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> Even on a device designed to support Linux (Framework, Thinkpad, whatever) There's apparently a world of difference. Nothing about the Framework suggests it

> Even on a device designed to support Linux (Framework, Thinkpad, whatever) There's apparently a world of difference. Nothing about the Framework suggests it was designed for Linux. A proper Thinkpad does not have issues with hibernation, or losing battery, or graphics, or any of the other things you mentioned. I just want something that works, and will receive updates as long as there are users. I don't want to muck about with VMs, or Crostini, or whatever it's called. Sounds like I must never let go of my Thinkpad.

Arainach 4y ago
I'm glad you've had that experience, but it hasn't been mine. I've owned other laptops running Linux and have had plenty of coworkers with experiences as well. Heck, there's an entire team at Google dedicated (full of incredibly smart people who know way more about Linux than I ever will) to trying to get Linux running well on laptops. Plenty of people shared their experiences in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32293541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32293541 The vast majority of people I know who tried running Linux on their laptop switched to Mac/Windows/ChromeOS. Containers and subsystems like WSLv2 or Crostini make it mostly painless to do Linux development while having a host operating system that has people paid to make the experience great rather than volunteers who generally want to work on shiny algorithms rather than fixing UX bugs. More specifically: I've run Windows on the Framework and it was generally great (I wished it was a touchscreen, but that's about it). Maybe with the right magical device I could get a great Linux experience, but it's not worth having to search and compromise for me. I can install Windows on anything and it will work. I can buy any of the few Macbooks on sale and it will just work. I can buy any Chromebook and it will largely work out of the box. Linux is the only OS that makes me carefully check that my exact set of chipsets and components will probably not be a complete disaster. I buy laptops based on their hardware specs (screen, keyboard, trackpad, weight, ports) rather than their compatibility with an operating system.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > I can install Windows on anything and it will work. Not necessarily. There's plenty of instances of devices working poorly in Windows before the issues get patched (if they are at all). If you want something that 'just works', you are indeed better with the Apple ecosystem. They control the hardware and software. The only way around these issues is to pressure vendors to provide better Linux support. The only reason Windows laptops tend to work better out of the box (or at least with all hardware working to some extent) is because of all the testing done by vendors.
- xorcist 4y ago
  Not to take anything away from your experience, but drawing conclusions from threads like those is not the whole picture. That will be skewed against people who use problematic hardware, and say things like "the Linux way is tweaking everything". But it's really not. Linux is mainly for users, by users. You're going to a very diverse set of users and experiences. For every tweaker out there you're going to find someone like me who just wants a unix-like operating system, with Perl and Python and everything else available with a minimum of fuss. They just don't speak up very often, because there's not much to something that works. Of course it's important to mention the problematic bits too, and there's been many. I've mostly run Debian for over twenty years, and there has been several times where I had to fix issues from migrations such as rootless, utf8, python3 things, and file format migrations. For a long time things like hot plugging monitors, projectors and