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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 addition

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.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, what laptop? My samples in the last 6 years are: - Thinkpad Carbon X1 14" (i7-5600u). Everything worked out of the box with Arch Linux at the time. Best experience I've ever had. - HP Envy 13z (R5 2500u) everything works today but the out of the box experience was very poor. Windows update installed an APU microcode update that broke the Linux AMDGPU driver and had to run an -rc kernel for awhile. Took a year to get a touchscreen driver and years to get the driver for the tablet sensors (rotation, etc.). Total wait of 3 years for all features, but I never had the desire to use it as a tablet so I was okay with it. Sleep works but this laptop had awful battery drain issues in sleep (30% per day). - Dell XPS 15 7590 (i9-9980hk) - Sleep is broke in both Linux and Windows. Everything else works well, including, notably, NVIDIA Optimus / DRI PRIME. - Asus ZenBook 14 (R7 5800U) - second best out of box experience. Touchpad is connected via i2c and my Gentoo install didn't have it enabled. I'd never bumped into i2c hid devices other than touchscreens.
  - meibo 4y ago
    > Dell XPS 15 7590 (i9-9980hk) - Sleep is broke in both Linux and Windows. Yes! How can they sell these like that? My XPS 13 will never go to sleep correctly, either the screen stays on or it doesn't shut off correctly, in Windows or Linux. You'd think that this is the basic feature a laptop has to have. And it's not just me, their forums are full of people having problems and their support has no idea. They were sending me guides for latitudes from 2012. Definitely not going for Dell hardware again.
  - wooque 4y ago
    Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 (Ryzen 7 4700U), old laptop was Dell Latitude 7xx0 (or something, don't remember exact model), with Intel i5-5300U CPU, Linux worked perfectly on that machine.
    - Teknoman117 4y ago
      Oof. I better check in with the person I bought one for as a gift... (R5 4500U variant though)
Teknoman117 4y ago
My main issue with my current laptop is that the synopsis touchpads connect over i2c, and there has been a lot of ongoing work in the kernel that keeps requiring me to change my kernel config (PINCTRL_AMD needing to be selected for the 5.18 to 5.19 kernel update). My last laptop (an AMD version of the HP Envy 13) was also rough at the beginning. A BIOS update updated the AMD GPU firmware or microcode or something and broke compatibility with the current kernel stable kernel at the time. Had to switch to an -rc kernel to get video to work. Admittedly, my day job is basically Linux kernel development so I'm intimately familiar with most of this stuff. Not exactly your typical user.
- genewitch 4y ago
  I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers, but you mentioned that you do kernel dev, so it makes sense. 5.15 is "stable", at least on gentoo.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    > I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers Distro maintainers certainly, unless you're Gentoo, Arch, or one of the other mostly-bleeding-edge rolling release distros. The "stable" kernel is whatever the current release is and "longterm" kernels are typically the last major kernel version released in a given year. https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html Most distributions pick whatever the latest longterm kernel is when they cut releases. Sometimes they don't and things get strange, such as when Canonical chose kernel 4.15 for Ubuntu 18.04, requiring them to maintain an unsupported kernel themselves. IIRC that was because a bunch of AMD CPU and GPU support was added in 4.15.
vjk800 4y ago
The annoying thing is that it's quite unpredictable. You can sometimes find information on the internet on which laptops Ubuntu is going to work on out of the box, but usually it's a gamble. Sometimes you notice something's not working a month after buying the laptop just because you never happened to try the feature before.
Loic 4y ago
For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480. But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bit.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mid-kid 4y ago
  I kind of expected the A485 to have similar issues to the T480, since it's the same laptop except for the cpu and graphics. I did some preliminary searching and the listing of the laptop as "ubuntu certified" gave me too much confidence, I guess. I forgot to mention in the parent post that the SD card reader can't detect insertion/removal at times, yeah, so I have a script to reload the rtsx_pci_sdmmc kernel module to force it to recheck.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    Being an AMD instead of Intel, the motherboard is different which means the whole laptop is different.
  - ldng 4y ago
    The A485 has really terrible support ! To the point I'm wondering if Lenovo didn't do it on purpose ... Very disappointed with mine to this day. Time definitely did not improve support.
- a-dub 4y ago
  same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.
  - autoexec 4y ago
sbf501 4y ago
Ubuntu: Except for Bluetooth and audio, and sometimes it forgets there's a wired Ethernet port I have to down/up the interface with `ip`. BT is a trainwreck.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Can confirm, my god how terrible BT support can be. So much for things working on older laptops, my 6ish years old Asus as some weird Intel BT chip that has completely broken drivers on Ubuntu. Not as in that they can't be built or installed, but the damn thing keeps fucking disconnecting and reconnecting every few seconds. It literally would've been better if they hadn't bothered. But also like in general, at least anyone making any new protocol or standard can rest easy knowing that they cannot possibly fuck up worse than IEEE making the bluetooth spec.
otikik 4y ago
For new laptops, if you have the option, go for something that has some official support out of the door. Something like System76 or your local equivalent. Otherwise yes, it can still be a bit of a lottery. Everything could be smooth, or you might become your own Linux support guy. Some people enjoy that.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  Pop has gone from something that was expected to "just work" to deciding it's more of a developer or enthusiast product. Linux still needs an 'it just works' version. I really thought pop would be it, but the last year of development has been very disappointing with system breaking updates being pushed (I'm on system 76 hardware).
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Debian? Ubuntu? Mint? Linux is mostly it just works versions unless you're only looking for the trendy new thing. I run debian stable on my headless desktops/television and testing on my laptops. It's so easy it's boring.
    - mafuy 4y ago
      I run debian stable on my headless desktop and I could not get sound to work
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      My Ubuntu LTS "just works" until the laptop decides it needs to have an heavier connection to download big data, then its wlan infrastructure dies and needs to be restarted. It "just works" until I decide to view videos online, and despite all my hacking efforts, keeps using software decoding for videos. It "just works" until I try some 3D stuff that requires GL 4.1, but the AMD open source driver for the GPU only does hardware acceleration up to GL 3.3. Sleeping "just works" until I wake it up and is in such a frozen state that only taking the battery out makes the booting process work again. Yeah it just works.
- 4y ago
iaaan 4y ago
This has also been my experience with a new ThinkPad P1 G5. Wifi didn't work out of the box with stable releases of any of the distros I wanted to use, I had to use the testing release, and even then the wifi is unusably bad unless I'm sat right in front of the AP (all other wifi devices in my home work perfectly fine from any room). Putting the OS or even just the display to sleep causes the whole thing to completely freeze, forcing me to hold the power button until it shuts off. Other than that, usable, but some really bad quirks that would make me switch back to Windows if I didn't have workarounds (use an ethernet cable, never let the display sleep, never close the lid while the laptop is running).
ASalazarMX 4y ago
