8 ms·

I always find it strange reading (negative) articles about Linux's hardware support. I've used it for almost 15 years now, and in my experience the hardware sup

I always find it strange reading (negative) articles about Linux's hardware support. I've used it for almost 15 years now, and in my experience the hardware support is unparalleled. Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new. I loved never having to scour the web for drivers on the manufacturer support websites. I use Ubuntu for minimal effort installations, and so I can focus on my work. I have tried other OS's like macOS and Windows but the development experience is painful (coming from feeling right at home with the GNU coreutils and full control of my OS with all of the relevant source and debugging tools).

AnEro 5y ago
Same, not to mention the issues OS wise I've had on linux where a achievable to fix with cmd lines or a config file away and was usually my fault for rushing and not reading. Where when something is wrong at an OS level of windows its exponentially more stressful, little to no description or so specific your googling hoping that the one response you found actually applies to you
- kiawe_fire 5y ago
  10 years ago I thought Linux was "ok", but that Windows and MacOS "just worked". And I loved my Snow Leopard Macbook like crazy. At the time, MacOS felt like the best Linux distro available. Sure, I could make Ubuntu look and work however I wanted, but I didn't have time for that. MacOS wasn't perfect, but it was pretty close. Losing customization is a small price for "just works". Last year, after fighting with weird OS bugs on my newest 2019 Macbook Pro, and fighting constant frustrations and issues in Windows 10, I realized that they no longer actually "just work". I was putting up with an inability to make things work _better_ based on an outdated notion that things work well to begin with. And when they don't, it's a black box that I can do nothing about. So, cue the XPS 13 with Ubuntu (that I since replaced with Manjaro) and I have something that takes a little bit more work, but actually _works_ once I do. I get to now be in charge of what does and does not work, with my time being the limiting factor. Time that is valuable, for sure, but a small price to pay for not putting me at the mercy of a tech company that may or may not even fix the things that I need fixed. It's still not perfect. Nothing is. And I look forward to an M(2+) Mac at some point for iOS development. But for now, Linux has progressed enough, and Windows and MacOS regressed enough, that Linux is now the side of the line on which I fall.
handrous 5y ago
I built a machine to try desktop Linux last year. I wanted it to double as a gaming machine, so I got an ATI/AMD card that's supposed to be well supported. 1-2 crashes from both Wayland and Xorg on two very different distros, per day. Unusable for any purpose. Win10 on the same machine is perfectly stable. So I'm back to Win10 for gaming and macOS for work. I ran Gentoo on a Thinkpad and later an HP laptop for years, but I just don't have time for this shit anymore. I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that. I also had to manually intervene with my old Gentoo skillz to get Debian to install on my boring, old (used) home server. It couldn't install Grub, on repeated attempts. All I did was drop into a shell and do exactly what the installer should have been doing, with no changes to config. Worked first try. Ubuntu on an early home server managed to render itself unbootable after an update. No idea what happened with that but it solidified my mistrust of LVM (who knows, may not have been its fault, but life's getting too short for me to want to find out) My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Please list the specs of this impossibly crashy machine so we can avoid at all costs. You found a unicorn of failure.
  - handrous 5y ago
    I find that video cards are the reason for the overwhelming majority of stability issues on desktops and laptops for at least the last 15 years (they didn't seem quite as bad when those cards were much simpler), across all operating systems, including macOS (how many models have had stability issues related to discrete video card heat management or other shittiness? But windows laptops with discrete cards tend toward similar problems) so I'd bet it's that. Luckily, since I don't do anything with machine learning or 3D modeling or any of that, I can usually get away with using ultra-stable Intel video or something similarly bland. I only put a fancy card in this because I wanted it to double as a gaming rig. Win 10 on the same machine? Zero crashes in about a year. Linux in a VM on the same machine, hosted on Windows? No crashes. So it's probably the video card driver in Linux, not the hardware's fault exactly. Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine. Probably would have gone Nvidia but I'm aware which one works better on Linux has flipped sharply since Way Back When, the last time I ran Linux on a machine with a discrete video card. Didn't matter, still broken. No clear cause of crashes. Would crash in a game, crash while browsing, crash editing text. Often I've been able to track Xorg crashes to a specific action (playing Flash on the first version of Ubuntu to use PulseAudio, for example) but not this time. Driver is (or was, for the couple months I made a go of it) just absolute shit with this particular card, I guess. ("but that's AMD's driver, not Linux's fault" OK, but that doesn't matter from my perspective, the machine was unusable for either work or gaming with Linux on it, unless, maybe, I crippled the hardware by using an open-source driver) [EDIT] that it did it in both Xorg and Wayland is another indicator it's likely a driver issue. It's that or bad memory, but Windows and Linux-in-VirtualBox-on-Windows don't crash, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.
noobermin 5y ago
A good point to recall is the author mentioned they stopped using linux around 11 years ago, which is when there were hardware issues. I see the exact same comments that get upvoted here about how they used linux in 2010 and how suspend didn't work/wifi didn't work/xyz didn't work. Long gone are those days, now the issues are primarily games and...I think that's it? Although games often don't work on macos either.