printers were a bit of a gamble. But for the most part it's given me an environment where I can use a wide range of tools from emacs to nmap, from git to latex without giving a second thought how to configure paths, and how to fix some random missing dependency for a package to build, or why nginx doesn't pick up the changed file date. All those things have been ironed out by someone who went before me. That's worth a lot. > I buy laptops based on their hardware specs (screen, keyboard, trackpad, weight, ports) rather than their compatibility with an operating system Yes, that pretty much explains everything. That's a luxury available to users only of a completely dominant software platform. A Mac user could never say that. If you want OSX you must carefully buy supported hardware. You can buy a hackintosh, but don't fill up threads with complaints how bad the suspend works, and that the picture quality of the webcam is subpar. Speaking for myself, I know what software I want to use. I do not care about hardware specifications in any other way than it runs my software reliably. Sometimes that means you can pick any color you want, as long as it's black. Black as my laptop.
  - flkiwi 4y ago
    The hackintosh world is fascinating, and a really useful analogy. It makes the Linux experience (which, in the last half decade, has been largely good) look utterly seamless and polished, at least with the bigger distros. I own a MBP and will continue to use Apple laptops, but their excellence depends entirely on controlling the entire end-to-end product. And there's nothing particularly weird or objectionable about that. But it makes what the Linux community has been able to do, supporting an almost arbitrarily large set of hardware, that much more impressive. (This, incidentally, is one reason I don't get into OS wars: they're all doing different things in wildly different ways, even if, for the most part, they're capable of the same core tasks.)
ayushnix 4y ago
> A proper Thinkpad does not have issues with hibernation, or losing battery, or graphics, or any of the other things you mentioned. Not sure if my E495 would qualify as a "proper thinkpad", although I've read about the same issues on T series laptops, I've almost never managed to make my laptop sleep in the 3 years I've owned this laptop starting from kernel version 5.4.x to the present 5.19.x. Whenever I try to 'systemctl suspend', one of the following things happens - the laptop sleeps for a few seconds and wakes up - the laptop sleeps for a few seconds and wakes up completely frozen and I have to perform a hard reboot - the laptop doesn't sleep and freezes and I have to perform a hard reboot - the laptop sleeps successfully but when I wake it up, the screen is messed up with green colors all over the place, hard reboot needed My laptop also kept freezing randomly from 5.4.x to 5.14.x.
- xorcist 4y ago
  The T- and X-series is what people usually refer to as the "real" Thinkpads, which existed before this Lenovo nonsense. Lenovo labels widely varying hardware under the Thinkpad brand, but that's not what you want as a Linux user. I don't know about the E-series specifically, sorry.
  - ayushnix 4y ago
    As I wrote before, I have observed similar issues reported by many T series owners when I was desperately scouring the Internet for a fix for months. Of course, I haven't used a T series ThinkPad so I can't say if these issues got resolved or not. I gave up long ago and now keep my laptop on 24x7 when I'm not traveling.
- flkiwi 4y ago
  Conversely, I have a ThinkPad X1 running Fedora 36 (and, previously, 35), and it has never given me a problem ... well, other than because I messed with one too many things. The only thing I did was to disable the so-called "modern suspend" in BIOS and it has run like an absolute dream. Not trying to contradict you. Just noting how even within one manufacturer's footprint (and "linux" however we define that for the purposes of this conversation) YMMV.

