Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by mid-kid » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

Beltalowda wrote: post #401

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…

Interesting; I got a A485 two years ago and everything except Bluetooth worked out of the box without problems (BT kind-of works but with a lot of problems, so I just got a USB one for €10). Never needed any kernel parameters, graphics work fine (including for some games), sleep always worked fine. Never tried AP mode or fingerprint scanner. Only reason I got a different laptop was due to hardware issues (some issue…

I'll be honest, aside from the FnLock LED issue, most of the issues I've mentioned were probably fixed by 2020. I got this laptop in january 2019, and none of the stable distros (ubuntus and such) would even boot without kernel parameters back then. 5.1 became the golden kernel version for me for a while, where everything worked as later kernels would break suspend/hibernate a few times before stabilizing properly. It was a rocky few years but by kernel 5.10 (december 2020) everything worked fine, probably earlier like you've mentioned.

Graphics always worked fine except for random full system lock-ups/kernel panics in amdgpu which have been fixed at some point I don't remember when. I have no idea what caused them but a kernel option (something with iommu) made them go away until it was properly fixed, and I think that wasn't exclusive to this laptop. Graphics are still scrambled when waking from sleep though, but they take a split second to restore. The rest of the problems (bluetooth, fingerprint), still persist.

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

#432

Post by eointierney » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

I always enjoy the crapshoot of installing linux on random (recycled) laptops. I've been doing this for decades and I'm always pleasantly surprised at how far we've come. Glitches abound, but so do solutions, and the general robustness is awesome.

So thank you, kernel and other devs, your work is hugely appreciated, even in moments of raging frustration (I just blame the short-sighted CxO's who delegate responsibilty to overworked product managers that are often just over-promoted engineers).

Yay GNU/Linux! Freedom for everyone with a bit of patience and a wilful curiousity :)

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

#433

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

oefnak wrote: post #425

Koshkin wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except that this is exactly what the post is implying.

No, the post is talking about the “windows system,” not Windows :)

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

#434

Post by jonas-w » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #151

I think that there should be a list of officially supported laptops and if you bought anything else then it is your problem and you are welcome to write necessary patches. It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.

There exist many entries on the ArchWiki. The ArchWiki is (IMO) one of the best sources for linux in general not only archlinux. E.g. this entry for Lenovo[0] has a huge list with Lenovo Laptops and what works/doesn't work. There are also some tweaks you can apply for specific Models.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo

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

#435

Post by nobiggie457 » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

caskstrength wrote: post #400

rtpg wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The battery life of hidpi monitors is often much worse than the same machine with a lower resolution monitor.

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

#436

Post by chickenimprint » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

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 slapped Arch Linux on a new HP 2 in 1 and everything except for the fingerprint reader worked out of the box, including the stylus. Not even a single controller of my weird Chinese 10-port USB-C dongle refused to work.

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

#437

Post by justinzollars » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

t-3 wrote: post #72

justinzollars wrote: post #36

Except it eats battery. I would not recommend Linux on a laptop under any circumstances.

I was getting 12 hour battery life on a Macbook Air running Gentoo a decade ago... things have only gotten better. You're way off base here.

I had a System76, and the thing ate battery. Had to sell it and go back to a mac because it wasn't usable.

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

#438

Post by tmtvl » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:48 PM UTC

lbayes wrote: post #302

Yeah, even a broken clock is right twice a day. OP got lucky with some crusty laptop and drew a wildly expansive and inaccurate conclusion. Maybe true for old machines, but definitely not true for newish models. Not even for machines being sold with Linux preinstalled. My Linux Dell XPS from ~5 years ago required me to buy and install a different radio because the Broadcom one didn't actually work with latest Ubuntu…

YMMV indeed, I've been using Linux full-time since 2012, with a brief exception in 2016-2017 when I was working for a company that was all-in on Apple.

I used an iMac running Yosemite that year and could reliably get the iMac to hard reboot by launching a Xubuntu VM in VirtualBox.

It kinda made me lose all hope for our industry as Apple is usually hailed as the epitome of quality and yet it still was garbage.

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

#439

Post by vanviegen » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:48 PM UTC

spadros wrote: post #153

vladvasiliu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers. At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint…

In all my years I have yet to see HDMI output from a laptop to a monitor work on the first try in Ubuntu. Always need to install the proprietary drivers for that to work at all. If it can't even do that without a headache, after 10+ years of Linux use, I would call that a Linux problem, not a hardware problem. My colleagues seem to run into the same issue frequently as well. This article seems kind of ignorant. I'm g…

Your laptops have Nvidia GPUs, I suppose? In my experience, that's the one brand to avoid when shopping for laptops to put Linux on. (Though you can usually get things to work, with some of effort.)

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

#440

Post by irusensei » Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 10:51 PM UTC

I don’t know about that but I appreciate some things about Linux, specially the fact that the OS is not creepily trying to sell you something. I have an Asus G513 that I bought specially for Linux. It a Ryzen laptop with a discrete Radeon card. Nice performing machine, although its easy to thermal throttle it so tunning thermal profiles is often necessary. Its not perfect but it works.

Out of curiosity I’ve decided to use Windows for a while. Well, anyone here probably knows how Windows became Bonzi Buddy OS but that’s not the worse of it. On Linux I had asusctl to control fans and keyboard lights. For this functionality on Windows I had to install something called Armory Crate from Asus. I shit you not this app sends product offers as system notifications. Things in Windows land also tend to ambush the user at every opportunity to create an account or associate their social media profiles.

When I compare the professional presentation of Fedora or Pop OS default desktops with the hysterical ad show of Windows and its third party tools having to live with one or two things not working correctly is a tradeoff I gladly take.