- neogodless 5y ago
  But this post is dated July 31, 2021, and the author is discussing problems with crashing around July 2020 after building their new desktop. Certainly, one anecdote here is not data, but it's also not really relevant to point out that "some" comments are from 10+ years ago unless they all are.
- jarkhen 5y ago
  With all the work that's gone into Proton over the past few years, the vast majority of games Just Work and there's very well-documented tweaks for making the vast majority of the rest work as well. It's relatively rare to have a game that's completely unplayable on Linux, unless it's hampered specifically by anti-cheat software that doesn't like Linux.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    The anti-cheat software (which borders on being spyware) is the issue, in particular for very popular games today.
  - runjake 5y ago
    A bunch of games in Proton pretty much work in singleplayer and very few work in multiplayer due to anti-cheat software incompatibilities. It’s disingenuous to steer people toward Proton without mentioning that fact about multiplayer, given how hugely popular multiplayer is.
    - fellellor 5y ago
      Not if one doesn’t play any multiplayer games. There are many who don’t. If you’re looking to switch then shouldn’t you be doing your own research? Words like disingenuous reek of fanboyism.
nickjj 5y ago
It was pretty finnicky for me. I tried switching 2 years ago, which I wrote about here[0] but also ended up going back to Windows and WSL 2. I couldn't get my USB audio interface to work with my hardware combo without getting a ton of crackly sounds and pops that happened every time I recorded my microphone when screencasting. This was after literally an entire week of troubleshooting and trying every audio thing I could think of. I think that's the main problem with Linux hardware compatibility. A lot of devices work in isolation but certain combinations don't work. The USB audio interface I have is known to work trouble free on Linux and I know some folks using it based on what they say on YouTube but for me, it didn't work. Was it due to my motherboard or something else who knows, but it works in Windows. I'd rather not stick with Windows, but the reality of my current situation is there seems to be a hardware incompatibility for this box to run native Linux. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-tried-linux-as-my-main-dev-environment-but-was-forced-back-to-windows https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-tried-linux-as-my-main-dev-...
- sudopluto 5y ago
  why are you and the guy below trying to use debian, and then complaining about hardware? using old kernels and drivers with newer hardware and then complaining things aren't smooth?
  - nickjj 5y ago
    > Why are you and the guy below trying to use debian ... using old kernels and drivers with newer hardware and then complaining things aren't smooth? The blog post mentions I was using Debian Unstable btw. Using a different distro wouldn't have gotten me a newer kernel at the time of when I wrote that post. The post was written in Jan 2019 and I was using Linux kernel 4.19 back then which was about the latest stable Linux kernel at the time. I think 4.20 might have been out but in either case all of my hardware was around for years prior to that kernel release.
  - roblabla 5y ago
    People new to linux don't necessarily know that debian comes with old kernels, or what the consequences of this are. When I got into linux (admittedly, around 9 years ago), it was quite hard to come by information on what the appropriate distros for which situations were. Heck, at the time, I thought distros were just different skins for the computer, no thanks to the *buntu panel of distributions. I wish the linux community did a better job explaining that Debian is generally not a good fit for desktops/laptops, and that distros geared for this use-case should be used instead, like Ubuntu or Fedora.
acomjean 5y ago
Hardware support has been great. I have a linux laptop now for home use and am quite happy with it. Someone left a hp1200 laser jet on our buildings swap table. I couldn't leave it... schleped it upstairs and plugged it in (popOS). It found the driver and I can print. Is a little slow for graphics, but its quite old (8 mb ram...) I got a USB headset/microphone as a gift. I plugged it into my machine and it works like a charm. Its kind of remarkable.
- mongol 5y ago
  I plugged in an old Iomega Zip drive. Parallell port. Plugged it in, booted. "Driver detected". Worked perfectly
Kudos 5y ago
In my experience, the key is to not run cutting edge hardware, particularly networking and graphics hardware. Especially not on older kernels, like on Ubuntu 20.04.
pizza234 5y ago
The devil is in the details. At least on Ubuntu, and possibly on Debian, the Bluetooth stack has been broken until around 20.04. It's still partially broken as of 20.04 (the discovery module is incorrectly configured). This applies to any machine with such distro(s) installed. I have the reference Ubuntu-supported laptop, and it's misconfigured by default, so that on standby, the battery drains very quickly. The keyboard lights also are buggy. And something else I can't remember. Oh, and just for reference - Nvidia users can hardly even start a standard Ubuntu, because Nouveau has poor compatibility (GT 710? Nah, and let alone the RTX cards...). Nvidia's ferociously guilty in this case, but to a end user, matter-of-factually, this is a Linux problem. A fair description of Linux is that its compatibility is "fine". More than that... it's a stretch. Nonetheless, I'm still a Linux hardcore user :)
- tuatoru 5y ago
  > bluetooth on Ubuntu apt install linux-oem-20.04c The 5.13-oem kernel fixed a bunch of niggles for me with bluetooth, an RX 5700XT, CPU temperatures, and USB audio. (The last is still not all the way to where I want it, but that's down to it being really hard to figure out how to tweak Alsa.) I agree with your assessment. "Fine" (with the quotes) is about right.
juancn 5y ago
