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Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mikece 4y ago
Boring is good when it comes to tech because it means you're not spending time trying to make things work. Save the excitement for the stuff that pays your bills.
- jb1991 4y ago
  That is in fact exactly the point the article is making, in fact it’s the subtitle right on the page.
- bagaswastu 4y ago
  Yes, and I don't want to spent my time dealing with bad drivers, so that's why I'm using Windows instead.
  - stalfosknight 4y ago
    I haven’t had to concern myself with drivers, kernels, proper sleep behavior, or any of that other low level bs since switching to a Mac in 2006.
  - batmanturkey 4y ago
    Funny, bad drivers are one of the reasons I left windows. Even needing drivers for class compliant USB audio was a dealbreaker
azangru 4y ago
Medium :-( Does anyone have a link to the full text of this article?
- jjulius 4y ago
  Just slap the URL into the box at archive.is
- mdaniel 4y ago
  replace the "medium.com" with "scribe.rip" for a pure(?) html version: https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-works-so-damn-well-that-its-boring-29014b347941 https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-works-s... or evidently 12ft.io also works as submitted by the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606)
  - throwaway888abc 4y ago
    Very nice, Thanks for above / mentioning scribe.rip , today i learned, you deserve one
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      I believe this is where I first learned about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838053
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Does the link not give you the full text, or is there a different problem? I don't know what your frown means.
theomega 4y ago
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.com%2Flinux-on-the-laptop-works-so-damn-well-that-its-boring-29014b347941 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.c...
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
The laptop: "It’s an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol’ thick brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for $200."
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Could there be a more correct choice?
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  Sure, but it also works perfectly on modern equipment like the Zenbook I bought last year.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Meanwhile, my Framework Laptop that the Fedora OS team is specifically developing for has had busted microphone drivers for months. It's all a little random on how well different internal components decide to play nice.
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      Is it because of their switch from a realtek chip to tempo? It's broken on Windows too ... https://community.frame.work/t/no-driver-for-tempo-audio-chip/15926 https://community.frame.work/t/no-driver-for-tempo-audio-chi... All platforms have issues, especially with uncommon hardware combinations. But if you buy any mainstream device odds of it working in linux are probably similar to the odds of it working in windows. For older hardware the odds are much better that it will work out of the box in linux.
      - NavinF 4y ago
        That forum thread you linked does not say microphone drivers are broken on Windows. The first reply sounds on point. I'll add that all laptops produce noise on the headphone jack as the audio amplifier is preemptively switched on and off. Only difference is that it's normally just barely audible. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say they just choose a crappy IC.
csdvrx 4y ago
If you want fun, grab an exotic machine like a X1 Fold with a weird CPU (i5-L16G7 with 1 fast Sunny Cove core, 4 small Tremont cores) and start hacking: even on Windows, everything works more or less (https://csdvrx.github.io/ https://csdvrx.github.io/) but the asymmetric CPU architecture gives me ideas about core pinning for some daemons. On Linux, right now I'm looking at why the i915 style GPU (9840) gives me "Failed to get size of gamma for output default" in xrandr, which prevents redshift from working.
manaskarekar 4y ago
Agreed. That's why I turn to r/unixporn to vicariously live through alternate setups.
j7ake 4y ago
How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  My System76 lemur pro gets 14 hours. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
  - mdeepwell 4y ago
    Lemur has really great battery life in my experience. For example, 1 hour of watching a video stream in a browser uses < 10% of the battery.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ? Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc. After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries. That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life, but I like to carry my laptop in a small bag, so the AC adapter doesn't intrude much. Actually, I have 2 bags: both feature an AC adapter. I carry either the "big" bag with a regular Lenovo keyboard (I like it) and a 65W GaN adapter from Aohi (a cube about 2cm per side, that's not your grandpa power brick) or a flat 20W adapter (shaped like a 6mm thick credit card, with foldable blades) that's perfect for my Lenovo that barely sucks 10W (I measured).
  - sayitenough 4y ago
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    That's cool, but I don't know if your experience is uniquely yours or common, and for me at least, it's not common. I want a laptop that will last a full day without charging because when I use it as a laptop, I may be moving around, or going between meetings, or walking to lunch or a coffee shop, and I don't want to have to find a power outlet. Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better".
aarpmcgee 4y ago
I installed PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) on my 5 year old MacBook Pro and it feels like a brand new machine. The UX feels better to me than MacOS which is starting to feel more and more like Windows imo.
- JoeQuery 4y ago
  PopOS is wonderful. I highly recommend.
- delta1 4y ago
  Pop!_OS Very annoying to type
  - CoolGuySteve 4y ago
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  >> PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) It is: Pop!_OS https://pop.system76.com/ https://pop.system76.com/ It basically a customized Ubuntu with perfect driver support for System76 hardware. I use it on a 2015 Meerkat (https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat) and it works great.
  - brightball 4y ago
    I just bought a Meerkat and it’s incredible. I love this thing.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  You should look into enabling Wayland, which PopOS! disables by default. That should give you silky-smooth 60fps desktop transitions like MacOS, as well as 1:1 trackpad gestures. Happy hacking!
stoplying1 4y ago
I can't believe I'm saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn't have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there's numerous speakers, some of which aren't active under Linux, and/or a similair issue with woofers. I've tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I'm running 5.19... From what I can tell, it's a growing issue, affecting laptops from multiple manufacturers often with "Dolby Atmos" printed on them. The result is very poor fidelity, low volume audio.
- vondur 4y ago
  That’s usually the case with these types of hardware on Linux. Super new or exotic hardware may have little or no official support.
- aarobot 4y ago
  No audio device at all is detected on my Lenovo IdeaPad 5. (running Arch Linux)
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    Try setting up Pipewire, that’s what’s working for me in Fedora on the same hardware.
  - oblak 4y ago
    Is it an intel one? I have a 16 inch one with 5800H and audio has been working since day. Running Manjaro, since I am just a dumb user. In fact, I have a problem with too much sound. The damn thing has a pc speaker that I cannot completely get rid of.
- btdmaster 4y ago
  Have you checked ArchWiki? For example, it provides the kernel command line for enabling all speakers on the y530: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_IdeaPad_y530 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_IdeaPad_y530
  - 4y ago
ai_ja_nai 4y ago
Uhm, how about suspension/hibernate? That was pretty lame even 2 years ago and I'm not seeing it improve
- masklinn 4y ago
  With my 3 years old work Dell, I can't say that it has improved in any way. Suspended laptop basically scrapes over the week-end, a 3 day week-end will see me booting from shutdown on the first morning.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Dunno, in the last 10 years I've had a ThinkPad T530 and an Acer Swift 3 (AMD), suspend has worked just fine on both (Ubuntu and Fedora). My girlfriend has a Dell running Windows she always manually turns off because suspend is flakey... At this point whether or not suspend works really depends on the laptop and there's plenty of reports of Windows users having the same issues.
- windows_sucks 4y ago
  works flawlessly on my X1 carbon
  - number6 4y ago
    I so want a X1, got a E13 to travel and I am waiting for an upgrade for my work laptop
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    On modern Thinkpads, less that 0.5% of the battery per hour is expected, so if you disable automatic suspend to disk (aka "suspend to both") to save a few TBW from your NVME, expect to lose about 10% per day. Personally, I like that Windows suspend to disks can be setup to only kick-in if a specific power budget has been exhausted: if the laptop has been sleeping for 5 days while disconnected, with 50% of the battery gone, it's neat to suspend to disk so that a week later (or more) it has enough power to resume work.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aborsy 4y ago
I have been running Ubuntu on laptops for over a decade. No major issues, at least as of past 8 years. Great hardware compatibility.
- blowski 4y ago
  Whenever I try, it works 90% great, but little things are problematic enough that I switch back. The power management doesn’t quite work, so fans stay on and it doesn’t sleep when you close the lid. The screen doesn’t quite have the same quality graphics. The trackpad isn’t as smooth.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Yea, hibernate/suspend issues are by far the biggest problem I have with Linux on laptops. Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me. I essentially have to treat my linux laptop like a small desktop computer and just shut it down fully when I'm not using it and can't leave it plugged in to power or else it loses 5-10% battery per hour.
    - alias_neo 4y ago
      I use XPSs for home and work, and my understanding is that they don't implement one of the sleep state capabilities properly in hardware so full "deep sleep" , next to zero battery mode isn't possible. That said, my XPS 13 will suspend for a couple of weeks on battery once it's configured, even given this caveat. I haven't shut it down when I finish using it since I bought it in 2019. I run Ubuntu LTSs.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me. Funnily that's not at all my experience with an M1 MBP. It either sleeps when lid is closed even with an external screen, or never (even if i explicitly click on the sleep button). And even if I manage to get it to sleep, Bluetooth is always on and battery is at 0% after 2 days.
jstimpfle 4y ago
Is that actually true? What does it say that I immediately recognize that T420 from the image? Maybe the title should be changed to "Linux on the X220 and T420 ...". Even on these devices I've had some problems. Due to experiences I've made I'm sceptical that there are no issues with Fn keys, Trackpads, Display brightness, power consumption, connectivity... on random laptops - especially the lower-priced ones.
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
I installed ZorinOS on a laptop from 2010 and it works like magic! It's a bit slow because the software it's running is all new but man does Linux feel nice to use on old hardware.
app4soft 4y ago
> Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring Until there is no NVidia's legacy GPU/video card inside that laptop.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  I'm currently running ZorinOS on a GT610, fairly old and obsolete and can be considered legacy but it works great. The drivers came pre-installed in the distro so I had 0 problems installing and using the OS.
liampulles 4y ago
Bluetooth on linux continues to suck however - it sucks a bit on windows too but it has been unusable on a few of my linux laptops.
- blooalien 4y ago
  Know where I've had troubles with Bluetooth on Linux? Discord! Stupid Discord keeps forgetting my Bluetooth headset lately. Saddest thing about that? I've heard my Windows using friends cursing Discord over the exact same issue on their Windows 10 and 11 rigs. (Leads me to believe it's not entirely Bluetooth's fault every single time, but sometimes badly written software doing screwy things that confuse the Bluetooth somewhere along the way.) In my case it's only been Discord doin' this, while everything else that uses the same headset has no troubles with it at all.
- hpcjoe 4y ago
  My favorite bluetooth issue is with MacOS. On my M1 Mac Mini, my Logitech MX keys and MX Master 3 mouse are not recognized after a reboot. So I have to attach a corded keyboard to my Mini to log in. Because when it goes to sleep after a reboot, it does not wake up for the logitech kit. Which is explicitly supporting MacOS. Its not just linux where bluetooth sucks. I opened a ticket with Apple on this, gave them my notes, and they still haven't done anything about this. Bluetooth on linux sucks. As it does on MacOS. And windows.
mdaniel 4y ago
> works so well so long as one doesn't need a working fingerprint reader, otherwise too bad
woodruffw 4y ago
I agree largely with this (as another T420 owner). My only problem is finding new, high-quality battery packs.
- hotcrossbunny 4y ago
  Absolutely this!
kernelcurry 4y ago
Recently installed Linux on my 2011 MacBook Air and loving it. Faster than MacOS and all drivers just worked (Ubuntu 22.04). The only issue with the setup is me! Daily driving new hardware for work makes it difficult to adapt to an older display, keyboard and trackpad. laptop hardware really has come a long way in the past 11 years.
gigel82 4y ago
It depends on the laptop. I tried with several older machines (2015 era), with several distros and never got it to work right (though my scenario is a bit weird, I have the laptop closed with an external monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up). Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...
Eleison23 4y ago
In 2018 I was in college, working on a Linux degree, and studying for certifications such as CompTIA Linux+. I had allocated some funds to purchase a new machine; my desktop was already over 8 years old and I obviously wanted a good machine I could bring to campus. I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad T580, because it was on the Red Hat certified list. It came with Windows 10 but I immediately installed CentOS. This turned out to be a minor error on my part; CentOS was too old to support the modern T580's hardware. I struggled briefly and then realized that Fedora would be a better option in this situation. I ran Fedora for 3 years, flawlessly, effortlessly, and yes, boringly. Due to the vagaries of needing to use something supportable and normal for work, and because this has become not only my "daily driver" but my "BYOD" device for work, I decided to abandon Linux and install Windows 10 on Christmas Day last year. I may never run Linux again on a personal machine, but I don't regret 30 years of "Linux on my Desktop", and I'd recommend it to any burgeoning hacker type!
- number6 4y ago
  Sad to hear that. I hope you will find your way back again.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    If they're anything like a typical software person, they will likely be running Linux on that Windows anyway.
- ant6n 4y ago
  After years of Linux and Mac, I was issued a Win 10 machine at work. I don’t know how anybody voluntarily uses that. It’s like instead of fixing bugs over the last 30 years, they just keep adding new ones. And also make the whole experience more bloated, more confusing, more slow and still kinda ugly.
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    Based on the requirements from my employer, I may be able to spec out a high-end Chromebook instead of a Windows machine for my next upgrade. That is assuming I can weasel out of the requirements to maintain a virtualization environment, which I never use anymore. Of course, that also depends on near-future hardware availability and Google not killing their own high-end Chromebook lines.
justinzollars 4y ago
Except it eats battery. I would not recommend Linux on a laptop under any circumstances.
- t-3 4y ago
  I was getting 12 hour battery life on a Macbook Air running Gentoo a decade ago... things have only gotten better. You're way off base here.
  - justinzollars 4y ago
    I had a System76, and the thing ate battery. Had to sell it and go back to a mac because it wasn't usable.
    - t-3 4y ago
      I'm not surprised, I've never used a system76 laptop, but they always looked like chunky "portable workstations" rather than mobile computing devices. After dealing with the horrible battery life, weight, and fan noise of a Thinkpad with a discrete GPU and fast CPU, I decided that I would ignore that segment of the market in favor of the small and light category.
- raisin_churn 4y ago
  I get 15-20 hours of battery on my laptop running Debian, at say 30% brightness, with an open ssh connection or two over wifi. So, there are clearly circumstances where it is fine, though I'm quite sure there are cases where it isn't, too. Use the tools that work for you when they work for you.
mkl95 4y ago
I love Linux on the laptop. I previously used it on a desktop computer for many years and the experience wasn't nearly as good.
ufmace 4y ago
I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices. Windows has its faults for sure, but it's much better in my experience as far as just working on any type of hardware and accessories. If it doesn't just work already, drivers are generally easy to find and install.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  Anecdote time. I have a gaming laptop from Asus, 2022 model. It keeps hard crashing on Windows (both 10 and 11) while working fine on Linux. Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
  - mdtusz 4y ago
    I use my desktop at home exclusively for gaming. I had Windows on it, but it would continually crash when trying to use my bluetooth xbox controller with it. I've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
    - blooalien 4y ago
      About the only games I've had any troubles with lately have been those which include ridiculous DRM or anti-cheat (and even many anti-cheats work fine on Linux these days). Between WINE/DXVK and Valve's Proton, I find the vast majority of my game library from my Windows days now run fine. (Of course it should go without saying that all my many Linux native games also tend to run fine as well, although a rare few of them require running in Valve's "Steam Runtime for Linux" container thingy.)
  - II2II 4y ago
    Different laptop, different issues, similar outcome. I ran into issues with Windows corrupting the EFI boot entries, even on a dedicated install. I have also had Windows fail to enter sleep or come out of sleep when the lid is closed. I have never had these issues under Linux on the same hardware. Having investigated problems with Windows, I think it is fair to say that Linux is more reliable on supported hardware. The main problems with Linux are: some hardware is not supported, and sometimes Linux only supports a subset of the functionality of hardware it does support. If you're careful with what you buy, your experience can be just as good (if not better) under Linux. If you're not careful with what you buy, you can still luck out and have a positive experience.
habibur 4y ago
Things changed sometime circa 2018. Previously I had to check and ensure online if the laptop runs linux and then buy it. Now I don't. I just buy it, and know it will run linux. Fedora distribution is the most compatible one that I have found.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Someone show me how to get my xps-15 to run Ubuntu with comparable GPU and battery performance to Windows in less than five hours of work and I will be eternally grateful. I gave up and plugged it in permanently for work and use my Mac for mobile.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Pretty happy with my XPS and Fedora. I switch to X for gaming, and use Wayland for day to day usage / programming.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Ooh I’ll try Fedora. Thanks! Does it handle switching the dedicated GPU on and off when needed? Any tips on how to set up? Mine stays on and kills battery in about 90 minutes. I tried the switching and it would always just crash.
- bbertelsen 4y ago
  Hello! I have been using PopOS which is a derivative of Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia drivers baked in. Setup on every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year), has been about 20 minutes. Dell devices have excellent Linux support. Battery is a problem, I can get 5-7 hours in PopOS vs. 5-9 hours in Windows, depending on what I'm working on by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life (9+ hours on 2021 xps with half cores disabled, running around 6-8 watts). PopOS also offers the ability to turn discrete graphics on or off which can also increase battery life.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    > every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year) Haha, nice - I imagine it's satisfying to have a reliable and reproducible setup. Just curious, do you sell the used ones, or give them away..?
    - 4y ago
fredrikholm 4y ago
The combination of Mint (Ubuntu) and dwm hovers around ~400Mb RAM when idling, and feels so incredibly nice to work with even on decade old machines. I only switched from Windows a few years ago after some 20 years, and in retrospect I can't believe how many hours I wasted trying to run things on Windows that 'just work' on Linux.
pjmlp 4y ago
No it doesn't, even on an Asus 1215B that was actually sold with Linux on it. GL support isn't at the same level as the DirectX 11 for the APU, still has some issues waking up time to time (only fixed by taking the battery out), and is the only device that has issues connecting to my router.
- semiquaver 4y ago
  Yeah, I have to second this. As badly as I wish this article were true, even on devices specifically designed to support linux, like the Framework, there are a million tiny glitches and inconveniences with sleep, wifi, power management, webcam, bluetooth, etc, etc. These simply don't happen on windows. Using linux on a laptop is the same as it has been for the last 20 years: something you only do if you don't mind being forced to be an enthusiast constantly tinkering with configuration files and such. If you want a tool to actually get work done it can be painfully frustrating. I say this as someone who willingly pays the cost of this frustration because I much prefer linux as a development environment. But the people who write articles like this are either delusional, lying, or very, very lucky.
  - trelane 4y ago
    That sounds like what I'd expect with Framework. Modern hardware is complex enough that you have to specifically target and support an OS, and afaict, framework just kind of doesn't. It's sold either with windows or as-is, then then it's up to you to be the systems integration team.
FZ_BA 4y ago
I found the article to be very well written and I overall agree with it. Years ago (2016) I bought a Lenovo Yoga Pro 3, with an Intel M processor. It had Windows 8, which I almost immediately upgraded to Win10. It was dreadfully slow with both O.S. from the beginning but I used it for 2 years, just sucking it up and enjoying how small and portable it was. At some point I installed Ubuntu, and it gave the laptop a whole new life, HOWEVER... for me it always needed some crazy things to be done in the terminal in order to make things work properly, the wifi, the bluetooth or something else, at some point just broke, and it was a little field day everytime to make it work again. I still have it and it still works OK! So does Linux on laptop work well? Yes. It works TOO well? In my opinion, NO, it really depends sometimes. But I believe it's a great O.S.
unpopularopp 4y ago
I wish Ubuntu didn't kill Wubi tho. We used that at my first workplace on laptops with Windows and it was so damn good. There is a new fork [0] but it's a hit and miss with modern UEFI and especially with Windows 11 (had to use it for some reason). And other distros never had an option like this afaik, none does as of today. But I know it's all about Docker, VMs, or WSL nowadays yet Wubi covered a niche segment which was pefect. 0, https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi
- btdmaster 4y ago
  UNetbootin[1] still works fine last I tried it. [1] https://unetbootin.github.io/ https://unetbootin.github.io/
  - unpopularopp 4y ago
    But that sounds like a totally different use case. Wubi installed the whole distro into a local file on your drive + it worked natively.
whatever1 4y ago
No it does not. Give it to me for 5’ and I will find at least 10 things that are broken. Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken. Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing. The best we can do is to put it in a VM and run it in a OS that has actual hardware support.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Can you name a kernel with more robust hardware support?
  - CyberDildonics 4y ago
    Windows for starters. Also the title claims that things work well not that linux is the best.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Windows has pretty terrible hardware support IMO. Comparing the state of Linux Vs Windows on ARM/PowerPC/RISC-V, it's not even a contest. I think there's a case to be made for the stability of Windows drivers (I should hope vendors don't half-ass support), but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        Which consumer laptops are there out there with Power or RISC-V chips?
      - CyberDildonics 4y ago
        > PowerPC/RISC-V The person you replied to didn't mention those and there aren't laptops with those CPUs anyway, so this is just goal post shifting nonsense. > but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water I don't think that's true at all and you didn't link any evidence.
admax88qqq 4y ago
Linux still can't handle out of memory issues gracefully. Sometimes I create memory leaks or use too many electron apps and when you hit a low memory situation Linux starts trashing and your system becomes unusable for minutes to hours unless you reboot your machine. Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems. This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, multitask too much and your system effectively locks up. Laptops tend to have less ram available.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Depends on your configuration/distro. OOM killers aren't really used on the desktop because swap makes more sense, but you can certainly add one if you're using a resource-constrained machine.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    OOM killer is a pseudosolution to an artificially created problem. https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/ https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Then don't use it. Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.
      - yakubin 4y ago
        Yes, but that still leaves the problem, which shouldn’t exist in the first place (edit: and on Windows doesn’t).
      - quotemstr 4y ago
        > Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason. Every Linux system configured for overcommit (every major distribution out of the box) will invoke the kernel OOM killer upon demand. There is no such thing as distributions not "enabling" this thing. You're talking about things like systemd-oomd, which act as a layer on top of the kernel OOM killer.
boredemployee 4y ago
I miss the old slackware days where nothing works
londons_explore 4y ago
I have the reverse... Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features. For example, power saving features, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness controls, fingerprint readers, keyboard hotkeys and backlights, etc. rarely work. Prepare for broken external hdmi ports or USB stuck at USB 2.0 speeds. Have fun with the fan stuck on either max or zero, or the CPU stuck at the lowest clock speed. There are still lots of things you have to go hunting for the right old firmware version for. I think Linux is only great if you have whatever hardware distro developers have, because that will be all that works out of the box.
- ssivark 4y ago
  But isn’t that basically “good enough” if you know you want Linux and can either afford the latest thinkpads or are okay with a slightly bulkier older Thinkpad? Seems not worse than different from needing Apple hardware to use Apple software… (though in practice there is a significantly wider array of hardware that has very good support for the software)
- trelane 4y ago
  Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters. Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing. Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX on commodity Windows hardware.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    What is “Windows hardware”?
    - codewiz 4y ago
      Hardware sold with Windows preinstalled, by vendors who won't support anything else than Windows. I simply avoid them.
mid-kid 4y ago
Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers. Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.
- wooque 4y ago
  Yep, my 2 year old Ryzen laptop still doesn't have properly functioning sleep without tweaking kernel parameter, and that workaround got broken on 5.19 kernel release and I had to find out new parameter to tweak. Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
  - Delk 4y ago
    These kinds of things probably still depend a lot on the brand and the product line. The post is really only an anecdote about a ThinkPad, and a relatively old one at that, which is probably as good as it gets in terms of Linux compatibility. I personally more or less agree with the title, though, assuming a suitable hardware choice. I have a new-ish Ryzen ThinkPad for work and the only issue I've had is Gnome occasionally semi-hanging, and I don't know if that's just because of Ubuntu being a bit flimsy or because of something more general such as an issue with the AMD graphics driver. Also, the Teams client the post mentions is about to be dropped by MS and it was never really that good to begin with, but having seen about two decades of desktop Linux, I'd rather be surprised that it's been available and worked somewhat reliably at all without hit-and-miss with Wine.
CalChris 4y ago
I had a Dell XPS 13 and tried to get a Linux distributor running on it (not hard) reliably (impossible). This led to hours, days of frustration and I eventually gave it away to someone who spent hours more and eventually put Windows back on it and sold it.
NavinF 4y ago
> Linux on the laptop > 11-year-old Thinkpad T420 This guy better be trolling.
- sateesh 4y ago
  Any reason why you think so ? I have 8 year old t410 i5, 8 gb and runs Ubuntu 20.04 perfectly fine.So I believe the author to be genuine.
factorialboy 4y ago
I run Gnome based distros on Thinkpads and Dell XPSs and they are the breeze to setup and use. Nvidia drivers are always a concern, apart from that in all ways superior to Windows OSs on these same laptops. Personally i find myself more productive with my Linix workstation but the M1 Mac I use for official work is also quite good.
- kache_ 4y ago
  I've had no problems with Nvidia drivers. Running an RTX 3090, doing inferences on stable diffusion and can also fire up steam and play elden ring online Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly.
  - factorialboy 4y ago
    > Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly. Thanks for that, I'll make a note to how to use a computer. Meanwhile this is Linus Torvalds opinion on Nvidia https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEyMTc https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEyMTc Nvidia driver issues is a public, well-known challenge when it comes to Linux.
neilv 4y ago
> It was not always thus. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, installing Linux on one's home computer was a rather terrifying affair, requiring a ton of abstruse tweaking using the command line. For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  > CYA Notice: Like all worthwhile activities, messing around with laptop computers is not without risks. You could destroy your display by misconfiguring for the video chipset. You could accidentally corrupt your flash BIOS. You could encounter your potential soulmate in a cafe but then alienate him or her at a crucial flirtation stage by evangelizing Linux to an unhealthy degree. This page is provided without warranty. Love this lol
kache_ 4y ago
Get a laptop that is sold with Linux. Don't expect Linux to work with literally everything. Drivers. If you get a modern xps or thinkpad it'll work just fine. But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco. Maybe not :P
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  > But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco. Hah Acer's actually work pretty great. No funky hardware, BIOS, etc...
  - nichohel 4y ago
    Very much so: the Acer Predator gaming laptops have been great for me. They suspend/resume like a champ and have the horsepower for Linux Steam gaming. Their price point is excellent for what you get. Of course they look ridiculous, are heavy, and the battery life is not great but they'll do a couple hours watching a movie in the hot tub, which is all I really care about as far as battery life.
_8j50 4y ago
Perhaps if you leave the defaults alone this is correct. Even defaults aside sleep and hibernate don't work well. Don't even get me started on secure boot. I've used Linux for over a decade so I am used to turning off random things I don't need, changing defaults, hardening my setup,etc... and it is more unpleasant than ever before. There is less debuggability( if that's a word) and it really does take a while to get things operational. For example on my debian laptop, I have secure boot and apparmor working. A lot of things broke when I removed software I don't need that is running by default which meant a lot of googling and searching for help but it all works now, I mean, to be fair I only struggled for one whole weekend only on it, which is an improvement, but, regardless of the DE I have to wait for at least 5 minutes after login staring at the wallpaper. I just accepted my fate now. Nothing in X11/xsession logs, dmesg, journalctl, lxdm logs, I have tried everything short of stracing random processes or attaching gdb. I mean, for personal use it beats windows and isn't locked down and unfriendly like macos.
marcodiego 4y ago
How to get linux on your laptop without any issue: buy a good laptop from a reputable vendor that comes with linux out-of-the-box. Buying a laptop that came with windows and installing linux is not the way we should do it these days.
albertopv 4y ago
Two days ago a friend found Spotify installed on hers Windows 10 laptop, pushed by Microsoft, even on the taskbar. That's insane. Windows 10 will be my last Windows ever.
- unnouinceput 4y ago
  I highly doubt that Microsoft did that and more likely her little brother or somebody else who used the laptop and didn't told her did it.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    Not this time, she lives alone, there's no one else who could have done it and she's not tech savvy, not at all, I bought and configured that laptop my self for her.
    - unnouinceput 4y ago
      "... she's not tech savvy..." - well, I guess we found the culprit. You did let her use it with full admin rights, didn't you? I recommend go to local policy and enable full audit for everything. When this happens in the future you'll have a clear picture of who/when/what.
      - albertopv 4y ago
