Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

clivethompson.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 640 posts

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

#361

Post by lozf »

Tozen wrote: post #323
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…

Well, the reality is that Linux consists of less than 5% of the market (desktops and laptops), where Windows OSes make up around 75% and macOS around 15%. So, that is going to dictate the priorities of companies supplying drivers.

What's the other >5%?

Surely not *BSDs?

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

#362

Post by sk1pper »

I want this to be true very badly. I’ve been a Linux user for nearly 20 years and I’ve never had an install that “just works” to the level of macOS or even Windows.

Although there was a while there in like 2006 where I had a pretty solid install of Ubuntu on some HP laptop I had at the time. That’s the closest I got.

This is of course extremely anecdotal. Everyone’s on different hardware and therefore has pretty different experiences.

I hate Windows as a development OS but I’d rather deal with that than some odd update that breaks my install completely, or spending hours reading forum posts to try to make my Bluetooth driver less shitty, etc etc.

I just use macOS for dev and Windows for gaming and they stay out of my way. I’ll keep trying Linux again once a year or so, but I’m not optimistic on it. It’s a moving target too due to varying hardware support over time.

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

#363

Post by tadfisher »

KaiserPro wrote: post #294

The fuck it does. I have a lenovo t14 something or other. I have to fiddle with the bios to get suspend work. This means that the battery lasts about 4 days. However whenever it resumes, the touchpad appears to only work at 5 frames per second. Moreover, its impossible to hibernate with secure boot.

Intel or AMD? Intel removed S3 support from the platform entirely, and S0ix support was spotty until recent kernels/distros. Lenovo royally screwed up the AMD firmware, so kernel 5.18 includes a hack to force-suspend the NVMe subsystem regardless of what their broken ACPI handler wants to do.

Hibernation with secure boot is actually disabled because of "kernel lockdown", which most distros leave enabled. I feel like the security people push these patches through and dismiss user needs by waving the "hibernation is impossible to secure and standby is good enough" flag, and we have to live with a broken feature set compared to Windows. It's not a great attitude to have, from the user standpoint anyway.

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

#364

Post by _skel »

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…

With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed.

In 2022.

That is the kind of basic thing that does not work.

In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

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

#365

Post by teva »

petra wrote: post #338
autoexec wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old IBM Thinkpads were pretty solid, but now they're made by Lenovo who has a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors, usually in exchange for money. They've even been caught stuffing malware into UEFI so that users reinstalling their OS would be infected over and over again. However nice their laptops are, I could never trust them. They have already proved that they are perfectly wil…

What laptops brands do you buy? Why?

Framework laptop is a good option as well.

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

#366

Post by admax88qqq »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #101
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…

> 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've turned off swap, it still happens.

It's not the users fault. Every other major OS handles this situation.

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

#367

Post by usr1106 »

rtpg wrote: post #303
pxeboot wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree. If you pick a random new laptop, you will probably have a bad time running Linux. When I decided to switch to Linux as my main OS, I researched well supported models and settled on the X1 Carbon. I bought it a large discount right after a new generation was released and the Linux support has been near perfect. Really only one or two minor issues in the past ~3 years, which is similar to what I have e…

yeah seconding the X1 thing. The battery life is a bit wanting but I have more issues on my desktop than on my laptop at this point

I had a X1C bought early 2018 and it had great battery life. And I generally was happy with it. Unfortunately it got stolen (luckily I had full disk encryption). Without much investigation I took a X1C again. This time it was a 7th gen. It had HiDPi display which was a bit of pain to have all apps working with a satisfactory resolution and the battery life is much poorer than before. I would take my older one back right away if I could.

Edit: The author uses an 11 year old machine. Not a surprise it works well. With all the new stuff the vendors introduce difficulties are much more common. I hear a lot of complaints from colleagues with Thunderbolt docks, the newest Intel camera generation has no Linux support, not that much has changed. Whether it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back or the other way round is debatable.

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

#368

Post by bayindirh »

paulcarroty wrote: post #359
bayindirh wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP Elitebooks and Thinkpads are designed and built with Linux in mind. I never came across an HP Elitebook or Thinkpad which failed to run Linux out of the box. Dell XPS is the latest addition to this group. Consumer laptops come with a lot of trickery analogous to WinModems of the era, which require Windows specifically. Hence these cost saving measurements create a lot of problems.

Disagree, used to use Dell Inspiron and some cheap HPs, found nothing extraordinary.

It's more of a chance than the norm, then.

My Dad's Lenovo Ideapad comes with a soft-raid of two SSDs for example, since a faster and twice bigger would be much more pricey.

Also, I've seen non-standard GPUs, tons of broken BIOS tables, vendor specific devices with weird quirks and whatnot over the years.

Maybe these things still happen but newer kernels know how to deal with this better, I don't know.

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

#369

Post by admax88qqq »

marcodiego wrote: post #95
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…

You're probably using an old version of systemd without oomd. If you can wait a little, MGLRU will soon fix that in the kernel; no other software will need to be installed or updated.

Neat thanks for the pointer! I'll definitely follow MGLRU with interest.
Post reply on HN