I always had trouble with Linux. I mean, it always kind of works, but never quite right. Graphic cards are difficult, sound is a pain in the ass to get working (Pulse + ALSA omfg! It's a clusterfuck). Another thing that has never been quite right is power management. Deep sleep modes, etc. Dynamic hardware coming and going (monitors especially). Battery life tends to suck on notebooks. I don't know. Apple still makes the best notebooks for my taste in terms of overall experience.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Did you try to buy preinstalled Linux?
  - juancn 5y ago
    I always toyed with the idea of getting a System76 laptop, but at the time I was shopping, the price was close to a MacBook Pro at similar specs, with worse display and uglier. On the upside, the memory/CPU specs were really nice.
- II2II 5y ago
  Were you using a mainstream desktop Linux distribution? Those are generally configured to handle things like graphics cards, sound systems, power management, and dynamic hardware coming and going (including monitors). That is not meant to say they always get it right. There are very few vendors who will test their products with Linux, and the community hasn't necessarily tested it either, but they usually do a fairly good job. The reason why I bring this up is your description sounds like the experiences of someone who has used Arch or Debian or another distribution where there is a lot of configuration to be done out of the box. That is not necessarily a bad thing if you have the time or inclination, but it is also the sort of thing that desktop distributions are intended to handle for the end user.
  - juancn 5y ago
    I tried, Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat and Mint (and Slackware, but a long time ago) if memory serves right. There's always something wrong. The feeling I got, is that I was always tinkering with something rather than getting the job done. Windows is not a lot better, just a little bit better (I used all of them, starting on DOS). MacOS so far has been the one that's out of my way most of the time when I want to get shit done. I love Linux for servers, but for notebooks it kind of sucks (or to be fair, is the worst one of the big three OSes).
zozbot234 5y ago
> Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new. This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. But there's a lot of random junk around that is just very unlikely to get meaningful support.
- II2II 5y ago
  > This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. Can we actually make that assertion? For the most part, we hear of problems because people are trying to deal with those problems. Only a handful of people will pipe up to say everything worked for them, and it will usually appear in conversations like this one rather than being self-initiated. I am in the everything-works-for-me camp. In the past, I could have attributed that to avoiding iffy types of hardware and sticking to vendors that usually have well supported hardware (either by the vendor or by the community). That being said, I've had to go out on a limb a few times due to the events of the past year. Each of those hardware purchases could have resulted in switching to Windows. None of them did. It all leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth about these anti-Linux rants. Are these people who have had a bit of bad luck, and think it's representative? Or are these people who are actively looking for problems to gripe about? I mean, it is possible that I have been lucky. I just find it difficult to believe that I have been lucky for a quarter century. I also suppose that it is possible that I have some sort of gut instinct about what hardware will be supported, but it would be just that. I rarely put much thought into my purchases beyond whether I need it.
  - remexre 5y ago
    Yeah, every amd64 box I've bought recently has had everything working out-of-the-box; weirdly, my desktop actually has much more trouble booting the Windows installer ISO (they ship it as UDF without a FAT32 ESP, so the for-consumers Asus mobo doesn't think it's bootable?)
hmsshagatsea 5y ago
Bad HW support is a meme, granted NVIDIA is its own issue. I’ve installed all sorts of linux distros on all sorts of old and new hardware. And I have never had an issue regarding stuff like bluetooth or wireless or cameraa or anything else I keep hearing about. I might be lucky but I’d rather think Linux has been more supportive than not.
avnigo 5y ago
I had the same experience on computers I've built myself. On some laptops, though, it's not been smooth sailing. I don't blame Linux for that, though; it's rather the fault of laptop manufacturers and their use of uncommon hardware because it's what they can get cheaply and in bulk.
midrus 5y ago
> Nearly everything That's the problem.
heavyset_go 5y ago
This is one of the I like about Linux, as well. One of the pain points in the past, however, was printing, but since 2010 every printer I've owned supported IPP Everywhere[1] driverless printing that works flawlessly on Linux. Even the Brother and HP printers that had their own Linux drivers did, too. AirPrint also works on Linux. [1] https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html
telxos 5y ago
I forgot you even have to install drivers. I have a USB network adapter with a penguin on it. That was the key that solved all my problems. Everything just worked after that. If you don't play games I just can't imagine using Windows over KDE with the application menu. It just feels like Windows 2050.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Which box? I think results vary heavily depending on what hardware one runs on.
phendrenad2 5y ago
> I loved never having to scour the web for drivers on the manufacturer support websites That hasn't been a thing on Windows for 10+ years, so glad you got ~5 years out of that. > Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new I remember the olden days when hardware wouldn't work on Linux, then eventually someone would make a driver for it. These days, it's arguably worse. Nobody writes drivers for modern hardware without the aid of the manufacturer. So some hardware, including virtually all "Amazon's Choice" USB wifi adapters on Amazon, don't work on Linux without hacky unofficial drivers on github, which haven't been upstreamed or vetted for backdoors. (Plus you get to compile and load them into your kernel yourself, which is beyond the ability of most users)

