3 ms·

I'm more and more surprised by my MacBook Air 11'' 2012, where everything worked flawlessly under Linux mainline when I purchased it back in 2013. It's really

by nextos 11y ago

I'm more and more surprised by my MacBook Air 11'' 2012, where everything worked flawlessly under Linux mainline when I purchased it back in 2013. It's really sad that even a device which is selected with Linux in mind requires a patched kernel. If you look into stuff which is not only supported by Linux, but also has good power management the list of devices is tiny. Essentially there's no laptop where everything just works. This is absurd. Things work pretty well using Intel components, but they're including things such as TPM which worry me quite a lot. I think there's an enormous opportunity for a startup that produced good ARM - Coreboot devices as open as possible and with developers in mind. The Pyra guys are doing something similar to handheld devices. Perhaps they could scale up.

zanny 11y ago
> Essentially there's no laptop where everything just works. This is absurd. Like I said though, my Clevo 740su did work perfectly out of the box. I don't have to fuck with the trackpad, my sound worked, my pic works, webcam works, battery life is alright considering the SOC (I get about 4 hours idle and 2 hours load). The only missing thing is keyboard resume, which is barely a blip on my radar. There are combinations of parts that work perfectly out of the box in Linux. It is just nobody is putting them all together on average, and Dell seems to rather brute force unsupported hardware rather than field parts with comprehensive support. They exist, you just have to use them instead of their belligerent competitors. Macbooks are always strange, because there are dozens of hackers who will spend night and day reverse engineering each new Macbook to work on the Linux kernel. You don't get that kind of hobbyist support for pretty much anything else.
- nextos 11y ago
  Well, modern MacBooks are much less well supported, but I see your point. I think we need some company that cherrypicks components for Linux. Dell could do it. They already have a gazillion models, why not a Linux specific one? I still applaud their XPS model though. It looks pretty amazing.

by nextos 11y ago

zanny 11y ago

> Essentially there's no laptop where everything just works. This is absurd. Like I said though, my Clevo 740su did work perfectly out of the box. I don't have to fuck with the trackpad, my sound worked, my pic works, webcam works, battery life is alright considering the SOC (I get about 4 hours idle and 2 hours load). The only missing thing is keyboard resume, which is barely a blip on my radar. There are combinations of parts that work perfectly out of the box in Linux. It is just nobody is putting them all together on average, and Dell seems to rather brute force unsupported hardware rather than field parts with comprehensive support. They exist, you just have to use them instead of their belligerent competitors. Macbooks are always strange, because there are dozens of hackers who will spend night and day reverse engineering each new Macbook to work on the Linux kernel. You don't get that kind of hobbyist support for pretty much anything else.

nextos 11y ago
Well, modern MacBooks are much less well supported, but I see your point. I think we need some company that cherrypicks components for Linux. Dell could do it. They already have a gazillion models, why not a Linux specific one? I still applaud their XPS model though. It looks pretty amazing.