Dell Latitudes have been relatively painless for years with Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS, probably because Dell sells a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Still, Dell doesn't have fingerprint reader support in Linux, and the built-in card reader needed additional setup, but other than that it just works on a fresh install. Even my favorite Windows games work on Steam with Proton, if you accept minor texture glitches, which I gladly do to avoid dual booting. I love it because these days I have less time to fiddle with it every six months.
vladvasiliu 4y ago
This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers. At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint sensor, light sensor, mute LEDs, etc. On Windows, to this day, the webcam isn't recognized because of some USB chip along the line. There's also a lot of lag when adjusting the display backlight, for some reason. I also have its cousin, an EB 840 g8 (intel 11th gen). A few days ago I installed Win11 22h2 on it. I was lucky to have had an external mouse, since neither the touchpad nor the track point could be used for setup. And it absolutely needs the latest Intel GPU drivers to correctly output 4k@60 through its HP dock (DP pass-thtough, not DisplayLink). On Linux, the same display setup has worked well since day one. But the mute LEDs are still broken. Both laptops don't come with integrated wired network, so I have an HP USB dongle (Realtek chip). This works quite well on Linux. On Windows, it initially works well, but then, for some reason, Windows figures it needs to update the driver. Then it gains some interesting failure modes, where from the terminal I can do whatever I want, but Edge keeps thinking the connection is lost.
- uluyol 4y ago
  Arch is a rolling release distro. So it gets hardware support faster than other distros that stick to older kernels and userspace. Most users are not on rolling releases. I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Ubuntu with the HWE kernel is basically rolling release for drivers, which seems like the best of both worlds.
    - the8472 4y ago
      you also want recent userspace for some components, e.g. mesa or libinput
codedokode 4y ago
I don't think that Linux should support any hardware, especially if its vendors do not provide drivers and documentation. Instead, there should be an actual list of well supported devices and people should buy only them.
stormbrew 4y ago
It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices. It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years. Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the stuffed-full-of-garbage oem installs I've found it way more likely that I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.
- koofdoof 4y ago
  Snappy Driver Installer has an offline driver package made just for that situation that I've found quite useful.
- emkoemko 4y ago
  man i remember those days when you had to go and find all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place. how do people on windows figure out what driver has updates? do you guys check the version installed and go to each manufacture to see if there is a new version>?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Volundr 4y ago
    Now this is usually (but not universally) handled by windows update, but I too remember the bad old days of manually tracking down drivers.
- ccouzens 4y ago
  > I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started. If you've got an Android phone and a USB cable, you should be able to USB tether to your phone's WiFi connection. This should work out the box on Linux and Windows.
JadeNB 4y ago
> Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. Even "Linux works damn well on your ancient laptop" is a great selling point. Want to run Windows or macOS on an ancient machine? You can run an insecure ancient version, or, if the up-to-date version can even be installed, it'll run at a crawl. Linux makes those machines still usable.
phendrenad2 4y ago
How do we fix this? It seems like most people in the community have the mentality that these issues work themselves out eventually, so it's no problem. And there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of people really really want better hardware support for new hardware, and fewer regressions in drivers for older hardware. Perhaps we need a special-interest group that keeps track of ongoing hardware issues, and generates kernel patches.
SyrupThinker 4y ago
As a user of the E485 (basically a budget version of the A485) I can confirm, and agree with, everything but one thing here. Regarding your Bluetooth issue, what chipset do you have? I picked a Qualcomm one on mine because I had bad experiences with Realtek before. Never had an issue like yours with it. For me its quite a usable machine now. But I'm currently giving a M1 Macbook a shot and it certainly is convenient not to have hiccups like this (yet).
api 4y ago
That and he says “most software has migrated to the browser.” Maybe most of what he uses, but if that’s the case then you’re basically doing a DIY Chromebook.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
My Vostro 1400 (Core 2 Duo) has kernel bugs on sleep-wake related to the Ricoh xD media reader (remember those? I don't either), and my Inspiron 15R SE (Ivy Bridge) randomly disconnects from all external USB devices until I use the internal keyboard to remove and reload the xhci_hcd kernel module. And my Ideapad Flex 4 models have a bug where you can press Page Up, release Fn, and release Up, which on Windows stops sending Page Up events but on Linux results in a stuck Page Up key (technically a laptop bug but affects Linux far worse). So older laptops are by no means trouble-free either.
lostmsu 4y ago
IMHO, the fact that you need a kernel patch for a key LED is what holds Linux back.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I am assuming the above is sarcasm, but... for the record, for the HP Mic Mute LED, the "Windows" driver was: 1. Crashing regularly for most of the early Windows 10 era, leaving users with a frozen mute LED, 2. Was found to contain an actual keylogger. Yes, the driver as shipped by HP and signed by MS had malware. Google "mictray64.exe" .
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Yeah, no. My XPS13 which I bought basically when it came out works great with the pre installed Ubuntu 20.04.
vlunkr 4y ago
Unfortunately this seems inevitable. Hardware manufacturers have to support windows or they won’t survive, so that support is going to be there day 1. Some of them have spotty support for Linux, most have none. So it falls on the community to buy the hardware and iron out the issues.
pessimizer 4y ago
Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available? It's an impossible expectation, and also one that no other OS would have a chance of fulfilling unless hardware vendors specifically catered to them. It's like asking for a book review of a book that hasn't been published. Yes, other people have published reviews, but they got advance copies and a supplementary synopsis from the publisher six months ago.
- coryrc 4y ago
  Windows users don't have to reverse engineer anything before their hardware works.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    No shit. The hardware vendors do all the work for them.
    - __turbobrew__ 4y ago
      Users don’t care who did the work, they only care if the device functions or not.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        pxmpxm 4y ago
        2022 YOLD right there
  - autoexec 4y ago
    that's because new hardware is made to work for windows. Few companies care about linux drivers
ollien 4y ago
I have an E15 from work and have a myriad of just _strange_ issues. When I first got Fedora installed, the integrated mouse/keyboard didn't work without some kernel parameter tweaks. This was eventually fixed. Right now I'm dealing with some random crashes(?; there's no stacktraces, it's kind of annoying) of XFCE that I'm blaming on the 12th gen intel GPU firmware, but I have no evidence to back that up yet.
pxeboot 4y ago
I tend to agree. If you pick a random new laptop, you will probably have a bad time running Linux. When I decided to switch to Linux as my main OS, I researched well supported models and settled on the X1 Carbon. I bought it a large discount right after a new generation was released and the Linux support has been near perfect. Really only one or two minor issues in the past ~3 years, which is similar to what I have experienced with most Windows and macOS devices.
