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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

#181

Post by Delk »

wooque wrote: post #93
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…

Yep, my 2 year old Ryzen laptop still doesn't have properly functioning sleep without tweaking kernel parameter, and that workaround got broken on 5.19 kernel release and I had to find out new parameter to tweak. Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.

These kinds of things probably still depend a lot on the brand and the product line.

The post is really only an anecdote about a ThinkPad, and a relatively old one at that, which is probably as good as it gets in terms of Linux compatibility.

I personally more or less agree with the title, though, assuming a suitable hardware choice. I have a new-ish Ryzen ThinkPad for work and the only issue I've had is Gnome occasionally semi-hanging, and I don't know if that's just because of Ubuntu being a bit flimsy or because of something more general such as an issue with the AMD graphics driver.

Also, the Teams client the post mentions is about to be dropped by MS and it was never really that good to begin with, but having seen about two decades of desktop Linux, I'd rather be surprised that it's been available and worked somewhat reliably at all without hit-and-miss with Wine.

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

#182

Post by brightball »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #24
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.

>> PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) It is: Pop!_OS https://pop.system76.com/ It basically a customized Ubuntu with perfect driver support for System76 hardware. I use it on a 2015 Meerkat ( https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat ) and it works great.

I just bought a Meerkat and it’s incredible. I love this thing.

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

#183

Post by brightball »

smoldesu wrote: post #102
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.

You should look into enabling Wayland, which PopOS! disables by default. That should give you silky-smooth 60fps desktop transitions like MacOS, as well as 1:1 trackpad gestures. Happy hacking!

Really?

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

#184

Post by lima »

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.

Indeed. I was surprised to install Windows on a two year old Thinkpad recently to use some proprietary hardware and ended up with more random issues than I'd have on Fedora.

Trackpoint sideways scrolling not working (works fine with libinput), inexplicably high power usage, wifi disconnects...

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

#185

Post by eddieroger »

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,…

That's cool, but I don't know if your experience is uniquely yours or common, and for me at least, it's not common. I want a laptop that will last a full day without charging because when I use it as a laptop, I may be moving around, or going between meetings, or walking to lunch or a coffee shop, and I don't want to have to find a power outlet. Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better".

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

#186

Post by weberer »

admax88qqq wrote: post #66

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…

It sounds like you're running without a swap file. You should really enable that.

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

#187

Post by pizza234 »

codedokode wrote: post #151

I think that there should be a list of officially supported laptops and if you bought anything else then it is your problem and you are welcome to write necessary patches. It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.

To an extent, there is; Ubuntu holds a list of certified hardware, including laptops: https://ubuntu.com/certified.

Notably, the latest Dell XPS is certified.

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

#189

Post by Waterluvian »

bbertelsen wrote: post #134
Waterluvian wrote: post #45

Someone show me how to get my xps-15 to run Ubuntu with comparable GPU and battery performance to Windows in less than five hours of work and I will be eternally grateful. I gave up and plugged it in permanently for work and use my Mac for mobile.

Hello! I have been using PopOS which is a derivative of Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia drivers baked in. Setup on every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year), has been about 20 minutes. Dell devices have excellent Linux support. Battery is a problem, I can get 5-7 hours in PopOS vs. 5-9 hours in Windows, depending on what I'm working on by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and…

Oh wow. I’m grateful you shared this. Wasn’t aware of PopOS and your experience with it sounds promising. I will gladly take 5 hours of battery. Currently I get 60-90 minutes in Ubuntu.

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

#190

Post by lioeters »

bbertelsen wrote: post #134
Waterluvian wrote: post #45

Someone show me how to get my xps-15 to run Ubuntu with comparable GPU and battery performance to Windows in less than five hours of work and I will be eternally grateful. I gave up and plugged it in permanently for work and use my Mac for mobile.

Hello! I have been using PopOS which is a derivative of Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia drivers baked in. Setup on every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year), has been about 20 minutes. Dell devices have excellent Linux support. Battery is a problem, I can get 5-7 hours in PopOS vs. 5-9 hours in Windows, depending on what I'm working on by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and…

> every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year)

Haha, nice - I imagine it's satisfying to have a reliable and reproducible setup. Just curious, do you sell the used ones, or give them away..?

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