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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

#501
post #9

How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?

I tested this recently, my 6 year old Dell runs Ubuntu 2022 and has 16G RAM and nVidia with 4G VRAM. It runs a 2G VM running Ubuntu 2022 running Apache, Dovecot, postfix, MySQL and Postgres, for multiple domains. The host also runs all of those for local email.

Both the VM and the host runs Docker and containers. The host also runs k3s (Kubernetes single cluster) continuously for me to do various container running comparisons vs plain Docker.

With me logged in watching Netflix in a browser full screen it gets around 1.5 - 1.75 hours.

I guess if I were to just stream full screen without the VM running it'd run somewhat longer.

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

#502
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same. it's been rock solid on thinkpads because thinkpads are some of the strongest pc laptops and as such have been popular (and well supported by) oss developers.

old IBM Thinkpads were pretty solid, but now they're made by Lenovo who has a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors, usually in exchange for money. They've even been caught stuffing malware into UEFI so that users reinstalling their OS would be infected over and over again. However nice their laptops are, I could never trust them. They have already proved that they are perfectly wil…

> a long history of shipping devices pre-infested with malware and backdoors,

Lol thats rich. They did it like 2 or 3 times for the windows laptops they sold most of the time not part of the thinkpad line. So yeah. Long history it is. You also have a long history of making bad comments then?

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

#504
Hoping one day soon I'll be able to use Gnome on my M1 MacBook with full hardware acceleration and unchanged power efficiency/battery life.

MacBook laptops feel great to use, their Keyboards, their trackpads, their screens, their battery lives are unparalleled - but MacOS is such a compatibility nightmare. No Vulkan support makes gaming difficult, no kernel support for containerisation makes using development tools like Docker cumbersome.

Apple are total dicks for locking down their hardware so tightly and refusing to support efforts to extend support to other OSes.

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

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

> 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. For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most. On Linux I get better window tiling than on Windows, and shortcuts for navigating directly to a virtual desktop,…

> For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most.

+1 if you're looking for some anecdata. The thing that finally pushed me from Windows to Linux was a privacy setting not actually being persisted (after a long battle to find the relevant settings). The fact that some wireless network cards don't work yet is definitely a rough spot, but I can also just buy a new one or write a driver, whereas getting Windows to care about my privacy or MacOS to care about basic usability with respect to keyboard remapping or window positioning seems unnecessarily daunting.

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

#506
I have an L14 gen 2 amd thinkpad, and have had a ton of issues with the touchpad and occansional issues with the down key repeating for no reason. My wife has an E14 gen 3 amd thinkpad and absolutely no issues.

The future for linux on the laptop is here, just unevenly distributed.

Both on Fedora 36 KDE.

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

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, my mistake; you're quite correct that it's not a proper rolling release. I still think that it's a step forward for drivers, but yeah that's still a significant lag especially when Arch is in the running. Didn't know about the OEM kernels, either; that's a nice touch for what hardware it supports.

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

#508

I find the comments so strangely defensive. How can one even start to compare MacOS, which needs to support exactly one (1) vendor with less than 10 models with a kernel with the widest hardware support on the planet? Noone would test-drive a new car and expect all the buttons and dials to still be at the same exact positions, but when it comes to trying out a different OS, it sure seems like lots of folx assume it's…

No one is arguing that Mac has an advantage in the game, that people are working hard on *nix. It's just irrelevant if your goal is to have a laptop that just works.

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

#509
post #207

Just an anecdote: got my Framework laptop the other week. Installed Pop!_OS. That was the only step. Everything works. Suspend/resume. WiFi. Audio. Webcam. Funky dongle ports. This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.

How does your suspend battery life work out for you? I'm running Ubuntu with Framework and even though I've done tweaked some settings I still end up with a dead battery after I reopen my laptop a day later.

Pretty sure that's a known Framework hardware limitation, see https://community.frame.work/t/high-battery-drain-during-sus...

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

#510
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly know what you're talking about because from a lot of experimentation, my take on the state of 2022: If you want the "works so well it's boring", go with X11. The one exception, as you note, is multi-DPI, which has native support in Wayland. For Wayland, there are (depending on DE/compositor) some specific issues or inconsistencies, like the scroll speed you are mentioning. Personally, I also have qt5 ap…

I can’t imagine not being in the “multi DPI” scenario though? It’s not some edge feature that affects a minority of power users, it’s just plugging an external display into a laptop. The DPIs almost never line up - not since high DPI displays became mainstream about 10 years ago.

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