- rtpg 4y ago
  yeah seconding the X1 thing. The battery life is a bit wanting but I have more issues on my desktop than on my laptop at this point
  - usr1106 4y ago
    I had a X1C bought early 2018 and it had great battery life. And I generally was happy with it. Unfortunately it got stolen (luckily I had full disk encryption). Without much investigation I took a X1C again. This time it was a 7th gen. It had HiDPi display which was a bit of pain to have all apps working with a satisfactory resolution and the battery life is much poorer than before. I would take my older one back right away if I could. Edit: The author uses an 11 year old machine. Not a surprise it works well. With all the new stuff the vendors introduce difficulties are much more common. I hear a lot of complaints from colleagues with Thunderbolt docks, the newest Intel camera generation has no Linux support, not that much has changed. Whether it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back or the other way round is debatable.
  - caskstrength 4y ago
    With TLP installed and properly configured? Strange, battery life of my x1c tends to be as good or better as on Windows.
    - nobiggie457 4y ago
      The battery life of hidpi monitors is often much worse than the same machine with a lower resolution monitor.
mbreese 4y ago
To be fair, this is also an issue with servers. I bought a server from a Linux server vendor and the chip was too new that it wasn’t supported on their custom Linux OS (same company, but the hardware and software sides didn’t communicate). Thankfully, it was supported on CentOS at the time, so I was able to switch pretty easily. I just mention this to say, this can be an issue with any recent hardware. With Linux (the the most part) drivers are built-in and vendors do often ship drivers, so we have to wait sometimes for compatibility.
Tozen 4y ago
Well, the reality is that Linux consists of less than 5% of the market (desktops and laptops), where Windows OSes make up around 75% and macOS around 15%. So, that is going to dictate the priorities of companies supplying drivers.
- lozf 4y ago
  What's the other >5%? Surely not *BSDs?
  - tedd4u 4y ago
    Some articles claim ChromeOS is at about 10% (Chromebooks)
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      Is that not a Linux kernel?
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Yep, with drivers that don't get upstream, and a custom userland based on a browser engine.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  These numbers are always so skewed. I wish just one time we could get market share numbers for new sales WITHOUT corporate purchases, but Microsoft has made this a "thing" for 30 years now. On the one hand manufacturers would still want to target numbers, even if that includes corporate "fleets." On the other, they'd see that Linux makes up a larger portion of the market where people are spending their own money.
andix 4y ago
Did Lenovo classify the device as Linux compatible? A lot of laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell have Ubuntu or RedHat as an optional pre-installed operating system. Those devices usually work with Linux. As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
- blahyawnblah 4y ago
  Isn't the developer xps sold through their website?
_skel 4y ago
With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. In 2022. That is the kind of basic thing that does not work. In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Wayland just generally is missing config files... Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had... They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...
  - twblalock 4y ago
    If we are talking about desktop Linux, a lack of config files is not a problem. If you expect people to edit files to get their desktops to work properly, you have already lost. The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      To add in the fancy slider you want so much, there needs to be a corresponding tunable in Wayland. MacOS does this with plists, it's not some radical or hated design pattern.
      - twblalock 4y ago
        If you think that is a "fancy slider" you lack perspective. It is a basic, expected feature that is supported by Windows and macOS for laptop users. And I'm pretty sure it used to work on Linux too, before Wayland.
        4y ago
tmccrary55 4y ago
I only buy laptops with official OEM Linux support these days.
Beltalowda 4y ago
Interesting; I got a A485 two years ago and everything except Bluetooth worked out of the box without problems (BT kind-of works but with a lot of problems, so I just got a USB one for €10). Never needed any kernel parameters, graphics work fine (including for some games), sleep always worked fine. Never tried AP mode or fingerprint scanner. Only reason I got a different laptop was due to hardware issues (some issue with the mainboard). I only used Void Linux on it; maybe it's different with other distros.
- mid-kid 4y ago
  I'll be honest, aside from the FnLock LED issue, most of the issues I've mentioned were probably fixed by 2020. I got this laptop in january 2019, and none of the stable distros (ubuntus and such) would even boot without kernel parameters back then. 5.1 became the golden kernel version for me for a while, where everything worked as later kernels would break suspend/hibernate a few times before stabilizing properly. It was a rocky few years but by kernel 5.10 (december 2020) everything worked fine, probably earlier like you've mentioned. Graphics always worked fine except for random full system lock-ups/kernel panics in amdgpu which have been fixed at some point I don't remember when. I have no idea what caused them but a kernel option (something with iommu) made them go away until it was properly fixed, and I think that wasn't exclusive to this laptop. Graphics are still scrambled when waking from sleep though, but they take a split second to restore. The rest of the problems (bluetooth, fingerprint), still persist.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I got it second-hand in late 2020, so that about pans out.
geniium 4y ago
Thanks for honesty. During my studies I really tried using Linux on my laptop for a few years. It was amazing to tinker around. But when I finally switched to Mac OS, I felt I became instantly more productive. That was 15 years ago in 2007. I never went back. Now macOS has its struggles, but I can work and focus on a clean UI.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Legogris 4y ago
It's always a gamble with new laptops. I've had multiple Thinkpad T-generations from T410 to the latest. Sometimes it does works flawlessly out of the factory at purchase. This time, it did not. The 12th gen Intel CPUs have a heterogeneous design with traditional "P-cores" and low-power "E-cores". I'm suspecting the reason I see terrible performance is that the CPU scheduler does not handle this efficiently and assigns the wrong task to the E-cores. Also the Intel WiFi does not even get detected. Have not dug deeper into that yet. Anything > ~6(Intel) ~12(AMD/Realtek) months old tend to work smoothly out of the box, IME.
ghostly_s 4y ago
My daily driver is a Thinkpad x230 running Linux and I also vehemently disagree with his author's claim. Yes, things are certainly better than they were 10 years ago, yet I still have a lengthy to-do list of things that are broken, but low-impact enough to work around that I don't want to waste the hours of dicking around with poor documentation, noxious forum threads and command line fiddling to sort them out. Circumstance do force me to finally tackle one of these issues regularly, yet the list never seems to get shorter...
- tluyben2 4y ago
  Like what? Must be things I do not use I guess, which definitely can be the case as I never plug in external monitors etc, but everything I use works very well for dev work.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
Old laptops & desktops too have been left in the dust for some time now. Decades ago one of the most important benchmarks of Linux distributions was they were all higher performance using less resources than the original Windows that came with the PC. If you have a PC with only 1GB of memory which still works fine with XP or W7, most distros are now unusable.
vba616 4y ago
> sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions How do people typically learn to debug kernel issues on their hardware? It seems like actively promoting widespread knowledge of the practical methods would benefit the community.

