4 ms·

I was at a Ubuntu conference in Korea a few years ago and there was this kid with a Macbook running Linux but it was themed perfectly to MacOS. It was all very

I was at a Ubuntu conference in Korea a few years ago and there was this kid with a Macbook running Linux but it was themed perfectly to MacOS. It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the HDMI didn't work.

rbanffy 2y ago
> It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the HDMI didn't work. Let me guess... Nvidia?
- ramon156 2y ago
  I cannot stress enough how much the nvidia situation pisses me off. I've had to convince colleagues that their bad experience is with nvidia drivers, not linux. If your only solution is to buy a completely different version of a laptop to fix jankyness, most people would just say fuck it and opt for a macbook instead. It's a shame people dismiss linux because of that experience, but I cannot blame them.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Currently at least, it’s much easier to get a laptop without any Nvidia GPUs. I always tell people to get the boring machines because those will be the solid ones.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I know Linux since 1995's Summer, starting with Slackware 2.0, and UNIX since Xenix in 1993, have subscripted to Linux Journal from 1995 until it stop publishing, got most Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, and plenty of other UNIX stuff. Yet, I run Windows/macOS as desktop between private devices and work ones, eventually I decided to start spending my weekends doing other stuff other than making GNU/Linux run on laptops supporting 100% of the hardware, even when bought with Linux pre-installed like on my, now dead of old age, Asus netbook.
    - badsectoracula 2y ago
      I "only" know Linux since 1999 when i found Caldera OpenLinux on a magazine cover disk, but my experience is the complete opposite: i use Windows as a desktop whenever some work require it (at work) but on my private devices i always use Linux because i find Windows increasingly and extremely user hostile with a ton of annoying issues. When it comes to hardware i make sure the hardware i buy is supported before buying it (e.g. i'm using AMD GPUs since that has the best support under Linux[0] - though when it comes to desktop GPUs, i also used Nvidia GPUs around the GeForce 980 times and didn't had any issues myself), so hardware support isn't much of a concern. The only time i remember having issues was with an early Nvidia Optimus laptop which required a custom kernel patch that wasn't mainlined yet. That was annoying at the time but not too long ago i installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on the same laptop and everything worked out of the box (even got a GPU switcher). I even connected it to an old TV via HDMI to play some games using Wine and an older version of DXVK before Vulkan 1.0 support was dropped (sadly the laptop does not get driver updates anymore from Nvidia - the perils of relying on closed source drivers). [0] bugs notwithstanding, but even then, i still had more AMD GPU-related bugs under Windows when i used it
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        > The only time i remember having issues was with an early Nvidia Optimus laptop which required a custom kernel patch that wasn't mainlined yet. This is exactly the kind of stuff I don't care any longer. Speaking of AMD, https://community.amd.com/t5/pc-drivers-software/can-t-install-amdgpu-drivers-on-ubuntu-20-04-2-lts-kernel-5-8-0/td-p/443498 https://community.amd.com/t5/pc-drivers-software/can-t-insta... That Asus 1215 B netbook that you will find in endless remarks from my comments, now finally joined other netbooks on laptop heaven, was also bought with Linux pre-installed from Asus directly, and yet it did not prevented it from suffering from wlan connection issues with FOSS driver, having the AMD driver only go up to GL 3.3, when Windows side could do 4.1, or after Flash was gone, never getting VA-API working properly with either FF or Chrome.
        badsectoracula 2y ago
        As i wrote the laptop now works out of the box - what i describe was 12 years ago, which is practically ancient history in terms of software. The only issue is that because Nvidia only provides closed source drivers and they decided they do not want to support the laptop's GPU anymore, there is no way to use any newer drivers from it. But that is because of Nvidia, not because of Linux. I could even install a recent distro on my mid-2000s ATI X1950 Pro-based PC if i wanted as that has an open source driver. I'm not sure what the link is meant to show - or really what exactly it refers to (EDIT: or if it is even relevant, the post is already 4 years old). The AMD driver is part of the Linux kernel this days, you don't need to install anything. AMD has its own alternative driver if you -e.g.- need their OpenGL implementation, but pretty much nobody uses that stuff nor is any software tested on it. Basically unless you have some very specific software needs, chances are trying to install AMD's drivers is going to have both worse performance and a ton of issues.
- okanat 2y ago
  I did see this happening with AMD too. AMD drivers had a bug around 2020 that newer AMD Thinkpads couldn't drive 4K displays. It was one of the reasons I stopped using Linux after buying a new Thinkpad T14 Gen 1. Half of the hardware outright didn't work. It took a good 2 years for them to fix it.
thurm 2y ago
Some say the kernel code is a lot worse then people tend to believe. Supposedly it's crafted by geeks instead of devine beings.

