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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

#451

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

CoolCold wrote: post #314
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really tried to make wsl work for the windows users on my team, but we kept getting tangled up with networking (I guess there's a virtual switch involved and so when a tool claims to have forwarded a port it's hard to figure out where it forwarded it to and why only half of your stuff can see it). Do you know if that situation has improved in the last year or so?

I'd like to know on your use case more, if possible. Not sure I've ever need to forward port or I probably read your description wrong way.

It's been a year but if I recall it went something like this:

I was using microk8s (a kubernetes distribution) on the wsl side, and I had python scripts (also on the wsl side) which would deploy things into it, run tests until there was a problem, forward a port from the broken service to "localhost:8080", and then instruct the user to open a browser to explore the UI post-test-failure.

On bare metal Linux this was no big deal because "localhost" was unambiguous. But on windows you end up with the browser on the windows side and the forwarded port on the wsl side, so when the browser opened there was nothing at "localhost:8080" even though I could "curl localhost:8080" from the wsl side and get a response.

Presumably there is a way to further forward the port so that it is available to both Windows browsers and wsl python scripts, but I never found it.

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

#452

Post by Gigachad »

_abox wrote: post #444
_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.

> 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 indee…

Wayland supports it quite well but any app that uses the legacy XWayland compatibility layer does not work. Which is basically everything using Electron.

It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.

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

#453

Post by Klonoar »

pessimizer wrote: post #296
Klonoar wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trivial nitpicking is not the same issue as hardware support.

It's odd how you can hear two people make the same vague statement about Linux and OSes that aren't Linux, and the statement about Linux registers to you as insightful while the one about Windows/MacOS registers as "trivial nitpicking."

Not particularly what happened here, no.

To be clear, the OP of this thread stated the following with regards to Linux:

>...Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken...

These things are what is being discussed, and they are not broken on macOS and Windows. You could not easily find 20 of these things "broken" in 5 minutes on a random setup given to you.

Most Linux threads inevitably derail into people complaining that macOS/Windows don't work exactly how they want, and then go on to label those platforms as "broken". That is not "broken" though, and simply nitpicking. You can throw a rock on this site and find plenty of examples of it.

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

#454

Post by Gigachad »

abrouwers wrote: post #398
_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.

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

X is purely worse for this case. Wayland supports live switching window scaling as they drag across monitor boundaries. X does not. The issue is that electron apps do not support Wayland yet so they run in the X compatibility layer which can not live switch. So reverting to X means you go from some of your windows not working to all of them not working.

Supposedly upstream electron has fixed this but I'm yet to see a single electron app that works. Maybe they just haven't updated electron.

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

#455

Post by Gigachad »

stormbrew wrote: post #159
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…

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…

I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done. Stuff like finger print readers and often web cams not working is borderline expected. On OLED monitors you can expect brightness adjustment and often sleep/wake to not work quite right if at all, etc.

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

#456

Post by GekkePrutser »

Gigachad wrote: post #452
_abox wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 indee…

Wayland supports it quite well but any app that uses the legacy XWayland compatibility layer does not work. Which is basically everything using Electron. It's not a fault of Wayland but it is reflective of the whole Linux laptop experience.

Well, it took a long time for all Windows programs to work somewhat decently, and even now the OS still does not have great multi-DPI support.

For example when I move my mouse from my 192 DPI screen to my 96 DPI screen, the mouse position translates in physical pixel, not in physical location. So at the bottom it matches but near the middle of the 192 DPI screen it stops going to the left (it already ends up on the top of the 96 DPI screen going from the middle of the 192 DPI screen) and becomes an 'invisible wall'. Even in Windows 11 they didn't bother to fix this :(

The only OS that had a good transition to multi-DPI capabilities was macOS and that's really because Apple doesn't care about legacy and forces app devs to update their stuff. But it's not just Linux that's having a hard time with this.

But I didn't know this was a specific problem. I'm not using Wayland yet and won't for the foreseeable future. I'm on FreeBSD and KDE on Wayland has been broken a long time. When I hear this it sounds like a good decision anyway :)

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

#457

Post by Gigachad »

pessimizer wrote: post #274
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…

Why would anybody expect that new hardware that has to be reverse engineered and for which no Linux drivers are provided to work out of the box as soon is it is available? It's an impossible expectation, and also one that no other OS would have a chance of fulfilling unless hardware vendors specifically catered to them. It's like asking for a book review of a book that hasn't been published. Yes, other people have pu…

I don't expect it. Which is why I switched from buying Windows laptops to install Linux and now buy MacBooks where I can expect that absolutely everything will work on day one.

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

#458

Post by Gigachad »

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?

RGB control is quite spotty. Finger print readers are almost entirely non functioning. Often webcams on brand new laptops do not work. Brightness control for OLED often doesn't work. Suspend and sleep still seems to be an issue, especially with something relating to "modern sleep" where the OS remains functional for things like internet access while sleeping.

I think largely these days people just plug less stuff in, printers, scanners, other odd gadgets are less common so its really just USB mass storage devices and video outputs getting physically plugged in. Otherwise everything else is controlled over wifi with a phone app.

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

#459

Post by linuxhansl »

+1

Running Linux on laptops since the late 90's. In the beginning I had to tinker a lot, compile custom kernels, etc.

Now - for the past 10 years or so - it (especially Redhat's Fedora) just works without doing anything, even with the newest laptops.

Wayland is not quite there, yet (IMHO), so I'm still running X11 (thankfully Fedora let's me do that).

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

#460

Post by drpixie »

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.

Absolutely ... Windows config gets changed with every significant upgrade. The things I've carefully set-up get disabled, other things just stop working, and new garbage appears ... Windows is not a stable work platform. It's become an ad platform :(

And all the time, I have to fight the Microsoft way of doing things ... Worse the Apple, Microsoft push really hard to force me to do things their way. Eg. initially and after upgrade, it defaults to save everything on the MS cloud - NO, I have a perfectly good cloud of my own and don't want to pay MS extra.

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