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.
Teknoman117 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what laptop? My samples in the last 6 years are: - Thinkpad Carbon X1 14" (i7-5600u). Everything worked out of the box with Arch Linux at the time. Best experience I've ever had. - HP Envy 13z (R5 2500u) everything works today but the out of the box experience was very poor. Windows update installed an APU microcode update that broke the Linux AMDGPU driver and had to run an -rc kernel for awhile. Took a year to get a touchscreen driver and years to get the driver for the tablet sensors (rotation, etc.). Total wait of 3 years for all features, but I never had the desire to use it as a tablet so I was okay with it. Sleep works but this laptop had awful battery drain issues in sleep (30% per day). - Dell XPS 15 7590 (i9-9980hk) - Sleep is broke in both Linux and Windows. Everything else works well, including, notably, NVIDIA Optimus / DRI PRIME. - Asus ZenBook 14 (R7 5800U) - second best out of box experience. Touchpad is connected via i2c and my Gentoo install didn't have it enabled. I'd never bumped into i2c hid devices other than touchscreens.
- meibo 4y ago
  > Dell XPS 15 7590 (i9-9980hk) - Sleep is broke in both Linux and Windows. Yes! How can they sell these like that? My XPS 13 will never go to sleep correctly, either the screen stays on or it doesn't shut off correctly, in Windows or Linux. You'd think that this is the basic feature a laptop has to have. And it's not just me, their forums are full of people having problems and their support has no idea. They were sending me guides for latitudes from 2012. Definitely not going for Dell hardware again.
- wooque 4y ago
  Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 (Ryzen 7 4700U), old laptop was Dell Latitude 7xx0 (or something, don't remember exact model), with Intel i5-5300U CPU, Linux worked perfectly on that machine.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    Oof. I better check in with the person I bought one for as a gift... (R5 4500U variant though)

