Okay, does hibernation work? How about palm rejection on the track pad? Hi-Dpi fractional scaling? Do I need to read hostile *nix forums to find the right incantation to make Wi-fi work?
Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
441–450 of 640 posts
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#442Ludicrous. On some, it does, on others, otherwise there's minor issues, major issues, sometimes regressions. Linux is very clearly a second class citizen on the PC, with hardware only coming with support for the current gen Windows. Some doesn't even work with Windows well, and that's the supposedly supported platform.
I _do_ use Linux on everything, mind you. But I also keep a file where I collect my fixes for the different systems, so that I won't forget them when I reinstall. And I accept that sometimes things don't work, like a fingerprint reader, and I live with that.
One such random thing from the notes is that the touchpad wouldn't come alive after a sleep. The fix is the "i8042.nomux=1" kernel parameter. Hours of duckduckgoing went into that. I like to tinker, but it's not working "so damn well that it's boring".
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#443Yeah, 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…
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…
Anecdotal and it may not be hip to say, but I haven't had a problem with any Dell I've used (Fedora and Ubuntu since ~2010).
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#444Yeah, 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.
> 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.
Sure? This is exactly the thing that Wayland was supposed to solve. Only X has one DPI for all screens.
I still use X because I'm on FreeBSD and I even got multi-screen multi-dpi scaling to work there, with xrandr settings but indeed it was not fun. In Wayland it should be click & play though.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#445Sure, the overall "eventually stuff gets supported" story is good. And people hold on to hardware a lot more than they used to. This guy's using a T420. That's an 11 year old machine! Older hardware has always worked much better under Linux than newer hardware (sometimes for longer than it's worked well on Windows).
It's also pretty amazing that there are now some major-vendor Linux-out-of-the-box laptops. But the pool is still not all that large.
I was just looking at an Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Google suggests ... nah. Very un-boring.
E.g.
https://zentalk.asus.com/en/discussion/63549/linux-on-zenboo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/wv2c28/anyon...
Fun shit like "keyboard doesn't work yet" plus various other nothing-surprising-to-me-after-doing-this-for-20-years stuff like weird audio driver patch crap.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#446Intel hardware was really good on Linux but I suppose that will change in the future because it seems the person responsible for that has left Intel.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#447Earlier 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.
Agreed. It's a sad state of affairs. And unfortunately Wayland is the only way to get mixed-DPI with proper scaling.
It's not. I've managed to do it in xrandr. I have my main screen (and thus all screens) rendered at 200% and then scale down the other 2 back down to 100. Basically how macOS does fractional scaling.
It's not real multi-DPI no but effectively it does work. Does require a pretty decent GPU to render all screens at 200% before it scales them down though.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices. It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years. Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the st…
man i remember those days when you had to go and find all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place. how do people on windows figure out what driver has updates? do you guys check the version installed and go to each manufacture to see if there is a new version>?
Now this is usually (but not universally) handled by windows update, but I too remember the bad old days of manually tracking down drivers.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#449my experience has been mostly good. I used to work on a beat-up hp low-end laptop from 2012, on which I put arch w/ i3-gaps. It had only one issue, a driver that killed the laptop on any sudden acceleration (to protect the hdd write heads on the original machine, I'd put in a ssd). I found a way to disable it and otherwise had no issues, everything was pretty snappy considering the slow i3 cpu.
On my current 2020 razer blade, I've had to create a workaround script for the intel backlight driver not working properly (on boot it maxes out at 30% backlight, but cat 100 to the correct file and the full range is unlocked). I still don't know how to handle plugging in external screens (e.g. to give presentations) but that's an i3-gaps issue and not the laptop's fault, and the battery life is pretty abysmal since graphics switching from the nvidia gpu to the igpu seems to disable using the gpu for cuda workloads (for which the fix is to have the charger with me at all times).
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally those config panels write to files for you (how else would their changes be persisted?)
The storage mechanism is not the interaction mechanism, and Linux config files are not user friendly. All other desktop operating systems have a control pane for this stuff.
Configuration files are a developer-friendly and user-friendly way of supporting customization. It allows more conventional Linux users to do their customization using their favorite text editor, in the familiar interface that they already like. And, if somebody decides they want to write a GUI for configuration (maybe to chase users who are more familiar with consumer OSes), all the GUI has to do is write to a file (an easy task in most languages).