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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

#581

Post by yourapostasy »

tomrod wrote: post #384
teva wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Framework laptop is a good option as well.

I had a Framework and really liked it. Unfortunately the components just degraded really quickly for me, and now can't work but 20 minutes at a time until it freezes completely. Swapped out for a Thinkpad last week. Even swapped out the Framework mainboard after a long back and forth with support. Just some poor battery unloading or similar causing shorts. I was very close to committing my company to using them until…

> Unfortunately the components just degraded really quickly for me...

How long in months was “really quickly”?

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

#582

Post by APhoenixRises »

I like to keep one of my personal laptops running Linux, but I won't be using one at work again soon unless I have the rights to pave and reinstall. While I'm more than willing to spend my evenings tinkering issues on my own laptop, I can't spend hours of work time debugging a graphics or audio issue that pops up.

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

#583

Post by hansvm »

hutzlibu wrote: post #527
ratherbefuddled wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've had it work first time, perfectly on: - Tongfangs, 3 different models - Lenovo, many different models - Clevos, 2 different models - Asus Zenbooks, 2 different models - Too many Dells to count - Asus Zen2 deskto…

"I've had it work first time, perfectly on" In my world, running perfectly means, runs at least as good as windows. Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc. And I doubt that. Not because windows is so awesome, but because hardware manufacture write and optimize their drivers for windows. And linux is a way smaller market and one with intentional no stable driver ABI (to force the…

> Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.

Other hardware can be sketchier, but I've found power handling much more reliable on Linux than Windows. It just works on my Linux boxes, whereas my Windows machines I would regularly notice that my previously suspended laptop was 130F+ roasting its bag and emptying its battery, or I'd find it completely dead after the same thing had happened and I didn't catch it in time.

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

#584

Post by tomrod »

yourapostasy wrote: post #581
tomrod wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Framework and really liked it. Unfortunately the components just degraded really quickly for me, and now can't work but 20 minutes at a time until it freezes completely. Swapped out for a Thinkpad last week. Even swapped out the Framework mainboard after a long back and forth with support. Just some poor battery unloading or similar causing shorts. I was very close to committing my company to using them until…

> Unfortunately the components just degraded really quickly for me... How long in months was “really quickly”?

First freeze in the first two weeks, six months until unusable.

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

#586

Post by hedora »

albertopv wrote: post #580
unnouinceput wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... she's not tech savvy..." - well, I guess we found the culprit. You did let her use it with full admin rights, didn't you? I recommend go to local policy and enable full audit for everything. When this happens in the future you'll have a clear picture of who/when/what.

She barely knows how to open outlook, let alone go to ms store and install a sw. Please don't try to defend MS, not this time. I found plenty of casual games installed in my work win10 PC. It's MS.

According to duck duck go, multiple people complained about Spotify auto installing on their windows box two days ago.

I completely stopped using windows in the 8.1 days (forced telemetry was the last straw). I can't imagine dealing with the sorts of gaslighting you are experiencing.

Happily, a combination of steam proton and dosbox run dos / windows games on my Linux desktop more smoothly than native ever did, and that was my last missing use case.

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

#587

Post by hedora »

Eleison23 wrote: post #562
ant6n wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be tempted to put Linux on a Chromebook (I don't trust Google...), but Chromebook vendors often sell a windows version of the same laptop, but with a different (standard) BIOS.

I bought one of those once (an Acer Cloud Book), and it was great. Not high end though.

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

#588

Post by hedora »

s_ting765 wrote: post #518

Yes. 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 Xor…

Nvidia driver support is indeed garbage, but AMD is great for video games, stable diffusion, etc these days.

The OOM situation is a dumb systemd thing. Presumably some distros will ship working setups.

I haven't had any problems with Majaro. I've been using Linux since the pppd days, but the last time I tried (2019?) it took me over a day to get Ubuntu LTS's DNS client to resolve sites in under thirty seconds. YMMV.

Also, Devuan isn't bad for single user setups.

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

#589

Post by hedora »

mminer237 wrote: post #332
jll29 wrote: post #297

Linux worked out of the box (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu) with: - Lenovo ThinkPad T41 - Lenovo ThinkPad X61s - LenovWo ThinkPad X220 - Lenovo ThinkPad X230 - Lenovo ThinkPad X1 - DELL Latitude E7762 - DELL Latitude E7480 - Apple iMac 27" Problems encountered: - The touchpad on the Lenovo ThinkPad 240 mad random jumps, not sure if this is a Linux issue since I never tried Windows (I usually wipe it right after unpacking). -…

The worst thing about broken touchpads is that they're impossible to turn off in Ubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-dis... There's a button to do so, but it's just been broken for months with no fix other than uninstalling part of the last update. Given that Linux typically has no palm detection, it's really a frustrating experience to use on a laptop.

The palm detection problem surprises me. The toggle has has "just worked" for 15+ years of laptops for me. However, palm detection on many of those laptops was garbage in Windows and equally bad in Linux.

Some distros support rejecting touchpad events for N seconds after the last keystroke. That is 100% software, and sort of works for even the worst touchpads.

Edit: Oh, you mention Ubuntu. I gave up on them a long time ago. Devuan works well if you want old-school Debian. Manjaro works well if you want a stable "modern" desktop environment (like Ubuntu used to provide) with menus for hardware configuration, user session switching, etc.

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

#590

Post by hutzlibu »

tluyben2 wrote: post #579
hutzlibu wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are free to have a look at my devices, but I did manual optimizing, tld, thermalD, optimized grub settings, allmost bricked devices with it and still even stock windows is better. But a proper installed windows, without bloatware and updated drivers, always won by a large margin. And the bigger showstopper are standby/hibernation. Touchscreen glitches etc. So I have 2 devices, one lightweight chromebook. A bigger…

Yeah, the things like standby and hibernation and touchscreen are major issues especially in new laptops. But I never use these features myself. Guess I got used to it. Which devices (specifically) do you have? I might have one or both or know someone who has.

Acer Spin 5.

Out of the box linux experience is actually quite good. Performance loss I can handle, but standby-resume reliably introduced touch screen bugs and other annoyances. Or did not wake up at all. I actually just recently gave up with linux on it and installed windows.

(which was surprisingly a big huzzle, I had to resort to third party software to get the right windows drivers. But now it runs way better - and more importantly, more stable.)

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