rbanffy 2y ago

> It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the HDMI didn't work. Let me guess... Nvidia?

ramon156 2y ago
I cannot stress enough how much the nvidia situation pisses me off. I've had to convince colleagues that their bad experience is with nvidia drivers, not linux. If your only solution is to buy a completely different version of a laptop to fix jankyness, most people would just say fuck it and opt for a macbook instead. It's a shame people dismiss linux because of that experience, but I cannot blame them.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Currently at least, it’s much easier to get a laptop without any Nvidia GPUs. I always tell people to get the boring machines because those will be the solid ones.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I know Linux since 1995's Summer, starting with Slackware 2.0, and UNIX since Xenix in 1993, have subscripted to Linux Journal from 1995 until it stop publishing, got most Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, and plenty of other UNIX stuff. Yet, I run Windows/macOS as desktop between private devices and work ones, eventually I decided to start spending my weekends doing other stuff other than making GNU/Linux run on laptops supporting 100% of the hardware, even when bought with Linux pre-installed like on my, now dead of old age, Asus netbook.
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    I "only" know Linux since 1999 when i found Caldera OpenLinux on a magazine cover disk, but my experience is the complete opposite: i use Windows as a desktop whenever some work require it (at work) but on my private devices i always use Linux because i find Windows increasingly and extremely user hostile with a ton of annoying issues. When it comes to hardware i make sure the hardware i buy is supported before buying it (e.g. i'm using AMD GPUs since that has the best support under Linux[0] - though when it comes to desktop GPUs, i also used Nvidia GPUs around the GeForce 980 times and didn't had any issues myself), so hardware support isn't much of a concern. The only time i remember having issues was with an early Nvidia Optimus laptop which required a custom kernel patch that wasn't mainlined yet. That was annoying at the time but not too long ago i installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on the same laptop and everything worked out of the box (even got a GPU switcher). I even connected it to an old TV via HDMI to play some games using Wine and an older version of DXVK before Vulkan 1.0 support was dropped (sadly the laptop does not get driver updates anymore from Nvidia - the perils of relying on closed source drivers). [0] bugs notwithstanding, but even then, i still had more AMD GPU-related bugs under Windows when i used it
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      > The only time i remember having issues was with an early Nvidia Optimus laptop which required a custom kernel patch that wasn't mainlined yet. This is exactly the kind of stuff I don't care any longer. Speaking of AMD, https://community.amd.com/t5/pc-drivers-software/can-t-install-amdgpu-drivers-on-ubuntu-20-04-2-lts-kernel-5-8-0/td-p/443498 https://community.amd.com/t5/pc-drivers-software/can-t-insta... That Asus 1215 B netbook that you will find in endless remarks from my comments, now finally joined other netbooks on laptop heaven, was also bought with Linux pre-installed from Asus directly, and yet it did not prevented it from suffering from wlan connection issues with FOSS driver, having the AMD driver only go up to GL 3.3, when Windows side could do 4.1, or after Flash was gone, never getting VA-API working properly with either FF or Chrome.
      - badsectoracula 2y ago
        As i wrote the laptop now works out of the box - what i describe was 12 years ago, which is practically ancient history in terms of software. The only issue is that because Nvidia only provides closed source drivers and they decided they do not want to support the laptop's GPU anymore, there is no way to use any newer drivers from it. But that is because of Nvidia, not because of Linux. I could even install a recent distro on my mid-2000s ATI X1950 Pro-based PC if i wanted as that has an open source driver. I'm not sure what the link is meant to show - or really what exactly it refers to (EDIT: or if it is even relevant, the post is already 4 years old). The AMD driver is part of the Linux kernel this days, you don't need to install anything. AMD has its own alternative driver if you -e.g.- need their OpenGL implementation, but pretty much nobody uses that stuff nor is any software tested on it. Basically unless you have some very specific software needs, chances are trying to install AMD's drivers is going to have both worse performance and a ton of issues.
okanat 2y ago
I did see this happening with AMD too. AMD drivers had a bug around 2020 that newer AMD Thinkpads couldn't drive 4K displays. It was one of the reasons I stopped using Linux after buying a new Thinkpad T14 Gen 1. Half of the hardware outright didn't work. It took a good 2 years for them to fix it.

thurm 2y ago

Some say the kernel code is a lot worse then people tend to believe. Supposedly it's crafted by geeks instead of devine beings.