Teknoman117 4y ago

My main issue with my current laptop is that the synopsis touchpads connect over i2c, and there has been a lot of ongoing work in the kernel that keeps requiring me to change my kernel config (PINCTRL_AMD needing to be selected for the 5.18 to 5.19 kernel update). My last laptop (an AMD version of the HP Envy 13) was also rough at the beginning. A BIOS update updated the AMD GPU firmware or microcode or something and broke compatibility with the current kernel stable kernel at the time. Had to switch to an -rc kernel to get video to work. Admittedly, my day job is basically Linux kernel development so I'm intimately familiar with most of this stuff. Not exactly your typical user.

genewitch 4y ago
I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers, but you mentioned that you do kernel dev, so it makes sense. 5.15 is "stable", at least on gentoo.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  > I was going to cry foul since 5.18 and 5.19 aren't considered "stable" by most maintainers Distro maintainers certainly, unless you're Gentoo, Arch, or one of the other mostly-bleeding-edge rolling release distros. The "stable" kernel is whatever the current release is and "longterm" kernels are typically the last major kernel version released in a given year. https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html Most distributions pick whatever the latest longterm kernel is when they cut releases. Sometimes they don't and things get strange, such as when Canonical chose kernel 4.15 for Ubuntu 18.04, requiring them to maintain an unsupported kernel themselves. IIRC that was because a bunch of AMD CPU and GPU support was added in 4.15.

vjk800 4y ago

The annoying thing is that it's quite unpredictable. You can sometimes find information on the internet on which laptops Ubuntu is going to work on out of the box, but usually it's a gamble. Sometimes you notice something's not working a month after buying the laptop just because you never happened to try the feature before.

Loic 4y ago

For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480. But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bit.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mid-kid 4y ago
I kind of expected the A485 to have similar issues to the T480, since it's the same laptop except for the cpu and graphics. I did some preliminary searching and the listing of the laptop as "ubuntu certified" gave me too much confidence, I guess. I forgot to mention in the parent post that the SD card reader can't detect insertion/removal at times, yeah, so I have a script to reload the rtsx_pci_sdmmc kernel module to force it to recheck.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Being an AMD instead of Intel, the motherboard is different which means the whole laptop is different.
- ldng 4y ago
  The A485 has really terrible support ! To the point I'm wondering if Lenovo didn't do it on purpose ... Very disappointed with mine to this day. Time definitely did not improve support.
a-dub 4y ago
same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.
- autoexec 4y ago

sbf501 4y ago

Ubuntu: Except for Bluetooth and audio, and sometimes it forgets there's a wired Ethernet port I have to down/up the interface with `ip`. BT is a trainwreck.

moffkalast 4y ago
Can confirm, my god how terrible BT support can be. So much for things working on older laptops, my 6ish years old Asus as some weird Intel BT chip that has completely broken drivers on Ubuntu. Not as in that they can't be built or installed, but the damn thing keeps fucking disconnecting and reconnecting every few seconds. It literally would've been better if they hadn't bothered. But also like in general, at least anyone making any new protocol or standard can rest easy knowing that they cannot possibly fuck up worse than IEEE making the bluetooth spec.

