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The laptop: "It’s an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol’ thick brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for $200."
Except it eats battery. I would not recommend Linux on a laptop under any circumstances.
Medium :-( Does anyone have a link to the full text of this article?
replace the "medium.com" with "scribe.rip" for a pure(?) html version: https://clivethompson.scribe.rip/linux-on-the-laptop-works-s... or evidently 12ft.io also works as submitted by the sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964606 )
I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies. If you happen to be lucky to have all hardware that Linux supports well, then everything does work nicely (which is infact a nice improvement over the early days). If you get unlucky on your hardware, well buckle up, it's gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices. Windows h…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdote time. I have a gaming laptop from Asus, 2022 model. It keeps hard crashing on Windows (both 10 and 11) while working fine on Linux. Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
I use my desktop at home exclusively for gaming. I had Windows on it, but it would continually crash when trying to use my bluetooth xbox controller with it. I've switched to linux for gaming and have no issues, even running games like GTAV (excluding the occasional nvidia BS...).
(Of course it should go without saying that all my many Linux native games also tend to run fine as well, although a rare few of them require running in Valve's "Steam Runtime for Linux" container thingy.)
The laptop: "It’s an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol’ thick brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for $200."
At one point, there was a joke, if you wanted some new hardware to work with Linux, the easiest way was to buy two of them, and give one to Alan Cox or similar.
Then Linux became mainstream, and you had dynamics like Lenovo wanting Linux to work well at launch of a new ThinkPad.
I don't know how that's holding up, now that we're back to a large percentage of developers who are using Windows for development, and all that brings in. Which relieves some of the commercial motivation to honestly support open source, as well as eroding technical savvy about what's secure/sustainable/etc.
(I'm guessing most developers don't understand why there was commercial embrace of open systems, and then of open source. It's partly cost, but also outright abuse and counterproductive dynamics. In some sense, we're coasting, reaping many of the benefits of past battles that got out of abusive situations, while setting up the next generation for abuse. Only, the next generation might have it worse: tech will be vastly more ubiquitous, complex, and mandated -- and perhaps impossible to dig themselves out of.)
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.
I have been running Ubuntu on laptops for over a decade. No major issues, at least as of past 8 years. Great hardware compatibility.
Whenever I try, it works 90% great, but little things are problematic enough that I switch back. The power management doesn’t quite work, so fans stay on and it doesn’t sleep when you close the lid. The screen doesn’t quite have the same quality graphics. The trackpad isn’t as smooth.
I essentially have to treat my linux laptop like a small desktop computer and just shut it down fully when I'm not using it and can't leave it plugged in to power or else it loses 5-10% battery per hour.