Earlier quoted context omitted.
No shit. The hardware vendors do all the work for them.
Users don’t care who did the work, they only care if the device functions or not.
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Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
341–350 of 640 posts
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
X230 meanwhile requires turning some exotic feature in BIOS if you want suspend to work properly
I don't think it does, maybe only some builds, as my X230 worked with no issues and no extra settings anywhere.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (…
I’ve been buying MacBook Airs of the 2011-2013 vintage for 10 years. Love them. I have to disable third party JavaScript, and I have to be careful what software I install, but I love this machine. I will probably upgrade to an M1/M2 for my next machine, but it’s because of software not hardware. The software, after 10 years, is finally starting to be bloated enough that I feel like I might need more soon.
Installed latest Mint MATE (based on Ubuntu 22.04) on a MacBook Air 11 2015. Linux has a lot of rough edges on the MacBook Air, definitely not boring, it but works well enough for my needs:
* No fan control out of the box, so CPU overheats after a new minutes. Fixed by installing a 3rd party fan control package.
* Broken sleep. Always wakes up 2-3 seconds after putting to sleep. Fixed by a series of hacks to disable the keyboard and lid while sleeping. Only the Power button is able to wake it up now.
* Display brightness setting lost after sleep. Always wakes up at 100%.
* Webcam does not work. There is no compatible driver from what I understand.
* Two-finger scroll is awful on Linux, compared to the buttery smooth scroll of MacOS.
* Poor battery life compared to MacOS, I estimate about 25% less.
* It can be tricky to figure out how the Mac keys are mapped to normal Linux keys: Alt, Option, Command. Also tricky to figure out how to remap them so that they are more usable on Linux.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#344Yeah, 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…
Did Lenovo classify the device as Linux compatible? A lot of laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell have Ubuntu or RedHat as an optional pre-installed operating system. Those devices usually work with Linux.
As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#345Linux 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…
> Linux starts trashing You mean intensive use of swap memory? You could turn off swap and get OOM errors instead if you like a snappy system, but I don't know if it's fair to criticize an OS for running out of memory. It's the user fault for using software that demands more resources than the equipment has, or for not expanding the RAM when it's clearly needed.
I have swap turned off and I don't get OOM errors. System just crawls and is unresponsive. Usually happens because of Chromium. If I manage to kill it, then it comes back to normal.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#346Yeah, 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…
Did Lenovo classify the device as Linux compatible? A lot of laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell have Ubuntu or RedHat as an optional pre-installed operating system. Those devices usually work with Linux. As a regular customer you can't order it with Linux though, it is only sold to enterprise customers.
Isn't the developer xps sold through their website?
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I kind of expected the A485 to have similar issues to the T480, since it's the same laptop except for the cpu and graphics. I did some preliminary searching and the listing of the laptop as "ubuntu certified" gave me too much confidence, I guess. I forgot to mention in the parent post that the SD card reader can't detect insertion/removal at times, yeah, so I have a script to reload the rtsx_pci_sdmmc kernel module t…
Being an AMD instead of Intel, the motherboard is different which means the whole laptop is different.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#348Thesis: "Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days."
Evidence: 1 data point, my own 11-year old laptop
This article is not notable.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#349Ya know, Linux isn't for everyone, but I like it. I get to do what I want, when I want, and my OS doesn't stop me. I haven't had any issues with hardware so far, because I bought a laptop from System76 and they do a lot of work to make things usable without fuss. I am sure I can't do everything everyone wants to do with a computer, but I don't care because all I do with my laptop (work and home) is read Hacker News and random programming documentation and then program stuff. I guess for me, I could be using a smart toaster from 2012 and probably be happy.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#350Boring because you dont need to waste hours for configuration and troubleshooting not working drivers?