        She barely knows how to open outlook, let alone go to ms store and install a sw. Please don't try to defend MS, not this time. I found plenty of casual games installed in my work win10 PC. It's MS.
        hedora 4y ago
        According to duck duck go, multiple people complained about Spotify auto installing on their windows box two days ago. I completely stopped using windows in the 8.1 days (forced telemetry was the last straw). I can't imagine dealing with the sorts of gaslighting you are experiencing. Happily, a combination of steam proton and dosbox run dos / windows games on my Linux desktop more smoothly than native ever did, and that was my last missing use case.
the__alchemist 4y ago
Surface Pro 2017 trip report: Basic laptop functionality works. Battery life is poor compared to when running Windows. Pen and touch required some finicking to get working. No writing apps as good as OneNote. All the ones I tried have enough input latency to make the experience unpleasant. That was a ~2021 Ubuntu. I was unable to reach the desktop in Mint. Kali couldn't interface with the network chip.
deleted 4y ago
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seqizz 4y ago
Get a new xps, and let's talk about compiling 5 different things to make webcam work
- flerchin 4y ago
  Precision 5570 is a dream on linux. I have not a single complaint.
g42gregory 4y ago
I don’t like the color scheme and general rendering of websites on Linux (all browsers). By contrast, the MacOS renders websites really well. I played with the color settings on my video card and I can see that I could make it better, but I just couldn’t get it right all the way. Does anybody knows how to make Linux website rendering more pleasing to the eye and closer to MacOS? This is the only reason I still stick with MacOS on the front end. I would love to drop MacOS altogether.
- otikik 4y ago
  Better monitor, perhaps? Apple has had exclusivity on retina displays for some years, although I think that was over now.
  - g42gregory 4y ago
    Unfortunately no, I use non-Apple monitor for both MacbookPro and Linux box. The difference in rendering web is pretty noticeable to me. Windows used to render full, saturated colors a while back, but now it looks pretty washed out to me as well. So it’s only MacOS that renders well currently (I am sure they will “improve” it in the future, but looks good so far). I think it has something to do with default color profiles for the corresponding OS. I would love to talk to someone who is an expert in this field.
lmeyerov 4y ago
We burned an evening just last week tracing an Intel wifi driver issue to missing kernel headers that required upgrading the kernel to a new, non-LTS version. And only then did we move on to Nvidia drivers. So no, still not the year of Linux on the desktop. Our entire dev team does it, but largely because Nvidia and Apple stopped working together. The bigger surprise is Windows WSL2 is just about there for Ubuntu support. We are just blocked on opencl side of Nvidia support (but no ETA.)
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I really tried to make wsl work for the windows users on my team, but we kept getting tangled up with networking (I guess there's a virtual switch involved and so when a tool claims to have forwarded a port it's hard to figure out where it forwarded it to and why only half of your stuff can see it). Do you know if that situation has improved in the last year or so?
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    I'd like to know on your use case more, if possible. Not sure I've ever need to forward port or I probably read your description wrong way.
    - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      It's been a year but if I recall it went something like this: I was using microk8s (a kubernetes distribution) on the wsl side, and I had python scripts (also on the wsl side) which would deploy things into it, run tests until there was a problem, forward a port from the broken service to "localhost:8080", and then instruct the user to open a browser to explore the UI post-test-failure. On bare metal Linux this was no big deal because "localhost" was unambiguous. But on windows you end up with the browser on the windows side and the forwarded port on the wsl side, so when the browser opened there was nothing at "localhost:8080" even though I could "curl localhost:8080" from the wsl side and get a response. Presumably there is a way to further forward the port so that it is available to both Windows browsers and wsl python scripts, but I never found it.
LoganDark 4y ago
That's cool, tell it to Linux 5.18.11 which will not detect my ELANTECH i2c trackpad even if I use allyesconfig
fithisux 4y ago
It is good it works well so that you can design hardware with the FOSS that is free as in "freedom"
sayitenough 4y ago
somecommit 4y ago
The only thing restricting me to use it at home is the lack of parental control.
II2II 4y ago
To make a long story short: I bought a laptop to run Microsoft Office a couple of years back. Being a Linux user, I quickly became frustrated with Windows. Being a slightly rabid Linux user, I bit the bullet and installed Linux on a machine that was not purchased with Linux in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked well. Office was a dual boot away, but that was the price to maintain my sanity. Now Windows users would probably find issues with Linux on this machine. That's fine. The thing is, I am not going to miss a feature under Linux that I never even used under Windows. Audio, video, and networking meet my expectations. Sleep and hibernate work, and appear to be more reliable under Linux. I have never felt the need to compare battery life under both operating systems since it is acceptable under both operating systems. As for that dual boot thing: I ended up giving up on the standalone version of Microsoft Office. Online solutions are better for anything that involves collaboration. LibreOffice documents exported to PDF works perfectly well for anything where the product is what matters. The option to dual boot is gone. There is one big difference between the article's author and myself: after trying a couple of the boring distributions and finding they didn't meet my esoteric tastes, I settled upon the exciting route. Tweaking my workflows is fun as long as it doesn't interfere with my ability to work.
codedokode 4y ago
I think that there should be a list of officially supported laptops and if you bought anything else then it is your problem and you are welcome to write necessary patches. It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.
- pizza234 4y ago
  To an extent, there is; Ubuntu holds a list of certified hardware, including laptops: https://ubuntu.com/certified https://ubuntu.com/certified. Notably, the latest Dell XPS is certified.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    That is awesome, I didn't know this existed. I've stuck with xps13 for the last ~3 laptops and that's worked well. I'd like to consider one of those ARM laptops next, maybe I'll find one in here. So far the first two or three generations of ARM laptops have been just okay. I'm hoping the fact that Apple has jumped all-in on ARM will encourage other vendors to invest more here.
- jonas-w 4y ago
  There exist many entries on the ArchWiki. The ArchWiki is (IMO) one of the best sources for linux in general not only archlinux. E.g. this entry for Lenovo[0] has a huge list with Lenovo Laptops and what works/doesn't work. There are also some tweaks you can apply for specific Models. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo
hpcjoe 4y ago
My non-work laptops all run linux, and have for ~20 years. My oldest laptop is a 14 year old Sager (Clevo) notebook, whose display seems to have just died last month. My newest is a 1.75 year old HP Omen with Ryzen 7 4800H AMD and NVidia graphics. All run linux, specifically Mint. Same release. All (apart from the dead 14 year old Sager) work well. I am typing this on my 4.75 year old Sager (Clevo), running Linux Mint, with an Nvidia GTX 1060/Intel iGPU unit, 1.5 TB of SSD (SATA), 64 GB ram, 4 physical cores. Everything works. It worked when I first installed it. My personal office deskside unit is an AMD Epyc 16 core, 128 GB RAM, with NVidia RTX3060 workstation, running Debian 11, as a deskside workstation. I have some older units based upon E5-2687W CPU tech, old NVidia cards built cheaply from ebay parts. All running linux in desktop configs, though most don't have a display keyboard attached. I've used all of them as desksides at one point in time or the other, and still use them for larger personal computing projects unrelated to work. I've been using Linux on laptops and desksides for the last 23+ years. My first laptop, was a 75MHz pentium unit with 16MB of ram, I triple booted DOS, OS2, and Linux on in 1996. I had a tiny 20MB hard disk with it. I wrote lots of my phd thesis on that under linux, and my home SGI Indy (the perks of working at SGI in the 1990s). Linux was hard for laptops/desktops until about 2004-2005 or so. Then things that were hard to make work, started working out of the box. I didn't have to think about installing most drivers, apart for things like some usb based devices. That got better in 2008 or so. Over the last 14 years, everything pretty much just worked. As the OP notes, its been boring. For the most part. Occasionally I'll run into a cheap USB peripheral where the driver isn't updated, or its missing updated firmware, but this is, and has been for a while, the exception. I know there are many who have disdain for linux desktops. That's fine, have your own preferred environment. That noted, please recognize that there are many users out there using linux desktops, successfully, productively, without problems. From installation through normal/intense usage. My home office has a Mac M1 Mini running MacOS 12.6 , 1x HP Omen 64 GB RAM, 8 core Ryzen laptop with Nvidia 1660Ti gpu running linux mint, a deskside 16 core Epyc, 128GB RAM machine with RTX3060 running Debian 11. All configured with my various monitors and networks. Its productive for me. We do not have an operational, regularly in use, MS Windows installation. And we're happy with this setup. It works. Everything just works. The way it should. [edited to fix HP laptop brand, Omen, not Open]
TheRealPomax 4y ago
> I tell this anecdote to make a point that will be obvious to nerds, but may still be news for everyone else: Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days. Which one? Because you can't download and install "Linux", there is no linux-stable-09-2022.iso that you download from linux.org that you then use to install a full OS that "just works(tm)". In fact, if we're talking about an 11 year old laptop, the actual version of Linux installed on it might not even exist anymore, but happens to have been set up in a way that it can use still maintained PPA. And which laptop, with what hardware? Because it's trivial to support a generic network adapter and an ancient 1200x800 WXGA screen, but good luck getting linux to "just work" with your wifi6e and retina 4k screen. Downvotes notwithstanding, as an anecdote this post effectively undermines itself, because installing Microsoft teams worked contrary to the author's expectation. They expected this to be hard, so concluding that Linux on a laptop "just works" based on a single activity unexpectedly not being an absolute nightmare is not drawing a reasonable conclusion. (Not sure I buy the argument that Linux works so nicely, because "Most software has migrated to the browser" either, that feels like a false equivalency routed in anecdotal evidence for what "most" means to the author. Some productivity apps have decent webapp equivalents, but they all suffer from the fact that they run in the browser, and folks aren't going to run dedicated browser processes for each web app, so the regular browsing on the side can, and will, stall or even crash the browser)
zfxfr 4y ago
Oh really ? Then you're lucky you don't have one of those "gaming laptop" especially the ASUS TUF models (I am not a gamer at all but yet i decided to get an asus Tuf505d) and believe me setting up Linux on it wasn't boring at all. I actually learnt a lot while doing it. Because once you'll figure out why the wifi is shutting down every x minutes. You'll then have to find what's wrong with the Bluetooth who doesn't activate. And of course at some point you'll want to connect an external monitor right ? If you thought plugging an hdmi cable and pushing some keys would allow you to display your stuff on your projector... Well think again. Don't get me wrong I love Linux.. I have been using it for the last 12 years (switched to Ubuntu recently) While it's amazingly easy and smooth on my rpi4 (for my personnal use). It can be boringly complicated on some laptop brands
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Neat, I haven't read one of these stories since I stopped reading Slashdot in 2008'ish.
noasaservice 4y ago
I get this article, but I also don't like parts of it. Sure, everything just works. And that's awesome. But it's also being sold here as "the poor person's OS using janky equipment". Sure, Linux can greatly help with artificial obsolescence. But the biggest point is that you retain ownership and full power over your data. I've seen this again and again with stuff like Eagle vs KiCAD, and Autodesk software vs FreeCAD. Sure in some cases the FLOSS software isn't as "polished", but when Autodesk decides to arbitrarily change the policy locking you oout of your content, it's a matter of freedom and your data. The OS is the "carrier", and the applications are the actual thing.
pharmakom 4y ago
How nice for OP. Just a handful of my issues: - only one speaker works so volume is low - finger print scanner doesn’t work - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine - suspend and hibernate doesn’t work - random freezes - charging indicator unreliable - trackpad wrist filtering is very poor - boot failures after OS updates I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon. I really tried with Linux for philosophical reasons, but honestly what professional developer has time for all this?
- deleted 4y ago
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- avl999 4y ago
  > - only one speaker works so volume is low Never had this issue. > - finger print scanner doesn’t work Can't speak for this as I don't have a device with an FP reader > - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine I get ~6hrs on my laptop running Ubuntu + XFCE. I haven't ran windows on it but Amazon reviews claim ~5-5.5 hrs battery life for the same machine so seems to be inline for me. > - suspend and hibernate doesn’t work Works for me > - random freezes I can think of only 1 freeze I've had in the last year and that was due to me dropping the laptop > - charging indicator unreliable Pretty reliable for me except when it comes to the last 5%... my work macbook pro seems to have the same issue though when predicting how long that last 5% will last. > - boot failures after OS updates Never had this problem, on the other hand our work macbook pro has nothing but problems when upgrading os major versions. Atleast 1-2 people on our team always end up losing an afternoon whenever we are forced to upgrade it. > I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon. > I really tried with Linux for philosophical reasons, but honestly what professional developer has time for all this? What professional developers have the time or patience to deal with a Mac with: * It's proprietary hardware without any ability to upgrade components * Garbage oversized trackpad which registers false positives all the time * Terrible built in keyboard * All the nonsense with "we have a physical escape key, now we don't, now we do" actively making it unusable if you use Vim/Vim key bindings * Whatever nonsense they have done replacing physical function keys with that touchbar thingy * Actively user hostile decisions like putting the headphone jack on the right side of the laptop * A complete inability to connect peripherals unless you buy a (often expensive) dock. * Docker being a complete hog on these machines, yes that is not the fault of the mac but still something developers have to deal with every day I am forced to use a macbook for work and the only reason I can even bear working with it is connecting it to external keyboard/mouse and using it in clamshell mode.
roboben 4y ago
2022 is the year for Linux on the desktop.
pizza234 4y ago
Your Mileage May Vary, and may vary a lot. Lenovo Yogas, for example, have terrible compatibility (at least, the models released in the last years), which is a shame, because some are very good business machines. The Yoga Gen 7 AMD, on any Linux, has: - keyboard not working - speakers 50% not working - mic not working - bluetooth not working - standby not working And probably something else I'm missing. I think all the AMD 6x00 mobile CPUs suffer from the non-working keyboard issue, due a quirk (ironically, a compatibility-breaking hardware fix) that is fixed on the not yet released 6.0 kernel.
eBombzor 4y ago
MS teams works in the browser...
snemvalts 4y ago
Wifi and suspend stopped working on an LTS release on a Thinkpad X220 for me in 2018, the same generation as the laptop in the article. Moved to macOS shortly after. They are great $300 computers for when you're between jobs and moving to a place where you can use the work laptop for personal things. Or a pentesting machine. Don't see too much use for them otherwise.
tclover 4y ago
Unfortunately have to disagree, connecting to my wireless scanner/printer is way too complicated, no driver frontends for my mouse/keyboard, when multiple sound devices are connected, it's so bad to swap between them. When I connect to my home projector, it didn't allow to change audio output for some reason all in all, linux maybe works on popular laptops with predefined hardware, but it is still bad for desktops.
kome 4y ago
i'm using linux for the first time after years on an old laptop from 2011; it's such a pleasure! everything is so smooth and functional Try MX Linux on old hardware, it's awesome.
jspaetzel 4y ago
It's fine. There's also still a lot of tinkering you have to do to fully get the Linux experience. There's way too many applications out there still that may require you to drop into a terminal to get them working.
cdata 4y ago
Just an anecdote: got my Framework laptop the other week. Installed Pop!_OS. That was the only step. Everything works. Suspend/resume. WiFi. Audio. Webcam. Funky dongle ports. This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.
- nsilvestri 4y ago
  How does your suspend battery life work out for you? I'm running Ubuntu with Framework and even though I've done tweaked some settings I still end up with a dead battery after I reopen my laptop a day later.
  - broodbucket 4y ago
    Pretty sure that's a known Framework hardware limitation, see https://community.frame.work/t/high-battery-drain-during-suspend-windows-edition/4421 https://community.frame.work/t/high-battery-drain-during-sus...
  - cdata 4y ago
    I haven't put it through a rigorous test, but I can confirm that if I leave the laptop suspended without power, it will eventually lose its charge and shut off in what seems like a day. I only did this once by accident over a weekend; I've been using it every day and have the chance to charge it when I need to. The only laptops I have ever owned that didn't have this problem after some fashion are Apple laptops, so I guess my expectations were fairly low on this topic.
vander_elst 4y ago
It depends on the hardware. If you buy one of the certified machines maybe, otherwise you're in for a painful treat. IMO my requirements are pretty low: i3 window manager, chrome (sorry), a terminal, audio and multiple displays. To be honest Linux is not able to provide a fully working experience for those things.
khnov 4y ago
Used ubuntu on thinkpad for work for the first time. Just got back to windows as I am x10 more productive there. Besides the fan's noise, I struggled to find a calendar app that just shows alert for my meetings, and that is not buggy as fuck. I windows, Ms Mail just works. then I got the frustration when rust ins installed but not work (should install gcc ...) Linux is great free software, but I am not using ut just because it is great free, I am using windows because it is consistent and I just need to focus on my job
- batmanturkey 4y ago
  Funny, same reasons why I don’t windows and just Linux. I can’t even windows, it just doesn’t anymore
- sofixa 4y ago
  Evolution worked pretty well last i used it (up until a year ago roughly).
  - aeroevan 4y ago
    Still works for gmail or office356
phendrenad2 4y ago
In my experience, Linux on laptops is fine if you use it like a desktop. If you want all of the fancy features of laptops, like being able to close the lid and have it go to sleep, a lot of luck is involved. Small differences in hardware have profound effects on Linux usability, so the "just use a Thinkpad from 2008" crowd are naturally the happiest.
LooseMarmoset 4y ago
I gave up Windows entirely; between unavoidable telemetry, embedded ads, and poor service pack QA (especially printers), I'm done. I'm not paying to rent an O/S and sell my personal habits regardless of what Microsoft thinks I should do. I use a Macbook Pro for work. I don't really care for MacOS, but they've got a real bash shell at least, and I like the consistency of clipboard handling in MacOS. I don't get to dictate my work environment, but thank goodness it isn't Windows. I'm running Devuan at home on a recent AMD 550 board with a 3100, and also on an older Macbook Pro. The only real issues I have are around getting wifi working during install on Debian and Devuan, due to firmware open-ness issues. I doubt Ubuntu has these issues. After install, though, the OP is correct, it's wonderfully boring. Install TLP and a recent 5.x kernel on laptops and power issues just disappear. Install Steam and use Proton, even with games from GoG, and everything that I own works. It's always jarring to help someone with a normal Windows machine; the ads, the o/s response times, the forced manufacturer bloatware really shocks me. I don't miss Windows at all.
none_to_remain 4y ago
But can you print?
rhyn00 4y ago
I would add that the linux-ready boutique vendors like system76, tuxedo computers, framework are also options if you don't want to fuss with drivers and what not, but still want to run linux. I definitely agree that linux doesn't run super smooth on all hardware, but it's not hard to find hardware these days where it does run smooth. I came across tuxedo computers randomly one day, and gave it a shot. Very impressed, and am extremely happy with my tuxedo pulse 15 gen2 - running their supported version of Ubuntu+KDE, that just works out of the box. Only thing I can complain about is that: speakers are not great (but I use headphones 90% time anyways), and KDE doesn't support independent resolution scaling (I need 125% for laptop display but 100% for external monitor), so it's a bit hacky to get scaling the way I want. However, everything else runs perfectly and smoothly. It's best laptop I've ever owned for linux. It is quite, portable, moderate power laptop, for fair price. I gave my wife my Macbook air M1 over this one. While the M1 CPU/GPU is a little more powerful than Ryzen 5700U (8 core), I get more ram (32gb 3200mhz), bigger and faster disk (1TB 980 pro pci 4), more battery life (18hr idle, 10+ working) for similar price. It's also repairable, w/ removable standard components (not cpu tho). Linux running SMOOTH. Basically with these type of vendors, you don't need to struggle or sacrifice (much) to run linux anymore. Tuxedo computers [1] has many more models worth checking out, like with high end GPUs or smaller/more portable (even one that support external liquid cooling and an rtx 3080ti lol). [1] Tuxedo Computer (notebooks) https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note... [2] Pulse 15 gen2 : https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/15-16-inch/TUXEDO-Pulse-15-Gen2.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/...
- Klonoar 4y ago
  Another vendor to mention is Star Labs, who make the StarBook. Unlike most vendors they fabricate their own designs - not rebranded clevo shells.
  - rhyn00 4y ago
    Wow, I'd never heard of StarBook, but it does indeed look like a wonderful machine.
  - 4y ago
lukaszkups 4y ago
Also related: Linux Subsystem for Windows works in similar manner (at least for me!) - I've switched couple years ago from Linux -> OSX -> Linux -> WSL (when WSL was in 1.x version at the time and lacking from couple features) and gosh, I've never looked back since then (disclaimer: I'm a front-end developer (and making games in my spare time using various tools) and for my needs I've never found a serious complain about how WSL works)
- prmoustache 4y ago
  WSL do not works well with my company's vpn software and last time I checked there was an awful lot of limitations.
_nalply 4y ago
It's not boring. I use Arch Linux sway on my Framework laptop. I have 23 virtual screens (one for each digit, one for each function key and an additional one), and they have different scaling. This means on some screens I don't need my reading glasses. For that I wrote a script which is invoked by sway's event handler triggered by virtual screen switches. I find this exciting. It's not perfect. I still miss the smoothness of Apple's trackpad.
- commandersaki 4y ago
  Are you on the 11th or 12th gen Intel? What's your take on Arch -- do you find most things work? I've got a Framework on order coming sometime October and I'm thinking of using Arch for install. Things that I care about are display/graphics, webcam/mic/audio/video, a working suspend even if I have to resort to hibernate, media keys on the keyboard, and a usable trackpad. Things I don't really care about is probably the fingerprint reader. From the ArchWiki this seems to be a go, but I'm still a bit sceptical.
  - _nalply 4y ago
    11th I think. I got mine February. Most things work. I didn't setup mic and audio, because being Deaf I couldn't be bothered. Suspend is very nice. There's hibernate, too and hybrid suspend/hibernate (first suspend and if battery is too low, hibernate). With sway you setup media keys yourself. I didn't bother. I only configured screen brightness and screenshots. Trackpad is okay. Don't expect Apple's smoothness. First it was very jerky till I found out that Firefox fell back to X11. The good: very configurable and mostly working The bad: it takes a lot of time to configure everything The ugly: kinetic scrolling is per application so all applications do this differently
isodev 4y ago
That’s a great story, and I’m happy that this is possible today. There is nothing technically limiting Linux desktops from offering a fantastic experience apart from walled gardens trying to keep eyeballs in their corner. Speaking of, unfortunately, Microsoft will be retiring Teams for Linux later this year https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-for-linux-is-being-retired/ https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...
synu 4y ago
I must have been unlucky, I battled what felt like endlessly with sound and video card issues until I just switched back to Mac.
inamberclad 4y ago
Everything except bluetooth...
LinuxBender 4y ago
I've had mixed results on laptops. I've never bothered to make the fingerprint reader work, that just isn't my thing. I've had decent luck with all the standard functions video, audio, storage, keyboard, mousepad, wifi on most models of Lenovo and Dell in the last decade. I've had mixed results on Asus laptops, especially the recent ones. The biggest challenge I've had is finding out ahead of time what wifi chipset is used and this has only affected me when using tools like aircrack-ng [1]. The chipset can vary even within the same make/model of laptop depending on when it was manufactured. The way I quickly test how a laptop will behave is to boot Kali Linux [2] into ram. Sometimes a sales person at a computer store would let me do this on a demo model even though they probably should not. [1] - https://www.aircrack-ng.org/ https://www.aircrack-ng.org/ [2] - https://www.kali.org/ https://www.kali.org/
fefe23 4y ago
Buttons840 4y ago
I recently streamed some OuterWilds (great Myst style mystery / puzzle game) on Linux with Wayland and OBS. The game is only officially available for Windows, but Steam's work on emulation has done a lot for Linux. Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time. I was quite amazed it all worked so well. But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.
- xani_ 4y ago
  > Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. Was that "permission for OBS to record" or "permission for OBS to record that specific window" ? Coz I can see the second one being pretty annoying... > While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time. That worked with composing on X like 10 years ago. Well, aside from the fact that there was no Steam/Proton on Linux back then > But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux. Huh, my colleague had to do a bit of fuckery to get it working, altho a lot of that was due to 3rd party dock being... weird. It still randomly makes jet noises when idle... probably user error tho
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
cjohansson 4y ago
I will never buy a Apple laptop again because Apple stops supporting it after a while and you can't install new version of the OS on it and new software. This is a deal breaker for me, completely a waste of perfectly fine hardware. Installing Ununtu on it solved all problems fortunately. Same thing with Apple AirPort TimeCapsule, such a waste to buy it when Apple stops supporting it after a couple of years. You might as well buy products from Apple and get the delivered directly to the garbage dump
analog31 4y ago
No luck with touch screen in Ubuntu so far. It's a combination of the touch screen but not wanting the on-screen keyboard to pop up every time I touch in a text entry widget. I googled all over the place and tried a bunch of things that were suggested. Fortunately I've been trying this while Windows still works on my laptop, so I'm not desperate, and can always try again at asome point.
ricardobeat 4y ago
“Software is exists” and “my camera works” are pretty low bars.
sergiotapia 4y ago
The future is a Windows 10 desktop for gaming and most software. VMWare running your flavor of Linux for serious dev work. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. Been coding on my Linux VM for the past two years without a single hitch.
MichaelRazum 4y ago
Agree. At least ThinkPads work extremely well. The one thing that keeps me from completely switching is RDP. Is there some solutions that work as good on linux? Tried few but they couldn't match RDP on windows, especially with a bad connection.
netmonk 4y ago
To be clear, i had to wait from 1998 to 2021 before i install linux Mint on my father Laptop (now in his 70's). Since this recent move, i never receive a call that something is broken on his old laptop, and i dont need to explain to him that i dont know windows over the air, while he is stressing about printing his latest document to print and send ASAP. Thanks linux Mint.
chx 4y ago
My experience sharply differs and that was also on a T420 (later a T420s, same difference). In my experience there is a very narrow usage where ChromeOS does not suffice but Linux desktop does. If you fall into this -- and no doubt a lot of people do -- then things are peachy. But step aside and you are toast. I worked for a company running a certain F5 VPN and their 2FA didn't have a Linux client. I managed to make it work by running an ancient Firefox which still could run old style extensions -- and ran it as root. Very secure. MFC devices break all the time. And so forth.
jryan49 4y ago
I couldn't get dpi resizing to work at all. Like when I unplug my laptop from a lower dpi monitor. It was a such a nusance for me I went back to windows and use wsl.
mattlondon 4y ago
So damn well if you don't care about: sleep working reliably, waking from sleep working at all, Bluetooth, high-dpi without flickering, visual artefacts from igpus, vanishing mouse pointer, audio failing mid video call, webcams failing mid video call, no CPU scaling, crashing hard when the battery hits literally zero (without warning) causing BIOS corruption etc etc etc. I dumped my recent dell Linux laptop for a M1 Mac. Not my preference but at least the Mac works.
semireg 4y ago
Linux on the laptop instantly triggers nostalgia. I was 15 in 1998 and had just worked our families root beer and popcorn concession stands for 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair. Every penny I earned was used to purchase a brand new iMac in bondi blue. A year later I sold the iMac via the newspaper classifieds. I used that money to buy my first used laptop and proceeded to install Linux. I got my Linux distro, Redhat, from a CD-rom inside a book purchased at Barnes & Noble. I must have reinstalled Linux 100x on that machine. I remember using it to take notes in my PSEO (college in high school) classes at the local tech school. Fond memories. I’m sure Linux has come a long way. I still use it every day on the server, but switched back to mac on the desktop when apple went to Intel and could just run Linux/Windows in a VM when necessary.
afroisalreadyin 4y ago
I so wish this were true (and seeing it at the top of HN would make you believe it were true), but my experiences in the last 6 years or so with 4 different laptops speaks otherwise. 2 of those were sold with Linux on them (Dell and Tuxedo), 2 were Thinkpads, and they all had all kinds of issues. The best is the Tuxedo, but even that thing has issues with hybernating. Unfortunately, none of them comparable to the smooth functioning of a Macbook.
KaiserPro 4y ago
The fuck it does. I have a lenovo t14 something or other. I have to fiddle with the bios to get suspend work. This means that the battery lasts about 4 days. However whenever it resumes, the touchpad appears to only work at 5 frames per second. Moreover, its impossible to hibernate with secure boot.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  Intel or AMD? Intel removed S3 support from the platform entirely, and S0ix support was spotty until recent kernels/distros. Lenovo royally screwed up the AMD firmware, so kernel 5.18 includes a hack to force-suspend the NVMe subsystem regardless of what their broken ACPI handler wants to do. Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown", which most distros leave enabled. I feel like the security people push these patches through and dismiss user needs by waving the "hibernation is impossible to secure and standby is good enough" flag, and we have to live with a broken feature set compared to Windows. It's not a great attitude to have, from the user standpoint anyway.
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    Intel and S0ix is still spotty, in that out of the box it doesn't work. To make suspend work I need to enable s3 support in the bios. even then it gets me about 4 days, rather than the weeks I expect a modern laptop to last > Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown" Which as I can't practically turn it off (the linux laptop is owned by $work) is a massive pain. Meanwhile the 2014 retina has a standby time of >3 weeks, and if the battery gets too low, it goes into hibernation. which leads me to my original statement; "the fuck it does" (I should point out that I've been using linux since the late 90s, and whilst I use it everyday, I still don't really think its good on laptops. Its better, but not good.)
jll29 4y ago
Linux worked out of the box (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu) with: - Lenovo ThinkPad T41 - Lenovo ThinkPad X61s - LenovWo ThinkPad X220 - Lenovo ThinkPad X230 - Lenovo ThinkPad X1 - DELL Latitude E7762 - DELL Latitude E7480 - Apple iMac 27" Problems encountered: - The touchpad on the Lenovo ThinkPad 240 mad random jumps, not sure if this is a Linux issue since I never tried Windows (I usually wipe it right after unpacking). - Couldn't install any Linux flavour on the Microsoft Surface 3 laptop. It was painful to get rid of Windows and UEFI boot, and apparently a kernel patch is needed to go further (according to Microsoft support, who didn't provide said patch). Does anyone here have that patch BTW? Generally speaking it is getting harder and harder to install Linux, due to Microsofts efforts to make PCs "more secure" (which - oops - prevents the installation of competitors' OSes, how convenient).
- mminer237 4y ago