AnEro 5y ago

Same, not to mention the issues OS wise I've had on linux where a achievable to fix with cmd lines or a config file away and was usually my fault for rushing and not reading. Where when something is wrong at an OS level of windows its exponentially more stressful, little to no description or so specific your googling hoping that the one response you found actually applies to you

kiawe_fire 5y ago
10 years ago I thought Linux was "ok", but that Windows and MacOS "just worked". And I loved my Snow Leopard Macbook like crazy. At the time, MacOS felt like the best Linux distro available. Sure, I could make Ubuntu look and work however I wanted, but I didn't have time for that. MacOS wasn't perfect, but it was pretty close. Losing customization is a small price for "just works". Last year, after fighting with weird OS bugs on my newest 2019 Macbook Pro, and fighting constant frustrations and issues in Windows 10, I realized that they no longer actually "just work". I was putting up with an inability to make things work _better_ based on an outdated notion that things work well to begin with. And when they don't, it's a black box that I can do nothing about. So, cue the XPS 13 with Ubuntu (that I since replaced with Manjaro) and I have something that takes a little bit more work, but actually _works_ once I do. I get to now be in charge of what does and does not work, with my time being the limiting factor. Time that is valuable, for sure, but a small price to pay for not putting me at the mercy of a tech company that may or may not even fix the things that I need fixed. It's still not perfect. Nothing is. And I look forward to an M(2+) Mac at some point for iOS development. But for now, Linux has progressed enough, and Windows and MacOS regressed enough, that Linux is now the side of the line on which I fall.

