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> Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked I bought a System76 machine running their own PopOS distro and everything Just Works as I'd expect, with

by kibwen 3y ago

> Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked I bought a System76 machine running their own PopOS distro and everything Just Works as I'd expect, with the added benefit of actually having the ability to muck around with the innards of my system when I want to, unlike Mac or Windows, which are increasingly locked-down, opaque, and user-hostile. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are consumer desktop OS-focused companies these days; the former is a mostly a phone manufacturer and the latter is a confusing mess that might be best described as an enterprise software company. They have no material incentive to care about the quality of Mac or Windows, and it shows; their desktop OSes are afterthoughts.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>I bought a System76 machine running their own PopOS distro and everything Just Works as I'd expect Including touchpad gestures and browser hardware video acceleration out of the box?
- kibwen 3y ago
  It has touchpad gestures, and I even used a GUI program (I think it's called Touche, trivially installed via the app store) to customize the gestures further (it's quite powerful, it lets you assign arbitrary keys or shell scripts to gestures and scope them by context, e.g. I assigned four-finger swipe left/right to Alt+Left/Right while inside Firefox to perform back/forward navigation (this was before Firefox started shipping with gestures natively)). As for browser hardware video acceleration, I sure hope so (the model I got has a beefy GPU) but I'm not sure how to check, and in any case I reflexively watch all videos in 480p after years of watching my old Windows laptop overheat while trying to decode video so I'm the wrong person to ask. :P
- amlib 3y ago
  Firefox has hardware video decoding enabled by default on linux for years now, only google chrome doesn't want to bother doing the work to enable it. That said, in some cases hardware video decoding may be unavailable due to IP issues that forbid the necessary code to be distributed freely.

by kibwen 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>I bought a System76 machine running their own PopOS distro and everything Just Works as I'd expect Including touchpad gestures and browser hardware video acceleration out of the box?

kibwen 3y ago
It has touchpad gestures, and I even used a GUI program (I think it's called Touche, trivially installed via the app store) to customize the gestures further (it's quite powerful, it lets you assign arbitrary keys or shell scripts to gestures and scope them by context, e.g. I assigned four-finger swipe left/right to Alt+Left/Right while inside Firefox to perform back/forward navigation (this was before Firefox started shipping with gestures natively)). As for browser hardware video acceleration, I sure hope so (the model I got has a beefy GPU) but I'm not sure how to check, and in any case I reflexively watch all videos in 480p after years of watching my old Windows laptop overheat while trying to decode video so I'm the wrong person to ask. :P
amlib 3y ago
Firefox has hardware video decoding enabled by default on linux for years now, only google chrome doesn't want to bother doing the work to enable it. That said, in some cases hardware video decoding may be unavailable due to IP issues that forbid the necessary code to be distributed freely.