otikik 4y ago

For new laptops, if you have the option, go for something that has some official support out of the door. Something like System76 or your local equivalent. Otherwise yes, it can still be a bit of a lottery. Everything could be smooth, or you might become your own Linux support guy. Some people enjoy that.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
Pop has gone from something that was expected to "just work" to deciding it's more of a developer or enthusiast product. Linux still needs an 'it just works' version. I really thought pop would be it, but the last year of development has been very disappointing with system breaking updates being pushed (I'm on system 76 hardware).
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Debian? Ubuntu? Mint? Linux is mostly it just works versions unless you're only looking for the trendy new thing. I run debian stable on my headless desktops/television and testing on my laptops. It's so easy it's boring.
  - mafuy 4y ago
    I run debian stable on my headless desktop and I could not get sound to work
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    My Ubuntu LTS "just works" until the laptop decides it needs to have an heavier connection to download big data, then its wlan infrastructure dies and needs to be restarted. It "just works" until I decide to view videos online, and despite all my hacking efforts, keeps using software decoding for videos. It "just works" until I try some 3D stuff that requires GL 4.1, but the AMD open source driver for the GPU only does hardware acceleration up to GL 3.3. Sleeping "just works" until I wake it up and is in such a frozen state that only taking the battery out makes the booting process work again. Yeah it just works.
4y ago

iaaan 4y ago

This has also been my experience with a new ThinkPad P1 G5. Wifi didn't work out of the box with stable releases of any of the distros I wanted to use, I had to use the testing release, and even then the wifi is unusably bad unless I'm sat right in front of the AP (all other wifi devices in my home work perfectly fine from any room). Putting the OS or even just the display to sleep causes the whole thing to completely freeze, forcing me to hold the power button until it shuts off. Other than that, usable, but some really bad quirks that would make me switch back to Windows if I didn't have workarounds (use an ethernet cable, never let the display sleep, never close the lid while the laptop is running).

ASalazarMX 4y ago

Dell Latitudes have been relatively painless for years with Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS, probably because Dell sells a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Still, Dell doesn't have fingerprint reader support in Linux, and the built-in card reader needed additional setup, but other than that it just works on a fresh install. Even my favorite Windows games work on Steam with Proton, if you accept minor texture glitches, which I gladly do to avoid dual booting. I love it because these days I have less time to fiddle with it every six months.

vladvasiliu 4y ago

This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers. At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint sensor, light sensor, mute LEDs, etc. On Windows, to this day, the webcam isn't recognized because of some USB chip along the line. There's also a lot of lag when adjusting the display backlight, for some reason. I also have its cousin, an EB 840 g8 (intel 11th gen). A few days ago I installed Win11 22h2 on it. I was lucky to have had an external mouse, since neither the touchpad nor the track point could be used for setup. And it absolutely needs the latest Intel GPU drivers to correctly output 4k@60 through its HP dock (DP pass-thtough, not DisplayLink). On Linux, the same display setup has worked well since day one. But the mute LEDs are still broken. Both laptops don't come with integrated wired network, so I have an HP USB dongle (Realtek chip). This works quite well on Linux. On Windows, it initially works well, but then, for some reason, Windows figures it needs to update the driver. Then it gains some interesting failure modes, where from the terminal I can do whatever I want, but Edge keeps thinking the connection is lost.

uluyol 4y ago
Arch is a rolling release distro. So it gets hardware support faster than other distros that stick to older kernels and userspace. Most users are not on rolling releases. I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Ubuntu with the HWE kernel is basically rolling release for drivers, which seems like the best of both worlds.
  - the8472 4y ago
    you also want recent userspace for some components, e.g. mesa or libinput

codedokode 4y ago

I don't think that Linux should support any hardware, especially if its vendors do not provide drivers and documentation. Instead, there should be an actual list of well supported devices and people should buy only them.

stormbrew 4y ago

It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices. It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years. Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the stuffed-full-of-garbage oem installs I've found it way more likely that I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.

koofdoof 4y ago
Snappy Driver Installer has an offline driver package made just for that situation that I've found quite useful.
emkoemko 4y ago
man i remember those days when you had to go and find all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place. how do people on windows figure out what driver has updates? do you guys check the version installed and go to each manufacture to see if there is a new version>?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Volundr 4y ago
  Now this is usually (but not universally) handled by windows update, but I too remember the bad old days of manually tracking down drivers.
ccouzens 4y ago
> I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started. If you've got an Android phone and a USB cable, you should be able to USB tether to your phone's WiFi connection. This should work out the box on Linux and Windows.

JadeNB 4y ago

> Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. Even "Linux works damn well on your ancient laptop" is a great selling point. Want to run Windows or macOS on an ancient machine? You can run an insecure ancient version, or, if the up-to-date version can even be installed, it'll run at a crawl. Linux makes those machines still usable.

phendrenad2 4y ago

How do we fix this? It seems like most people in the community have the mentality that these issues work themselves out eventually, so it's no problem. And there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of people really really want better hardware support for new hardware, and fewer regressions in drivers for older hardware. Perhaps we need a special-interest group that keeps track of ongoing hardware issues, and generates kernel patches.

