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For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/
I 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…
Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing.
Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX on commodity Windows hardware.
Yeah, 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 rewr…
Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.
Yeah, 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 rewr…
My last laptop (an AMD version of the HP Envy 13) was also rough at the beginning. A BIOS update updated the AMD GPU firmware or microcode or something and broke compatibility with the current kernel stable kernel at the time. Had to switch to an -rc kernel to get video to work.
Admittedly, my day job is basically Linux kernel development so I'm intimately familiar with most of this stuff. Not exactly your typical user.
Linux 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, mul…
Yeah, 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 rewr…
> It was not always thus. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, installing Linux on one's home computer was a rather terrifying affair, requiring a ton of abstruse tweaking using the command line. For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
Love this lol
Earlier quoted context omitted.
replace the "medium.com" with "scribe.rip" for a pure(?) html version: https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-works-s... or evidently 12ft.io also works as submitted by the sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606 )
Very nice, Thanks for above / mentioning scribe.rip , today i learned, you deserve one
I 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…
The rallying cry of the Linux desktop enthusiast: “well, it works for me!”
I run Gnome based distros on Thinkpads and Dell XPSs and they are the breeze to setup and use. Nvidia drivers are always a concern, apart from that in all ways superior to Windows OSs on these same laptops. Personally i find myself more productive with my Linix workstation but the M1 Mac I use for official work is also quite good.
Though, you do need to know how to use a computer to set things up properly.