Arainach 4y ago

I'm glad you've had that experience, but it hasn't been mine. I've owned other laptops running Linux and have had plenty of coworkers with experiences as well. Heck, there's an entire team at Google dedicated (full of incredibly smart people who know way more about Linux than I ever will) to trying to get Linux running well on laptops. Plenty of people shared their experiences in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32293541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32293541 The vast majority of people I know who tried running Linux on their laptop switched to Mac/Windows/ChromeOS. Containers and subsystems like WSLv2 or Crostini make it mostly painless to do Linux development while having a host operating system that has people paid to make the experience great rather than volunteers who generally want to work on shiny algorithms rather than fixing UX bugs. More specifically: I've run Windows on the Framework and it was generally great (I wished it was a touchscreen, but that's about it). Maybe with the right magical device I could get a great Linux experience, but it's not worth having to search and compromise for me. I can install Windows on anything and it will work. I can buy any of the few Macbooks on sale and it will just work. I can buy any Chromebook and it will largely work out of the box. Linux is the only OS that makes me carefully check that my exact set of chipsets and components will probably not be a complete disaster. I buy laptops based on their hardware specs (screen, keyboard, trackpad, weight, ports) rather than their compatibility with an operating system.

outworlder 4y ago
> I can install Windows on anything and it will work. Not necessarily. There's plenty of instances of devices working poorly in Windows before the issues get patched (if they are at all). If you want something that 'just works', you are indeed better with the Apple ecosystem. They control the hardware and software. The only way around these issues is to pressure vendors to provide better Linux support. The only reason Windows laptops tend to work better out of the box (or at least with all hardware working to some extent) is because of all the testing done by vendors.
xorcist 4y ago
Not to take anything away from your experience, but drawing conclusions from threads like those is not the whole picture. That will be skewed against people who use problematic hardware, and say things like "the Linux way is tweaking everything". But it's really not. Linux is mainly for users, by users. You're going to a very diverse set of users and experiences. For every tweaker out there you're going to find someone like me who just wants a unix-like operating system, with Perl and Python and everything else available with a minimum of fuss. They just don't speak up very often, because there's not much to something that works. Of course it's important to mention the problematic bits too, and there's been many. I've mostly run Debian for over twenty years, and there has been several times where I had to fix issues from migrations such as rootless, utf8, python3 things, and file format migrations. For a long time things like hot plugging monitors, projectors and printers were a bit of a gamble. But for the most part it's given me an environment where I can use a wide range of tools from emacs to nmap, from git to latex without giving a second thought how to configure paths, and how to fix some random missing dependency for a package to build, or why nginx doesn't pick up the changed file date. All those things have been ironed out by someone who went before me. That's worth a lot. > I buy laptops based on their hardware specs (screen, keyboard, trackpad, weight, ports) rather than their compatibility with an operating system Yes, that pretty much explains everything. That's a luxury available to users only of a completely dominant software platform. A Mac user could never say that. If you want OSX you must carefully buy supported hardware. You can buy a hackintosh, but don't fill up threads with complaints how bad the suspend works, and that the picture quality of the webcam is subpar. Speaking for myself, I know what software I want to use. I do not care about hardware specifications in any other way than it runs my software reliably. Sometimes that means you can pick any color you want, as long as it's black. Black as my laptop.
- flkiwi 4y ago
  The hackintosh world is fascinating, and a really useful analogy. It makes the Linux experience (which, in the last half decade, has been largely good) look utterly seamless and polished, at least with the bigger distros. I own a MBP and will continue to use Apple laptops, but their excellence depends entirely on controlling the entire end-to-end product. And there's nothing particularly weird or objectionable about that. But it makes what the Linux community has been able to do, supporting an almost arbitrarily large set of hardware, that much more impressive. (This, incidentally, is one reason I don't get into OS wars: they're all doing different things in wildly different ways, even if, for the most part, they're capable of the same core tasks.)

ayushnix 4y ago

> A proper Thinkpad does not have issues with hibernation, or losing battery, or graphics, or any of the other things you mentioned. Not sure if my E495 would qualify as a "proper thinkpad", although I've read about the same issues on T series laptops, I've almost never managed to make my laptop sleep in the 3 years I've owned this laptop starting from kernel version 5.4.x to the present 5.19.x. Whenever I try to 'systemctl suspend', one of the following things happens - the laptop sleeps for a few seconds and wakes up - the laptop sleeps for a few seconds and wakes up completely frozen and I have to perform a hard reboot - the laptop doesn't sleep and freezes and I have to perform a hard reboot - the laptop sleeps successfully but when I wake it up, the screen is messed up with green colors all over the place, hard reboot needed My laptop also kept freezing randomly from 5.4.x to 5.14.x.

xorcist 4y ago
The T- and X-series is what people usually refer to as the "real" Thinkpads, which existed before this Lenovo nonsense. Lenovo labels widely varying hardware under the Thinkpad brand, but that's not what you want as a Linux user. I don't know about the E-series specifically, sorry.
- ayushnix 4y ago
  As I wrote before, I have observed similar issues reported by many T series owners when I was desperately scouring the Internet for a fix for months. Of course, I haven't used a T series ThinkPad so I can't say if these issues got resolved or not. I gave up long ago and now keep my laptop on 24x7 when I'm not traveling.
flkiwi 4y ago
Conversely, I have a ThinkPad X1 running Fedora 36 (and, previously, 35), and it has never given me a problem ... well, other than because I messed with one too many things. The only thing I did was to disable the so-called "modern suspend" in BIOS and it has run like an absolute dream. Not trying to contradict you. Just noting how even within one manufacturer's footprint (and "linux" however we define that for the purposes of this conversation) YMMV.