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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

#421

Post by joombaga »

_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.

Agreed. It's a sad state of affairs. And unfortunately Wayland is the only way to get mixed-DPI with proper scaling.

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

#422

Post by xani_ »

Buttons840 wrote: post #251

I recently streamed some OuterWilds (great Myst style mystery / puzzle game) on Linux with Wayland and OBS. The game is only officially available for Windows, but Steam's work on emulation has done a lot for Linux. Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would inst…

> Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do.

Was that "permission for OBS to record" or "permission for OBS to record that specific window" ? Coz I can see the second one being pretty annoying...

> While playing full-screen if I pressed the "super" key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time.

That worked with composing on X like 10 years ago. Well, aside from the fact that there was no Steam/Proton on Linux back then

> But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.

Huh, my colleague had to do a bit of fuckery to get it working, altho a lot of that was due to 3rd party dock being... weird.

It still randomly makes jet noises when idle... probably user error tho

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

#423

Post by Koshkin »

twblalock wrote: post #416
abrouwers wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you honestly expect users to swap out the window system to solve a simple problem like a lack of scroll speed adjustment? Most users won't even know the difference between Wayland and X.org and X11 unless they are already the kind of tinkerers who used Linux on the desktop despite its drawbacks. Normal people have no idea what any of it means, and they should not need to know.

To be fair, “normal people” do not run Linux on their laptops…

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

#425

Post by oefnak »

Koshkin wrote: post #423
twblalock wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly expect users to swap out the window system to solve a simple problem like a lack of scroll speed adjustment? Most users won't even know the difference between Wayland and X.org and X11 unless they are already the kind of tinkerers who used Linux on the desktop despite its drawbacks. Normal people have no idea what any of it means, and they should not need to know.

To be fair, “normal people” do not run Linux on their laptops…

Except that this is exactly what the post is implying.

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

#426

Post by smoldesu »

twblalock wrote: post #390
smoldesu wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add in the fancy slider you want so much, there needs to be a corresponding tunable in Wayland. MacOS does this with plists, it's not some radical or hated design pattern.

If you think that is a "fancy slider" you lack perspective. It is a basic, expected feature that is supported by Windows and macOS for laptop users. And I'm pretty sure it used to work on Linux too, before Wayland.

It indeed used to be supported before Wayland. I don't develop Wayland though, and if I did then it would look very different from how it exists now.

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

#427

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#428

Post by csdvrx »

eddieroger wrote: post #185
csdvrx wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ? Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc. After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries. That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life,…

That's cool, but I don't know if your experience is uniquely yours or common, and for me at least, it's not common. I want a laptop that will last a full day without charging because when I use it as a laptop, I may be moving around, or going between meetings, or walking to lunch or a coffee shop, and I don't want to have to find a power outlet. Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more…

> Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better"

With everything else equal, I'm offered a longer battery life with no tradeoff, I'll take it!

However, if I have to use arm binaries instead of amd64 binaries, I'm far less interested.

If I also have to use a laptop where I have little room to adjust the OS defaults, to the point of being in a walled garden, I start asking myself if I need it, and when.

> I don't want to have to find a power outlet

I agree, but TBH with anything over 5h, I rarely need to look for one. Maybe it happens once every month?

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

#429

Post by unnouinceput »

albertopv wrote: post #372
unnouinceput wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"... she's not tech savvy..." - well, I guess we found the culprit. You did let her use it with full admin rights, didn't you?

I recommend go to local policy and enable full audit for everything. When this happens in the future you'll have a clear picture of who/when/what.

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