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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

#471

Post by gsich »

_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.

Pointer speed is also messed up depending on DE.

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

#472

Post by black3r »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #287
uluyol wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch is a rolling release distro. So it gets hardware support faster than other distros that stick to older kernels and userspace. Most users are not on rolling releases. I personally like the rolling approach, but that doesn't reflect everyone's experience.

Ubuntu with the HWE kernel is basically rolling release for drivers, which seems like the best of both worlds.

HWE is not a rolling release, it's just backported kernels from newer non-LTS Ubuntu into an LTS version, releases every 6 months, so still very much a time-based release..., Ubuntu calls them "rolling" because when using HWE you get new kernel versions through regular "apt upgrade" once it gets released. But rolling release usually means that packages get upgrades as soon as possible after they are released upstream.

btw HWE isn't even the best "ubuntu flavored kernel" in terms of hardware support.., there are the OEM kernels designed for Ubuntu certified laptops (such as XPS 13 Developer Edition) which get newer kernel versions and drivers faster than HWE, you can install them on any Ubuntu with regular apt ("apt install linux-oem-22.04" for example) ...

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

#473

Post by topaz0 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #283
mariusor wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing. You seem to be placing the blame with the OS itself instead on the poor stance that hardware vendors have towards releasing proper drivers. It's true that the ecosystem has its own problems, but hardware not being compatible out of the box is not one of them. That's something the can be blamed fully on the vendors in my opinion.

As a Linux user it's important to understand that people don't care whose fault it is- they want to use their computer. I can respect that.

This sounds sensible until you realize that "use the computer" on windows means to use it in the extremely restrictive way that microsoft has blessed.

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

#474

Post by topaz0 »

Hellion wrote: post #74
ufmace wrote: post #42

I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices. Windows h…

The rallying cry of the Linux desktop enthusiast: “well, it works for me!”

The rallying cry of the Linux desktop skeptic: "I had an issue this one time!"

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

#475

Post by Legogris »

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 always a gamble with new laptops.

I've had multiple Thinkpad T-generations from T410 to the latest. Sometimes it does works flawlessly out of the factory at purchase.

This time, it did not. The 12th gen Intel CPUs have a heterogeneous design with traditional "P-cores" and low-power "E-cores". I'm suspecting the reason I see terrible performance is that the CPU scheduler does not handle this efficiently and assigns the wrong task to the E-cores.

Also the Intel WiFi does not even get detected. Have not dug deeper into that yet.

Anything > ~6(Intel) ~12(AMD/Realtek) months old tend to work smoothly out of the box, IME.

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

#476

Post by lmeyerov »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #248
lmeyerov wrote: post #125

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…

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?

We got stuck on the Nvidia opencl drivers before we went deep into k8s networking

Our experience with local k8s dev is the issues are more on the k8s distro side. So at least for local dev, I'm guessing the happier path is sticking with KinD approaches wrt WSL2. Our wsl2 docker testing was successful, even w GPUs, and bc of the file system seperation, felt more like native Ubuntu docker's imperceptible overheads vs the painfully slow OS X docker overheads (ex: npm run watch taking minutes vs seconds)

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

#477

Post by [deleted] »

xani_ wrote: post #422
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 t…

[deleted]

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

#478

Post by aeroevan »

sofixa wrote: post #235
khnov wrote: post #209

Used ubuntu on thinkpad for work for the first time. Just got back to windows as I am x10 more productive there. Besides the fan's noise, I struggled to find a calendar app that just shows alert for my meetings, and that is not buggy as fuck. I windows, Ms Mail just works. then I got the frustration when rust ins installed but not work (should install gcc ...) Linux is great free software, but I am not using ut just…

Evolution worked pretty well last i used it (up until a year ago roughly).

Still works for gmail or office356

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

#479

Post by theonemind »

topaz0 wrote: post #473
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Linux user it's important to understand that people don't care whose fault it is- they want to use their computer. I can respect that.

This sounds sensible until you realize that "use the computer" on windows means to use it in the extremely restrictive way that microsoft has blessed.

What restrictions? You don't have the OS source code, but you can write device drivers, and you can use the computer any way you want to.

I don't like Windows, but that statement seems incorrect.

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

#480

Post by ghostly_s »

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…

My daily driver is a Thinkpad x230 running Linux and I also vehemently disagree with his author's claim. Yes, things are certainly better than they were 10 years ago, yet I still have a lengthy to-do list of things that are broken, but low-impact enough to work around that I don't want to waste the hours of dicking around with poor documentation, noxious forum threads and command line fiddling to sort them out. Circumstance do force me to finally tackle one of these issues regularly, yet the list never seems to get shorter...
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