handrous 5y ago

I built a machine to try desktop Linux last year. I wanted it to double as a gaming machine, so I got an ATI/AMD card that's supposed to be well supported. 1-2 crashes from both Wayland and Xorg on two very different distros, per day. Unusable for any purpose. Win10 on the same machine is perfectly stable. So I'm back to Win10 for gaming and macOS for work. I ran Gentoo on a Thinkpad and later an HP laptop for years, but I just don't have time for this shit anymore. I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that. I also had to manually intervene with my old Gentoo skillz to get Debian to install on my boring, old (used) home server. It couldn't install Grub, on repeated attempts. All I did was drop into a shell and do exactly what the installer should have been doing, with no changes to config. Worked first try. Ubuntu on an early home server managed to render itself unbootable after an update. No idea what happened with that but it solidified my mistrust of LVM (who knows, may not have been its fault, but life's getting too short for me to want to find out) My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.

fartcannon 5y ago
Please list the specs of this impossibly crashy machine so we can avoid at all costs. You found a unicorn of failure.
- handrous 5y ago
  I find that video cards are the reason for the overwhelming majority of stability issues on desktops and laptops for at least the last 15 years (they didn't seem quite as bad when those cards were much simpler), across all operating systems, including macOS (how many models have had stability issues related to discrete video card heat management or other shittiness? But windows laptops with discrete cards tend toward similar problems) so I'd bet it's that. Luckily, since I don't do anything with machine learning or 3D modeling or any of that, I can usually get away with using ultra-stable Intel video or something similarly bland. I only put a fancy card in this because I wanted it to double as a gaming rig. Win 10 on the same machine? Zero crashes in about a year. Linux in a VM on the same machine, hosted on Windows? No crashes. So it's probably the video card driver in Linux, not the hardware's fault exactly. Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine. Probably would have gone Nvidia but I'm aware which one works better on Linux has flipped sharply since Way Back When, the last time I ran Linux on a machine with a discrete video card. Didn't matter, still broken. No clear cause of crashes. Would crash in a game, crash while browsing, crash editing text. Often I've been able to track Xorg crashes to a specific action (playing Flash on the first version of Ubuntu to use PulseAudio, for example) but not this time. Driver is (or was, for the couple months I made a go of it) just absolute shit with this particular card, I guess. ("but that's AMD's driver, not Linux's fault" OK, but that doesn't matter from my perspective, the machine was unusable for either work or gaming with Linux on it, unless, maybe, I crippled the hardware by using an open-source driver) [EDIT] that it did it in both Xorg and Wayland is another indicator it's likely a driver issue. It's that or bad memory, but Windows and Linux-in-VirtualBox-on-Windows don't crash, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.

noobermin 5y ago

A good point to recall is the author mentioned they stopped using linux around 11 years ago, which is when there were hardware issues. I see the exact same comments that get upvoted here about how they used linux in 2010 and how suspend didn't work/wifi didn't work/xyz didn't work. Long gone are those days, now the issues are primarily games and...I think that's it? Although games often don't work on macos either.

neogodless 5y ago
But this post is dated July 31, 2021, and the author is discussing problems with crashing around July 2020 after building their new desktop. Certainly, one anecdote here is not data, but it's also not really relevant to point out that "some" comments are from 10+ years ago unless they all are.
jarkhen 5y ago
With all the work that's gone into Proton over the past few years, the vast majority of games Just Work and there's very well-documented tweaks for making the vast majority of the rest work as well. It's relatively rare to have a game that's completely unplayable on Linux, unless it's hampered specifically by anti-cheat software that doesn't like Linux.
- noobermin 5y ago
  The anti-cheat software (which borders on being spyware) is the issue, in particular for very popular games today.
- runjake 5y ago
  A bunch of games in Proton pretty much work in singleplayer and very few work in multiplayer due to anti-cheat software incompatibilities. It’s disingenuous to steer people toward Proton without mentioning that fact about multiplayer, given how hugely popular multiplayer is.
  - fellellor 5y ago
    Not if one doesn’t play any multiplayer games. There are many who don’t. If you’re looking to switch then shouldn’t you be doing your own research? Words like disingenuous reek of fanboyism.

nickjj 5y ago

It was pretty finnicky for me. I tried switching 2 years ago, which I wrote about here[0] but also ended up going back to Windows and WSL 2. I couldn't get my USB audio interface to work with my hardware combo without getting a ton of crackly sounds and pops that happened every time I recorded my microphone when screencasting. This was after literally an entire week of troubleshooting and trying every audio thing I could think of. I think that's the main problem with Linux hardware compatibility. A lot of devices work in isolation but certain combinations don't work. The USB audio interface I have is known to work trouble free on Linux and I know some folks using it based on what they say on YouTube but for me, it didn't work. Was it due to my motherboard or something else who knows, but it works in Windows. I'd rather not stick with Windows, but the reality of my current situation is there seems to be a hardware incompatibility for this box to run native Linux. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-tried-linux-as-my-main-dev-environment-but-was-forced-back-to-windows https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-tried-linux-as-my-main-dev-...

