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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

#561

Post by bayindirh »

pjmlp wrote: post #538
bayindirh wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP Elitebooks and Thinkpads are designed and built with Linux in mind. I never came across an HP Elitebook or Thinkpad which failed to run Linux out of the box. Dell XPS is the latest addition to this group. Consumer laptops come with a lot of trickery analogous to WinModems of the era, which require Windows specifically. Hence these cost saving measurements create a lot of problems.

They never fail, true, but there is always some special model capabilities that can only be made available after the usual weekend and late nights fine tuning.

I never had to tune anything on my old EliteBook 850G2 (That thing was new when I got it), and had ~8 hours of battery life from get go.

Some higher end devices of course need it (esp. in the biometrics department), but rest is automagic now, as far as I experienced.

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

#562

Post by Eleison23 »

ant6n wrote: post #214
Eleison23 wrote: post #33

In 2018 I was in college, working on a Linux degree, and studying for certifications such as CompTIA Linux+. I had allocated some funds to purchase a new machine; my desktop was already over 8 years old and I obviously wanted a good machine I could bring to campus. I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad T580, because it was on the Red Hat certified list. It came with Windows 10 but I immediately installed CentOS. This turned ou…

After years of Linux and Mac, I was issued a Win 10 machine at work. I don’t know how anybody voluntarily uses that. It’s like instead of fixing bugs over the last 30 years, they just keep adding new ones. And also make the whole experience more bloated, more confusing, more slow and still kinda ugly.

Based on the requirements from my employer, I may be able to spec out a high-end Chromebook instead of a Windows machine for my next upgrade. That is assuming I can weasel out of the requirements to maintain a virtualization environment, which I never use anymore. Of course, that also depends on near-future hardware availability and Google not killing their own high-end Chromebook lines.

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

#563

Post by wooque »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #304
wooque wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, my 2 year old Ryzen laptop still doesn't have properly functioning sleep without tweaking kernel parameter, and that workaround got broken on 5.19 kernel release and I had to find out new parameter to tweak. Linux worked perfectly on my old laptop from 2015 though.

Out of curiosity, what laptop? My samples in the last 6 years are: - Thinkpad Carbon X1 14" (i7-5600u). Everything worked out of the box with Arch Linux at the time. Best experience I've ever had. - HP Envy 13z (R5 2500u) everything works today but the out of the box experience was very poor. Windows update installed an APU microcode update that broke the Linux AMDGPU driver and had to run an -rc kernel for awhile. T…

Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 (Ryzen 7 4700U), old laptop was Dell Latitude 7xx0 (or something, don't remember exact model), with Intel i5-5300U CPU, Linux worked perfectly on that machine.

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

#564

Post by GekkePrutser »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #556
GekkePrutser wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How's the blurriness, though? At one point I was using two 24" screens, one 1920x1080, one 3840x2160. I've tried messing around with settings, until I ended up on xrandr scaling as being, basically, the only solution. Five minutes later, the low-dpi display was in the closet, because I couldn't stand the blurry fonts.

It's ok for me but I used macOS before which also uses similar font anti-aliasing (macOS tries to preserve the look of the font in contrast to Windows which tries to align to pixel boundaries).

But indeed YMMV here.. There is no way to use non-anti aliased fonts at small sizes this way. For me it is fine, I would set it up the same way anyway but I forgot it's not for everyone.

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

#565

Post by [deleted] »

whatever1 wrote: post #63

No it does not. Give it to me for 5’ and I will find at least 10 things that are broken. Energy management, monitor color profiles, external monitors, discrete gpu / integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken. Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing. The best we can do is to put it in a VM and run it in a OS that has actual hardware support.

[deleted]

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

#566

Post by [deleted] »

Klonoar wrote: post #453
pessimizer wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#567

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

kaba0 wrote: post #519
_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.

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 se…

>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

Sure, but for me as an end user, it's irrelevant who's fault of this bazaar engineering endeavor it is that very basic quality of life features from Windows/MacOS do not work on Linux.

As a dev I understand the struggle why this and many other stuff doesn't work right on Linux, but as a consumer/end user I don't care about their internal feud and I expect the product I use to have basic stuff like this working out of the box.

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

#568

Post by PlsDntBan »

_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.

No post body was provided.

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

#569

Post by chrismorgan »

_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.

The thing I find odd here is that my experience is the opposite: in i3 (X) I can’t adjust scroll speed, but in Sway (Wayland) I can.

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

#570

Post by trelane »

p4bl0 wrote: post #540
trelane wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies that sell laptops with preinstalled Linux are far more often than not just selling rebranded "windows hardware." What examples do you have of this?

Dell did that.

Which models did they do that with? I'd heard the xps with Linux was pretty good, at least for a while.
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