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I always prefer Linux over MacOS. That said, Linux on laptops has been a tremendous pain in my experience. There are simply too many non-standard parts and cust

I always prefer Linux over MacOS. That said, Linux on laptops has been a tremendous pain in my experience. There are simply too many non-standard parts and custom drivers to make laptops work and Linux struggles to enable you to use your laptop in ways that you would expect to out of the box. Case in point: 1) I chose the route of entirely disabling nvidia and using the built-in intell graphics cards. This was probably a mistake in hindsight. I did it because I wanted to use less battery, but, so much stuff seemed to work sub-optimally. 2) For chrome in particular, I had to jump through a lot of hoops just to get it to render things properly and play videos. This had knock-on effects with chromium apps like slack and zoom. I never got Zoom the app working on Linux, but was forced instead to use the browser version. 3) I ended up having to install a non-stock kernel to get a lot of things working. 4) I remember running into issues with sleep not working. I don't even remember exactly what I had to do to fix, but, it's another example of something a MacOS user will never have to think about. Anways, I prefer Linux over MacOS so much that I was willing to experience a ton of pain to use it, but I could not honestly recommend it to others at the time. I hope it's gotten better since a few years ago, but I would be very surprised to hear it has. Each new generation of laptops brings new custom chipsets, hardware, etc. with no formal Linux support.

rg111 4y ago
> "Linux on laptops has been a tremendous pain in my experience. " Using Linux ~99.9% of times at both work and personal use for the last five years. 0.1% is Windows, because PowerPoint. Using Pop OS (NVIDIA) for the last 2.5 years, and Linux Mint before that. I have near zero issues, and spent contiguous months and years without any Linux Evenings [0]. Had 3-4 Linux Evenings in these 5 years. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013195
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > 0.1% is Windows, because PowerPoint. I was about to say: "Why not just use LibreOffice Impress?" - but the truth is that it's still far away from qualifying as a Powerpoint replacement. LO Writer has really gotten its act together over the years, and now handles Word documents very well and is a worthy replacement - Impress not as much. So, I urge you to spend a little time trying to open your PPT presentations in Impress, and if/when you see issues with it - complain about them! As an active LO user (https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2022/speaker/WHDWTF/ https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference...) I feel the user base is not putting enough pressure on developers to put focus on Impress polish. Also, donations help: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ ... then maybe in a couple of years you could ditch PowerPoint and make your 99.9% into 100%.
  - rg111 4y ago
    I am fortunate enough to work at a place where I don't have to make more than bare minimum number of presentations. If I had to make a lot of them, then maybe I would have learned Impress up to a level. But as that isn’t the case, I stuck with PP. I only open PP at the last moment, and forget it after work is done. I use PP at work and talks that I give occasionally (2-3 per year). For other things, I just use Google Docs and Sheets. They are enough for my usecases. As a challenge, last year, when I taught a class (as a volunteer)- I made all my slides with Impress. While it wasn’t painful, PP is miles better and smoother. While there are many FOSS softwares where I regularly report issues, and donated, and even contributed to some, presentations is not that important to me to spend a lot of time at.
    - einpoklum 4y ago
      > would have learned Impress up to a level. Oh, Impress is basically the same as PowerPoint, the differences are not significant. Here's a 11-minute video exemplifying the experience of creating a simple presentation from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmEvjs4iBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmEvjs4iBw ... frankly, I wouldn't even watch it, just pretend PowerPoint came out with a new version where they tweaked the UI a bit.
      - rg111 4y ago
        > "As a challenge, last year, when I taught a class (as a volunteer)- I made all my slides with Impress." You missed this bit? I did use Impress to make slides for 7 classes (>100 slides). I will go with PP for now. And, yes, using computers since 6, having one for myself since 10- I need not really explicitly learn UIs of programs intended for non-tech mass users.
bombolo 4y ago
> I hope it's gotten better since a few years ago I had all the issues you describe until 2010… Then my apple macbook that I used to run linux died, I bought a thinkpad and everything has worked since then. > I never got Zoom the app working on Linux, but was forced instead to use the browser version. I think that's a feature, since zoom had many spyware scandals.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  >> I never got Zoom the app working on Linux, but was forced instead to use the browser version. >I think that's a feature, since zoom had many spyware scandals. It's probably much easier to run on 100% Linux if you can dismiss away the inability to run common business apps as a "feature". This is why I run a Linux VM on a Mac -- I do nearly all of my development work in the Linux VM, and am fully supported by our IT department on the OSX side to run our business apps.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    What does the app (which is a website inside a copy of chromium) do that the website can't? I've been using linux for work since when I started working. I also do daily zoom calls. I tend to dismiss comments from people that clearly didn't run linux in the past decade but still keep complaining about the same things they experienced when they last tried it for 2 days in university.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
If your laptop's screen runs optimally with fractional scaling (e.g. 1.5x), that's also still a mess under Linux under both Wayland and X11. I have a laptop like this that I'm trying to run Fedora on instead of Windows but it's frustrating because the UI works best at 1.5x scale, which the DE (GNOME/KDE) handle ok, but third party apps are all over the place. It's difficult to goad even something as simple as Anki into doing the right thing at non-integer UI scales under Linux, whereas under Windows it works flawlessly.

