly dependent on the wireless card you had. > - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons. Yeah, audio on linux kinda sucks right now. I've never been stuck without a workaround, but I've needed workarounds multiple times. > - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general. I've not noticed this, but I also haven't looked. > - Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier. GNOME + Pop_shell at least has gotten fast enough to keep me from installing i3 again. This is of course a matter of personal preference. I personally trust neither Apple or MS, but they both have their upsides. To each their own, and happy hacking!
- pfranz 6y ago
  > > - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc. > Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen. I just wanted to throw out some non-Linux issues I've hit in the past couple years. I believe I had a MacbookPro 2015 and Apple's USB-C to HDMI I consistently had RGB noise patterns and it worked terribly. I switched to a third-party USB-C to DisplayPort and it worked great. I heard about similar issues online. Some talked about it being specific to hardware configuration (that series of MacbookPros) and others pointed to OS updates that triggered it. I've had trouble with a Windows desktop and an Nvidia card with detecting which port was used to send video signal to on boot. I think it assumed the first HDMI port when I had the intention of using the DisplayPort. I think it got extra confused if the monitor was off on boot (it was trying to detect the signal?) I would often get the BIOS to show up on one output, then Windows may try and use a different one.
bee_rider 6y ago
I would probably use a NUC and a portable monitor before I'd use Linux on a laptop.
monksy 6y ago
I've been using linux on laptops for the last 16 years. It hasn't been that bad for me. I've been using: 1. Dells 2. HP Elite books 3. Clevos (Branded by sager) 4. Asus Zenbooks About 16 years ago, the suspend and hibernate was a bit of work to get right. Now it just works right out of the gate. Sometimes it doesn't.. but that's the same for Windows and Macs. -- "Normal apps" There is no Netflix app for linux. Flash is mostly gone away, firefox and chrome fixed that 9 years ago at least. Spotify works. --- Monitor support, most of the X problems are resolved. Intel graphics support is great. Nvidia Optimus is still a dumpster fire. --- WIFI- what cards are you using? the intel cards work without an issue. -- Sound Yea I don't know what is the deal with alsa vs pulse etc. But most of the time they work out of the gate.. I've had minor issues mostly. Bluetooth audio is annoying. Haven't had complete stopages issues in a very long time. --- Anti-aliasing/font-support- this is more of your desktop environment than anything. KDE tends to correct those issues. ------ macOS often times has issues with their own software and makes it difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
romanoderoma 6y ago
I had complicated experiences with Linux in the past, but I was young and the problem solver in me loved it. But, honestly, at lest in the past 5 years, I had no problems especially if we consider laptops that usually have more or less the same standard hardware. 4 years ago I bought an Xiaomi 13' laptop to use it as a browsing machine and occasionally as a media player. It came with a Chinese windows preinstalled. Without even looking at the specs I installed Ubuntu on it and I've never had a problem. I upgraded it from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04 and I'm using it right now to watch the 4th season of Fargo I never had to tweak the configuration or change a single .conf file, it simply worked The battery lasts 8 hours and if I close the lid it automatically goes on suspend It's been the best setup I ever had. Unfortunately it's too underpowered to use it as a working device, but if I could I would be the happiest man in the World.

fsflover 6y ago

All your problems seem to come from the unsupported hardware. Consider a laptop with preinstalled Linux.

_emacsomancer_ 6y ago
Or a ThinkPad.
- hansvm 6y ago
  I had to swap out my network adapter to get wifi working on linux on my thinkpad, and libinput still occasionally locks up...everything... processing phantom drift from the mouse nipple (which would be less annoying if the touchpad mouse buttons weren't part of the same device as the mouse nipple).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lytefm 6y ago
Yup. Basically comparing apples to oranges. Unless you're looking at a System76 Laptop or at least a Thinkpad/Dell that's certified. I've had a great experience with my XPS 13 so far. Everything (Headphones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi,...) just works, Dell even provides Bios updates. Whereas Windows 10 didn't recognise that my headphones also have a microphone. Only downside is the limited battery management, this is definitely better on ThinkPads.

johnmaguire2013 6y ago

Parent here - I used to say this too, but I am running Arch Linux on a laptop (ThinkPad T470p), and it's actually working great for me. I agree this used to be the case. - Suspend works perfectly fine for me, including hibernating (incl. disk encryption) after a predetermined amount of time, and invoking a screenlock on wait. - Spotify and 1Password X work perfectly fine for me. I have not tried Netflix any time recently, and Flash is dead. - I use two external monitors, with different DPIs and resolutions, and this is working perfectly fine for me. - WiFi works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever. - Sound works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever. - Fonts appear perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever. - The UI is a sore spot for Linux. Linux doesn't tend to have consistent UI, between GTK, Qt, and other frameworks. Furthermore, adding Electron apps and things like Spotify into the mix, and things start to get funky. Some people put a lot of work into making their UI consistent, but it's tough. Many of the big distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have pretty good success with this I believe. For me, this isn't a huge issue. As for iMessage, certainly you're going to miss this on Linux, but that's really Apple's fault for not adding it to icloud.com. I use an Android phone, and messages.android.com works on all my devices. I think the vertical integration used to be a stronger argument, back before messages.android.com. These days, what is it really buying you? A consistent UI? AirDrop? Actually, I believe there's a Linux implementation of that now too.