sudopluto 5y ago
why are you and the guy below trying to use debian, and then complaining about hardware? using old kernels and drivers with newer hardware and then complaining things aren't smooth?
- nickjj 5y ago
  > Why are you and the guy below trying to use debian ... using old kernels and drivers with newer hardware and then complaining things aren't smooth? The blog post mentions I was using Debian Unstable btw. Using a different distro wouldn't have gotten me a newer kernel at the time of when I wrote that post. The post was written in Jan 2019 and I was using Linux kernel 4.19 back then which was about the latest stable Linux kernel at the time. I think 4.20 might have been out but in either case all of my hardware was around for years prior to that kernel release.
- roblabla 5y ago
  People new to linux don't necessarily know that debian comes with old kernels, or what the consequences of this are. When I got into linux (admittedly, around 9 years ago), it was quite hard to come by information on what the appropriate distros for which situations were. Heck, at the time, I thought distros were just different skins for the computer, no thanks to the *buntu panel of distributions. I wish the linux community did a better job explaining that Debian is generally not a good fit for desktops/laptops, and that distros geared for this use-case should be used instead, like Ubuntu or Fedora.

acomjean 5y ago

Hardware support has been great. I have a linux laptop now for home use and am quite happy with it. Someone left a hp1200 laser jet on our buildings swap table. I couldn't leave it... schleped it upstairs and plugged it in (popOS). It found the driver and I can print. Is a little slow for graphics, but its quite old (8 mb ram...) I got a USB headset/microphone as a gift. I plugged it into my machine and it works like a charm. Its kind of remarkable.

mongol 5y ago
I plugged in an old Iomega Zip drive. Parallell port. Plugged it in, booted. "Driver detected". Worked perfectly

Kudos 5y ago

In my experience, the key is to not run cutting edge hardware, particularly networking and graphics hardware. Especially not on older kernels, like on Ubuntu 20.04.

pizza234 5y ago

The devil is in the details. At least on Ubuntu, and possibly on Debian, the Bluetooth stack has been broken until around 20.04. It's still partially broken as of 20.04 (the discovery module is incorrectly configured). This applies to any machine with such distro(s) installed. I have the reference Ubuntu-supported laptop, and it's misconfigured by default, so that on standby, the battery drains very quickly. The keyboard lights also are buggy. And something else I can't remember. Oh, and just for reference - Nvidia users can hardly even start a standard Ubuntu, because Nouveau has poor compatibility (GT 710? Nah, and let alone the RTX cards...). Nvidia's ferociously guilty in this case, but to a end user, matter-of-factually, this is a Linux problem. A fair description of Linux is that its compatibility is "fine". More than that... it's a stretch. Nonetheless, I'm still a Linux hardcore user :)

tuatoru 5y ago
> bluetooth on Ubuntu apt install linux-oem-20.04c The 5.13-oem kernel fixed a bunch of niggles for me with bluetooth, an RX 5700XT, CPU temperatures, and USB audio. (The last is still not all the way to where I want it, but that's down to it being really hard to figure out how to tweak Alsa.) I agree with your assessment. "Fine" (with the quotes) is about right.

juancn 5y ago

I always had trouble with Linux. I mean, it always kind of works, but never quite right. Graphic cards are difficult, sound is a pain in the ass to get working (Pulse + ALSA omfg! It's a clusterfuck). Another thing that has never been quite right is power management. Deep sleep modes, etc. Dynamic hardware coming and going (monitors especially). Battery life tends to suck on notebooks. I don't know. Apple still makes the best notebooks for my taste in terms of overall experience.

