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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

#161

Post by wolfram74 »

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...

Corroborating this on the asus, I got one back in 2020 when my laptop gave up the ghost. Tried trudging through but I couldn't get comfortable with opensuse, things like on boot the mouse not responding, spontaneously rebooting when I tried to change volume, wifi card being throttled or just useless. All of it failing just enough I never quite trusted it.

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

#162

Post by vladvasiliu »

spadros wrote: post #153
vladvasiliu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In all my years I have yet to see HDMI output from a laptop to a monitor work on the first try in Ubuntu. Always need to install the proprietary drivers for that to work at all. If it can't even do that without a headache, after 10+ years of Linux use, I would call that a Linux problem, not a hardware problem. My colleagues seem to run into the same issue frequently as well. This article seems kind of ignorant. I'm g…

I've never had any issue with HDMI or DP output. But it's true that my only laptop with a dedicated GPU was an MBP, all the others have or had integrated graphics.

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

#163

Post by UncleMeat »

smoldesu wrote: post #124
CyberDildonics wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows for starters. Also the title claims that things work well not that linux is the best.

Windows has pretty terrible hardware support IMO. Comparing the state of Linux Vs Windows on ARM/PowerPC/RISC-V, it's not even a contest. I think there's a case to be made for the stability of Windows drivers (I should hope vendors don't half-ass support), but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water.

Which consumer laptops are there out there with Power or RISC-V chips?

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

#164

Post by TheRealPomax »

> I tell this anecdote to make a point that will be obvious to nerds, but may still be news for everyone else: Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days.

Which one? Because you can't download and install "Linux", there is no linux-stable-09-2022.iso that you download from linux.org that you then use to install a full OS that "just works(tm)". In fact, if we're talking about an 11 year old laptop, the actual version of Linux installed on it might not even exist anymore, but happens to have been set up in a way that it can use still maintained PPA. And which laptop, with what hardware? Because it's trivial to support a generic network adapter and an ancient 1200x800 WXGA screen, but good luck getting linux to "just work" with your wifi6e and retina 4k screen.

Downvotes notwithstanding, as an anecdote this post effectively undermines itself, because installing Microsoft teams worked contrary to the author's expectation. They expected this to be hard, so concluding that Linux on a laptop "just works" based on a single activity unexpectedly not being an absolute nightmare is not drawing a reasonable conclusion.

(Not sure I buy the argument that Linux works so nicely, because "Most software has migrated to the browser" either, that feels like a false equivalency routed in anecdotal evidence for what "most" means to the author. Some productivity apps have decent webapp equivalents, but they all suffer from the fact that they run in the browser, and folks aren't going to run dedicated browser processes for each web app, so the regular browsing on the side can, and will, stall or even crash the browser)

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

#166

Post by Mikeb85 »

kache_ wrote: post #103

Get a laptop that is sold with Linux. Don't expect Linux to work with literally everything. Drivers. If you get a modern xps or thinkpad it'll work just fine. But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco. Maybe not :P

> But your mom's acer laptop she got from Costco.

Hah Acer's actually work pretty great. No funky hardware, BIOS, etc...

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

#167

Post by lioeters »

aarpmcgee wrote: post #10

I installed PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) on my 5 year old MacBook Pro and it feels like a brand new machine. The UX feels better to me than MacOS which is starting to feel more and more like Windows imo.

I specifically searched for "Pop" in this thread, because I wanted to give them a thumbs up. In recent years I've been moving on from macOS to Linux, and I'm so pleased with my new Thinkpad running PopOS (and Nordic theme). It just works - quiet technology.

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

#169

Post by mrweasel »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #6

The laptop: "It’s an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol’ thick brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for $200."

Had it not died I would still have used my 2013 MacBook Pro. For many use cases computers stopped being slow a decade ago.

There are certainly things I can do on my new laptop that was a major hassle on the old one, but web browsing, Python development and day to day sys admin stuff was perfectly fine on the old machine.

For me it's all about the screen, an 11 year old ThinkPad most certainly have a terrible screen (it might not, but most do). Getting a clear hi-dpi monitor is more important than having the latest CPU, GPU or 32GB of RAM, at least for my needs.

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

#170

Post by marcodiego »

spadros wrote: post #153
vladvasiliu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In all my years I have yet to see HDMI output from a laptop to a monitor work on the first try in Ubuntu. Always need to install the proprietary drivers for that to work at all. If it can't even do that without a headache, after 10+ years of Linux use, I would call that a Linux problem, not a hardware problem. My colleagues seem to run into the same issue frequently as well. This article seems kind of ignorant. I'm g…

My Inspiron-3421 bought in 2013 never had a single issue with HDMI.
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