berkut 6y ago
Out of interest, how do you define "works perfectly fine"? :) Obviously you're saying "for me", which I recognise, but from my experience playing around with Linux Mint, Kubuntu and Fedora on a Thinkpad T480S over the past year, while things work technically, getting them perfect (in my opinion) takes a lot longer, and might not even be possible in some cases. Take for example suspend/resume: yes, this works in terms of the machine waking up again, but things like the keyboard and screen brightness get reset (or are at least inconsistent) each time. Googling the problem, there are a lot of suggestions for hooking up scripts to run xbacklight to store / reset it each time, and I did manage to get it almost working "perfectly", but I'm not really sure why I should have to do this from a user's perspective. It's even more annoying in that at least in Linux Mint and Kubuntu's case, controlling the screen brightness isn't possible until you've logged in, so if you resume the laptop and the screen is dark, it's actually sometimes difficult to verify what's going on at the login screen. Same goes for things like Dropbox - it doesn't know it's been woken up (maybe it's a Dropbox issue not listening for events), so doesn't resync - there are hacks to make a script to touch a file to trigger the refresh, and basically get it working, but again, why do I need to have to do this? Even getting decent battery life involves (in my experience) tweaking things and running things like powertop to work out what system services are doing what, etc, etc. Whilst I do agree it's technically possible to get something I'd term "good" with Linux + Laptop, I'm not convinced the average consumer would be that happy with it compared to a Mac or a PC laptop.

billylindeman 6y ago

I bought a lenovo to have a linux laptop earlier this year, and I must say I think it is the best laptop experience I've had. It has fantastic battery life, everything works with very minimal configuration, and with my i3 desktop setup exactly how I like it I'm more productive than I was on my macbook.

_iyig 6y ago
Does Lenovo still sell laptops with malware in the firmware? Not a "gotcha" question, I am seriously asking. Considering a Thinkpad for my next laptop, but memories of Superfish give me pause. https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...
- tempest_ 6y ago
  These issues were only ever with the consumer lenovo laptops. Thinkpads never had an issue and generally work with Linux without issues (I heard this was because Redhat used Thinkpads and so there were lots of contributions to make things work but that could just be scuttlebutt)
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I work for Red Hat, can confirm we get Think Pads and they do work wonderfully with Fedora and RHEL. I don't work with the kernel team but I can't imagine it's a coincidence that we use ThinkPads and it works well on Fedora.

skrtskrt 6y ago

The font rendering is one of the main things that keeps me on Mac. On Linux the font rendering is either far too thin or far too thick, no matter which setting I fiddle with. I don't have the greatest eyes and bleh font rendering is huge pain. I understand others may not be so picky, but acting like the font rendering is on par with Mac is just not true.

Shared404 6y ago

> linux on a laptop is bad. I think it at least partially depends on the hardware. > - Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad. I did experience this a little bit, but it's been 2-3 years since the last time it happened. > - 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now. No comment on this, I haven't really used any of these on my laptop. > - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc. Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen. Everything else has worked great. > - WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason. Haven't had any issues with this, but I would imagine it would be highly dependent on the wireless card you had. > - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons. Yeah, audio on linux kinda sucks right now. I've never been stuck without a workaround, but I've needed workarounds multiple times. > - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general. I've not noticed this, but I also haven't looked. > - Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier. GNOME + Pop_shell at least has gotten fast enough to keep me from installing i3 again. This is of course a matter of personal preference. I personally trust neither Apple or MS, but they both have their upsides. To each their own, and happy hacking!

pfranz 6y ago
> > - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc. > Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen. I just wanted to throw out some non-Linux issues I've hit in the past couple years. I believe I had a MacbookPro 2015 and Apple's USB-C to HDMI I consistently had RGB noise patterns and it worked terribly. I switched to a third-party USB-C to DisplayPort and it worked great. I heard about similar issues online. Some talked about it being specific to hardware configuration (that series of MacbookPros) and others pointed to OS updates that triggered it. I've had trouble with a Windows desktop and an Nvidia card with detecting which port was used to send video signal to on boot. I think it assumed the first HDMI port when I had the intention of using the DisplayPort. I think it got extra confused if the monitor was off on boot (it was trying to detect the signal?) I would often get the BIOS to show up on one output, then Windows may try and use a different one.

bee_rider 6y ago

I would probably use a NUC and a portable monitor before I'd use Linux on a laptop.

monksy 6y ago

I've been using linux on laptops for the last 16 years. It hasn't been that bad for me. I've been using: 1. Dells 2. HP Elite books 3. Clevos (Branded by sager) 4. Asus Zenbooks About 16 years ago, the suspend and hibernate was a bit of work to get right. Now it just works right out of the gate. Sometimes it doesn't.. but that's the same for Windows and Macs. -- "Normal apps" There is no Netflix app for linux. Flash is mostly gone away, firefox and chrome fixed that 9 years ago at least. Spotify works. --- Monitor support, most of the X problems are resolved. Intel graphics support is great. Nvidia Optimus is still a dumpster fire. --- WIFI- what cards are you using? the intel cards work without an issue. -- Sound Yea I don't know what is the deal with alsa vs pulse etc. But most of the time they work out of the gate.. I've had minor issues mostly. Bluetooth audio is annoying. Haven't had complete stopages issues in a very long time. --- Anti-aliasing/font-support- this is more of your desktop environment than anything. KDE tends to correct those issues. ------ macOS often times has issues with their own software and makes it difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong.

romanoderoma 6y ago

I had complicated experiences with Linux in the past, but I was young and the problem solver in me loved it. But, honestly, at lest in the past 5 years, I had no problems especially if we consider laptops that usually have more or less the same standard hardware. 4 years ago I bought an Xiaomi 13' laptop to use it as a browsing machine and occasionally as a media player. It came with a Chinese windows preinstalled. Without even looking at the specs I installed Ubuntu on it and I've never had a problem. I upgraded it from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04 and I'm using it right now to watch the 4th season of Fargo I never had to tweak the configuration or change a single .conf file, it simply worked The battery lasts 8 hours and if I close the lid it automatically goes on suspend It's been the best setup I ever had. Unfortunately it's too underpowered to use it as a working device, but if I could I would be the happiest man in the World.