  The worst thing about broken touchpads is that they're impossible to turn off in Ubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-disabled-in-ubuntu-22-04 https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-dis... There's a button to do so, but it's just been broken for months with no fix other than uninstalling part of the last update. Given that Linux typically has no palm detection, it's really a frustrating experience to use on a laptop.
  - wazoox 4y ago
    Weird, I'm running Pop_OS which is a Ubuntu fork and the trackpad button just works (not that I use it at all anyway).
  - hedora 4y ago
    The palm detection problem surprises me. The toggle has has "just worked" for 15+ years of laptops for me. However, palm detection on many of those laptops was garbage in Windows and equally bad in Linux. Some distros support rejecting touchpad events for N seconds after the last keystroke. That is 100% software, and sort of works for even the worst touchpads. Edit: Oh, you mention Ubuntu. I gave up on them a long time ago. Devuan works well if you want old-school Debian. Manjaro works well if you want a stable "modern" desktop environment (like Ubuntu used to provide) with menus for hardware configuration, user session switching, etc.
Snacklive 4y ago
Reading this post makes me wonder if i'm absolutely lucky or something because linux always worked great out of the box in almost any computer i ever had, even my new Gigabyte laptop
lbayes 4y ago
Yeah, even a broken clock is right twice a day. OP got lucky with some crusty laptop and drew a wildly expansive and inaccurate conclusion. Maybe true for old machines, but definitely not true for newish models. Not even for machines being sold with Linux preinstalled. My Linux Dell XPS from ~5 years ago required me to buy and install a different radio because the Broadcom one didn't actually work with latest Ubuntu (at that time). The next XPS I got mostly worked, but had lots of audio issues. The Inspiron was horrible. Touchscreen fails, audio fails, radio fails, sleep fails. My custom Ryzen 3900X workstation has ongoing issues with sound and sleep (yes, latest kernel, latest drivers, latest LTS OS). My most recent laptop purchase from earlier this year either had no wifi in Ubuntu or no Bluetooth in Fedora. I was able to force Fedora to work after a week of messing with it. Still have intermittent sleep and audio issues. FWIW, I've been running Linux in various roles since the late 90's, so not a noob and definitely not complaining. It's free, it's open source, package management is awesome. The command line is irreplaceable. I use Linux on the daily and deeply appreciate all the incredibly hard and thankless work that so many people put into it. That said, Linux still does not have anything close to the level of polish that MacOS delivers and it definitely doesn't get out of the way to the extent that it can be called boring. YMMV
- tmtvl 4y ago
  YMMV indeed, I've been using Linux full-time since 2012, with a brief exception in 2016-2017 when I was working for a company that was all-in on Apple. I used an iMac running Yosemite that year and could reliably get the iMac to hard reboot by launching a Xubuntu VM in VirtualBox. It kinda made me lose all hope for our industry as Apple is usually hailed as the epitome of quality and yet it still was garbage.
trm42 4y ago
Haha, sounds super boring compared to 2004 when I bought Fujitsu Siemen's cheapest Pentium M laptop and had to build some kernel modules, build custom rules for power saving scenes (as there weren't that much of ready rules) and find the most optimal parameters for every module and CPUFreq configs etc. Also, figuring out the sequence of disabling modules etc for suspend to disk and suspend to ram sleep modes with more custom scripts was super fun. Managed to squeeze whole 8 hours from a battery that was supposed to work 4-6 hours in Windows XP. Fun times.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
This has not been my experience. When I use Linux for work, I still hit random things that need the command line, and it's much less stable than Windows (hard freezes). I tried to use Linux (specifically Mint) as an HTPC to use with Stepmania, but immediately ran into problems with both audio coming through and the TV resolution, and had to fall back to Windows, which worked with no drama. This has happened every time I've tried to use Linux at home: I end up running into random problems that are weirdly hard to solve, or things that won't work period.
eBombzor 4y ago
So many negative comments. Always preferred Linux whether it's Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch to any windows OS. All the laptops I had were: Thinkpad T450s, HP Spectre 15, Acer Nitro 5. All of them work flawlessly. Windows on the other hand...
- onehair 4y ago
  It is the simple truth. Thinkpads are usually very good and work out of the box, but a lot of other brands just don't. It isn't about hate or being negative, it's seeing a very biased affirmation generalizing a positive one time occurrence and painting it as the actual general fact.
onehair 4y ago
On old niche laptops from Thinkpad, Dell, maybe, probably. Good luck with the other brands and fairly new laptops. My best non function is a trackpad not working :P Every damn time
LAC-Tech 4y ago
I've had linux on the desktop as my daily driver for 12 of the past 14 years. Yes it takes a little bit longer to setup. But once I do it it's just so much more comfortable for me than Windows. Faster, easier to maintain, insanely better UI all configured in my dot files. So yeah, there's a ramp up, and you need to be a bit resourceful. And it's probably not a great strategy to just choose any old laptop. But I still love it. 2022 is yet another happy year of the Linux Desktop for me.
jcalvinowens 4y ago
I've been running Linux on Dell XPS laptops with only very minor issues since 2016. Currently on an XPS 13 9310, everything works perfectly. ...and that's with debian sid, a btrfs rootfs, and rebooting into whatever "git pull" in the kernel git repo gives me most weeks. I do that because I want to help fix bugs, but I honestly haven't found anything to fix in years: it just works. Interesting that everybody with problems in this thread seems to be using thinkpads. Maybe they aren't what they used to be?
- davidw 4y ago
  I've been using Dell hardware with Ubuntu for... sheez almost 15 years now? Once in a while there's some little oddity, but it mostly just shows up working out of the box and lets me do what I need to without all the annoying MacOS crap. I had to use a Mac at my last job and I absolutely hated it. I couldn't configure it the way I wanted. Stuff like 'brew' is a necessity, but not a core part of the system like apt. Keys are not where I expect them... which isn't really their fault, but when you've been using something for 20+ years, switching suuuuucks.
jrm4 4y ago
Absolutely correct. Funny coincidence that happened to me: Got my Steam Deck on the same day I got an email informing my that one of my university supplied Macs had to go back and be surplused because of our end of life policies. Now, I've typically been able to keep pretty much every computer I've been given if I have a reason (and I teach IT so I always have reasons) Upon informing them that I wiped Mac Os from it and have been running Linux instead, IT services was -- "Ah, okay, fine -- bring it in so we can make sure it's updated and you're good to keep it. Otherwise it would have to come back."
varispeed 4y ago
Funny that, when my beefed up XPS 15 finally died, I went on eBay on got one of those Thinkpads dumped by corporations for like £120. I put in the NVMe drive from the XPS and... it was working out of the box. What is surprising that it feels much faster, fans don't make as much noise that despite weaker CPU and 4x less RAM. I really like it. I got an M1 Pro as well, but Thinkpad will be a nice backup machine.
lucideer 4y ago
Thesis: "Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days." Evidence: 1 data point, my own 11-year old laptop This article is not notable.
ok_dad 4y ago
Ya know, Linux isn't for everyone, but I like it. I get to do what I want, when I want, and my OS doesn't stop me. I haven't had any issues with hardware so far, because I bought a laptop from System76 and they do a lot of work to make things usable without fuss. I am sure I can't do everything everyone wants to do with a computer, but I don't care because all I do with my laptop (work and home) is read Hacker News and random programming documentation and then program stuff. I guess for me, I could be using a smart toaster from 2012 and probably be happy.
patrulek 4y ago
Boring because you dont need to waste hours for configuration and troubleshooting not working drivers?
mukundmr 4y ago
We use several hundred laptops from Dell that run Linux (Ubuntu & CentOS) as the primary developer laptop in our organisation. They work well. Of course every now and then some user comes up with an idea to uninstall default Python…
paulcarroty 4y ago
Yep, writing this on Linux laptop. And this is not thinkpad. Note: do not expect bleeding edge hardware to work 100% well, it takes some time (~3-6 months).
brink 4y ago
ITT: bunch of whiners that didn't pick hardware that was proven to be compatible with Linux before buying. The solid experience on modern laptops is there, you just have to spend 10 minutes researching compatibility on the laptop before you buy.
sk1pper 4y ago
I want this to be true very badly. I’ve been a Linux user for nearly 20 years and I’ve never had an install that “just works” to the level of macOS or even Windows. Although there was a while there in like 2006 where I had a pretty solid install of Ubuntu on some HP laptop I had at the time. That’s the closest I got. This is of course extremely anecdotal. Everyone’s on different hardware and therefore has pretty different experiences. I hate Windows as a development OS but I’d rather deal with that than some odd update that breaks my install completely, or spending hours reading forum posts to try to make my Bluetooth driver less shitty, etc etc. I just use macOS for dev and Windows for gaming and they stay out of my way. I’ll keep trying Linux again once a year or so, but I’m not optimistic on it. It’s a moving target too due to varying hardware support over time.
- fyloraspit 4y ago
  I see a lot of Windows laptops, and am also a Linux enthusiast, and honestly, Windows does have the issues you are talking about occasionally, same as popular Linux distros. They, for example, sometimes have maddening issues like on default settings delivering driver updates to (Intel) display drivers which are very fiddly to roll back and pin in order to fix. Even the walled garden of Apple has problems depending on whether or not their new M1 line will be compatible with what you want to do. Modern computers and the operating systems that straddle them are complex systems, and sometimes have complex problems. The best we can do is find our own balance of stability given requirements, and be thankful for the technological advancements meaningful to us.
geoffbp 4y ago
Year of the Linux desktop
zac23or 4y ago
The most dificult thing to believe is the Ms Teams working without problem. "The Linux works in a 11 year old ThinkPad, so it works easily in any computer" is a quantum jump to conclusion.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Linux Teams, kind of worked OK..ish. There are though, lots of features that are missing - which might be OK, except they are going to finish supporting Teams on Linux and pushing everyone to use the web version, which is poor.
raffraffraff 4y ago
...unlike the Raspberry Pi. About a year ago I installed a Raspberry Pi 4B+ behind my 40" monitor, with Kodi + some DLNA stuff on it. It almost works, but it has hard fails in enough important areas that I've given up on it. - No sleep / standby mode (lowest power is 'idle') - No Wake On Lan, so if you power it off completely, you have to cycle the power on the power supply (not easy, since mine is behind the "TV") - Chromium crashes on YouTube (https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640) - Firefox ESR doesn't play sound on most YouTube videos (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/109185/some-youtube-videos-have-no-audio-on-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-running-raspbian-bus https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/109185/some-...) - Can't run Windows apps (eg the amazing MusicBee) because it's ARM - Shitty disk support (stuck with SD card or USB) I gave an old ThinkPad T430 to my 9 year old nephews about a year ago, and they've completely trashed it: busted screen hinges, broken backlight and cracked case. I'm gonna remove the faulty screen and permanently hook it up to the TV as a "headless laptop" (https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jt2p8j/i_see_your_raspberry_pi_400_and_i_raise_you_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jt2p8j/i_see_your...). Because guess what? Linux runs boringly well on it. Also: built-in keyboard, low-power standby mode, trackpad, proper SSD and more useful ports than the Pi.
jagger27 4y ago
With the caveat that you have to like Gnome or KDE. They’re both better than Windows but Gnome in particular has gone too far with its ultra minimalist UI design. I just wish there was something built on Sway that’s nice to use out of the box that doesn’t require a witch’s cauldron of dot files. Why are all the cool DEs so allergic to GUI configuration tools?
major505 4y ago
I was suprised when I upgraded my old Thinkpad x250 to the Inspiron 15 from DEll. Installed Pop Os on it and it worked really well. I could even make the fingerprint scanner run without problem. In the end I endup going back to win 11 because someone wanted me to maintain a vb5 and winform .net aplication, and because Borderlands 3 runs better on win, unfortunally.
stuaxo 4y ago
Wow, I wish. I've been using a couple of ryzen laptops (an HP with a 2500u, then an HP with a 3700u) for about 5 years. It works pretty well, except: When the laptop wakes up there's a good chance that the UI shows up but I can't click on anything or type. I can then reboot by holding Alt-SysReq and typing REISUB. Or: The screen is still black, and nothing works, as above. I can run games, though if I play something like GTA-V, it will eventually get too hot and I have to hard reset. This is because the fan control doesn't properly work.
- wazoox 4y ago
  HP laptops are well known for their crappy linux support. I've bought a brand new Lenovo Ryzen laptop in 2020, slapped POP_OS on it and everything works fine ever since (excepting the fingerprint reader, that has no linux driver). It boots quickly, power management, bluetooth and Wifi work fine, I can hot plug screens and stuff to it no problem, and waking it up from sleep just works (OK it's getting a tad long recently, about 5 to 10s -- but it just works).
Saris 4y ago
I have the opposite experience, desktop or laptop I've never had Linux work well out of the box.
jeromenerf 4y ago
I thought Linux was often times annoying with Bluetooth connection issues, sleep related bugs … I enjoy how boring stable it is on thinkpad. Then I bought a Mac m1 second hand for photo related needs and it doesn’t wake up the external monitor on resume from suspend, doesn’t auto switch Bluetooth mic, doesn’t provide volume mixer for hdmi external monitor, can’t manage wifi&Ethernet at the same time … I stopped worrying and am using both happily, with their flaws.
rodolphoarruda 4y ago
Today I found out that my wife's 2 y.o. Lenovo IdeaPad reboots Ubuntu so fast that I thought it was just logging out the user session. It was around 3 seconds. It took me two reboots to actually realize what was going on.
adverbly 4y ago
I have a few old laptops kicking around still. We're talking 10+ year old laptops here that weren't even top of the line when new. The differences in OS bloat between the two is night and day. The Windows 8 laptop that I swear takes 15+ minutes to boot and struggles to do simple web browsing. It reminds me of what happens to 5+ year old phones where they seem to get slower for no good reason. My linux laptops are still going strong like the day they were new.
kristjank 4y ago
I find the comments so strangely defensive. How can one even start to compare MacOS, which needs to support exactly one (1) vendor with less than 10 models with a kernel with the widest hardware support on the planet? Noone would test-drive a new car and expect all the buttons and dials to still be at the same exact positions, but when it comes to trying out a different OS, it sure seems like lots of folx assume it's going to be just as their old one. The immense improvement in documentation provided by ArchWiki, ThinkWiki, Gentoo Wiki and wiki.instalgentoo.org shouldn't be understated. Almost all models are documented to the point where 30 minutes of research will teach you everything you need to know about the hardware and its capability to run whatever distro you want to. Going from a ton of older Dell models, then to a T420, to a T450s, to a T530, most of the features I ever needed as a developer and netadmin have always been readily available, with the rest of them being delegated to cloud services and/or remote (sometimes virtualized) machines running a Linux distro or a BSD. Windows has the definite advantage of being a market leader with the longest run in the history of personal computing, but there is definitely something to be said for the immense development that the *nix side of things has been exhibiting compared to 15, 10 or even just 5 years ago. The year of Linux desktop and laptop is still far away, but at least we're seeing goodwill both from software and hardware vendors, and it would be a real shame we throw the good trends away at this point in time.
- nicbou 4y ago
  No one is arguing that Mac has an advantage in the game, that people are working hard on *nix. It's just irrelevant if your goal is to have a laptop that just works.
xani_ 4y ago
Well, author threw a dice and won. Work Sony Vaio also worked perfectly. But seen quite a few people with other that had problems.
stakkur 4y ago
Ah, cue the long thread of “No because my special combination of hardware/special configuration demands caused problems so Linux bad!”
eointierney 4y ago
I always enjoy the crapshoot of installing linux on random (recycled) laptops. I've been doing this for decades and I'm always pleasantly surprised at how far we've come. Glitches abound, but so do solutions, and the general robustness is awesome. So thank you, kernel and other devs, your work is hugely appreciated, even in moments of raging frustration (I just blame the short-sighted CxO's who delegate responsibilty to overworked product managers that are often just over-promoted engineers). Yay GNU/Linux! Freedom for everyone with a bit of patience and a wilful curiousity :)
irusensei 4y ago
I don’t know about that but I appreciate some things about Linux, specially the fact that the OS is not creepily trying to sell you something. I have an Asus G513 that I bought specially for Linux. It a Ryzen laptop with a discrete Radeon card. Nice performing machine, although its easy to thermal throttle it so tunning thermal profiles is often necessary. Its not perfect but it works. Out of curiosity I’ve decided to use Windows for a while. Well, anyone here probably knows how Windows became Bonzi Buddy OS but that’s not the worse of it. On Linux I had asusctl to control fans and keyboard lights. For this functionality on Windows I had to install something called Armory Crate from Asus. I shit you not this app sends product offers as system notifications. Things in Windows land also tend to ambush the user at every opportunity to create an account or associate their social media profiles. When I compare the professional presentation of Fedora or Pop OS default desktops with the hysterical ad show of Windows and its third party tools having to live with one or two things not working correctly is a tradeoff I gladly take.
sfvegandude 4y ago
Okay, does hibernation work? How about palm rejection on the track pad? Hi-Dpi fractional scaling? Do I need to read hostile *nix forums to find the right incantation to make Wi-fi work?
npteljes 4y ago
Ludicrous. On some, it does, on others, otherwise there's minor issues, major issues, sometimes regressions. Linux is very clearly a second class citizen on the PC, with hardware only coming with support for the current gen Windows. Some doesn't even work with Windows well, and that's the supposedly supported platform. I _do_ use Linux on everything, mind you. But I also keep a file where I collect my fixes for the different systems, so that I won't forget them when I reinstall. And I accept that sometimes things don't work, like a fingerprint reader, and I live with that. One such random thing from the notes is that the touchpad wouldn't come alive after a sleep. The fix is the "i8042.nomux=1" kernel parameter. Hours of duckduckgoing went into that. I like to tinker, but it's not working "so damn well that it's boring".
majormajor 4y ago
Sure, the overall "eventually stuff gets supported" story is good. And people hold on to hardware a lot more than they used to. This guy's using a T420. That's an 11 year old machine! Older hardware has always worked much better under Linux than newer hardware (sometimes for longer than it's worked well on Windows). It's also pretty amazing that there are now some major-vendor Linux-out-of-the-box laptops. But the pool is still not all that large. I was just looking at an Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Google suggests ... nah. Very un-boring. E.g. https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/63549/linux-on-zenbook-s-13-oled https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/63549/linux-on-zenboo... https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wv2c28/anyone_using_one_of_these_new_um5302_from_asus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wv2c28/anyon... Fun shit like "keyboard doesn't work yet" plus various other nothing-surprising-to-me-after-doing-this-for-20-years stuff like weird audio driver patch crap.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Intel hardware was really good on Linux but I suppose that will change in the future because it seems the person responsible for that has left Intel.
drummersbrother 4y ago
my experience has been mostly good. I used to work on a beat-up hp low-end laptop from 2012, on which I put arch w/ i3-gaps. It had only one issue, a driver that killed the laptop on any sudden acceleration (to protect the hdd write heads on the original machine, I'd put in a ssd). I found a way to disable it and otherwise had no issues, everything was pretty snappy considering the slow i3 cpu. On my current 2020 razer blade, I've had to create a workaround script for the intel backlight driver not working properly (on boot it maxes out at 30% backlight, but cat 100 to the correct file and the full range is unlocked). I still don't know how to handle plugging in external screens (e.g. to give presentations) but that's an i3-gaps issue and not the laptop's fault, and the battery life is pretty abysmal since graphics switching from the nvidia gpu to the igpu seems to disable using the gpu for cuda workloads (for which the fix is to have the charger with me at all times).
linuxhansl 4y ago
+1 Running Linux on laptops since the late 90's. In the beginning I had to tinker a lot, compile custom kernels, etc. Now - for the past 10 years or so - it (especially Redhat's Fedora) just works without doing anything, even with the newest laptops. Wayland is not quite there, yet (IMHO), so I'm still running X11 (thankfully Fedora let's me do that).
gatane 4y ago
Improve less developed OSes, like Redox, Haiku, Serenety...
midislack 4y ago
Damn threads like this always bring out hordes of certain types of posters. For me though it's OpenBSD, I don't trust Linux any more. PRC's a little too heavily involved in the project. I can only imagine the back and forth between their operatives and the NSA's, sometimes it flares up on the LKML to the point where it glows brighter the sun.
TwoNineFive 4y ago
I am disappointed in the number of people hyping up Lenovo/Thinkpads in this thread. Lenovo is not IBM and their quality is not that great. Some models are good, but plenty of others are bad. Dell has been shipping linux for decades now and Lenovo only announced partial support on some models a year or two ago. Don't fall for the hype. Not all Lenovo/Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all).
- aljgz 4y ago
  > Not all Lenovo/Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all) That does not matter. If they have one really good model, that's enough for everyone. >Dell has been shipping linux for decades now I'm an Apple hater, like a vegan hates rare steak. Yet, I'm much more likely to buy my next gear from Apple than Dell. Where do I begin? For starters, everything I've bought from Dell starting with a Latitude D850, all the way to the Xps 13 I bought in 2020 and a 32 curved monitor in 2022, they were all faulty. In a large organization that with 30,000 laptops used by their employees, the IT department loves Dell's support: anything breaks, they will fix/replace it in 24 hours or a few hours depending on your guaranty level. But for me? I prefer it to work well to begin with. My Asus N550 worked for me for 7 years and it was top notch until the bed broke and destroyed it. I've never had a dell product that had zero problems. The latitude would flicker for minutes if for whatever reason screen went off and on. The xps's webcam stopped working and would randomly connect in certain angles of the lid. The laptop was advertised to support linux, but there was no fingerprint reader and when they released it, it was Ubuntu only. The monitor starts to flicker randomly and the replacement they sent me has a corner with ~100 pixels showing whatever they like, waiting for a second replacement. Never Dell again.
krick 4y ago
IDK, maybe it is boring for a guy who has nothing better to do than to fuck with configuring software he uses. But I kinda tricked myself into thinking GNU/Linux is an actually usable OS, like, to live with it without noticing it too much. Now, after 15 years I'm way too attached to it to sell my soul to Microsoft, but I'm still waiting for that "year of Linux on desktop". I don't want to configure anything anymore, I have my life, man. I'm too old and too busy for this shit. I just want it to work, on its own. Yet, I'm still occasionally struggling with hardware compatibility and Ubuntu package manager issues. And I won't even complain about that one time I was foolish enough to set-up ZFS on a laptop: after all, it was offered in "Advanced Settings" tab and I should've known better. Suffice to say, that buying basic consumer-grade hardware I still cannot assume that it will work reasonably well with Linux. Honestly, I'm almost for real offended by someone daring to say not having to spend my life solving Linux problems should be qualified as "boring" — especially when it's not the case, and when I still often find out that stuff that had me struggling with it for hours, days, or even turned out to simply not work on Linux at all — is basically plug-and-play on Windows. I mean, if you think about it, there's no reason to expect it not to be the case, but it is exactly the headlines like that, that trick you into believing this and buying stuff before meticulously googling everything and making sure it can be used with Linux in the first place (which is often not Google-able as well, when it comes to a bit less common items, than, let's say, top-100 products on Amazon).
drekipus 4y ago
I have a brand new dell xps 13 and it works so amazingly well I bought another xps 13 for my sister
mmmpetrichor 4y ago
I bought a a dell developer xps preloaded with ubuntu. It had issues from day 1, related to sleep, related to bluetooth, related to closing the lid and expecting it to do what I wanted. I fixed some of them after messing with it for weeks, but was plagued by kernel panics in the qualcomm wireless driver that was unfixable. Finally had enough BS and switched to windows. Always kind of aggravating to see posts like OP saying how great linux is as a desktop, ignoring how horrible it is in general across a broad range of hardware. And apparently even direct from dell, in my case. edit: BTW experienced dev using linux VMs, baremetal, and WSL for 15 years. I love linux as a dev, but I will never touch it again as a desktop OS.
- mmmpetrichor 4y ago
  Oh, I forgot to add, I tried to load linux on a different older dell xps 13 laptop since it was nearly dead and useless. No wireless driver out of box for dell wireless. Found some random articles about how to get it working. None of them worked. I actually forgave that since I had a USB network adapter and didn't necessarily need wireless. that wasn't it tho I ran into other random issues. seriously linux is still terrible as a desktop OS. I won't even get into UI .
apatheticonion 4y ago
Hoping one day soon I'll be able to use Gnome on my M1 MacBook with full hardware acceleration and unchanged power efficiency/battery life. MacBook laptops feel great to use, their Keyboards, their trackpads, their screens, their battery lives are unparalleled - but MacOS is such a compatibility nightmare. No Vulkan support makes gaming difficult, no kernel support for containerisation makes using development tools like Docker cumbersome. Apple are total dicks for locking down their hardware so tightly and refusing to support efforts to extend support to other OSes.
brianjacobs 4y ago
I have an L14 gen 2 amd thinkpad, and have had a ton of issues with the touchpad and occansional issues with the down key repeating for no reason. My wife has an E14 gen 3 amd thinkpad and absolutely no issues. The future for linux on the laptop is here, just unevenly distributed. Both on Fedora 36 KDE.
osigurdson 4y ago
My experience with fresh installs has usually be pretty good on older laptops. However, it always eventually starts to go downhill for me (likely somewhat self inflicted). It would be interesting if the author still feels the same after a year or so.
jll29 4y ago
I had the following - and luckily they worked great under Linux (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu): Lenovo ThinkPad x61s Lenovo ThinkPad x220 Lenovo ThinkPad x230 Lenovo ThinkPad Lenovo ThinkPad x1 DELL Latitude E7450 and similar Problematic: Lenovo ThinkPad x240 - hypersensitive touchpad makes mouse pointer jumpt while writing text
gregmolnar 4y ago
I just received my Framework laptop recently, installed Fedora 36 + KDE Plasma, and even though it took some tweaking to get a close to my Mac behaviour, it works perfect. I had 0 driver problems. So it looks like Linux on the desktop seems to be getting there. And the best part, with this laptop, no shop needed to replace the battery, I can do it myself.
- ansgri 4y ago
  For the battery part, any boring Dell Latitude is no worse. As probably are other common business laptops. It’s much easier in most of the world actually – your local dealer might have one in stock, no need to ship overseas. And Linux support for this machines is pretty decent too, a good trade-off over peculiarities of modern Windows at least. It’s been like this for about 10 years already, in my experience running Ubuntu and lately Mint on mid-range laptops as a tech-savvy user who hates tinkering with OS setup.
s_ting765 4y ago
Yes. Until you want to do anything gpu accelerated. You'll be lucky to setup hw video playback, and when you do hevc isn't supported. You want to watch your videos/or game in HDR? ,, banish those silly thoughts from your mind. Emulating graphics hardware (GPU passthrough) with qemu is a pita. You want to emulate Android apps, the best solution (Waydroid) only works on Wayland. Though this wouldn't be a problem if Xorg wasn't holding out. And Nvidia had played nice with Linux. Memory and OOM situation management is a sham and another pita just waiting to bite. This could make you lose all your windows and in some cases even data as the solution involves forcing a reboot from your machine. I could go on and on. A lot of improvements have however been made in the usability aspect, main one being flatpak packages. But there's a terribly long road ahead to make Linux desktop feel less of a second-class citizen compared to other operating systems.
- hedora 4y ago
  Nvidia driver support is indeed garbage, but AMD is great for video games, stable diffusion, etc these days. The OOM situation is a dumb systemd thing. Presumably some distros will ship working setups. I haven't had any problems with Majaro. I've been using Linux since the pppd days, but the last time I tried (2019?) it took me over a day to get Ubuntu LTS's DNS client to resolve sites in under thirty seconds. YMMV. Also, Devuan isn't bad for single user setups.
baby 4y ago
I recently looked into buying a linux laptop and it seems like only unattractive laptops were advised (thinkpads) and that you’d have to install linux on them yourself
cztomsik 4y ago
In the meantime I was trying to install new fedora kde plasma and it got frozen during the install. You were lucky. I was not.
kosolam 4y ago
Of course, like many others in this thread I strongly disagree. We are talking here of 20 years that Linux desktop has been mostly standing in place (and going backwards as well). I’ve used Linux in the 90’ and the early 2000’ so I remember well. The thing is it might be Microsoft putting sticks in the wheels of open source by planting it’s own people in the industry.
stoical 4y ago
lol, reading this as I'm trying to get the Nvidia driver working on a 2010 mac mini ... if it was an Intel graphics model it would be fine, but non-standard hardware still breaks things, even on relatively common machines
jarbus 4y ago
The most important thing I think when it comes to getting a Linux desktop that just works, is to buy a laptop that has little-to-no issues with Linux in the first place. As someone who struggled with linux on his existing Windows laptop, I made sure that my next laptop had very few issues on the Arch Wiki, and I installed Arch onto it. Works perfectly.
APhoenixRises 4y ago
I like to keep one of my personal laptops running Linux, but I won't be using one at work again soon unless I have the rights to pave and reinstall. While I'm more than willing to spend my evenings tinkering issues on my own laptop, I can't spend hours of work time debugging a graphics or audio issue that pops up.
husamia 4y ago
Linux works so well with old laptops because it took year for the community to solve the problems. thanks to the community
butz 4y ago
Laptop - I agree, as my Lenovo Thinkpad runs Linux without issues. I'm having trouble on desktop PC with wake up from suspend (when PC goes to sleep automatically after set amount on minutes) and wireless dropping randomly.
antifa 4y ago
I find the headline pretty disturbing because a) no it isn't and b) what would be boring is never being able to do anything because you were forced to spend all day "tinkering" with the OS for stability reasons or dismissing a constant barrage of nagware. Linux easily beats windows in this regard.
peanut_worm 4y ago
Trackpad drivers are still horrible as far as I know
ajyotirmay 4y ago
A lot of argument here complaints that Linux is broken outside of Linux specific vendors or ThinkPads. Well, how did it go for you to try and run MacOS on non-Apple hardware? Maybe, sure you get a better experience with hardware supported by Linux. But that's a lot of bias in your opinion.
wizwit999 4y ago
It's not bad, some things are just missing. E.g Night light doesn't work on Wayland with Nvidia drivers.
bel_marinaio 4y ago
Most of the comments here report the opposite of the linked article. Using Linux still seems to involve a significant amount of being your own IT department. I have tried Linux a few times over the years. One test was for almost 2 weeks on vacation, in a developing country, where it wasn't safe to be walking around with a MacBook. Another was for a few days as a Linux home theater. After struggling for hours with the sound drivers I gave up. I was frustrated with the amount of trouble shooting involved with Linux. That combined with preferring the OS has kept me on MacBooks for the past decade+.
paulsmal 4y ago
Dell XPS 15 9510(11th gen cpu), intel-only with Dell Thunderbolt Dock works with zero issues. I'm connecting Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and mouse + headphones, external monitors. Yeah, touchpad is not as good as on mac but I don't care. UPD: Fedora 36