rg111 4y ago

> "Linux on laptops has been a tremendous pain in my experience. " Using Linux ~99.9% of times at both work and personal use for the last five years. 0.1% is Windows, because PowerPoint. Using Pop OS (NVIDIA) for the last 2.5 years, and Linux Mint before that. I have near zero issues, and spent contiguous months and years without any Linux Evenings [0]. Had 3-4 Linux Evenings in these 5 years. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013195

einpoklum 4y ago
> 0.1% is Windows, because PowerPoint. I was about to say: "Why not just use LibreOffice Impress?" - but the truth is that it's still far away from qualifying as a Powerpoint replacement. LO Writer has really gotten its act together over the years, and now handles Word documents very well and is a worthy replacement - Impress not as much. So, I urge you to spend a little time trying to open your PPT presentations in Impress, and if/when you see issues with it - complain about them! As an active LO user (https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2022/speaker/WHDWTF/ https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference...) I feel the user base is not putting enough pressure on developers to put focus on Impress polish. Also, donations help: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ ... then maybe in a couple of years you could ditch PowerPoint and make your 99.9% into 100%.
- rg111 4y ago
  I am fortunate enough to work at a place where I don't have to make more than bare minimum number of presentations. If I had to make a lot of them, then maybe I would have learned Impress up to a level. But as that isn’t the case, I stuck with PP. I only open PP at the last moment, and forget it after work is done. I use PP at work and talks that I give occasionally (2-3 per year). For other things, I just use Google Docs and Sheets. They are enough for my usecases. As a challenge, last year, when I taught a class (as a volunteer)- I made all my slides with Impress. While it wasn’t painful, PP is miles better and smoother. While there are many FOSS softwares where I regularly report issues, and donated, and even contributed to some, presentations is not that important to me to spend a lot of time at.
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    > would have learned Impress up to a level. Oh, Impress is basically the same as PowerPoint, the differences are not significant. Here's a 11-minute video exemplifying the experience of creating a simple presentation from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmEvjs4iBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmEvjs4iBw ... frankly, I wouldn't even watch it, just pretend PowerPoint came out with a new version where they tweaked the UI a bit.
    - rg111 4y ago
      > "As a challenge, last year, when I taught a class (as a volunteer)- I made all my slides with Impress." You missed this bit? I did use Impress to make slides for 7 classes (>100 slides). I will go with PP for now. And, yes, using computers since 6, having one for myself since 10- I need not really explicitly learn UIs of programs intended for non-tech mass users.

bombolo 4y ago

> I hope it's gotten better since a few years ago I had all the issues you describe until 2010… Then my apple macbook that I used to run linux died, I bought a thinkpad and everything has worked since then. > I never got Zoom the app working on Linux, but was forced instead to use the browser version. I think that's a feature, since zoom had many spyware scandals.

Johnny555 4y ago
>> I never got Zoom the app working on Linux, but was forced instead to use the browser version. >I think that's a feature, since zoom had many spyware scandals. It's probably much easier to run on 100% Linux if you can dismiss away the inability to run common business apps as a "feature". This is why I run a Linux VM on a Mac -- I do nearly all of my development work in the Linux VM, and am fully supported by our IT department on the OSX side to run our business apps.
- bombolo 4y ago
  What does the app (which is a website inside a copy of chromium) do that the website can't? I've been using linux for work since when I started working. I also do daily zoom calls. I tend to dismiss comments from people that clearly didn't run linux in the past decade but still keep complaining about the same things they experienced when they last tried it for 2 days in university.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

If your laptop's screen runs optimally with fractional scaling (e.g. 1.5x), that's also still a mess under Linux under both Wayland and X11. I have a laptop like this that I'm trying to run Fedora on instead of Windows but it's frustrating because the UI works best at 1.5x scale, which the DE (GNOME/KDE) handle ok, but third party apps are all over the place. It's difficult to goad even something as simple as Anki into doing the right thing at non-integer UI scales under Linux, whereas under Windows it works flawlessly.