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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

#191

Post by hpcjoe »

admax88qqq wrote: post #66

Linux still can't handle out of memory issues gracefully. Sometimes I create memory leaks or use too many electron apps and when you hit a low memory situation Linux starts trashing and your system becomes unusable for minutes to hours unless you reboot your machine. Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems. This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, mul…

I was able to crash MacOS 12.5.1 a few weeks ago, by allocating 80+GB more than I had swap/memory space for. Over use/abuse of memory system leading to unstable system is not specific to Linux.

In my case, I was doing development/testing of a data analysis code. Pulling in the data was fine, I just needed to adjust my applications queries to reduce the size of this. I was specifically looking to see what I could get away with in terms of analysis size without adding additional code to handle out-of-core.

MacOS did not respond gracefully to the load. It took it a whole 20 minutes to crash, hard-locking the UI, and eventually rebooting.

My previous experience with a windows laptop (until I traded it in for the mac about 10 months ago), was even worse. I could not use WSL2 for anything approaching real memory utilization, as I'd get all these memory compaction pauses/GCs. These random freezes would often hang the machine for a while, and when it resumed, the interface was very laggy.

Compared to that, my linux experience for systems under horrific load is much better than windows, and on par with MacOS (M1 32GB laptop BTW, not a small system).

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

#192

Post by pizza234 »

Your Mileage May Vary, and may vary a lot. Lenovo Yogas, for example, have terrible compatibility (at least, the models released in the last years), which is a shame, because some are very good business machines. The Yoga Gen 7 AMD, on any Linux, has:

- keyboard not working

- speakers 50% not working

- mic not working

- bluetooth not working

- standby not working

And probably something else I'm missing.

I think all the AMD 6x00 mobile CPUs suffer from the non-working keyboard issue, due a quirk (ironically, a compatibility-breaking hardware fix) that is fixed on the not yet released 6.0 kernel.

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

#194

Post by thomaslord »

ai_ja_nai wrote: post #13

Uhm, how about suspension/hibernate? That was pretty lame even 2 years ago and I'm not seeing it improve

IIRC they changed something about sleep states on newer CPUs. Most people who report issues are on Linux, but I've heard about issues on Windows as well.

I have a modern-but-not-new laptop (a Lenovo Yoga 720 from ~2012) and when I was taking it into work daily before the pandemic it wouldn't even shut down properly. An Ubuntu update in 2019 seemed to pretty much fix that. I was running newer kernel builds (stable but not yet adopted by Ubuntu) so that may have also contributed to the initial issue and/or the fix.

Of course I'm writing this comment in support of "Linux on laptops works better now" but I had to opt in to newer kernel builds to get drivers for the laptop...

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

#195

Post by jahewson »

trelane wrote: post #92
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…

Yes, running Linux on Windows hardware is often a recipe for misery, or at least dealing with obscure kernel parameters. Which is why I've said and will say again: slapping Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game. Buy it preinstalled, from a company that supports it. We actually have that option these days, and it's amazing . Some days, I swear the smartest thing Apple ever did was prevent users from slapping OSX o…

What is “Windows hardware”?

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

#196

Post by snemvalts »

Wifi and suspend stopped working on an LTS release on a Thinkpad X220 for me in 2018, the same generation as the laptop in the article. Moved to macOS shortly after.

They are great $300 computers for when you're between jobs and moving to a place where you can use the work laptop for personal things. Or a pentesting machine. Don't see too much use for them otherwise.

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

#197

Post by kitsunesoba »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #141
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…

This seems to me as a more generic problem with newer hardware, not specific to Linux. Likely devices rushed out the door to meet some idiotic deadline, badly specced and with incompletely implemented drivers. At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint…

> At the end of 2021 I got an EliteBook 845 g8 (Zen 3) that worked completely fine out of the box on Linux (Arch with up-to-date kernel). Every last bit of kit worked perfectly. Bluetooth, IR webcam, fingerprint sensor, light sensor, mute LEDs, etc. On Windows, to this day, the webcam isn't recognized because of some USB chip along the line. There's also a lot of lag when adjusting the display backlight, for some reason.

Had an experience like this several years ago, but with hackintoshing.

On a Dell workstation laptop with a Quadro FX770M GPU (basically a relabeled Geforce 8800M GT), the Nvidia drivers had an issue under XP, Vista, and 7 where if the card downclocked when idle it'd cause Windows to bluescreen. The only fix for this for many years was to disable power saving features on the card, turning the laptop into a furnace even when it was doing nothing.

The proprietary Linux drivers for the card worked better (at least it could idle properly) but occasionally they'd cause your WM to lock up for no apparent reason.

The only thing that ran the card for extended periods without issues, of all things, was hackintoshed OS X. The built-in Nvidia drivers recognized it as an 8800M GT (which had been used in real Macs at some point) and it ran beautifully with power saving and everything. I even used that setup to play WoW on for several years.

The bug in the Windows driver was finally fixed at some point during the Windows 8/10 era, and so now I can run Windows on that laptop without problems, but holy cow it shouldn't have taken a decade (it was manufactured in 2008) for that to happen.

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

#198

Post by tclover »

Unfortunately have to disagree, connecting to my wireless scanner/printer is way too complicated, no driver frontends for my mouse/keyboard, when multiple sound devices are connected, it's so bad to swap between them. When I connect to my home projector, it didn't allow to change audio output for some reason all in all, linux maybe works on popular laptops with predefined hardware, but it is still bad for desktops.

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

#200

Post by JadeNB »

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…

> Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues.

Even "Linux works damn well on your ancient laptop" is a great selling point. Want to run Windows or macOS on an ancient machine? You can run an insecure ancient version, or, if the up-to-date version can even be installed, it'll run at a crawl. Linux makes those machines still usable.

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