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Boring is good when it comes to tech because it means you're not spending time trying to make things work. Save the excitement for the stuff that pays your bills.

jb1991 4y ago
That is in fact exactly the point the article is making, in fact it’s the subtitle right on the page.
bagaswastu 4y ago
Yes, and I don't want to spent my time dealing with bad drivers, so that's why I'm using Windows instead.
- stalfosknight 4y ago
  I haven’t had to concern myself with drivers, kernels, proper sleep behavior, or any of that other low level bs since switching to a Mac in 2006.
- batmanturkey 4y ago
  Funny, bad drivers are one of the reasons I left windows. Even needing drivers for class compliant USB audio was a dealbreaker

azangru 4y ago

Medium :-( Does anyone have a link to the full text of this article?

jjulius 4y ago
Just slap the URL into the box at archive.is
mdaniel 4y ago
replace the "medium.com" with "scribe.rip" for a pure(?) html version: https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-works-so-damn-well-that-its-boring-29014b347941 https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-works-s... or evidently 12ft.io also works as submitted by the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606)
- throwaway888abc 4y ago
  Very nice, Thanks for above / mentioning scribe.rip , today i learned, you deserve one
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    I believe this is where I first learned about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838053
Dylan16807 4y ago
Does the link not give you the full text, or is there a different problem? I don't know what your frown means.

theomega 4y ago

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.com%2Flinux-on-the-laptop-works-so-damn-well-that-its-boring-29014b347941 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.c...

