An Ode to Linux Desktop Users Everywhere

> Most things Just Work now.

I would definitely agree this is true compared to "before". I remember fooling with Linux in the late 90s and getting graphics to work at a native resolution to my monitor and sound was a big accomplishment. In comparison to now, where out of the box on my slightly aged thinkpad I could use my touchstick, touchpad (with two finger scroll!), volume/brightness/media keys, etc.

However, I think the goal "just works" is not necessarily the right one, at least not for Linux. It "just works" is kind of like a two way street, the computer won't throw you any curve balls as long as you don't throw it any curve balls, either. Toying with Linux on the desktop for the last few months, I've seen a lot of "it just works" type solutions which become a complete disaster when things break -- and things _always_ break -- because figuring out how it works, what went wrong, and how to fix it is not intuitive. Trying out KDE Neon, I had my screen just go black on login. Booting into the terminal and clearing the cache fixed it, but then later it happened again. I don't like the culture of copy-and-paste witchcraft, if something breaks, I want to know why it broke, and what steps I can take to deal with it.

Trying to make things automatic often means making things complex -- you have to include the baggage to cover every possibility and the logic to identify what's happening. Making things easy often means making things inflexible -- you remove what's not necessary from the main use case. Instead, I'd like to see a focus on goals like simple, direct, and transparent, so it's attainable for someone to observe and learn to understand how their system works and to work with it to accomplish their goals.

I disagree, at least for laptops. Desktops are mostly fine with Linux. Laptops... even certified ones, they suck. While battery life is decent, sleep and hibernate support has random issues, and external monitor support is awful. Try using a 4k external monitor when your internal display is not 4k, or viceversa. When the external monitor gets recognized at all (and its relative position is not forgotten).

I use Fedora, basically as it comes out of the box, with only a couple of Gnome shell extensions to make it nicer. My computer is a ThinkPad X230.

- I've never tried external monitors, so I can't say anything either way about that one.

- Printers/CUPS: always worked flawlessly (except for one single HP printer that just wouldn't). Autodiscovered network printers, USB printers, network printers have all "just worked" without an issue. I don't print that much though.

- Suspend/hibernate: I always suspend my laptop when I don't use it. That has worked flawlessly every time without any power management issues, sleep/wakeup issues or anything to complain about. I haven't tried hibernating though.

- Mounting USB sticks/drives: Never had a single issue relating to this. Every single time has worked flawlessly, exactly the same way: plug in USB, open it in the file manager, do things, eject, unplug USB. With both FAT32, NTFS and ext4 file systems, on USB drives, external hard drives, and SD cards.

- I've done two OS upgrades on this (Fedora 23 -> 24 -> 25) the normal upgrade way. Not a single thing broke in either of the upgrades. Both times the upgrade went literally like: start the OS upgrade, reboot to install upgrade, reboot after upgrade is finished, continue using computer without any problems. (By the way, Fedora 24 was the one that made Wayland good for use as daily driver for me, and 25 was where they made it the default.)

I realize that my comment is the definition of anecdotal evidence, and I understand that there are laptops with less fortunate hardware (Nvidia, some WiFi cards, some CPUs, etc.). But what I've realized during this year is that if they have a laptop with good hardware, then the common computer user can just install Fedora on their computer and get the same experience that I had, and that means Fedora is indeed in a very good place among the various desktop operating systems on offer today.

I don't know what problems UEFI has caused (you didn't mention any actual problems?). I have Fedora on two computers with UEFI firmware, and it runs flawlessly on both of them. Installing produced no difficulty at all: the installer automatically installed the bootloader and set it up perfectly on both of the machines.

I even disabled the CSM (legacy BIOS compatibility) on my machines because I want to embrace EFI booting, since I feel like it's such an immense improvement over the old BIOS days. Now the bootloader just goes in a file on a partition, no need to ever do anything with the Master Boot Record anymore.

What I recall was someone on HN saying the 11 inch Ubuntu model wasn't actually that Ubuntu compatible and to buy the 13 inch instead. But I can't remember was the specific HW was.