SyrupThinker 4y ago

As a user of the E485 (basically a budget version of the A485) I can confirm, and agree with, everything but one thing here. Regarding your Bluetooth issue, what chipset do you have? I picked a Qualcomm one on mine because I had bad experiences with Realtek before. Never had an issue like yours with it. For me its quite a usable machine now. But I'm currently giving a M1 Macbook a shot and it certainly is convenient not to have hiccups like this (yet).

api 4y ago

That and he says “most software has migrated to the browser.” Maybe most of what he uses, but if that’s the case then you’re basically doing a DIY Chromebook.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

My Vostro 1400 (Core 2 Duo) has kernel bugs on sleep-wake related to the Ricoh xD media reader (remember those? I don't either), and my Inspiron 15R SE (Ivy Bridge) randomly disconnects from all external USB devices until I use the internal keyboard to remove and reload the xhci_hcd kernel module. And my Ideapad Flex 4 models have a bug where you can press Page Up, release Fn, and release Up, which on Windows stops sending Page Up events but on Linux results in a stuck Page Up key (technically a laptop bug but affects Linux far worse). So older laptops are by no means trouble-free either.

lostmsu 4y ago

IMHO, the fact that you need a kernel patch for a key LED is what holds Linux back.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I am assuming the above is sarcasm, but... for the record, for the HP Mic Mute LED, the "Windows" driver was: 1. Crashing regularly for most of the early Windows 10 era, leaving users with a frozen mute LED, 2. Was found to contain an actual keylogger. Yes, the driver as shipped by HP and signed by MS had malware. Google "mictray64.exe" .

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Yeah, no. My XPS13 which I bought basically when it came out works great with the pre installed Ubuntu 20.04.

vlunkr 4y ago

Unfortunately this seems inevitable. Hardware manufacturers have to support windows or they won’t survive, so that support is going to be there day 1. Some of them have spotty support for Linux, most have none. So it falls on the community to buy the hardware and iron out the issues.

pessimizer 4y ago

Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available? It's an impossible expectation, and also one that no other OS would have a chance of fulfilling unless hardware vendors specifically catered to them. It's like asking for a book review of a book that hasn't been published. Yes, other people have published reviews, but they got advance copies and a supplementary synopsis from the publisher six months ago.

coryrc 4y ago
Windows users don't have to reverse engineer anything before their hardware works.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  No shit. The hardware vendors do all the work for them.
  - __turbobrew__ 4y ago
    Users don’t care who did the work, they only care if the device functions or not.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      - pxmpxm 4y ago
        2022 YOLD right there
- autoexec 4y ago
  that's because new hardware is made to work for windows. Few companies care about linux drivers

ollien 4y ago

I have an E15 from work and have a myriad of just _strange_ issues. When I first got Fedora installed, the integrated mouse/keyboard didn't work without some kernel parameter tweaks. This was eventually fixed. Right now I'm dealing with some random crashes(?; there's no stacktraces, it's kind of annoying) of XFCE that I'm blaming on the 12th gen intel GPU firmware, but I have no evidence to back that up yet.

pxeboot 4y ago

I tend to agree. If you pick a random new laptop, you will probably have a bad time running Linux. When I decided to switch to Linux as my main OS, I researched well supported models and settled on the X1 Carbon. I bought it a large discount right after a new generation was released and the Linux support has been near perfect. Really only one or two minor issues in the past ~3 years, which is similar to what I have experienced with most Windows and macOS devices.

rtpg 4y ago
yeah seconding the X1 thing. The battery life is a bit wanting but I have more issues on my desktop than on my laptop at this point
- usr1106 4y ago
  I had a X1C bought early 2018 and it had great battery life. And I generally was happy with it. Unfortunately it got stolen (luckily I had full disk encryption). Without much investigation I took a X1C again. This time it was a 7th gen. It had HiDPi display which was a bit of pain to have all apps working with a satisfactory resolution and the battery life is much poorer than before. I would take my older one back right away if I could. Edit: The author uses an 11 year old machine. Not a surprise it works well. With all the new stuff the vendors introduce difficulties are much more common. I hear a lot of complaints from colleagues with Thunderbolt docks, the newest Intel camera generation has no Linux support, not that much has changed. Whether it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back or the other way round is debatable.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  With TLP installed and properly configured? Strange, battery life of my x1c tends to be as good or better as on Windows.
  - nobiggie457 4y ago
    The battery life of hidpi monitors is often much worse than the same machine with a lower resolution monitor.

mbreese 4y ago

To be fair, this is also an issue with servers. I bought a server from a Linux server vendor and the chip was too new that it wasn’t supported on their custom Linux OS (same company, but the hardware and software sides didn’t communicate). Thankfully, it was supported on CentOS at the time, so I was able to switch pretty easily. I just mention this to say, this can be an issue with any recent hardware. With Linux (the the most part) drivers are built-in and vendors do often ship drivers, so we have to wait sometimes for compatibility.