ReactiveJelly 4y ago

The laptop: "It’s an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol’ thick brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for $200."

EamonnMR 4y ago
Could there be a more correct choice?
throwaway09223 4y ago
Sure, but it also works perfectly on modern equipment like the Zenbook I bought last year.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Meanwhile, my Framework Laptop that the Fedora OS team is specifically developing for has had busted microphone drivers for months. It's all a little random on how well different internal components decide to play nice.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    Is it because of their switch from a realtek chip to tempo? It's broken on Windows too ... https://community.frame.work/t/no-driver-for-tempo-audio-chip/15926 https://community.frame.work/t/no-driver-for-tempo-audio-chi... All platforms have issues, especially with uncommon hardware combinations. But if you buy any mainstream device odds of it working in linux are probably similar to the odds of it working in windows. For older hardware the odds are much better that it will work out of the box in linux.
    - NavinF 4y ago
      That forum thread you linked does not say microphone drivers are broken on Windows. The first reply sounds on point. I'll add that all laptops produce noise on the headphone jack as the audio amplifier is preemptively switched on and off. Only difference is that it's normally just barely audible. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say they just choose a crappy IC.

csdvrx 4y ago

If you want fun, grab an exotic machine like a X1 Fold with a weird CPU (i5-L16G7 with 1 fast Sunny Cove core, 4 small Tremont cores) and start hacking: even on Windows, everything works more or less (https://csdvrx.github.io/ https://csdvrx.github.io/) but the asymmetric CPU architecture gives me ideas about core pinning for some daemons. On Linux, right now I'm looking at why the i915 style GPU (9840) gives me "Failed to get size of gamma for output default" in xrandr, which prevents redshift from working.

manaskarekar 4y ago

Agreed. That's why I turn to r/unixporn to vicariously live through alternate setups.

j7ake 4y ago

How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?

acidburnNSA 4y ago
My System76 lemur pro gets 14 hours. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
- mdeepwell 4y ago
  Lemur has really great battery life in my experience. For example, 1 hour of watching a video stream in a browser uses < 10% of the battery.
csdvrx 4y ago
> How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ? Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc. After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries. That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life, but I like to carry my laptop in a small bag, so the AC adapter doesn't intrude much. Actually, I have 2 bags: both feature an AC adapter. I carry either the "big" bag with a regular Lenovo keyboard (I like it) and a 65W GaN adapter from Aohi (a cube about 2cm per side, that's not your grandpa power brick) or a flat 20W adapter (shaped like a 6mm thick credit card, with foldable blades) that's perfect for my Lenovo that barely sucks 10W (I measured).
- sayitenough 4y ago
- eddieroger 4y ago
  That's cool, but I don't know if your experience is uniquely yours or common, and for me at least, it's not common. I want a laptop that will last a full day without charging because when I use it as a laptop, I may be moving around, or going between meetings, or walking to lunch or a coffee shop, and I don't want to have to find a power outlet. Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better".

aarpmcgee 4y ago

I installed PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) on my 5 year old MacBook Pro and it feels like a brand new machine. The UX feels better to me than MacOS which is starting to feel more and more like Windows imo.

JoeQuery 4y ago
PopOS is wonderful. I highly recommend.
delta1 4y ago
Pop!_OS Very annoying to type
- CoolGuySteve 4y ago
thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
>> PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) It is: Pop!_OS https://pop.system76.com/ https://pop.system76.com/ It basically a customized Ubuntu with perfect driver support for System76 hardware. I use it on a 2015 Meerkat (https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat) and it works great.
- brightball 4y ago
  I just bought a Meerkat and it’s incredible. I love this thing.
smoldesu 4y ago
You should look into enabling Wayland, which PopOS! disables by default. That should give you silky-smooth 60fps desktop transitions like MacOS, as well as 1:1 trackpad gestures. Happy hacking!

stoplying1 4y ago

I can't believe I'm saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn't have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there's numerous speakers, some of which aren't active under Linux, and/or a similair issue with woofers. I've tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I'm running 5.19... From what I can tell, it's a growing issue, affecting laptops from multiple manufacturers often with "Dolby Atmos" printed on them. The result is very poor fidelity, low volume audio.

vondur 4y ago
That’s usually the case with these types of hardware on Linux. Super new or exotic hardware may have little or no official support.
aarobot 4y ago
No audio device at all is detected on my Lenovo IdeaPad 5. (running Arch Linux)
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Try setting up Pipewire, that’s what’s working for me in Fedora on the same hardware.
- oblak 4y ago
  Is it an intel one? I have a 16 inch one with 5800H and audio has been working since day. Running Manjaro, since I am just a dumb user. In fact, I have a problem with too much sound. The damn thing has a pc speaker that I cannot completely get rid of.
btdmaster 4y ago
Have you checked ArchWiki? For example, it provides the kernel command line for enabling all speakers on the y530: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_IdeaPad_y530 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_IdeaPad_y530
- 4y ago

ai_ja_nai 4y ago

Uhm, how about suspension/hibernate? That was pretty lame even 2 years ago and I'm not seeing it improve

masklinn 4y ago
With my 3 years old work Dell, I can't say that it has improved in any way. Suspended laptop basically scrapes over the week-end, a 3 day week-end will see me booting from shutdown on the first morning.
Mikeb85 4y ago
Dunno, in the last 10 years I've had a ThinkPad T530 and an Acer Swift 3 (AMD), suspend has worked just fine on both (Ubuntu and Fedora). My girlfriend has a Dell running Windows she always manually turns off because suspend is flakey... At this point whether or not suspend works really depends on the laptop and there's plenty of reports of Windows users having the same issues.
windows_sucks 4y ago
works flawlessly on my X1 carbon
- number6 4y ago
  I so want a X1, got a E13 to travel and I am waiting for an upgrade for my work laptop
- csdvrx 4y ago
  On modern Thinkpads, less that 0.5% of the battery per hour is expected, so if you disable automatic suspend to disk (aka "suspend to both") to save a few TBW from your NVME, expect to lose about 10% per day. Personally, I like that Windows suspend to disks can be setup to only kick-in if a specific power budget has been exhausted: if the laptop has been sleeping for 5 days while disconnected, with 50% of the battery gone, it's neat to suspend to disk so that a week later (or more) it has enough power to resume work.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

aborsy 4y ago

I have been running Ubuntu on laptops for over a decade. No major issues, at least as of past 8 years. Great hardware compatibility.

blowski 4y ago
Whenever I try, it works 90% great, but little things are problematic enough that I switch back. The power management doesn’t quite work, so fans stay on and it doesn’t sleep when you close the lid. The screen doesn’t quite have the same quality graphics. The trackpad isn’t as smooth.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Yea, hibernate/suspend issues are by far the biggest problem I have with Linux on laptops. Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me. I essentially have to treat my linux laptop like a small desktop computer and just shut it down fully when I'm not using it and can't leave it plugged in to power or else it loses 5-10% battery per hour.
  - alias_neo 4y ago
    I use XPSs for home and work, and my understanding is that they don't implement one of the sleep state capabilities properly in hardware so full "deep sleep" , next to zero battery mode isn't possible. That said, my XPS 13 will suspend for a couple of weeks on battery once it's configured, even given this caveat. I haven't shut it down when I finish using it since I bought it in 2019. I run Ubuntu LTSs.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me. Funnily that's not at all my experience with an M1 MBP. It either sleeps when lid is closed even with an external screen, or never (even if i explicitly click on the sleep button). And even if I manage to get it to sleep, Bluetooth is always on and battery is at 0% after 2 days.

jstimpfle 4y ago

Is that actually true? What does it say that I immediately recognize that T420 from the image? Maybe the title should be changed to "Linux on the X220 and T420 ...". Even on these devices I've had some problems. Due to experiences I've made I'm sceptical that there are no issues with Fn keys, Trackpads, Display brightness, power consumption, connectivity... on random laptops - especially the lower-priced ones.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

I installed ZorinOS on a laptop from 2010 and it works like magic! It's a bit slow because the software it's running is all new but man does Linux feel nice to use on old hardware.

app4soft 4y ago

> Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring Until there is no NVidia's legacy GPU/video card inside that laptop.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago
I'm currently running ZorinOS on a GT610, fairly old and obsolete and can be considered legacy but it works great. The drivers came pre-installed in the distro so I had 0 problems installing and using the OS.

liampulles 4y ago

Bluetooth on linux continues to suck however - it sucks a bit on windows too but it has been unusable on a few of my linux laptops.

blooalien 4y ago
Know where I've had troubles with Bluetooth on Linux? Discord! Stupid Discord keeps forgetting my Bluetooth headset lately. Saddest thing about that? I've heard my Windows using friends cursing Discord over the exact same issue on their Windows 10 and 11 rigs. (Leads me to believe it's not entirely Bluetooth's fault every single time, but sometimes badly written software doing screwy things that confuse the Bluetooth somewhere along the way.) In my case it's only been Discord doin' this, while everything else that uses the same headset has no troubles with it at all.
hpcjoe 4y ago
My favorite bluetooth issue is with MacOS. On my M1 Mac Mini, my Logitech MX keys and MX Master 3 mouse are not recognized after a reboot. So I have to attach a corded keyboard to my Mini to log in. Because when it goes to sleep after a reboot, it does not wake up for the logitech kit. Which is explicitly supporting MacOS. Its not just linux where bluetooth sucks. I opened a ticket with Apple on this, gave them my notes, and they still haven't done anything about this. Bluetooth on linux sucks. As it does on MacOS. And windows.

mdaniel 4y ago

> works so well so long as one doesn't need a working fingerprint reader, otherwise too bad

woodruffw 4y ago

I agree largely with this (as another T420 owner). My only problem is finding new, high-quality battery packs.

hotcrossbunny 4y ago
Absolutely this!

kernelcurry 4y ago

Recently installed Linux on my 2011 MacBook Air and loving it. Faster than MacOS and all drivers just worked (Ubuntu 22.04). The only issue with the setup is me! Daily driving new hardware for work makes it difficult to adapt to an older display, keyboard and trackpad. laptop hardware really has come a long way in the past 11 years.

gigel82 4y ago

It depends on the laptop. I tried with several older machines (2015 era), with several distros and never got it to work right (though my scenario is a bit weird, I have the laptop closed with an external monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up). Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...

Eleison23 4y ago

In 2018 I was in college, working on a Linux degree, and studying for certifications such as CompTIA Linux+. I had allocated some funds to purchase a new machine; my desktop was already over 8 years old and I obviously wanted a good machine I could bring to campus. I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad T580, because it was on the Red Hat certified list. It came with Windows 10 but I immediately installed CentOS. This turned out to be a minor error on my part; CentOS was too old to support the modern T580's hardware. I struggled briefly and then realized that Fedora would be a better option in this situation. I ran Fedora for 3 years, flawlessly, effortlessly, and yes, boringly. Due to the vagaries of needing to use something supportable and normal for work, and because this has become not only my "daily driver" but my "BYOD" device for work, I decided to abandon Linux and install Windows 10 on Christmas Day last year. I may never run Linux again on a personal machine, but I don't regret 30 years of "Linux on my Desktop", and I'd recommend it to any burgeoning hacker type!

number6 4y ago
Sad to hear that. I hope you will find your way back again.
- lioeters 4y ago
  If they're anything like a typical software person, they will likely be running Linux on that Windows anyway.
ant6n 4y ago
After years of Linux and Mac, I was issued a Win 10 machine at work. I don’t know how anybody voluntarily uses that. It’s like instead of fixing bugs over the last 30 years, they just keep adding new ones. And also make the whole experience more bloated, more confusing, more slow and still kinda ugly.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  Based on the requirements from my employer, I may be able to spec out a high-end Chromebook instead of a Windows machine for my next upgrade. That is assuming I can weasel out of the requirements to maintain a virtualization environment, which I never use anymore. Of course, that also depends on near-future hardware availability and Google not killing their own high-end Chromebook lines.

justinzollars 4y ago

Except it eats battery. I would not recommend Linux on a laptop under any circumstances.

t-3 4y ago
I was getting 12 hour battery life on a Macbook Air running Gentoo a decade ago... things have only gotten better. You're way off base here.
- justinzollars 4y ago
  I had a System76, and the thing ate battery. Had to sell it and go back to a mac because it wasn't usable.
  - t-3 4y ago
    I'm not surprised, I've never used a system76 laptop, but they always looked like chunky "portable workstations" rather than mobile computing devices. After dealing with the horrible battery life, weight, and fan noise of a Thinkpad with a discrete GPU and fast CPU, I decided that I would ignore that segment of the market in favor of the small and light category.
raisin_churn 4y ago
I get 15-20 hours of battery on my laptop running Debian, at say 30% brightness, with an open ssh connection or two over wifi. So, there are clearly circumstances where it is fine, though I'm quite sure there are cases where it isn't, too. Use the tools that work for you when they work for you.

mkl95 4y ago

I love Linux on the laptop. I previously used it on a desktop computer for many years and the experience wasn't nearly as good.

ufmace 4y ago

I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices. Windows has its faults for sure, but it's much better in my experience as far as just working on any type of hardware and accessories. If it doesn't just work already, drivers are generally easy to find and install.

darthrupert 4y ago
Anecdote time. I have a gaming laptop from Asus, 2022 model. It keeps hard crashing on Windows (both 10 and 11) while working fine on Linux. Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
- mdtusz 4y ago
  I use my desktop at home exclusively for gaming. I had Windows on it, but it would continually crash when trying to use my bluetooth xbox controller with it. I've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
  - blooalien 4y ago
    About the only games I've had any troubles with lately have been those which include ridiculous DRM or anti-cheat (and even many anti-cheats work fine on Linux these days). Between WINE/DXVK and Valve's Proton, I find the vast majority of my game library from my Windows days now run fine. (Of course it should go without saying that all my many Linux native games also tend to run fine as well, although a rare few of them require running in Valve's "Steam Runtime for Linux" container thingy.)
- II2II 4y ago
  Different laptop, different issues, similar outcome. I ran into issues with Windows corrupting the EFI boot entries, even on a dedicated install. I have also had Windows fail to enter sleep or come out of sleep when the lid is closed. I have never had these issues under Linux on the same hardware. Having investigated problems with Windows, I think it is fair to say that Linux is more reliable on supported hardware. The main problems with Linux are: some hardware is not supported, and sometimes Linux only supports a subset of the functionality of hardware it does support. If you're careful with what you buy, your experience can be just as good (if not better) under Linux. If you're not careful with what you buy, you can still luck out and have a positive experience.

habibur 4y ago

Things changed sometime circa 2018. Previously I had to check and ensure online if the laptop runs linux and then buy it. Now I don't. I just buy it, and know it will run linux. Fedora distribution is the most compatible one that I have found.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Someone show me how to get my xps-15 to run Ubuntu with comparable GPU and battery performance to Windows in less than five hours of work and I will be eternally grateful. I gave up and plugged it in permanently for work and use my Mac for mobile.

christophilus 4y ago
Pretty happy with my XPS and Fedora. I switch to X for gaming, and use Wayland for day to day usage / programming.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Ooh I’ll try Fedora. Thanks! Does it handle switching the dedicated GPU on and off when needed? Any tips on how to set up? Mine stays on and kills battery in about 90 minutes. I tried the switching and it would always just crash.
bbertelsen 4y ago
Hello! I have been using PopOS which is a derivative of Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia drivers baked in. Setup on every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year), has been about 20 minutes. Dell devices have excellent Linux support. Battery is a problem, I can get 5-7 hours in PopOS vs. 5-9 hours in Windows, depending on what I'm working on by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life (9+ hours on 2021 xps with half cores disabled, running around 6-8 watts). PopOS also offers the ability to turn discrete graphics on or off which can also increase battery life.
- lioeters 4y ago
  > every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year) Haha, nice - I imagine it's satisfying to have a reliable and reproducible setup. Just curious, do you sell the used ones, or give them away..?
  - 4y ago

fredrikholm 4y ago

The combination of Mint (Ubuntu) and dwm hovers around ~400Mb RAM when idling, and feels so incredibly nice to work with even on decade old machines. I only switched from Windows a few years ago after some 20 years, and in retrospect I can't believe how many hours I wasted trying to run things on Windows that 'just work' on Linux.

pjmlp 4y ago

No it doesn't, even on an Asus 1215B that was actually sold with Linux on it. GL support isn't at the same level as the DirectX 11 for the APU, still has some issues waking up time to time (only fixed by taking the battery out), and is the only device that has issues connecting to my router.

semiquaver 4y ago
Yeah, I have to second this. As badly as I wish this article were true, even on devices specifically designed to support linux, like the Framework, there are a million tiny glitches and inconveniences with sleep, wifi, power management, webcam, bluetooth, etc, etc. These simply don't happen on windows. Using linux on a laptop is the same as it has been for the last 20 years: something you only do if you don't mind being forced to be an enthusiast constantly tinkering with configuration files and such. If you want a tool to actually get work done it can be painfully frustrating. I say this as someone who willingly pays the cost of this frustration because I much prefer linux as a development environment. But the people who write articles like this are either delusional, lying, or very, very lucky.
- trelane 4y ago
  That sounds like what I'd expect with Framework. Modern hardware is complex enough that you have to specifically target and support an OS, and afaict, framework just kind of doesn't. It's sold either with windows or as-is, then then it's up to you to be the systems integration team.

FZ_BA 4y ago

I found the article to be very well written and I overall agree with it. Years ago (2016) I bought a Lenovo Yoga Pro 3, with an Intel M processor. It had Windows 8, which I almost immediately upgraded to Win10. It was dreadfully slow with both O.S. from the beginning but I used it for 2 years, just sucking it up and enjoying how small and portable it was. At some point I installed Ubuntu, and it gave the laptop a whole new life, HOWEVER... for me it always needed some crazy things to be done in the terminal in order to make things work properly, the wifi, the bluetooth or something else, at some point just broke, and it was a little field day everytime to make it work again. I still have it and it still works OK! So does Linux on laptop work well? Yes. It works TOO well? In my opinion, NO, it really depends sometimes. But I believe it's a great O.S.

unpopularopp 4y ago

I wish Ubuntu didn't kill Wubi tho. We used that at my first workplace on laptops with Windows and it was so damn good. There is a new fork [0] but it's a hit and miss with modern UEFI and especially with Windows 11 (had to use it for some reason). And other distros never had an option like this afaik, none does as of today. But I know it's all about Docker, VMs, or WSL nowadays yet Wubi covered a niche segment which was pefect. 0, https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi

btdmaster 4y ago
UNetbootin[1] still works fine last I tried it. [1] https://unetbootin.github.io/ https://unetbootin.github.io/
- unpopularopp 4y ago
  But that sounds like a totally different use case. Wubi installed the whole distro into a local file on your drive + it worked natively.

whatever1 4y ago

No it does not. Give it to me for 5’ and I will find at least 10 things that are broken. Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken. Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing. The best we can do is to put it in a VM and run it in a OS that has actual hardware support.

smoldesu 4y ago
Can you name a kernel with more robust hardware support?
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  Windows for starters. Also the title claims that things work well not that linux is the best.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Windows has pretty terrible hardware support IMO. Comparing the state of Linux Vs Windows on ARM/PowerPC/RISC-V, it's not even a contest. I think there's a case to be made for the stability of Windows drivers (I should hope vendors don't half-ass support), but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Which consumer laptops are there out there with Power or RISC-V chips?
    - CyberDildonics 4y ago
      > PowerPC/RISC-V The person you replied to didn't mention those and there aren't laptops with those CPUs anyway, so this is just goal post shifting nonsense. > but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water I don't think that's true at all and you didn't link any evidence.

admax88qqq 4y ago

Linux still can't handle out of memory issues gracefully. Sometimes I create memory leaks or use too many electron apps and when you hit a low memory situation Linux starts trashing and your system becomes unusable for minutes to hours unless you reboot your machine. Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems. This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, multitask too much and your system effectively locks up. Laptops tend to have less ram available.

smoldesu 4y ago
Depends on your configuration/distro. OOM killers aren't really used on the desktop because swap makes more sense, but you can certainly add one if you're using a resource-constrained machine.
- yakubin 4y ago
  OOM killer is a pseudosolution to an artificially created problem. https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/ https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Then don't use it. Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      Yes, but that still leaves the problem, which shouldn’t exist in the first place (edit: and on Windows doesn’t).
    - quotemstr 4y ago
      > Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason. Every Linux system configured for overcommit (every major distribution out of the box) will invoke the kernel OOM killer upon demand. There is no such thing as distributions not "enabling" this thing. You're talking about things like systemd-oomd, which act as a layer on top of the kernel OOM killer.

boredemployee 4y ago

I miss the old slackware days where nothing works

londons_explore 4y ago

I have the reverse... Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features. For example, power saving features, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness controls, fingerprint readers, keyboard hotkeys and backlights, etc. rarely work. Prepare for broken external hdmi ports or USB stuck at USB 2.0 speeds. Have fun with the fan stuck on either max or zero, or the CPU stuck at the lowest clock speed. There are still lots of things you have to go hunting for the right old firmware version for. I think Linux is only great if you have whatever hardware distro developers have, because that will be all that works out of the box.

ssivark 4y ago
But isn’t that basically “good enough” if you know you want Linux and can either afford the latest thinkpads or are okay with a slightly bulkier older Thinkpad? Seems not worse than different from needing Apple hardware to use Apple software… (though in practice there is a significantly wider array of hardware that has very good support for the software)
trelane 4y ago
Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters. Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing. Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX on commodity Windows hardware.
- jahewson 4y ago
  What is “Windows hardware”?
  - codewiz 4y ago
    Hardware sold with Windows preinstalled, by vendors who won't support anything else than Windows. I simply avoid them.

mid-kid 4y ago

Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers. Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.

wooque 4y ago
Yep, my 2 year old Ryzen laptop still doesn't have properly functioning sleep without tweaking kernel parameter, and that workaround got broken on 5.19 kernel release and I had to find out new parameter to tweak. Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
- Delk 4y ago
  These kinds of things probably still depend a lot on the brand and the product line. The post is really only an anecdote about a ThinkPad, and a relatively old one at that, which is probably as good as it gets in terms of Linux compatibility. I personally more or less agree with the title, though, assuming a suitable hardware choice. I have a new-ish Ryzen ThinkPad for work and the only issue I've had is Gnome occasionally semi-hanging, and I don't know if that's just because of Ubuntu being a bit flimsy or because of something more general such as an issue with the AMD graphics driver. Also, the Teams client the post mentions is about to be dropped by MS and it was never really that good to begin with, but having seen about two decades of desktop Linux, I'd rather be surprised that it's been available and worked somewhat reliably at all without hit-and-miss with Wine.

