I wish Ubuntu didn't kill Wubi tho. We used that at my first workplace on laptops with Windows and it was so damn good. There is a new fork [0] but it's a hit and miss with modern UEFI and especially with Windows 11 (had to use it for some reason). And other distros never had an option like this afaik, none does as of today. But I know it's all about Docker, VMs, or WSL nowadays yet Wubi covered a niche segment which was pefect.
Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
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Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#62Uhm, how about suspension/hibernate? That was pretty lame even 2 years ago and I'm not seeing it improve
Zero issues with Fedora 36 regarding that. I do have a Wi-Fi issue where sometimes I need to re-associate, but that typically happens when I move between two APs with the same SSID and seems to be a known issue for that Wi-Fi driver.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#63No it does not. Give it to me for 5’ and I will find at least 10 things that are broken. Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken.
Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing.
The best we can do is to put it in a VM and run it in a OS that has actual hardware support.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#64Boring is good when it comes to tech because it means you're not spending time trying to make things work. Save the excitement for the stuff that pays your bills.
Yes, and I don't want to spent my time dealing with bad drivers, so that's why I'm using Windows instead.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#65I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices. Windows h…
I have two Dell laptops and a Dell tower, all of which run flawlessly on Linux, all hardware supported out of the box. Everything I've plugged into them (most often via USB) or paired via Bluetooth also works without hassle (and never once did I have to search any manufacturer's websites for drivers).
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#66Linux still can't handle out of memory issues gracefully.
Sometimes I create memory leaks or use too many electron apps and when you hit a low memory situation Linux starts trashing and your system becomes unusable for minutes to hours unless you reboot your machine.
Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems.
This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, multitask too much and your system effectively locks up. Laptops tend to have less ram available.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#67No it doesn't, even on an Asus 1215B that was actually sold with Linux on it. GL support isn't at the same level as the DirectX 11 for the APU, still has some issues waking up time to time (only fixed by taking the battery out), and is the only device that has issues connecting to my router.
Yeah, I have to second this. As badly as I wish this article were true, even on devices specifically designed to support linux, like the Framework, there are a million tiny glitches and inconveniences with sleep, wifi, power management, webcam, bluetooth, etc, etc. These simply don't happen on windows.
Using linux on a laptop is the same as it has been for the last 20 years: something you only do if you don't mind being forced to be an enthusiast constantly tinkering with configuration files and such.
If you want a tool to actually get work done it can be painfully frustrating. I say this as someone who willingly pays the cost of this frustration because I much prefer linux as a development environment. But the people who write articles like this are either delusional, lying, or very, very lucky.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#68I miss the old slackware days where nothing works
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#69I have the reverse...
Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features.
For example, power saving features, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness controls, fingerprint readers, keyboard hotkeys and backlights, etc. rarely work. Prepare for broken external hdmi ports or USB stuck at USB 2.0 speeds. Have fun with the fan stuck on either max or zero, or the CPU stuck at the lowest clock speed.
There are still lots of things you have to go hunting for the right old firmware version for.
I think Linux is only great if you have whatever hardware distro developers have, because that will be all that works out of the box.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#70Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.
Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.