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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

#241

How nice for OP. Just a handful of my issues: - only one speaker works so volume is low - finger print scanner doesn’t work - battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine - suspend and hibernate doesn’t work - random freezes - charging indicator unreliable - trackpad wrist filtering is very poor - boot failures after OS updates I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon. I really tried with Linux for…

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

#242
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters. 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 o…

What is “Windows hardware”?

Hardware sold with Windows preinstalled, by vendors who won't support anything else than Windows. I simply avoid them.

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

#243
I've had mixed results on laptops. I've never bothered to make the fingerprint reader work, that just isn't my thing. I've had decent luck with all the standard functions video, audio, storage, keyboard, mousepad, wifi on most models of Lenovo and Dell in the last decade. I've had mixed results on Asus laptops, especially the recent ones. The biggest challenge I've had is finding out ahead of time what wifi chipset is used and this has only affected me when using tools like aircrack-ng [1]. The chipset can vary even within the same make/model of laptop depending on when it was manufactured. The way I quickly test how a laptop will behave is to boot Kali Linux [2] into ram. Sometimes a sales person at a computer store would let me do this on a demo model even though they probably should not.

[1] - https://www.aircrack-ng.org/

[2] - https://www.kali.org/

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever… I'm glad to no longer have to fight my operating system to work with my hardware like I always had to on Windows - "Plug and Pray" was a joke for a valid reason. Installing drivers is for rubes. I'd rather plug stuff in and just get to work without going on a freakin' scavenger hunt for drivers… If you hate Linux so much, then just don't use it. Simple, yeah?

I greatly prefer Linux and use Windows when some software forces me to, but I don't feel that your comment is constructive in this conversation. Windows is generally a smoother experience. Linux is generally not ready for the average user with a randomly picked computer, as much as we'd wish it is.

Yeah, well, I don't really feel that Linux gettin' shit on every single time it's mentioned anywhere is entirely constructive, either. I been using Linux for many years, and over that time it's quite simply continued to improve in areas where Windows was always a huge pain for me (and most all of my family and friends with few exceptions). Most notably, that whole "Plug and Play" hardware thing. In this most recent decade or so of my Linux use, that got to be a total non-issue with hardware I've bought ranging from cheap random Chinese garbage to high-priced high-quality hardware devices. I plug them in, and they work. On rare occasion (like with printers or NVIDIA cards) I'll have to install drivers (direct from my package manager), but even then, it's light-years ahead of any experience I've ever had with drivers on Windows. Is Linux perfect? Hell no! No operating system is. Is it the best operating system for me? Absolutely. It Just Works™ in my personal experience, and that's all I care about. I'll keep using it, and I will keep defending it to those who keep spreading decades old no longer even remotely true FUD. Don't like Linux? Don't use it. Period. Don't gotta keep telling those of us who do like and use Linux (for the billionth time) how much better Windows is. It isn't better - just different, and in some ways decidedly worse than all of it's competitors. But if it's what you need or want to use, then use it FFS. Just don't come to evangelize Windows to people who used it for years and learned to prefer something else because it straight up worked better/more reliably for them than Windows did. It gets beyond old to keep hearing that bullshit after a while.

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

#245
post #112
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…

For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480. But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bi…

same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.

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

#246
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…

IMHO, the fact that you need a kernel patch for a key LED is what holds Linux back.

I am assuming the above is sarcasm, but... for the record, for the HP Mic Mute LED, the "Windows" driver was:

1. Crashing regularly for most of the early Windows 10 era, leaving users with a frozen mute LED,

2. Was found to contain an actual keylogger. Yes, the driver as shipped by HP and signed by MS had malware.

Google "mictray64.exe" .

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

#247

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.

My experience with Windows on my laptop is that color profiles work out of the box, energy management is better on Linux, Bluetooth on Windows barely works and the webcam doesn't even need settings.

Nvidia crap works better on Windows (except for CUDA) and more settings have a GUI. Windows's fan profile can be switched between "VTOL takeoff" and "entirely silent but slow as hell". This includes all the firmware updates and driver updates I can find.

That's not necessarily a defence for Linux; Linux has rough edges if you need pretty much anything more than a browser and aren't technically inclined, in part because the online community can't help themselves from suggesting complex, out-of-date command line solutions for things that have had a GUI for a decade now. It's also inherently harder for enthusiasts to get system support than for a company with fulltime paid developers. That's an excuse for much of the poor experience but the end result is still not very attractive for many people.

It's more of an insult to the current state of Windows and its hardware partners. The Linux Foundation doesn't have contracts with its manufacturers and yet its hardware ecosystem is more stable than Windows 11. Whatever the hell Microsoft did to sleep mode is turning laptops into backpack heaters and that's honestly inexcusable.

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

#248

We burned an evening just last week tracing an Intel wifi driver issue to missing kernel headers that required upgrading the kernel to a new, non-LTS version. And only then did we move on to Nvidia drivers. So no, still not the year of Linux on the desktop. Our entire dev team does it, but largely because Nvidia and Apple stopped working together. The bigger surprise is Windows WSL2 is just about there for Ubuntu sup…

I really tried to make wsl work for the windows users on my team, but we kept getting tangled up with networking (I guess there's a virtual switch involved and so when a tool claims to have forwarded a port it's hard to figure out where it forwarded it to and why only half of your stuff can see it).

Do you know if that situation has improved in the last year or so?

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

#250

Also related: Linux Subsystem for Windows works in similar manner (at least for me!) - I've switched couple years ago from Linux -> OSX -> Linux -> WSL (when WSL was in 1.x version at the time and lacking from couple features) and gosh, I've never looked back since then (disclaimer: I'm a front-end developer (and making games in my spare time using various tools) and for my needs I've never found a serious complain a…

WSL do not works well with my company's vpn software and last time I checked there was an awful lot of limitations.
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