CalChris 4y ago

I had a Dell XPS 13 and tried to get a Linux distributor running on it (not hard) reliably (impossible). This led to hours, days of frustration and I eventually gave it away to someone who spent hours more and eventually put Windows back on it and sold it.

NavinF 4y ago

> Linux on the laptop > 11-year-old Thinkpad T420 This guy better be trolling.

sateesh 4y ago
Any reason why you think so ? I have 8 year old t410 i5, 8 gb and runs Ubuntu 20.04 perfectly fine.So I believe the author to be genuine.

factorialboy 4y ago

I run Gnome based distros on Thinkpads and Dell XPSs and they are the breeze to setup and use. Nvidia drivers are always a concern, apart from that in all ways superior to Windows OSs on these same laptops. Personally i find myself more productive with my Linix workstation but the M1 Mac I use for official work is also quite good.

kache_ 4y ago
I've had no problems with Nvidia drivers. Running an RTX 3090, doing inferences on stable diffusion and can also fire up steam and play elden ring online Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly.
- factorialboy 4y ago
  > Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly. Thanks for that, I'll make a note to how to use a computer. Meanwhile this is Linus Torvalds opinion on Nvidia https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEyMTc https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEyMTc Nvidia driver issues is a public, well-known challenge when it comes to Linux.

neilv 4y ago

> It was not always thus. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, installing Linux on one's home computer was a rather terrifying affair, requiring a ton of abstruse tweaking using the command line. For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/

Forgeties79 4y ago
> CYA Notice: Like all worthwhile activities, messing around with laptop computers is not without risks. You could destroy your display by misconfiguring for the video chipset. You could accidentally corrupt your flash BIOS. You could encounter your potential soulmate in a cafe but then alienate him or her at a crucial flirtation stage by evangelizing Linux to an unhealthy degree. This page is provided without warranty. Love this lol

kache_ 4y ago

Get a laptop that is sold with Linux. Don't expect Linux to work with literally everything. Drivers. If you get a modern xps or thinkpad it'll work just fine. But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco. Maybe not :P

Mikeb85 4y ago
> But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco. Hah Acer's actually work pretty great. No funky hardware, BIOS, etc...
- nichohel 4y ago
  Very much so: the Acer Predator gaming laptops have been great for me. They suspend/resume like a champ and have the horsepower for Linux Steam gaming. Their price point is excellent for what you get. Of course they look ridiculous, are heavy, and the battery life is not great but they'll do a couple hours watching a movie in the hot tub, which is all I really care about as far as battery life.

_8j50 4y ago

Perhaps if you leave the defaults alone this is correct. Even defaults aside sleep and hibernate don't work well. Don't even get me started on secure boot. I've used Linux for over a decade so I am used to turning off random things I don't need, changing defaults, hardening my setup,etc... and it is more unpleasant than ever before. There is less debuggability( if that's a word) and it really does take a while to get things operational. For example on my debian laptop, I have secure boot and apparmor working. A lot of things broke when I removed software I don't need that is running by default which meant a lot of googling and searching for help but it all works now, I mean, to be fair I only struggled for one whole weekend only on it, which is an improvement, but, regardless of the DE I have to wait for at least 5 minutes after login staring at the wallpaper. I just accepted my fate now. Nothing in X11/xsession logs, dmesg, journalctl, lxdm logs, I have tried everything short of stracing random processes or attaching gdb. I mean, for personal use it beats windows and isn't locked down and unfriendly like macos.

marcodiego 4y ago

How to get linux on your laptop without any issue: buy a good laptop from a reputable vendor that comes with linux out-of-the-box. Buying a laptop that came with windows and installing linux is not the way we should do it these days.

albertopv 4y ago

Two days ago a friend found Spotify installed on hers Windows 10 laptop, pushed by Microsoft, even on the taskbar. That's insane. Windows 10 will be my last Windows ever.

unnouinceput 4y ago
I highly doubt that Microsoft did that and more likely her little brother or somebody else who used the laptop and didn't told her did it.
- albertopv 4y ago
  Not this time, she lives alone, there's no one else who could have done it and she's not tech savvy, not at all, I bought and configured that laptop my self for her.
  - unnouinceput 4y ago
    "... she's not tech savvy..." - well, I guess we found the culprit. You did let her use it with full admin rights, didn't you? I recommend go to local policy and enable full audit for everything. When this happens in the future you'll have a clear picture of who/when/what.
    - albertopv 4y ago
      She barely knows how to open outlook, let alone go to ms store and install a sw. Please don't try to defend MS, not this time. I found plenty of casual games installed in my work win10 PC. It's MS.
      - hedora 4y ago
        According to duck duck go, multiple people complained about Spotify auto installing on their windows box two days ago. I completely stopped using windows in the 8.1 days (forced telemetry was the last straw). I can't imagine dealing with the sorts of gaslighting you are experiencing. Happily, a combination of steam proton and dosbox run dos / windows games on my Linux desktop more smoothly than native ever did, and that was my last missing use case.

the__alchemist 4y ago

Surface Pro 2017 trip report: Basic laptop functionality works. Battery life is poor compared to when running Windows. Pen and touch required some finicking to get working. No writing apps as good as OneNote. All the ones I tried have enough input latency to make the experience unpleasant. That was a ~2021 Ubuntu. I was unable to reach the desktop in Mint. Kali couldn't interface with the network chip.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

seqizz 4y ago

Get a new xps, and let's talk about compiling 5 different things to make webcam work

flerchin 4y ago
Precision 5570 is a dream on linux. I have not a single complaint.

g42gregory 4y ago

I don’t like the color scheme and general rendering of websites on Linux (all browsers). By contrast, the MacOS renders websites really well. I played with the color settings on my video card and I can see that I could make it better, but I just couldn’t get it right all the way. Does anybody knows how to make Linux website rendering more pleasing to the eye and closer to MacOS? This is the only reason I still stick with MacOS on the front end. I would love to drop MacOS altogether.

otikik 4y ago
Better monitor, perhaps? Apple has had exclusivity on retina displays for some years, although I think that was over now.
- g42gregory 4y ago
  Unfortunately no, I use non-Apple monitor for both MacbookPro and Linux box. The difference in rendering web is pretty noticeable to me. Windows used to render full, saturated colors a while back, but now it looks pretty washed out to me as well. So it’s only MacOS that renders well currently (I am sure they will “improve” it in the future, but looks good so far). I think it has something to do with default color profiles for the corresponding OS. I would love to talk to someone who is an expert in this field.

lmeyerov 4y ago

We burned an evening just last week tracing an Intel wifi driver issue to missing kernel headers that required upgrading the kernel to a new, non-LTS version. And only then did we move on to Nvidia drivers. So no, still not the year of Linux on the desktop. Our entire dev team does it, but largely because Nvidia and Apple stopped working together. The bigger surprise is Windows WSL2 is just about there for Ubuntu support. We are just blocked on opencl side of Nvidia support (but no ETA.)

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I really tried to make wsl work for the windows users on my team, but we kept getting tangled up with networking (I guess there's a virtual switch involved and so when a tool claims to have forwarded a port it's hard to figure out where it forwarded it to and why only half of your stuff can see it). Do you know if that situation has improved in the last year or so?
- CoolCold 4y ago
  I'd like to know on your use case more, if possible. Not sure I've ever need to forward port or I probably read your description wrong way.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    It's been a year but if I recall it went something like this: I was using microk8s (a kubernetes distribution) on the wsl side, and I had python scripts (also on the wsl side) which would deploy things into it, run tests until there was a problem, forward a port from the broken service to "localhost:8080", and then instruct the user to open a browser to explore the UI post-test-failure. On bare metal Linux this was no big deal because "localhost" was unambiguous. But on windows you end up with the browser on the windows side and the forwarded port on the wsl side, so when the browser opened there was nothing at "localhost:8080" even though I could "curl localhost:8080" from the wsl side and get a response. Presumably there is a way to further forward the port so that it is available to both Windows browsers and wsl python scripts, but I never found it.

LoganDark 4y ago

That's cool, tell it to Linux 5.18.11 which will not detect my ELANTECH i2c trackpad even if I use allyesconfig

fithisux 4y ago

It is good it works well so that you can design hardware with the FOSS that is free as in "freedom"

sayitenough 4y ago

somecommit 4y ago

The only thing restricting me to use it at home is the lack of parental control.

II2II 4y ago

To make a long story short: I bought a laptop to run Microsoft Office a couple of years back. Being a Linux user, I quickly became frustrated with Windows. Being a slightly rabid Linux user, I bit the bullet and installed Linux on a machine that was not purchased with Linux in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked well. Office was a dual boot away, but that was the price to maintain my sanity. Now Windows users would probably find issues with Linux on this machine. That's fine. The thing is, I am not going to miss a feature under Linux that I never even used under Windows. Audio, video, and networking meet my expectations. Sleep and hibernate work, and appear to be more reliable under Linux. I have never felt the need to compare battery life under both operating systems since it is acceptable under both operating systems. As for that dual boot thing: I ended up giving up on the standalone version of Microsoft Office. Online solutions are better for anything that involves collaboration. LibreOffice documents exported to PDF works perfectly well for anything where the product is what matters. The option to dual boot is gone. There is one big difference between the article's author and myself: after trying a couple of the boring distributions and finding they didn't meet my esoteric tastes, I settled upon the exciting route. Tweaking my workflows is fun as long as it doesn't interfere with my ability to work.

codedokode 4y ago

I think that there should be a list of officially supported laptops and if you bought anything else then it is your problem and you are welcome to write necessary patches. It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.

pizza234 4y ago
To an extent, there is; Ubuntu holds a list of certified hardware, including laptops: https://ubuntu.com/certified https://ubuntu.com/certified. Notably, the latest Dell XPS is certified.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  That is awesome, I didn't know this existed. I've stuck with xps13 for the last ~3 laptops and that's worked well. I'd like to consider one of those ARM laptops next, maybe I'll find one in here. So far the first two or three generations of ARM laptops have been just okay. I'm hoping the fact that Apple has jumped all-in on ARM will encourage other vendors to invest more here.
jonas-w 4y ago
There exist many entries on the ArchWiki. The ArchWiki is (IMO) one of the best sources for linux in general not only archlinux. E.g. this entry for Lenovo[0] has a huge list with Lenovo Laptops and what works/doesn't work. There are also some tweaks you can apply for specific Models. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo

hpcjoe 4y ago

My non-work laptops all run linux, and have for ~20 years. My oldest laptop is a 14 year old Sager (Clevo) notebook, whose display seems to have just died last month. My newest is a 1.75 year old HP Omen with Ryzen 7 4800H AMD and NVidia graphics. All run linux, specifically Mint. Same release. All (apart from the dead 14 year old Sager) work well. I am typing this on my 4.75 year old Sager (Clevo), running Linux Mint, with an Nvidia GTX 1060/Intel iGPU unit, 1.5 TB of SSD (SATA), 64 GB ram, 4 physical cores. Everything works. It worked when I first installed it. My personal office deskside unit is an AMD Epyc 16 core, 128 GB RAM, with NVidia RTX3060 workstation, running Debian 11, as a deskside workstation. I have some older units based upon E5-2687W CPU tech, old NVidia cards built cheaply from ebay parts. All running linux in desktop configs, though most don't have a display keyboard attached. I've used all of them as desksides at one point in time or the other, and still use them for larger personal computing projects unrelated to work. I've been using Linux on laptops and desksides for the last 23+ years. My first laptop, was a 75MHz pentium unit with 16MB of ram, I triple booted DOS, OS2, and Linux on in 1996. I had a tiny 20MB hard disk with it. I wrote lots of my phd thesis on that under linux, and my home SGI Indy (the perks of working at SGI in the 1990s). Linux was hard for laptops/desktops until about 2004-2005 or so. Then things that were hard to make work, started working out of the box. I didn't have to think about installing most drivers, apart for things like some usb based devices. That got better in 2008 or so. Over the last 14 years, everything pretty much just worked. As the OP notes, its been boring. For the most part. Occasionally I'll run into a cheap USB peripheral where the driver isn't updated, or its missing updated firmware, but this is, and has been for a while, the exception. I know there are many who have disdain for linux desktops. That's fine, have your own preferred environment. That noted, please recognize that there are many users out there using linux desktops, successfully, productively, without problems. From installation through normal/intense usage. My home office has a Mac M1 Mini running MacOS 12.6 , 1x HP Omen 64 GB RAM, 8 core Ryzen laptop with Nvidia 1660Ti gpu running linux mint, a deskside 16 core Epyc, 128GB RAM machine with RTX3060 running Debian 11. All configured with my various monitors and networks. Its productive for me. We do not have an operational, regularly in use, MS Windows installation. And we're happy with this setup. It works. Everything just works. The way it should. [edited to fix HP laptop brand, Omen, not Open]

TheRealPomax 4y ago

> I tell this anecdote to make a point that will be obvious to nerds, but may still be news for everyone else: Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days. Which one? Because you can't download and install "Linux", there is no linux-stable-09-2022.iso that you download from linux.org that you then use to install a full OS that "just works(tm)". In fact, if we're talking about an 11 year old laptop, the actual version of Linux installed on it might not even exist anymore, but happens to have been set up in a way that it can use still maintained PPA. And which laptop, with what hardware? Because it's trivial to support a generic network adapter and an ancient 1200x800 WXGA screen, but good luck getting linux to "just work" with your wifi6e and retina 4k screen. Downvotes notwithstanding, as an anecdote this post effectively undermines itself, because installing Microsoft teams worked contrary to the author's expectation. They expected this to be hard, so concluding that Linux on a laptop "just works" based on a single activity unexpectedly not being an absolute nightmare is not drawing a reasonable conclusion. (Not sure I buy the argument that Linux works so nicely, because "Most software has migrated to the browser" either, that feels like a false equivalency routed in anecdotal evidence for what "most" means to the author. Some productivity apps have decent webapp equivalents, but they all suffer from the fact that they run in the browser, and folks aren't going to run dedicated browser processes for each web app, so the regular browsing on the side can, and will, stall or even crash the browser)

zfxfr 4y ago

Oh really ? Then you're lucky you don't have one of those "gaming laptop" especially the ASUS TUF models (I am not a gamer at all but yet i decided to get an asus Tuf505d) and believe me setting up Linux on it wasn't boring at all. I actually learnt a lot while doing it. Because once you'll figure out why the wifi is shutting down every x minutes. You'll then have to find what's wrong with the Bluetooth who doesn't activate. And of course at some point you'll want to connect an external monitor right ? If you thought plugging an hdmi cable and pushing some keys would allow you to display your stuff on your projector... Well think again. Don't get me wrong I love Linux.. I have been using it for the last 12 years (switched to Ubuntu recently) While it's amazingly easy and smooth on my rpi4 (for my personnal use). It can be boringly complicated on some laptop brands

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

Neat, I haven't read one of these stories since I stopped reading Slashdot in 2008'ish.

noasaservice 4y ago

I get this article, but I also don't like parts of it. Sure, everything just works. And that's awesome. But it's also being sold here as "the poor person's OS using janky equipment". Sure, Linux can greatly help with artificial obsolescence. But the biggest point is that you retain ownership and full power over your data. I've seen this again and again with stuff like Eagle vs KiCAD, and Autodesk software vs FreeCAD. Sure in some cases the FLOSS software isn't as "polished", but when Autodesk decides to arbitrarily change the policy locking you oout of your content, it's a matter of freedom and your data. The OS is the "carrier", and the applications are the actual thing.

pharmakom 4y ago

How nice for OP. Just a handful of my issues: - only one speaker works so volume is low - finger print scanner doesn’t work - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine - suspend and hibernate doesn’t work - random freezes - charging indicator unreliable - trackpad wrist filtering is very poor - boot failures after OS updates I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon. I really tried with Linux for philosophical reasons, but honestly what professional developer has time for all this?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
avl999 4y ago
> - only one speaker works so volume is low Never had this issue. > - finger print scanner doesn’t work Can't speak for this as I don't have a device with an FP reader > - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine I get ~6hrs on my laptop running Ubuntu + XFCE. I haven't ran windows on it but Amazon reviews claim ~5-5.5 hrs battery life for the same machine so seems to be inline for me. > - suspend and hibernate doesn’t work Works for me > - random freezes I can think of only 1 freeze I've had in the last year and that was due to me dropping the laptop > - charging indicator unreliable Pretty reliable for me except when it comes to the last 5%... my work macbook pro seems to have the same issue though when predicting how long that last 5% will last. > - boot failures after OS updates Never had this problem, on the other hand our work macbook pro has nothing but problems when upgrading os major versions. Atleast 1-2 people on our team always end up losing an afternoon whenever we are forced to upgrade it. > I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon. > I really tried with Linux for philosophical reasons, but honestly what professional developer has time for all this? What professional developers have the time or patience to deal with a Mac with: * It's proprietary hardware without any ability to upgrade components * Garbage oversized trackpad which registers false positives all the time * Terrible built in keyboard * All the nonsense with "we have a physical escape key, now we don't, now we do" actively making it unusable if you use Vim/Vim key bindings * Whatever nonsense they have done replacing physical function keys with that touchbar thingy * Actively user hostile decisions like putting the headphone jack on the right side of the laptop * A complete inability to connect peripherals unless you buy a (often expensive) dock. * Docker being a complete hog on these machines, yes that is not the fault of the mac but still something developers have to deal with every day I am forced to use a macbook for work and the only reason I can even bear working with it is connecting it to external keyboard/mouse and using it in clamshell mode.

roboben 4y ago

2022 is the year for Linux on the desktop.

pizza234 4y ago

Your Mileage May Vary, and may vary a lot. Lenovo Yogas, for example, have terrible compatibility (at least, the models released in the last years), which is a shame, because some are very good business machines. The Yoga Gen 7 AMD, on any Linux, has: - keyboard not working - speakers 50% not working - mic not working - bluetooth not working - standby not working And probably something else I'm missing. I think all the AMD 6x00 mobile CPUs suffer from the non-working keyboard issue, due a quirk (ironically, a compatibility-breaking hardware fix) that is fixed on the not yet released 6.0 kernel.

eBombzor 4y ago

MS teams works in the browser...

snemvalts 4y ago

Wifi and suspend stopped working on an LTS release on a Thinkpad X220 for me in 2018, the same generation as the laptop in the article. Moved to macOS shortly after. They are great $300 computers for when you're between jobs and moving to a place where you can use the work laptop for personal things. Or a pentesting machine. Don't see too much use for them otherwise.

tclover 4y ago

Unfortunately have to disagree, connecting to my wireless scanner/printer is way too complicated, no driver frontends for my mouse/keyboard, when multiple sound devices are connected, it's so bad to swap between them. When I connect to my home projector, it didn't allow to change audio output for some reason all in all, linux maybe works on popular laptops with predefined hardware, but it is still bad for desktops.

kome 4y ago

i'm using linux for the first time after years on an old laptop from 2011; it's such a pleasure! everything is so smooth and functional Try MX Linux on old hardware, it's awesome.

jspaetzel 4y ago

It's fine. There's also still a lot of tinkering you have to do to fully get the Linux experience. There's way too many applications out there still that may require you to drop into a terminal to get them working.

cdata 4y ago

Just an anecdote: got my Framework laptop the other week. Installed Pop!_OS. That was the only step. Everything works. Suspend/resume. WiFi. Audio. Webcam. Funky dongle ports. This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.

nsilvestri 4y ago
How does your suspend battery life work out for you? I'm running Ubuntu with Framework and even though I've done tweaked some settings I still end up with a dead battery after I reopen my laptop a day later.
- broodbucket 4y ago
  Pretty sure that's a known Framework hardware limitation, see https://community.frame.work/t/high-battery-drain-during-suspend-windows-edition/4421 https://community.frame.work/t/high-battery-drain-during-sus...
- cdata 4y ago
  I haven't put it through a rigorous test, but I can confirm that if I leave the laptop suspended without power, it will eventually lose its charge and shut off in what seems like a day. I only did this once by accident over a weekend; I've been using it every day and have the chance to charge it when I need to. The only laptops I have ever owned that didn't have this problem after some fashion are Apple laptops, so I guess my expectations were fairly low on this topic.

vander_elst 4y ago

It depends on the hardware. If you buy one of the certified machines maybe, otherwise you're in for a painful treat. IMO my requirements are pretty low: i3 window manager, chrome (sorry), a terminal, audio and multiple displays. To be honest Linux is not able to provide a fully working experience for those things.

khnov 4y ago

Used ubuntu on thinkpad for work for the first time. Just got back to windows as I am x10 more productive there. Besides the fan's noise, I struggled to find a calendar app that just shows alert for my meetings, and that is not buggy as fuck. I windows, Ms Mail just works. then I got the frustration when rust ins installed but not work (should install gcc ...) Linux is great free software, but I am not using ut just because it is great free, I am using windows because it is consistent and I just need to focus on my job

batmanturkey 4y ago
Funny, same reasons why I don’t windows and just Linux. I can’t even windows, it just doesn’t anymore
sofixa 4y ago
Evolution worked pretty well last i used it (up until a year ago roughly).
- aeroevan 4y ago
  Still works for gmail or office356

phendrenad2 4y ago

In my experience, Linux on laptops is fine if you use it like a desktop. If you want all of the fancy features of laptops, like being able to close the lid and have it go to sleep, a lot of luck is involved. Small differences in hardware have profound effects on Linux usability, so the "just use a Thinkpad from 2008" crowd are naturally the happiest.