fsflover 5y ago
Did you try to buy preinstalled Linux?
- juancn 5y ago
  I always toyed with the idea of getting a System76 laptop, but at the time I was shopping, the price was close to a MacBook Pro at similar specs, with worse display and uglier. On the upside, the memory/CPU specs were really nice.
II2II 5y ago
Were you using a mainstream desktop Linux distribution? Those are generally configured to handle things like graphics cards, sound systems, power management, and dynamic hardware coming and going (including monitors). That is not meant to say they always get it right. There are very few vendors who will test their products with Linux, and the community hasn't necessarily tested it either, but they usually do a fairly good job. The reason why I bring this up is your description sounds like the experiences of someone who has used Arch or Debian or another distribution where there is a lot of configuration to be done out of the box. That is not necessarily a bad thing if you have the time or inclination, but it is also the sort of thing that desktop distributions are intended to handle for the end user.
- juancn 5y ago
  I tried, Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat and Mint (and Slackware, but a long time ago) if memory serves right. There's always something wrong. The feeling I got, is that I was always tinkering with something rather than getting the job done. Windows is not a lot better, just a little bit better (I used all of them, starting on DOS). MacOS so far has been the one that's out of my way most of the time when I want to get shit done. I love Linux for servers, but for notebooks it kind of sucks (or to be fair, is the worst one of the big three OSes).

zozbot234 5y ago

> Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new. This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. But there's a lot of random junk around that is just very unlikely to get meaningful support.

II2II 5y ago
> This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. Can we actually make that assertion? For the most part, we hear of problems because people are trying to deal with those problems. Only a handful of people will pipe up to say everything worked for them, and it will usually appear in conversations like this one rather than being self-initiated. I am in the everything-works-for-me camp. In the past, I could have attributed that to avoiding iffy types of hardware and sticking to vendors that usually have well supported hardware (either by the vendor or by the community). That being said, I've had to go out on a limb a few times due to the events of the past year. Each of those hardware purchases could have resulted in switching to Windows. None of them did. It all leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth about these anti-Linux rants. Are these people who have had a bit of bad luck, and think it's representative? Or are these people who are actively looking for problems to gripe about? I mean, it is possible that I have been lucky. I just find it difficult to believe that I have been lucky for a quarter century. I also suppose that it is possible that I have some sort of gut instinct about what hardware will be supported, but it would be just that. I rarely put much thought into my purchases beyond whether I need it.
- remexre 5y ago
  Yeah, every amd64 box I've bought recently has had everything working out-of-the-box; weirdly, my desktop actually has much more trouble booting the Windows installer ISO (they ship it as UDF without a FAT32 ESP, so the for-consumers Asus mobo doesn't think it's bootable?)

hmsshagatsea 5y ago

Bad HW support is a meme, granted NVIDIA is its own issue. I’ve installed all sorts of linux distros on all sorts of old and new hardware. And I have never had an issue regarding stuff like bluetooth or wireless or cameraa or anything else I keep hearing about. I might be lucky but I’d rather think Linux has been more supportive than not.

avnigo 5y ago

I had the same experience on computers I've built myself. On some laptops, though, it's not been smooth sailing. I don't blame Linux for that, though; it's rather the fault of laptop manufacturers and their use of uncommon hardware because it's what they can get cheaply and in bulk.

midrus 5y ago

> Nearly everything That's the problem.

heavyset_go 5y ago

This is one of the I like about Linux, as well. One of the pain points in the past, however, was printing, but since 2010 every printer I've owned supported IPP Everywhere[1] driverless printing that works flawlessly on Linux. Even the Brother and HP printers that had their own Linux drivers did, too. AirPrint also works on Linux. [1] https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html

telxos 5y ago

I forgot you even have to install drivers. I have a USB network adapter with a penguin on it. That was the key that solved all my problems. Everything just worked after that. If you don't play games I just can't imagine using Windows over KDE with the application menu. It just feels like Windows 2050.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Which box? I think results vary heavily depending on what hardware one runs on.

phendrenad2 5y ago

> I loved never having to scour the web for drivers on the manufacturer support websites That hasn't been a thing on Windows for 10+ years, so glad you got ~5 years out of that. > Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new I remember the olden days when hardware wouldn't work on Linux, then eventually someone would make a driver for it. These days, it's arguably worse. Nobody writes drivers for modern hardware without the aid of the manufacturer. So some hardware, including virtually all "Amazon's Choice" USB wifi adapters on Amazon, don't work on Linux without hacky unofficial drivers on github, which haven't been upstreamed or vetted for backdoors. (Plus you get to compile and load them into your kernel yourself, which is beyond the ability of most users)