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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep. I'm not a huge fan of Wayland personally, but if you simply want "more Mac-feel" then it's probably perfect. Enabling it in your config allows you to switch between x11/Wayland without a real risk of borking your desktop.

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

#392

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…

WSL 2 is the only thing keeping me from dual booting Linux on my Windows 10 machine. I want to dual boot, but it can be quite a pain to get it going

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

#393

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 updat…

> suggesting complex, out-of-date command line solutions for things that have had a GUI for a decade now.

I can help somebody on basically any Linux system with most problems they have, but I couldn't tell you how to do that in that particular GUI. Sure, it's not great, but it's what happens when everyone is free to use whichever GUI they want.

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

#394
Wow, I wish.

I've been using a couple of ryzen laptops (an HP with a 2500u, then an HP with a 3700u) for about 5 years.

It works pretty well, except:

When the laptop wakes up there's a good chance that the UI shows up but I can't click on anything or type.

I can then reboot by holding Alt-SysReq and typing REISUB.

Or: The screen is still black, and nothing works, as above.

I can run games, though if I play something like GTA-V, it will eventually get too hot and I have to hard reset.

This is because the fan control doesn't properly work.

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

#395

The most dificult thing to believe is the Ms Teams working without problem. "The Linux works in a 11 year old ThinkPad, so it works easily in any computer" is a quantum jump to conclusion.

Linux Teams, kind of worked OK..ish.

There are though, lots of features that are missing - which might be OK, except they are going to finish supporting Teams on Linux and pushing everyone to use the web version, which is poor.

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

#396
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

every once in a while there's a lenovo default windows image/hardware security controversy, but never one that has affected me directly.

i don't care what they put on the default windows partition (i replace it on arrival) and the uefi issue was a production mistake where they imaged with a nonproduction image.

they're still used widely by serious people in academia, open source and security sensitive industry.

i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.

if you're truly paranoid, a pine arm machine or fully open source risc-v may be your jam. everything else is going to be loaded up with proprietary blobs everywhere along with overcomplicated supply chains and overzealous marketing departments cross selling adware onto that default image you should be tossing anyway.

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

#397
post #9

How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?

My System76 lemur pro gets 14 hours. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

Lemur has really great battery life in my experience. For example, 1 hour of watching a video stream in a browser uses < 10% of the battery.

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

#398
post #364
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.

Well, Wayland is "new.". Why not use X if it doesn't yet fit your needs?

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

#399
I thought Linux was often times annoying with Bluetooth connection issues, sleep related bugs … I enjoy how boring stable it is on thinkpad.

Then I bought a Mac m1 second hand for photo related needs and it doesn’t wake up the external monitor on resume from suspend, doesn’t auto switch Bluetooth mic, doesn’t provide volume mixer for hdmi external monitor, can’t manage wifi&Ethernet at the same time …

I stopped worrying and am using both happily, with their flaws.

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

#400
post #303

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

With TLP installed and properly configured? Strange, battery life of my x1c tends to be as good or better as on Windows.
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