LooseMarmoset 4y ago

I gave up Windows entirely; between unavoidable telemetry, embedded ads, and poor service pack QA (especially printers), I'm done. I'm not paying to rent an O/S and sell my personal habits regardless of what Microsoft thinks I should do. I use a Macbook Pro for work. I don't really care for MacOS, but they've got a real bash shell at least, and I like the consistency of clipboard handling in MacOS. I don't get to dictate my work environment, but thank goodness it isn't Windows. I'm running Devuan at home on a recent AMD 550 board with a 3100, and also on an older Macbook Pro. The only real issues I have are around getting wifi working during install on Debian and Devuan, due to firmware open-ness issues. I doubt Ubuntu has these issues. After install, though, the OP is correct, it's wonderfully boring. Install TLP and a recent 5.x kernel on laptops and power issues just disappear. Install Steam and use Proton, even with games from GoG, and everything that I own works. It's always jarring to help someone with a normal Windows machine; the ads, the o/s response times, the forced manufacturer bloatware really shocks me. I don't miss Windows at all.

none_to_remain 4y ago

But can you print?

rhyn00 4y ago

I would add that the linux-ready boutique vendors like system76, tuxedo computers, framework are also options if you don't want to fuss with drivers and what not, but still want to run linux. I definitely agree that linux doesn't run super smooth on all hardware, but it's not hard to find hardware these days where it does run smooth. I came across tuxedo computers randomly one day, and gave it a shot. Very impressed, and am extremely happy with my tuxedo pulse 15 gen2 - running their supported version of Ubuntu+KDE, that just works out of the box. Only thing I can complain about is that: speakers are not great (but I use headphones 90% time anyways), and KDE doesn't support independent resolution scaling (I need 125% for laptop display but 100% for external monitor), so it's a bit hacky to get scaling the way I want. However, everything else runs perfectly and smoothly. It's best laptop I've ever owned for linux. It is quite, portable, moderate power laptop, for fair price. I gave my wife my Macbook air M1 over this one. While the M1 CPU/GPU is a little more powerful than Ryzen 5700U (8 core), I get more ram (32gb 3200mhz), bigger and faster disk (1TB 980 pro pci 4), more battery life (18hr idle, 10+ working) for similar price. It's also repairable, w/ removable standard components (not cpu tho). Linux running SMOOTH. Basically with these type of vendors, you don't need to struggle or sacrifice (much) to run linux anymore. Tuxedo computers [1] has many more models worth checking out, like with high end GPUs or smaller/more portable (even one that support external liquid cooling and an rtx 3080ti lol). [1] Tuxedo Computer (notebooks) https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note... [2] Pulse 15 gen2 : https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/15-16-inch/TUXEDO-Pulse-15-Gen2.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Notebooks/...

Klonoar 4y ago
Another vendor to mention is Star Labs, who make the StarBook. Unlike most vendors they fabricate their own designs - not rebranded clevo shells.
- rhyn00 4y ago
  Wow, I'd never heard of StarBook, but it does indeed look like a wonderful machine.
- 4y ago

lukaszkups 4y ago

Also related: Linux Subsystem for Windows works in similar manner (at least for me!) - I've switched couple years ago from Linux -> OSX -> Linux -> WSL (when WSL was in 1.x version at the time and lacking from couple features) and gosh, I've never looked back since then (disclaimer: I'm a front-end developer (and making games in my spare time using various tools) and for my needs I've never found a serious complain about how WSL works)

prmoustache 4y ago
WSL do not works well with my company's vpn software and last time I checked there was an awful lot of limitations.

_nalply 4y ago

It's not boring. I use Arch Linux sway on my Framework laptop. I have 23 virtual screens (one for each digit, one for each function key and an additional one), and they have different scaling. This means on some screens I don't need my reading glasses. For that I wrote a script which is invoked by sway's event handler triggered by virtual screen switches. I find this exciting. It's not perfect. I still miss the smoothness of Apple's trackpad.

commandersaki 4y ago
Are you on the 11th or 12th gen Intel? What's your take on Arch -- do you find most things work? I've got a Framework on order coming sometime October and I'm thinking of using Arch for install. Things that I care about are display/graphics, webcam/mic/audio/video, a working suspend even if I have to resort to hibernate, media keys on the keyboard, and a usable trackpad. Things I don't really care about is probably the fingerprint reader. From the ArchWiki this seems to be a go, but I'm still a bit sceptical.
- _nalply 4y ago
  11th I think. I got mine February. Most things work. I didn't setup mic and audio, because being Deaf I couldn't be bothered. Suspend is very nice. There's hibernate, too and hybrid suspend/hibernate (first suspend and if battery is too low, hibernate). With sway you setup media keys yourself. I didn't bother. I only configured screen brightness and screenshots. Trackpad is okay. Don't expect Apple's smoothness. First it was very jerky till I found out that Firefox fell back to X11. The good: very configurable and mostly working The bad: it takes a lot of time to configure everything The ugly: kinetic scrolling is per application so all applications do this differently

isodev 4y ago

That’s a great story, and I’m happy that this is possible today. There is nothing technically limiting Linux desktops from offering a fantastic experience apart from walled gardens trying to keep eyeballs in their corner. Speaking of, unfortunately, Microsoft will be retiring Teams for Linux later this year https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-for-linux-is-being-retired/ https://www.omglinux.com/the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...

synu 4y ago

I must have been unlucky, I battled what felt like endlessly with sound and video card issues until I just switched back to Mac.

inamberclad 4y ago

Everything except bluetooth...

LinuxBender 4y ago

I've had mixed results on laptops. I've never bothered to make the fingerprint reader work, that just isn't my thing. I've had decent luck with all the standard functions video, audio, storage, keyboard, mousepad, wifi on most models of Lenovo and Dell in the last decade. I've had mixed results on Asus laptops, especially the recent ones. The biggest challenge I've had is finding out ahead of time what wifi chipset is used and this has only affected me when using tools like aircrack-ng [1]. The chipset can vary even within the same make/model of laptop depending on when it was manufactured. The way I quickly test how a laptop will behave is to boot Kali Linux [2] into ram. Sometimes a sales person at a computer store would let me do this on a demo model even though they probably should not. [1] - https://www.aircrack-ng.org/ https://www.aircrack-ng.org/ [2] - https://www.kali.org/ https://www.kali.org/

fefe23 4y ago

Buttons840 4y ago

I recently streamed some OuterWilds (great Myst style mystery / puzzle game) on Linux with Wayland and OBS. The game is only officially available for Windows, but Steam's work on emulation has done a lot for Linux. Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time. I was quite amazed it all worked so well. But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.

xani_ 4y ago
> Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. Was that "permission for OBS to record" or "permission for OBS to record that specific window" ? Coz I can see the second one being pretty annoying... > While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time. That worked with composing on X like 10 years ago. Well, aside from the fact that there was no Steam/Proton on Linux back then > But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux. Huh, my colleague had to do a bit of fuckery to get it working, altho a lot of that was due to 3rd party dock being... weird. It still randomly makes jet noises when idle... probably user error tho
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

cjohansson 4y ago

I will never buy a Apple laptop again because Apple stops supporting it after a while and you can't install new version of the OS on it and new software. This is a deal breaker for me, completely a waste of perfectly fine hardware. Installing Ununtu on it solved all problems fortunately. Same thing with Apple AirPort TimeCapsule, such a waste to buy it when Apple stops supporting it after a couple of years. You might as well buy products from Apple and get the delivered directly to the garbage dump

analog31 4y ago

No luck with touch screen in Ubuntu so far. It's a combination of the touch screen but not wanting the on-screen keyboard to pop up every time I touch in a text entry widget. I googled all over the place and tried a bunch of things that were suggested. Fortunately I've been trying this while Windows still works on my laptop, so I'm not desperate, and can always try again at asome point.

ricardobeat 4y ago

“Software is exists” and “my camera works” are pretty low bars.

sergiotapia 4y ago

The future is a Windows 10 desktop for gaming and most software. VMWare running your flavor of Linux for serious dev work. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. Been coding on my Linux VM for the past two years without a single hitch.

MichaelRazum 4y ago

Agree. At least ThinkPads work extremely well. The one thing that keeps me from completely switching is RDP. Is there some solutions that work as good on linux? Tried few but they couldn't match RDP on windows, especially with a bad connection.

netmonk 4y ago

To be clear, i had to wait from 1998 to 2021 before i install linux Mint on my father Laptop (now in his 70's). Since this recent move, i never receive a call that something is broken on his old laptop, and i dont need to explain to him that i dont know windows over the air, while he is stressing about printing his latest document to print and send ASAP. Thanks linux Mint.

chx 4y ago

My experience sharply differs and that was also on a T420 (later a T420s, same difference). In my experience there is a very narrow usage where ChromeOS does not suffice but Linux desktop does. If you fall into this -- and no doubt a lot of people do -- then things are peachy. But step aside and you are toast. I worked for a company running a certain F5 VPN and their 2FA didn't have a Linux client. I managed to make it work by running an ancient Firefox which still could run old style extensions -- and ran it as root. Very secure. MFC devices break all the time. And so forth.

jryan49 4y ago

I couldn't get dpi resizing to work at all. Like when I unplug my laptop from a lower dpi monitor. It was a such a nusance for me I went back to windows and use wsl.

mattlondon 4y ago

So damn well if you don't care about: sleep working reliably, waking from sleep working at all, Bluetooth, high-dpi without flickering, visual artefacts from igpus, vanishing mouse pointer, audio failing mid video call, webcams failing mid video call, no CPU scaling, crashing hard when the battery hits literally zero (without warning) causing BIOS corruption etc etc etc. I dumped my recent dell Linux laptop for a M1 Mac. Not my preference but at least the Mac works.

semireg 4y ago

Linux on the laptop instantly triggers nostalgia. I was 15 in 1998 and had just worked our families root beer and popcorn concession stands for 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair. Every penny I earned was used to purchase a brand new iMac in bondi blue. A year later I sold the iMac via the newspaper classifieds. I used that money to buy my first used laptop and proceeded to install Linux. I got my Linux distro, Redhat, from a CD-rom inside a book purchased at Barnes & Noble. I must have reinstalled Linux 100x on that machine. I remember using it to take notes in my PSEO (college in high school) classes at the local tech school. Fond memories. I’m sure Linux has come a long way. I still use it every day on the server, but switched back to mac on the desktop when apple went to Intel and could just run Linux/Windows in a VM when necessary.

afroisalreadyin 4y ago

I so wish this were true (and seeing it at the top of HN would make you believe it were true), but my experiences in the last 6 years or so with 4 different laptops speaks otherwise. 2 of those were sold with Linux on them (Dell and Tuxedo), 2 were Thinkpads, and they all had all kinds of issues. The best is the Tuxedo, but even that thing has issues with hybernating. Unfortunately, none of them comparable to the smooth functioning of a Macbook.

KaiserPro 4y ago

The fuck it does. I have a lenovo t14 something or other. I have to fiddle with the bios to get suspend work. This means that the battery lasts about 4 days. However whenever it resumes, the touchpad appears to only work at 5 frames per second. Moreover, its impossible to hibernate with secure boot.

tadfisher 4y ago
Intel or AMD? Intel removed S3 support from the platform entirely, and S0ix support was spotty until recent kernels/distros. Lenovo royally screwed up the AMD firmware, so kernel 5.18 includes a hack to force-suspend the NVMe subsystem regardless of what their broken ACPI handler wants to do. Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown", which most distros leave enabled. I feel like the security people push these patches through and dismiss user needs by waving the "hibernation is impossible to secure and standby is good enough" flag, and we have to live with a broken feature set compared to Windows. It's not a great attitude to have, from the user standpoint anyway.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  Intel and S0ix is still spotty, in that out of the box it doesn't work. To make suspend work I need to enable s3 support in the bios. even then it gets me about 4 days, rather than the weeks I expect a modern laptop to last > Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown" Which as I can't practically turn it off (the linux laptop is owned by $work) is a massive pain. Meanwhile the 2014 retina has a standby time of >3 weeks, and if the battery gets too low, it goes into hibernation. which leads me to my original statement; "the fuck it does" (I should point out that I've been using linux since the late 90s, and whilst I use it everyday, I still don't really think its good on laptops. Its better, but not good.)

jll29 4y ago

Linux worked out of the box (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu) with: - Lenovo ThinkPad T41 - Lenovo ThinkPad X61s - LenovWo ThinkPad X220 - Lenovo ThinkPad X230 - Lenovo ThinkPad X1 - DELL Latitude E7762 - DELL Latitude E7480 - Apple iMac 27" Problems encountered: - The touchpad on the Lenovo ThinkPad 240 mad random jumps, not sure if this is a Linux issue since I never tried Windows (I usually wipe it right after unpacking). - Couldn't install any Linux flavour on the Microsoft Surface 3 laptop. It was painful to get rid of Windows and UEFI boot, and apparently a kernel patch is needed to go further (according to Microsoft support, who didn't provide said patch). Does anyone here have that patch BTW? Generally speaking it is getting harder and harder to install Linux, due to Microsofts efforts to make PCs "more secure" (which - oops - prevents the installation of competitors' OSes, how convenient).

mminer237 4y ago
The worst thing about broken touchpads is that they're impossible to turn off in Ubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-disabled-in-ubuntu-22-04 https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-dis... There's a button to do so, but it's just been broken for months with no fix other than uninstalling part of the last update. Given that Linux typically has no palm detection, it's really a frustrating experience to use on a laptop.
- wazoox 4y ago
  Weird, I'm running Pop_OS which is a Ubuntu fork and the trackpad button just works (not that I use it at all anyway).
- hedora 4y ago
  The palm detection problem surprises me. The toggle has has "just worked" for 15+ years of laptops for me. However, palm detection on many of those laptops was garbage in Windows and equally bad in Linux. Some distros support rejecting touchpad events for N seconds after the last keystroke. That is 100% software, and sort of works for even the worst touchpads. Edit: Oh, you mention Ubuntu. I gave up on them a long time ago. Devuan works well if you want old-school Debian. Manjaro works well if you want a stable "modern" desktop environment (like Ubuntu used to provide) with menus for hardware configuration, user session switching, etc.

Snacklive 4y ago

Reading this post makes me wonder if i'm absolutely lucky or something because linux always worked great out of the box in almost any computer i ever had, even my new Gigabyte laptop

lbayes 4y ago

Yeah, even a broken clock is right twice a day. OP got lucky with some crusty laptop and drew a wildly expansive and inaccurate conclusion. Maybe true for old machines, but definitely not true for newish models. Not even for machines being sold with Linux preinstalled. My Linux Dell XPS from ~5 years ago required me to buy and install a different radio because the Broadcom one didn't actually work with latest Ubuntu (at that time). The next XPS I got mostly worked, but had lots of audio issues. The Inspiron was horrible. Touchscreen fails, audio fails, radio fails, sleep fails. My custom Ryzen 3900X workstation has ongoing issues with sound and sleep (yes, latest kernel, latest drivers, latest LTS OS). My most recent laptop purchase from earlier this year either had no wifi in Ubuntu or no Bluetooth in Fedora. I was able to force Fedora to work after a week of messing with it. Still have intermittent sleep and audio issues. FWIW, I've been running Linux in various roles since the late 90's, so not a noob and definitely not complaining. It's free, it's open source, package management is awesome. The command line is irreplaceable. I use Linux on the daily and deeply appreciate all the incredibly hard and thankless work that so many people put into it. That said, Linux still does not have anything close to the level of polish that MacOS delivers and it definitely doesn't get out of the way to the extent that it can be called boring. YMMV

tmtvl 4y ago
YMMV indeed, I've been using Linux full-time since 2012, with a brief exception in 2016-2017 when I was working for a company that was all-in on Apple. I used an iMac running Yosemite that year and could reliably get the iMac to hard reboot by launching a Xubuntu VM in VirtualBox. It kinda made me lose all hope for our industry as Apple is usually hailed as the epitome of quality and yet it still was garbage.

trm42 4y ago

Haha, sounds super boring compared to 2004 when I bought Fujitsu Siemen's cheapest Pentium M laptop and had to build some kernel modules, build custom rules for power saving scenes (as there weren't that much of ready rules) and find the most optimal parameters for every module and CPUFreq configs etc. Also, figuring out the sequence of disabling modules etc for suspend to disk and suspend to ram sleep modes with more custom scripts was super fun. Managed to squeeze whole 8 hours from a battery that was supposed to work 4-6 hours in Windows XP. Fun times.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

This has not been my experience. When I use Linux for work, I still hit random things that need the command line, and it's much less stable than Windows (hard freezes). I tried to use Linux (specifically Mint) as an HTPC to use with Stepmania, but immediately ran into problems with both audio coming through and the TV resolution, and had to fall back to Windows, which worked with no drama. This has happened every time I've tried to use Linux at home: I end up running into random problems that are weirdly hard to solve, or things that won't work period.

eBombzor 4y ago

So many negative comments. Always preferred Linux whether it's Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch to any windows OS. All the laptops I had were: Thinkpad T450s, HP Spectre 15, Acer Nitro 5. All of them work flawlessly. Windows on the other hand...

onehair 4y ago
It is the simple truth. Thinkpads are usually very good and work out of the box, but a lot of other brands just don't. It isn't about hate or being negative, it's seeing a very biased affirmation generalizing a positive one time occurrence and painting it as the actual general fact.

onehair 4y ago

On old niche laptops from Thinkpad, Dell, maybe, probably. Good luck with the other brands and fairly new laptops. My best non function is a trackpad not working :P Every damn time

LAC-Tech 4y ago

I've had linux on the desktop as my daily driver for 12 of the past 14 years. Yes it takes a little bit longer to setup. But once I do it it's just so much more comfortable for me than Windows. Faster, easier to maintain, insanely better UI all configured in my dot files. So yeah, there's a ramp up, and you need to be a bit resourceful. And it's probably not a great strategy to just choose any old laptop. But I still love it. 2022 is yet another happy year of the Linux Desktop for me.

jcalvinowens 4y ago

I've been running Linux on Dell XPS laptops with only very minor issues since 2016. Currently on an XPS 13 9310, everything works perfectly. ...and that's with debian sid, a btrfs rootfs, and rebooting into whatever "git pull" in the kernel git repo gives me most weeks. I do that because I want to help fix bugs, but I honestly haven't found anything to fix in years: it just works. Interesting that everybody with problems in this thread seems to be using thinkpads. Maybe they aren't what they used to be?

davidw 4y ago
I've been using Dell hardware with Ubuntu for... sheez almost 15 years now? Once in a while there's some little oddity, but it mostly just shows up working out of the box and lets me do what I need to without all the annoying MacOS crap. I had to use a Mac at my last job and I absolutely hated it. I couldn't configure it the way I wanted. Stuff like 'brew' is a necessity, but not a core part of the system like apt. Keys are not where I expect them... which isn't really their fault, but when you've been using something for 20+ years, switching suuuuucks.

jrm4 4y ago

Absolutely correct. Funny coincidence that happened to me: Got my Steam Deck on the same day I got an email informing my that one of my university supplied Macs had to go back and be surplused because of our end of life policies. Now, I've typically been able to keep pretty much every computer I've been given if I have a reason (and I teach IT so I always have reasons) Upon informing them that I wiped Mac Os from it and have been running Linux instead, IT services was -- "Ah, okay, fine -- bring it in so we can make sure it's updated and you're good to keep it. Otherwise it would have to come back."

varispeed 4y ago

Funny that, when my beefed up XPS 15 finally died, I went on eBay on got one of those Thinkpads dumped by corporations for like £120. I put in the NVMe drive from the XPS and... it was working out of the box. What is surprising that it feels much faster, fans don't make as much noise that despite weaker CPU and 4x less RAM. I really like it. I got an M1 Pro as well, but Thinkpad will be a nice backup machine.

lucideer 4y ago

Thesis: "Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days." Evidence: 1 data point, my own 11-year old laptop This article is not notable.

ok_dad 4y ago

Ya know, Linux isn't for everyone, but I like it. I get to do what I want, when I want, and my OS doesn't stop me. I haven't had any issues with hardware so far, because I bought a laptop from System76 and they do a lot of work to make things usable without fuss. I am sure I can't do everything everyone wants to do with a computer, but I don't care because all I do with my laptop (work and home) is read Hacker News and random programming documentation and then program stuff. I guess for me, I could be using a smart toaster from 2012 and probably be happy.

patrulek 4y ago

Boring because you dont need to waste hours for configuration and troubleshooting not working drivers?

mukundmr 4y ago

We use several hundred laptops from Dell that run Linux (Ubuntu & CentOS) as the primary developer laptop in our organisation. They work well. Of course every now and then some user comes up with an idea to uninstall default Python…

paulcarroty 4y ago

Yep, writing this on Linux laptop. And this is not thinkpad. Note: do not expect bleeding edge hardware to work 100% well, it takes some time (~3-6 months).

brink 4y ago

ITT: bunch of whiners that didn't pick hardware that was proven to be compatible with Linux before buying. The solid experience on modern laptops is there, you just have to spend 10 minutes researching compatibility on the laptop before you buy.

sk1pper 4y ago

I want this to be true very badly. I’ve been a Linux user for nearly 20 years and I’ve never had an install that “just works” to the level of macOS or even Windows. Although there was a while there in like 2006 where I had a pretty solid install of Ubuntu on some HP laptop I had at the time. That’s the closest I got. This is of course extremely anecdotal. Everyone’s on different hardware and therefore has pretty different experiences. I hate Windows as a development OS but I’d rather deal with that than some odd update that breaks my install completely, or spending hours reading forum posts to try to make my Bluetooth driver less shitty, etc etc. I just use macOS for dev and Windows for gaming and they stay out of my way. I’ll keep trying Linux again once a year or so, but I’m not optimistic on it. It’s a moving target too due to varying hardware support over time.

