151–160 of 640 posts
It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.
I am typing this on my 4.75 year old Sager (Clevo), running Linux Mint, with an Nvidia GTX 1060/Intel iGPU unit, 1.5 TB of SSD (SATA), 64 GB ram, 4 physical cores. Everything works. It worked when I first installed it.
My personal office deskside unit is an AMD Epyc 16 core, 128 GB RAM, with NVidia RTX3060 workstation, running Debian 11, as a deskside workstation. I have some older units based upon E5-2687W CPU tech, old NVidia cards built cheaply from ebay parts. All running linux in desktop configs, though most don't have a display keyboard attached. I've used all of them as desksides at one point in time or the other, and still use them for larger personal computing projects unrelated to work.
I've been using Linux on laptops and desksides for the last 23+ years. My first laptop, was a 75MHz pentium unit with 16MB of ram, I triple booted DOS, OS2, and Linux on in 1996. I had a tiny 20MB hard disk with it. I wrote lots of my phd thesis on that under linux, and my home SGI Indy (the perks of working at SGI in the 1990s).
Linux was hard for laptops/desktops until about 2004-2005 or so. Then things that were hard to make work, started working out of the box. I didn't have to think about installing most drivers, apart for things like some usb based devices. That got better in 2008 or so.
Over the last 14 years, everything pretty much just worked. As the OP notes, its been boring. For the most part. Occasionally I'll run into a cheap USB peripheral where the driver isn't updated, or its missing updated firmware, but this is, and has been for a while, the exception.
I know there are many who have disdain for linux desktops. That's fine, have your own preferred environment. That noted, please recognize that there are many users out there using linux desktops, successfully, productively, without problems. From installation through normal/intense usage.
My home office has a Mac M1 Mini running MacOS 12.6 , 1x HP Omen 64 GB RAM, 8 core Ryzen laptop with Nvidia 1660Ti gpu running linux mint, a deskside 16 core Epyc, 128GB RAM machine with RTX3060 running Debian 11. All configured with my various monitors and networks. Its productive for me. We do not have an operational, regularly in use, MS Windows installation. And we're happy with this setup. It works. Everything just works. The way it should.
[edited to fix HP laptop brand, Omen, not Open]
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…
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…
That has been my experience too. Even then if you get a next generation thinkpad that is slightly newer than what has been "blessed" by the community, there is a good chance that a lot of essential hardware won't work. Fortunately, in the case of Lenovo they do actively track issues with hardware and issue new bios versions that fix compatibility but even having to install new firmware when you are using Linux can ca…
I thought lvfs ( https://fwupd.org/ ) had fixed that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, well, it's been that way for me for many years now through many machines of varying brands. These Dell machines are just the most recent, and I was shocked at how effortless the whole install process went this time around compared to way back when I first started using Linux. It really was a huge hassle back in the "olden days" of early Linux… Nowadays it's proven pretty "plug and play" all the way around every…
This comment is exactly what I mean.
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.
Can you name a kernel with more robust hardware support?
I don’t like the color scheme and general rendering of websites on Linux (all browsers). By contrast, the MacOS renders websites really well. I played with the color settings on my video card and I can see that I could make it better, but I just couldn’t get it right all the way. Does anybody knows how to make Linux website rendering more pleasing to the eye and closer to MacOS? This is the only reason I still stick…
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...
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 used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years.
Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the stuffed-full-of-garbage oem installs I've found it way more likely that I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OOM killer is a pseudosolution to an artificially created problem. https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/
Then don't use it. Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.
Every Linux system configured for overcommit (every major distribution out of the box) will invoke the kernel OOM killer upon demand. There is no such thing as distributions not "enabling" this thing. You're talking about things like systemd-oomd, which act as a layer on top of the kernel OOM killer.