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Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
511–520 of 640 posts
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#512I've been running Linux on Dell XPS laptops with only very minor issues since 2016. Currently on an XPS 13 9310, everything works perfectly. ...and that's with debian sid, a btrfs rootfs, and rebooting into whatever "git pull" in the kernel git repo gives me most weeks. I do that because I want to help fix bugs, but I honestly haven't found anything to fix in years: it just works. Interesting that everybody with prob…
I've been using Dell hardware with Ubuntu for... sheez almost 15 years now? Once in a while there's some little oddity, but it mostly just shows up working out of the box and lets me do what I need to without all the annoying MacOS crap. I had to use a Mac at my last job and I absolutely hated it. I couldn't configure it the way I wanted. Stuff like 'brew' is a necessity, but not a core part of the system like apt. Keys are not where I expect them... which isn't really their fault, but when you've been using something for 20+ years, switching suuuuucks.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#513My experience with fresh installs has usually be pretty good on older laptops. However, it always eventually starts to go downhill for me (likely somewhat self inflicted). It would be interesting if the author still feels the same after a year or so.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
X230 meanwhile requires turning some exotic feature in BIOS if you want suspend to work properly
I don't think it does, maybe only some builds, as my X230 worked with no issues and no extra settings anywhere.
Maybe it was turned off on your device https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-laptop-and-ne...
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#515Earlier 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.
I think this is more niche to care about than you might imagine. First off, a huge % of the population barely knows what an HDMI cable is and just doesn't plug their laptop into anything. Second, office workers might have a nice docking station setup, but in that case you are probably basically turning the laptop into a desktop (with a keyboard, mouse, and nice monitor) -- why bother with the laptop screen at all? Finally, perfect DPI matching isn't really required -- a 1080p laptop with a 1440p monitor should probably be fairly reasonable looking for most normal screen sizes.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a user and I don't find being made to directly edit config files user-friendly at all. Why on earth would I want to use a text editor to configure my printer? I don't use Powerpoint to edit photos either, even though in theory I probably could, but what a hassle. That sort of paradigm is fine for applications intended for professional use to be deployed to servers etc., but config management systems exist for tho…
It is user-friendly to typical Linux users. It is a community-developed project, so it only really needs to appeal to developers. What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy. Other platforms do this sort of thing because their entire reason for existing is to satisfy customers.
> What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy.
First of all, adjusting scrolling speed is not an "uninteresting polishing related task," it is a basic standard of usability.
Secondly, if you don't think Linux on laptops should be broadly usable by the general population, you are in the wrong thread. The central point of the HN post we are all commenting on is the usability of the Linux desktop ecosystem on commodity laptops.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#517I just received my Framework laptop recently, installed Fedora 36 + KDE Plasma, and even though it took some tweaking to get a close to my Mac behaviour, it works perfect. I had 0 driver problems. So it looks like Linux on the desktop seems to be getting there.
And the best part, with this laptop, no shop needed to replace the battery, I can do it myself.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#518Yes. Until you want to do anything gpu accelerated. You'll be lucky to setup hw video playback, and when you do hevc isn't supported. You want to watch your videos/or game in HDR? ,, banish those silly thoughts from your mind.
Emulating graphics hardware (GPU passthrough) with qemu is a pita.
You want to emulate Android apps, the best solution (Waydroid) only works on Wayland. Though this wouldn't be a problem if Xorg wasn't holding out. And Nvidia had played nice with Linux.
Memory and OOM situation management is a sham and another pita just waiting to bite. This could make you lose all your windows and in some cases even data as the solution involves forcing a reboot from your machine.
I could go on and on.
A lot of improvements have however been made in the usability aspect, main one being flatpak packages. But there's a terribly long road ahead to make Linux desktop feel less of a second-class citizen compared to other operating systems.
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#519Yeah, 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.
Here is a comment that may solve it from a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32896463
Though it has nothing to do with Wayland before the flamewar starts, it’s just libinput and gtk maintainers not agreeing upon whose responsibility is it to handle scroll events (it is gtk’s though, libinput doesn’t have enough context to implement kinetic scrolling, so it really should be the framework that adds semantic meaning to an event stream)
Re: Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
#520Earlier 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.
Wayland just generally is missing config files... Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had... They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...
HTTP just generally is missing config files - wtf does that mean? Which wayland compositor?