fyloraspit 4y ago
I see a lot of Windows laptops, and am also a Linux enthusiast, and honestly, Windows does have the issues you are talking about occasionally, same as popular Linux distros. They, for example, sometimes have maddening issues like on default settings delivering driver updates to (Intel) display drivers which are very fiddly to roll back and pin in order to fix. Even the walled garden of Apple has problems depending on whether or not their new M1 line will be compatible with what you want to do. Modern computers and the operating systems that straddle them are complex systems, and sometimes have complex problems. The best we can do is find our own balance of stability given requirements, and be thankful for the technological advancements meaningful to us.

geoffbp 4y ago

Year of the Linux desktop

zac23or 4y ago

The most dificult thing to believe is the Ms Teams working without problem. "The Linux works in a 11 year old ThinkPad, so it works easily in any computer" is a quantum jump to conclusion.

stuaxo 4y ago
Linux Teams, kind of worked OK..ish. There are though, lots of features that are missing - which might be OK, except they are going to finish supporting Teams on Linux and pushing everyone to use the web version, which is poor.

raffraffraff 4y ago

...unlike the Raspberry Pi. About a year ago I installed a Raspberry Pi 4B+ behind my 40" monitor, with Kodi + some DLNA stuff on it. It almost works, but it has hard fails in enough important areas that I've given up on it. - No sleep / standby mode (lowest power is 'idle') - No Wake On Lan, so if you power it off completely, you have to cycle the power on the power supply (not easy, since mine is behind the "TV") - Chromium crashes on YouTube (https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640) - Firefox ESR doesn't play sound on most YouTube videos (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/109185/some-youtube-videos-have-no-audio-on-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-running-raspbian-bus https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/109185/some-...) - Can't run Windows apps (eg the amazing MusicBee) because it's ARM - Shitty disk support (stuck with SD card or USB) I gave an old ThinkPad T430 to my 9 year old nephews about a year ago, and they've completely trashed it: busted screen hinges, broken backlight and cracked case. I'm gonna remove the faulty screen and permanently hook it up to the TV as a "headless laptop" (https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jt2p8j/i_see_your_raspberry_pi_400_and_i_raise_you_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jt2p8j/i_see_your...). Because guess what? Linux runs boringly well on it. Also: built-in keyboard, low-power standby mode, trackpad, proper SSD and more useful ports than the Pi.

jagger27 4y ago

With the caveat that you have to like Gnome or KDE. They’re both better than Windows but Gnome in particular has gone too far with its ultra minimalist UI design. I just wish there was something built on Sway that’s nice to use out of the box that doesn’t require a witch’s cauldron of dot files. Why are all the cool DEs so allergic to GUI configuration tools?

major505 4y ago

I was suprised when I upgraded my old Thinkpad x250 to the Inspiron 15 from DEll. Installed Pop Os on it and it worked really well. I could even make the fingerprint scanner run without problem. In the end I endup going back to win 11 because someone wanted me to maintain a vb5 and winform .net aplication, and because Borderlands 3 runs better on win, unfortunally.

stuaxo 4y ago

Wow, I wish. I've been using a couple of ryzen laptops (an HP with a 2500u, then an HP with a 3700u) for about 5 years. It works pretty well, except: When the laptop wakes up there's a good chance that the UI shows up but I can't click on anything or type. I can then reboot by holding Alt-SysReq and typing REISUB. Or: The screen is still black, and nothing works, as above. I can run games, though if I play something like GTA-V, it will eventually get too hot and I have to hard reset. This is because the fan control doesn't properly work.

wazoox 4y ago
HP laptops are well known for their crappy linux support. I've bought a brand new Lenovo Ryzen laptop in 2020, slapped POP_OS on it and everything works fine ever since (excepting the fingerprint reader, that has no linux driver). It boots quickly, power management, bluetooth and Wifi work fine, I can hot plug screens and stuff to it no problem, and waking it up from sleep just works (OK it's getting a tad long recently, about 5 to 10s -- but it just works).

Saris 4y ago

I have the opposite experience, desktop or laptop I've never had Linux work well out of the box.

jeromenerf 4y ago

I thought Linux was often times annoying with Bluetooth connection issues, sleep related bugs … I enjoy how boring stable it is on thinkpad. Then I bought a Mac m1 second hand for photo related needs and it doesn’t wake up the external monitor on resume from suspend, doesn’t auto switch Bluetooth mic, doesn’t provide volume mixer for hdmi external monitor, can’t manage wifi&Ethernet at the same time … I stopped worrying and am using both happily, with their flaws.

rodolphoarruda 4y ago

Today I found out that my wife's 2 y.o. Lenovo IdeaPad reboots Ubuntu so fast that I thought it was just logging out the user session. It was around 3 seconds. It took me two reboots to actually realize what was going on.

adverbly 4y ago

I have a few old laptops kicking around still. We're talking 10+ year old laptops here that weren't even top of the line when new. The differences in OS bloat between the two is night and day. The Windows 8 laptop that I swear takes 15+ minutes to boot and struggles to do simple web browsing. It reminds me of what happens to 5+ year old phones where they seem to get slower for no good reason. My linux laptops are still going strong like the day they were new.

kristjank 4y ago

I find the comments so strangely defensive. How can one even start to compare MacOS, which needs to support exactly one (1) vendor with less than 10 models with a kernel with the widest hardware support on the planet? Noone would test-drive a new car and expect all the buttons and dials to still be at the same exact positions, but when it comes to trying out a different OS, it sure seems like lots of folx assume it's going to be just as their old one. The immense improvement in documentation provided by ArchWiki, ThinkWiki, Gentoo Wiki and wiki.instalgentoo.org shouldn't be understated. Almost all models are documented to the point where 30 minutes of research will teach you everything you need to know about the hardware and its capability to run whatever distro you want to. Going from a ton of older Dell models, then to a T420, to a T450s, to a T530, most of the features I ever needed as a developer and netadmin have always been readily available, with the rest of them being delegated to cloud services and/or remote (sometimes virtualized) machines running a Linux distro or a BSD. Windows has the definite advantage of being a market leader with the longest run in the history of personal computing, but there is definitely something to be said for the immense development that the *nix side of things has been exhibiting compared to 15, 10 or even just 5 years ago. The year of Linux desktop and laptop is still far away, but at least we're seeing goodwill both from software and hardware vendors, and it would be a real shame we throw the good trends away at this point in time.

nicbou 4y ago
No one is arguing that Mac has an advantage in the game, that people are working hard on *nix. It's just irrelevant if your goal is to have a laptop that just works.

xani_ 4y ago

Well, author threw a dice and won. Work Sony Vaio also worked perfectly. But seen quite a few people with other that had problems.

stakkur 4y ago

Ah, cue the long thread of “No because my special combination of hardware/special configuration demands caused problems so Linux bad!”

eointierney 4y ago

I always enjoy the crapshoot of installing linux on random (recycled) laptops. I've been doing this for decades and I'm always pleasantly surprised at how far we've come. Glitches abound, but so do solutions, and the general robustness is awesome. So thank you, kernel and other devs, your work is hugely appreciated, even in moments of raging frustration (I just blame the short-sighted CxO's who delegate responsibilty to overworked product managers that are often just over-promoted engineers). Yay GNU/Linux! Freedom for everyone with a bit of patience and a wilful curiousity :)

irusensei 4y ago

I don’t know about that but I appreciate some things about Linux, specially the fact that the OS is not creepily trying to sell you something. I have an Asus G513 that I bought specially for Linux. It a Ryzen laptop with a discrete Radeon card. Nice performing machine, although its easy to thermal throttle it so tunning thermal profiles is often necessary. Its not perfect but it works. Out of curiosity I’ve decided to use Windows for a while. Well, anyone here probably knows how Windows became Bonzi Buddy OS but that’s not the worse of it. On Linux I had asusctl to control fans and keyboard lights. For this functionality on Windows I had to install something called Armory Crate from Asus. I shit you not this app sends product offers as system notifications. Things in Windows land also tend to ambush the user at every opportunity to create an account or associate their social media profiles. When I compare the professional presentation of Fedora or Pop OS default desktops with the hysterical ad show of Windows and its third party tools having to live with one or two things not working correctly is a tradeoff I gladly take.

sfvegandude 4y ago

Okay, does hibernation work? How about palm rejection on the track pad? Hi-Dpi fractional scaling? Do I need to read hostile *nix forums to find the right incantation to make Wi-fi work?

npteljes 4y ago

Ludicrous. On some, it does, on others, otherwise there's minor issues, major issues, sometimes regressions. Linux is very clearly a second class citizen on the PC, with hardware only coming with support for the current gen Windows. Some doesn't even work with Windows well, and that's the supposedly supported platform. I _do_ use Linux on everything, mind you. But I also keep a file where I collect my fixes for the different systems, so that I won't forget them when I reinstall. And I accept that sometimes things don't work, like a fingerprint reader, and I live with that. One such random thing from the notes is that the touchpad wouldn't come alive after a sleep. The fix is the "i8042.nomux=1" kernel parameter. Hours of duckduckgoing went into that. I like to tinker, but it's not working "so damn well that it's boring".

majormajor 4y ago

Sure, the overall "eventually stuff gets supported" story is good. And people hold on to hardware a lot more than they used to. This guy's using a T420. That's an 11 year old machine! Older hardware has always worked much better under Linux than newer hardware (sometimes for longer than it's worked well on Windows). It's also pretty amazing that there are now some major-vendor Linux-out-of-the-box laptops. But the pool is still not all that large. I was just looking at an Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Google suggests ... nah. Very un-boring. E.g. https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/63549/linux-on-zenbook-s-13-oled https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/63549/linux-on-zenboo... https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wv2c28/anyone_using_one_of_these_new_um5302_from_asus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wv2c28/anyon... Fun shit like "keyboard doesn't work yet" plus various other nothing-surprising-to-me-after-doing-this-for-20-years stuff like weird audio driver patch crap.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

Intel hardware was really good on Linux but I suppose that will change in the future because it seems the person responsible for that has left Intel.

drummersbrother 4y ago

my experience has been mostly good. I used to work on a beat-up hp low-end laptop from 2012, on which I put arch w/ i3-gaps. It had only one issue, a driver that killed the laptop on any sudden acceleration (to protect the hdd write heads on the original machine, I'd put in a ssd). I found a way to disable it and otherwise had no issues, everything was pretty snappy considering the slow i3 cpu. On my current 2020 razer blade, I've had to create a workaround script for the intel backlight driver not working properly (on boot it maxes out at 30% backlight, but cat 100 to the correct file and the full range is unlocked). I still don't know how to handle plugging in external screens (e.g. to give presentations) but that's an i3-gaps issue and not the laptop's fault, and the battery life is pretty abysmal since graphics switching from the nvidia gpu to the igpu seems to disable using the gpu for cuda workloads (for which the fix is to have the charger with me at all times).

linuxhansl 4y ago

+1 Running Linux on laptops since the late 90's. In the beginning I had to tinker a lot, compile custom kernels, etc. Now - for the past 10 years or so - it (especially Redhat's Fedora) just works without doing anything, even with the newest laptops. Wayland is not quite there, yet (IMHO), so I'm still running X11 (thankfully Fedora let's me do that).

gatane 4y ago

Improve less developed OSes, like Redox, Haiku, Serenety...

midislack 4y ago

Damn threads like this always bring out hordes of certain types of posters. For me though it's OpenBSD, I don't trust Linux any more. PRC's a little too heavily involved in the project. I can only imagine the back and forth between their operatives and the NSA's, sometimes it flares up on the LKML to the point where it glows brighter the sun.

TwoNineFive 4y ago

I am disappointed in the number of people hyping up Lenovo/Thinkpads in this thread. Lenovo is not IBM and their quality is not that great. Some models are good, but plenty of others are bad. Dell has been shipping linux for decades now and Lenovo only announced partial support on some models a year or two ago. Don't fall for the hype. Not all Lenovo/Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all).

aljgz 4y ago
> Not all Lenovo/Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all) That does not matter. If they have one really good model, that's enough for everyone. >Dell has been shipping linux for decades now I'm an Apple hater, like a vegan hates rare steak. Yet, I'm much more likely to buy my next gear from Apple than Dell. Where do I begin? For starters, everything I've bought from Dell starting with a Latitude D850, all the way to the Xps 13 I bought in 2020 and a 32 curved monitor in 2022, they were all faulty. In a large organization that with 30,000 laptops used by their employees, the IT department loves Dell's support: anything breaks, they will fix/replace it in 24 hours or a few hours depending on your guaranty level. But for me? I prefer it to work well to begin with. My Asus N550 worked for me for 7 years and it was top notch until the bed broke and destroyed it. I've never had a dell product that had zero problems. The latitude would flicker for minutes if for whatever reason screen went off and on. The xps's webcam stopped working and would randomly connect in certain angles of the lid. The laptop was advertised to support linux, but there was no fingerprint reader and when they released it, it was Ubuntu only. The monitor starts to flicker randomly and the replacement they sent me has a corner with ~100 pixels showing whatever they like, waiting for a second replacement. Never Dell again.

krick 4y ago

IDK, maybe it is boring for a guy who has nothing better to do than to fuck with configuring software he uses. But I kinda tricked myself into thinking GNU/Linux is an actually usable OS, like, to live with it without noticing it too much. Now, after 15 years I'm way too attached to it to sell my soul to Microsoft, but I'm still waiting for that "year of Linux on desktop". I don't want to configure anything anymore, I have my life, man. I'm too old and too busy for this shit. I just want it to work, on its own. Yet, I'm still occasionally struggling with hardware compatibility and Ubuntu package manager issues. And I won't even complain about that one time I was foolish enough to set-up ZFS on a laptop: after all, it was offered in "Advanced Settings" tab and I should've known better. Suffice to say, that buying basic consumer-grade hardware I still cannot assume that it will work reasonably well with Linux. Honestly, I'm almost for real offended by someone daring to say not having to spend my life solving Linux problems should be qualified as "boring" — especially when it's not the case, and when I still often find out that stuff that had me struggling with it for hours, days, or even turned out to simply not work on Linux at all — is basically plug-and-play on Windows. I mean, if you think about it, there's no reason to expect it not to be the case, but it is exactly the headlines like that, that trick you into believing this and buying stuff before meticulously googling everything and making sure it can be used with Linux in the first place (which is often not Google-able as well, when it comes to a bit less common items, than, let's say, top-100 products on Amazon).

drekipus 4y ago

I have a brand new dell xps 13 and it works so amazingly well I bought another xps 13 for my sister

mmmpetrichor 4y ago

I bought a a dell developer xps preloaded with ubuntu. It had issues from day 1, related to sleep, related to bluetooth, related to closing the lid and expecting it to do what I wanted. I fixed some of them after messing with it for weeks, but was plagued by kernel panics in the qualcomm wireless driver that was unfixable. Finally had enough BS and switched to windows. Always kind of aggravating to see posts like OP saying how great linux is as a desktop, ignoring how horrible it is in general across a broad range of hardware. And apparently even direct from dell, in my case. edit: BTW experienced dev using linux VMs, baremetal, and WSL for 15 years. I love linux as a dev, but I will never touch it again as a desktop OS.

mmmpetrichor 4y ago
Oh, I forgot to add, I tried to load linux on a different older dell xps 13 laptop since it was nearly dead and useless. No wireless driver out of box for dell wireless. Found some random articles about how to get it working. None of them worked. I actually forgave that since I had a USB network adapter and didn't necessarily need wireless. that wasn't it tho I ran into other random issues. seriously linux is still terrible as a desktop OS. I won't even get into UI .

apatheticonion 4y ago

Hoping one day soon I'll be able to use Gnome on my M1 MacBook with full hardware acceleration and unchanged power efficiency/battery life. MacBook laptops feel great to use, their Keyboards, their trackpads, their screens, their battery lives are unparalleled - but MacOS is such a compatibility nightmare. No Vulkan support makes gaming difficult, no kernel support for containerisation makes using development tools like Docker cumbersome. Apple are total dicks for locking down their hardware so tightly and refusing to support efforts to extend support to other OSes.

brianjacobs 4y ago

I have an L14 gen 2 amd thinkpad, and have had a ton of issues with the touchpad and occansional issues with the down key repeating for no reason. My wife has an E14 gen 3 amd thinkpad and absolutely no issues. The future for linux on the laptop is here, just unevenly distributed. Both on Fedora 36 KDE.

osigurdson 4y ago

My experience with fresh installs has usually be pretty good on older laptops. However, it always eventually starts to go downhill for me (likely somewhat self inflicted). It would be interesting if the author still feels the same after a year or so.

jll29 4y ago

I had the following - and luckily they worked great under Linux (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu): Lenovo ThinkPad x61s Lenovo ThinkPad x220 Lenovo ThinkPad x230 Lenovo ThinkPad Lenovo ThinkPad x1 DELL Latitude E7450 and similar Problematic: Lenovo ThinkPad x240 - hypersensitive touchpad makes mouse pointer jumpt while writing text

gregmolnar 4y ago

I just received my Framework laptop recently, installed Fedora 36 + KDE Plasma, and even though it took some tweaking to get a close to my Mac behaviour, it works perfect. I had 0 driver problems. So it looks like Linux on the desktop seems to be getting there. And the best part, with this laptop, no shop needed to replace the battery, I can do it myself.

ansgri 4y ago
For the battery part, any boring Dell Latitude is no worse. As probably are other common business laptops. It’s much easier in most of the world actually – your local dealer might have one in stock, no need to ship overseas. And Linux support for this machines is pretty decent too, a good trade-off over peculiarities of modern Windows at least. It’s been like this for about 10 years already, in my experience running Ubuntu and lately Mint on mid-range laptops as a tech-savvy user who hates tinkering with OS setup.

s_ting765 4y ago

Yes. Until you want to do anything gpu accelerated. You'll be lucky to setup hw video playback, and when you do hevc isn't supported. You want to watch your videos/or game in HDR? ,, banish those silly thoughts from your mind. Emulating graphics hardware (GPU passthrough) with qemu is a pita. You want to emulate Android apps, the best solution (Waydroid) only works on Wayland. Though this wouldn't be a problem if Xorg wasn't holding out. And Nvidia had played nice with Linux. Memory and OOM situation management is a sham and another pita just waiting to bite. This could make you lose all your windows and in some cases even data as the solution involves forcing a reboot from your machine. I could go on and on. A lot of improvements have however been made in the usability aspect, main one being flatpak packages. But there's a terribly long road ahead to make Linux desktop feel less of a second-class citizen compared to other operating systems.

hedora 4y ago
Nvidia driver support is indeed garbage, but AMD is great for video games, stable diffusion, etc these days. The OOM situation is a dumb systemd thing. Presumably some distros will ship working setups. I haven't had any problems with Majaro. I've been using Linux since the pppd days, but the last time I tried (2019?) it took me over a day to get Ubuntu LTS's DNS client to resolve sites in under thirty seconds. YMMV. Also, Devuan isn't bad for single user setups.

baby 4y ago

I recently looked into buying a linux laptop and it seems like only unattractive laptops were advised (thinkpads) and that you’d have to install linux on them yourself

cztomsik 4y ago

In the meantime I was trying to install new fedora kde plasma and it got frozen during the install. You were lucky. I was not.

kosolam 4y ago

Of course, like many others in this thread I strongly disagree. We are talking here of 20 years that Linux desktop has been mostly standing in place (and going backwards as well). I’ve used Linux in the 90’ and the early 2000’ so I remember well. The thing is it might be Microsoft putting sticks in the wheels of open source by planting it’s own people in the industry.

stoical 4y ago

lol, reading this as I'm trying to get the Nvidia driver working on a 2010 mac mini ... if it was an Intel graphics model it would be fine, but non-standard hardware still breaks things, even on relatively common machines

jarbus 4y ago

The most important thing I think when it comes to getting a Linux desktop that just works, is to buy a laptop that has little-to-no issues with Linux in the first place. As someone who struggled with linux on his existing Windows laptop, I made sure that my next laptop had very few issues on the Arch Wiki, and I installed Arch onto it. Works perfectly.

APhoenixRises 4y ago

I like to keep one of my personal laptops running Linux, but I won't be using one at work again soon unless I have the rights to pave and reinstall. While I'm more than willing to spend my evenings tinkering issues on my own laptop, I can't spend hours of work time debugging a graphics or audio issue that pops up.

husamia 4y ago

Linux works so well with old laptops because it took year for the community to solve the problems. thanks to the community

butz 4y ago

Laptop - I agree, as my Lenovo Thinkpad runs Linux without issues. I'm having trouble on desktop PC with wake up from suspend (when PC goes to sleep automatically after set amount on minutes) and wireless dropping randomly.

antifa 4y ago

I find the headline pretty disturbing because a) no it isn't and b) what would be boring is never being able to do anything because you were forced to spend all day "tinkering" with the OS for stability reasons or dismissing a constant barrage of nagware. Linux easily beats windows in this regard.

peanut_worm 4y ago

Trackpad drivers are still horrible as far as I know

ajyotirmay 4y ago

A lot of argument here complaints that Linux is broken outside of Linux specific vendors or ThinkPads. Well, how did it go for you to try and run MacOS on non-Apple hardware? Maybe, sure you get a better experience with hardware supported by Linux. But that's a lot of bias in your opinion.

wizwit999 4y ago

It's not bad, some things are just missing. E.g Night light doesn't work on Wayland with Nvidia drivers.

bel_marinaio 4y ago

Most of the comments here report the opposite of the linked article. Using Linux still seems to involve a significant amount of being your own IT department. I have tried Linux a few times over the years. One test was for almost 2 weeks on vacation, in a developing country, where it wasn't safe to be walking around with a MacBook. Another was for a few days as a Linux home theater. After struggling for hours with the sound drivers I gave up. I was frustrated with the amount of trouble shooting involved with Linux. That combined with preferring the OS has kept me on MacBooks for the past decade+.

paulsmal 4y ago

Dell XPS 15 9510(11th gen cpu), intel-only with Dell Thunderbolt Dock works with zero issues. I'm connecting Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and mouse + headphones, external monitors. Yeah, touchpad is not as good as on mac but I don't care. UPD: Fedora 36