Tozen 4y ago

Well, the reality is that Linux consists of less than 5% of the market (desktops and laptops), where Windows OSes make up around 75% and macOS around 15%. So, that is going to dictate the priorities of companies supplying drivers.

lozf 4y ago
What's the other >5%? Surely not *BSDs?
- tedd4u 4y ago
  Some articles claim ChromeOS is at about 10% (Chromebooks)
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    Is that not a Linux kernel?
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Yep, with drivers that don't get upstream, and a custom userland based on a browser engine.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
These numbers are always so skewed. I wish just one time we could get market share numbers for new sales WITHOUT corporate purchases, but Microsoft has made this a "thing" for 30 years now. On the one hand manufacturers would still want to target numbers, even if that includes corporate "fleets." On the other, they'd see that Linux makes up a larger portion of the market where people are spending their own money.

andix 4y ago

Did Lenovo classify the device as Linux compatible? A lot of laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell have Ubuntu or RedHat as an optional pre-installed operating system. Those devices usually work with Linux. As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.

blahyawnblah 4y ago
Isn't the developer xps sold through their website?

_skel 4y ago

With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. In 2022. That is the kind of basic thing that does not work. In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

londons_explore 4y ago
Wayland just generally is missing config files... Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had... They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...
- twblalock 4y ago
  If we are talking about desktop Linux, a lack of config files is not a problem. If you expect people to edit files to get their desktops to work properly, you have already lost. The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    To add in the fancy slider you want so much, there needs to be a corresponding tunable in Wayland. MacOS does this with plists, it's not some radical or hated design pattern.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      If you think that is a "fancy slider" you lack perspective. It is a basic, expected feature that is supported by Windows and macOS for laptop users. And I'm pretty sure it used to work on Linux too, before Wayland.
      - 4y ago

tmccrary55 4y ago

I only buy laptops with official OEM Linux support these days.

Beltalowda 4y ago

Interesting; I got a A485 two years ago and everything except Bluetooth worked out of the box without problems (BT kind-of works but with a lot of problems, so I just got a USB one for €10). Never needed any kernel parameters, graphics work fine (including for some games), sleep always worked fine. Never tried AP mode or fingerprint scanner. Only reason I got a different laptop was due to hardware issues (some issue with the mainboard). I only used Void Linux on it; maybe it's different with other distros.

mid-kid 4y ago
I'll be honest, aside from the FnLock LED issue, most of the issues I've mentioned were probably fixed by 2020. I got this laptop in january 2019, and none of the stable distros (ubuntus and such) would even boot without kernel parameters back then. 5.1 became the golden kernel version for me for a while, where everything worked as later kernels would break suspend/hibernate a few times before stabilizing properly. It was a rocky few years but by kernel 5.10 (december 2020) everything worked fine, probably earlier like you've mentioned. Graphics always worked fine except for random full system lock-ups/kernel panics in amdgpu which have been fixed at some point I don't remember when. I have no idea what caused them but a kernel option (something with iommu) made them go away until it was properly fixed, and I think that wasn't exclusive to this laptop. Graphics are still scrambled when waking from sleep though, but they take a split second to restore. The rest of the problems (bluetooth, fingerprint), still persist.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I got it second-hand in late 2020, so that about pans out.

geniium 4y ago

Thanks for honesty. During my studies I really tried using Linux on my laptop for a few years. It was amazing to tinker around. But when I finally switched to Mac OS, I felt I became instantly more productive. That was 15 years ago in 2007. I never went back. Now macOS has its struggles, but I can work and focus on a clean UI.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Legogris 4y ago

It's always a gamble with new laptops. I've had multiple Thinkpad T-generations from T410 to the latest. Sometimes it does works flawlessly out of the factory at purchase. This time, it did not. The 12th gen Intel CPUs have a heterogeneous design with traditional "P-cores" and low-power "E-cores". I'm suspecting the reason I see terrible performance is that the CPU scheduler does not handle this efficiently and assigns the wrong task to the E-cores. Also the Intel WiFi does not even get detected. Have not dug deeper into that yet. Anything > ~6(Intel) ~12(AMD/Realtek) months old tend to work smoothly out of the box, IME.

ghostly_s 4y ago

My daily driver is a Thinkpad x230 running Linux and I also vehemently disagree with his author's claim. Yes, things are certainly better than they were 10 years ago, yet I still have a lengthy to-do list of things that are broken, but low-impact enough to work around that I don't want to waste the hours of dicking around with poor documentation, noxious forum threads and command line fiddling to sort them out. Circumstance do force me to finally tackle one of these issues regularly, yet the list never seems to get shorter...

tluyben2 4y ago
Like what? Must be things I do not use I guess, which definitely can be the case as I never plug in external monitors etc, but everything I use works very well for dev work.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

Old laptops & desktops too have been left in the dust for some time now. Decades ago one of the most important benchmarks of Linux distributions was they were all higher performance using less resources than the original Windows that came with the PC. If you have a PC with only 1GB of memory which still works fine with XP or W7, most distros are now unusable.

vba616 4y ago

> sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions How do people typically learn to debug kernel issues on their hardware? It seems like actively promoting widespread knowledge of the practical methods would benefit the community.