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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

#371

Post by akvadrako »

odysseus wrote: post #172
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…

I had a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and still had many of the problems you mention and more: - Barely ever waking from sleep, especially with external monitor connected - Screen brightness keyboard controls didn't work (needed to use a CLI tool to control gamma as a hacky workaround) - Had to power cycle repeatedly to get to a desktop when booting - Not working reliably in clamshell mode - Randomly forgetting external monit…

I've also had a recent Thinkpad X1 with Ubuntu and had several major issues, for example no working microphone for the first 6 months.

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

#372

Post by albertopv »

unnouinceput wrote: post #128
albertopv wrote: post #109

Two days ago a friend found Spotify installed on hers Windows 10 laptop, pushed by Microsoft, even on the taskbar. That's insane. Windows 10 will be my last Windows ever.

I highly doubt that Microsoft did that and more likely her little brother or somebody else who used the laptop and didn't told her did it.

Not this time, she lives alone, there's no one else who could have done it and she's not tech savvy, not at all, I bought and configured that laptop my self for her.

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

#373

Post by moffkalast »

sbf501 wrote: post #113
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…

Ubuntu: Except for Bluetooth and audio, and sometimes it forgets there's a wired Ethernet port I have to down/up the interface with `ip`. BT is a trainwreck.

Can confirm, my god how terrible BT support can be.

So much for things working on older laptops, my 6ish years old Asus as some weird Intel BT chip that has completely broken drivers on Ubuntu. Not as in that they can't be built or installed, but the damn thing keeps fucking disconnecting and reconnecting every few seconds. It literally would've been better if they hadn't bothered.

But also like in general, at least anyone making any new protocol or standard can rest easy knowing that they cannot possibly fuck up worse than IEEE making the bluetooth spec.

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

#374

Post by g42gregory »

otikik wrote: post #157
g42gregory wrote: post #122

I don’t like the color scheme and general rendering of websites on Linux (all browsers). By contrast, the MacOS renders websites really well. I played with the color settings on my video card and I can see that I could make it better, but I just couldn’t get it right all the way. Does anybody knows how to make Linux website rendering more pleasing to the eye and closer to MacOS? This is the only reason I still stick…

Better monitor, perhaps? Apple has had exclusivity on retina displays for some years, although I think that was over now.

Unfortunately no, I use non-Apple monitor for both MacbookPro and Linux box. The difference in rendering web is pretty noticeable to me. Windows used to render full, saturated colors a while back, but now it looks pretty washed out to me as well. So it’s only MacOS that renders well currently (I am sure they will “improve” it in the future, but looks good so far). I think it has something to do with default color profiles for the corresponding OS. I would love to talk to someone who is an expert in this field.

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

#375

Post by autoexec »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #339
autoexec wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's because new hardware is made to work for windows. Few companies care about linux drivers

Almost any hardware you get today will have standard components with Linux support. Can you give some more examples of which companies and what components you're referring to?

There's a long list of devices that have problems with linux. The hardware I think I've seen the most complaints about are wifi/ethernet chipsets, printers/scanners, and spotty support for specific features like sensors, LED lights, and fan/cooling controls. Problems with video cards are far less common now than they used to be but I still see people having weird issues from time to time and sadly most of the firmware still contains closed source binary blobs.

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

#376

Post by londons_explore »

_skel wrote: post #364
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.

Wayland just generally is missing config files...

Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had...

They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...

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

#377

Post by twblalock »

londons_explore wrote: post #376
_skel wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wayland just generally is missing config files... Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had... They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...

If we are talking about desktop Linux, a lack of config files is not a problem. If you expect people to edit files to get their desktops to work properly, you have already lost.

The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.

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

#378

Post by raffraffraff »

...unlike the Raspberry Pi. About a year ago I installed a Raspberry Pi 4B+ behind my 40" monitor, with Kodi + some DLNA stuff on it. It almost works, but it has hard fails in enough important areas that I've given up on it.

- No sleep / standby mode (lowest power is 'idle')

- No Wake On Lan, so if you power it off completely, you have to cycle the power on the power supply (not easy, since mine is behind the "TV")

- Chromium crashes on YouTube (https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640)

- Firefox ESR doesn't play sound on most YouTube videos (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/109185/some-...)

- Can't run Windows apps (eg the amazing MusicBee) because it's ARM

- Shitty disk support (stuck with SD card or USB)

I gave an old ThinkPad T430 to my 9 year old nephews about a year ago, and they've completely trashed it: busted screen hinges, broken backlight and cracked case. I'm gonna remove the faulty screen and permanently hook it up to the TV as a "headless laptop" (https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jt2p8j/i_see_your...). Because guess what? Linux runs boringly well on it. Also: built-in keyboard, low-power standby mode, trackpad, proper SSD and more useful ports than the Pi.

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

#379

Post by jagger27 »

With the caveat that you have to like Gnome or KDE. They’re both better than Windows but Gnome in particular has gone too far with its ultra minimalist UI design. I just wish there was something built on Sway that’s nice to use out of the box that doesn’t require a witch’s cauldron of dot files. Why are all the cool DEs so allergic to GUI configuration tools?

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

#380

Post by major505 »

I was suprised when I upgraded my old Thinkpad x250 to the Inspiron 15 from DEll. Installed Pop Os on it and it worked really well. I could even make the fingerprint scanner run without problem.

In the end I endup going back to win 11 because someone wanted me to maintain a vb5 and winform .net aplication, and because Borderlands 3 runs better on win, unfortunally.

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