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You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop; all these issues (except for virtual keyboard related ones) also occur there: - EFI is a bit di
by linmob 4y ago
You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop; all these issues (except for virtual keyboard related ones) also occur there:
- EFI is a bit difficult with distributions when Secure Boot is enabled. Ubuntu and Fedora support it, if you choose a different distribution you may have to tinker, as evidenced in the post;
- camera: Well, Microsoft was doing fancy stuff here; and most distributions just don't support anything but UVC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class) style webcams. It's a pain point now, but may not be in a year or two. Also, depending on the lifestyle and the devices one uses, a non working camera may not be an issue at all;
- SSD: Yes, this may be painful, but... for me personal it works well enough. Networking does wonders ;-)
- Lap friendliness... I have had a Surface Pro 3 years ago, and with that device I would agree. With the Surface Go 2 it's way less of an issue. The device is just so much lighter. Works on the subway for me without fear or trouble so far.
Now on the "Why would anyone want this experience" point: I just love desktop Linux, and it's nice to have some full desktop Firefox or apps like rNote [1] on a small, portable device. It's nice to run the OS you know, be able to replicate the same experience on a small form factor device so that you can have it, when you need it, while also being able to use it as tablet - more and more touch friendly apps are available.[2] With GNOME Shell adapting to mobile [3], this experience is only going to get better.
[1]: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.flxzt.rnote https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.flxzt.rnote
[2]: https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/ https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/
[3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2022/05/30/towards-gnome-shell-on-mobile/ https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2022/05/30/towards-gnome-s...
- mkesper 4y agoDebian supports UEFI with secure boot too so this must be some specific quirk.
- benlivengood 4y agoHave you noticed a big problem with ZFS on 8GB of RAM? I've successfully ran fairly large (2TB, thousands of snapshots) zpools out of 4GB of RAM, with dedup off of course.
- linmob 4y agoI don't use ZFS, so I can’t comment. Maybe the blogs author just wants to use that RAM for the web browser :-)
- mmh0000 4y agoSince ZFS is the greatest filesystem in the world, I use ZFS -everywhere-. Including, on my very old Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (2013) with a slow dual core, and only 8GB of ram. ZFS works great, on that device I need to manually limit the ARC size so that it doesn't eat all my ram: # cat /etc/modprobe.d/tiny-modprobe.d-zfs.conf options zfs zfs_arc_max=2147483648
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago> You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop Yes, but not with a laptop mentioned in an article called "I Finally Found a Solid Debian Laptop". This is not a solid debian tablet, it's a shitty unsupported tablet. Thinkpads (t series) are solid linux laptops, with occasional mini quirks, this tablet is far from anything "solid".
- linmob 4y agoHonestly, I have one. I put KDE Neon User Edition (based on 20.04) on it (a somewhat bad choice, as it does not ship a virtual keyboard by default yet, GNOME is generally better there), and it installed just fine. Touch works, the Pen works (with pressure sensitivity) rotation works, WiFi and Bluetooth work, Standby (deep sleep, I put to sleep for 8 hours and it only lost 5%) works (including wake-up). Non working: Webcams. All that OOTB, without switching to a special kernel or similar. If that’s "shitty unsupported tablet" in your book that's ok, but in my book it's pretty cool and way better than what I've seen on my last ThinkPad (L380 Yoga) when I got it, where standby wouldn’t just work.