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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

#121

Post by mid-kid »

Loic wrote: post #112
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…

For the past 20 years I have been only using Thinkpad from the T and the X series. The only one with an issue was I think the X220 with the SD card reader not being stable. All the other ones are working perfectly well. My current one is a T480. But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bi…

I kind of expected the A485 to have similar issues to the T480, since it's the same laptop except for the cpu and graphics. I did some preliminary searching and the listing of the laptop as "ubuntu certified" gave me too much confidence, I guess.

I forgot to mention in the parent post that the SD card reader can't detect insertion/removal at times, yeah, so I have a script to reload the rtsx_pci_sdmmc kernel module to force it to recheck.

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

#122

Post by g42gregory »

I don’t like the color scheme and general rendering of websites on Linux (all browsers). By contrast, the MacOS renders websites really well. I played with the color settings on my video card and I can see that I could make it better, but I just couldn’t get it right all the way. Does anybody knows how to make Linux website rendering more pleasing to the eye and closer to MacOS? This is the only reason I still stick with MacOS on the front end. I would love to drop MacOS altogether.

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

#123

Post by otikik »

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…

For new laptops, if you have the option, go for something that has some official support out of the door. Something like System76 or your local equivalent. Otherwise yes, it can still be a bit of a lottery. Everything could be smooth, or you might become your own Linux support guy. Some people enjoy that.

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

#124

Post by smoldesu »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #105
smoldesu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a kernel with more robust hardware support?

Windows for starters. Also the title claims that things work well not that linux is the best.

Windows has pretty terrible hardware support IMO. Comparing the state of Linux Vs Windows on ARM/PowerPC/RISC-V, it's not even a contest.

I think there's a case to be made for the stability of Windows drivers (I should hope vendors don't half-ass support), but modern networking and storage drivers on Linux blow Microsoft's analogs out of the water.

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

#125

Post by lmeyerov »

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 support. We are just blocked on opencl side of Nvidia support (but no ETA.)

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

#126

Post by jolmg »

londons_explore wrote: post #69

I have the reverse... Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features. For example, power saving features, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness controls, fingerprint readers, keyboard hotkeys and backlights, etc. rarely work. Prepare for broken external hdmi ports…

> Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box

Well, I can share that it works out of the box with Panasonic toughbooks, at least.

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

#127

Post by smoldesu »

yakubin wrote: post #88
smoldesu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your configuration/distro. OOM killers aren't really used on the desktop because swap makes more sense, but you can certainly add one if you're using a resource-constrained machine.

OOM killer is a pseudosolution to an artificially created problem. https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/

Then don't use it. Most distributors don't enable it by default for a reason.

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

#128

Post by unnouinceput »

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.

I highly doubt that Microsoft did that and more likely her little brother or somebody else who used the laptop and didn't told her did it.

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

#129

Post by btdmaster »

unpopularopp wrote: post #61

I wish Ubuntu didn't kill Wubi tho. We used that at my first workplace on laptops with Windows and it was so damn good. There is a new fork [0] but it's a hit and miss with modern UEFI and especially with Windows 11 (had to use it for some reason). And other distros never had an option like this afaik, none does as of today. But I know it's all about Docker, VMs, or WSL nowadays yet Wubi covered a niche segment which…

UNetbootin[1] still works fine last I tried it.

[1] https://unetbootin.github.io/

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

#130

Post by blooalien »

liampulles wrote: post #21

Bluetooth on linux continues to suck however - it sucks a bit on windows too but it has been unusable on a few of my linux laptops.

Know where I've had troubles with Bluetooth on Linux? Discord! Stupid Discord keeps forgetting my Bluetooth headset lately. Saddest thing about that? I've heard my Windows using friends cursing Discord over the exact same issue on their Windows 10 and 11 rigs. (Leads me to believe it's not entirely Bluetooth's fault every single time, but sometimes badly written software doing screwy things that confuse the Bluetooth somewhere along the way.)

In my case it's only been Discord doin' this, while everything else that uses the same headset has no troubles with it at all.

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