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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

#141

Post by vladvasiliu »

mid-kid wrote: post #70

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…

This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers.

At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint sensor, light sensor, mute LEDs, etc. On Windows, to this day, the webcam isn't recognized because of some USB chip along the line. There's also a lot of lag when adjusting the display backlight, for some reason.

I also have its cousin, an EB 840 g8 (intel 11th gen). A few days ago I installed Win11 22h2 on it. I was lucky to have had an external mouse, since neither the touchpad nor the track point could be used for setup. And it absolutely needs the latest Intel GPU drivers to correctly output 4k@60 through its HP dock (DP pass-thtough, not DisplayLink). On Linux, the same display setup has worked well since day one. But the mute LEDs are still broken.

Both laptops don't come with integrated wired network, so I have an HP USB dongle (Realtek chip). This works quite well on Linux. On Windows, it initially works well, but then, for some reason, Windows figures it needs to update the driver. Then it gains some interesting failure modes, where from the terminal I can do whatever I want, but Edge keeps thinking the connection is lost.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#143

Post by mod »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #119
londons_explore wrote: post #69

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…

From everything I've read, ThinkPads (IBM/Red Hat devs seem to use them), Acers (have pretty standard parts, nothing funky), Dells and HPs (both have Linux dev laptops) all seem to run pretty well. The worst seem to be gaming laptops, non-Lenovo Chinese brands, Asus, etc...

I have an HP gaming laptop. Zero issues running ubuntu. Detects my SD card reader and everything.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#145

Post by bitexploder »

Hellion wrote: post #74
ufmace wrote: post #42

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!”

True though. Half our team runs Linux with minimal issues across a variety of modern hardware. Infosec consulting, so pretty demanding users, but also pretty experienced with Linux. there are caveats and small things, but I will take them over Mac or Win these days.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#146

Post by codedokode »

mid-kid wrote: post #70

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…

I don't think that Linux should support any hardware, especially if its vendors do not provide drivers and documentation.

Instead, there should be an actual list of well supported devices and people should buy only them.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#147

Post by sayitenough »

csdvrx wrote: post #37
j7ake wrote: post #9

How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?

> How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ? Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc. After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries. That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life,…

No post body was provided.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#148

Post by hcrean »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #107
whatever1 wrote: post #63

No 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.

> OS that has actual hardware support. Give me 5' with such an OS and I will find at least 20 things which are broken.

And you can complete this task remotely...

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#149

Post by uluyol »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #141
mid-kid wrote: post #70

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…

This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers. At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint…

Arch is a rolling release distro. So it gets hardware support faster than other distros that stick to older kernels and userspace. Most users are not on rolling releases.

I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.

Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring

#150

Post by II2II »

To make a long story short: I bought a laptop to run Microsoft Office a couple of years back. Being a Linux user, I quickly became frustrated with Windows. Being a slightly rabid Linux user, I bit the bullet and installed Linux on a machine that was not purchased with Linux in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked well. Office was a dual boot away, but that was the price to maintain my sanity.

Now Windows users would probably find issues with Linux on this machine. That's fine. The thing is, I am not going to miss a feature under Linux that I never even used under Windows. Audio, video, and networking meet my expectations. Sleep and hibernate work, and appear to be more reliable under Linux. I have never felt the need to compare battery life under both operating systems since it is acceptable under both operating systems.

As for that dual boot thing: I ended up giving up on the standalone version of Microsoft Office. Online solutions are better for anything that involves collaboration. LibreOffice documents exported to PDF works perfectly well for anything where the product is what matters. The option to dual boot is gone.

There is one big difference between the article's author and myself: after trying a couple of the boring distributions and finding they didn't meet my esoteric tastes, I settled upon the exciting route. Tweaking my workflows is fun as long as it doesn't interfere with my ability to work.

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