Boring is good when it comes to tech because it means you're not spending time trying to make things work. Save the excitement for the stuff that pays your bills.
All platforms have issues, especially with uncommon hardware combinations. But if you buy any mainstream device odds of it working in linux are probably similar to the odds of it working in windows.
For older hardware the odds are much better that it will work out of the box in linux.
That forum thread you linked does not say microphone drivers are broken on Windows. The first reply sounds on point.
I'll add that all laptops produce noise on the headphone jack as the audio amplifier is preemptively switched on and off. Only difference is that it's normally just barely audible. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say they just choose a crappy IC.
Good catch. The traditional problem (from the era before T420) is waiting for the kernel to catch up with the new hardware, for any kinks to be shaken out.
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.)
Had it not died I would still have used my 2013 MacBook Pro. For many use cases computers stopped being slow a decade ago.
There are certainly things I can do on my new laptop that was a major hassle on the old one, but web browsing, Python development and day to day sys admin stuff was perfectly fine on the old machine.
For me it's all about the screen, an 11 year old ThinkPad most certainly have a terrible screen (it might not, but most do). Getting a clear hi-dpi monitor is more important than having the latest CPU, GPU or 32GB of RAM, at least for my needs.
I’ve been buying MacBook Airs of the 2011-2013 vintage for 10 years. Love them.
I have to disable third party JavaScript, and I have to be careful what software I install, but I love this machine.
I will probably upgrade to an M1/M2 for my next machine, but it’s because of software not hardware. The software, after 10 years, is finally starting to be bloated enough that I feel like I might need more soon.
Installed latest Mint MATE (based on Ubuntu 22.04) on a MacBook Air 11 2015. Linux has a lot of rough edges on the MacBook Air, definitely not boring, it but works well enough for my needs:
* No fan control out of the box, so CPU overheats after a new minutes. Fixed by installing a 3rd party fan control package.
* Broken sleep. Always wakes up 2-3 seconds after putting to sleep. Fixed by a series of hacks to disable the keyboard and lid while sleeping. Only the Power button is able to wake it up now.
* Display brightness setting lost after sleep. Always wakes up at 100%.
* Webcam does not work. There is no compatible driver from what I understand.
* Two-finger scroll is awful on Linux, compared to the buttery smooth scroll of MacOS.
* Poor battery life compared to MacOS, I estimate about 25% less.
* It can be tricky to figure out how the Mac keys are mapped to normal Linux keys: Alt, Option, Command. Also tricky to figure out how to remap them so that they are more usable on Linux.
Weird, I installed Asahi on my M1 Pro and while the two finger scroll isn't butty smooth as MacOS, it works well enough and already better than in any Thinkpad touchpad.
I bought an M1 Pro a month ago. While I kinda miss linux, I do not miss x86 at all.
Seriously, going back from a performant arm64 to x86 feels like going back to the POWER architecture all over again. Big bloated chips where every little computation generates a lot of heat and you need big fans to dissipate all of it.
I wish I could do the same, although in the lower end, with my Raspberry Pi 4. Sadly, those laptop cases for the RPi are too expensive, if you include shipping, to justify them.
If you want fun, grab an exotic machine like a X1 Fold with a weird CPU (i5-L16G7 with 1 fast Sunny Cove core, 4 small Tremont cores) and start hacking: even on Windows, everything works more or less (https://csdvrx.github.io/) but the asymmetric CPU architecture gives me ideas about core pinning for some daemons.
On Linux, right now I'm looking at why the i915 style GPU (9840) gives me "Failed to get size of gamma for output default" in xrandr, which prevents redshift from working.
> How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?
Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc.
After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries.
That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life, but I like to carry my laptop in a small bag, so the AC adapter doesn't intrude much.
Actually, I have 2 bags: both feature an AC adapter. I carry either the "big" bag with a regular Lenovo keyboard (I like it) and a 65W GaN adapter from Aohi (a cube about 2cm per side, that's not your grandpa power brick) or a flat 20W adapter (shaped like a 6mm thick credit card, with foldable blades) that's perfect for my Lenovo that barely sucks 10W (I measured).
That's cool, but I don't know if your experience is uniquely yours or common, and for me at least, it's not common. I want a laptop that will last a full day without charging because when I use it as a laptop, I may be moving around, or going between meetings, or walking to lunch or a coffee shop, and I don't want to have to find a power outlet. Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better".
> Narcissism aside, I think more people lean towards the use case of "more battery is better"
With everything else equal, I'm offered a longer battery life with no tradeoff, I'll take it!
However, if I have to use arm binaries instead of amd64 binaries, I'm far less interested.
If I also have to use a laptop where I have little room to adjust the OS defaults, to the point of being in a walled garden, I start asking myself if I need it, and when.
> I don't want to have to find a power outlet
I agree, but TBH with anything over 5h, I rarely need to look for one. Maybe it happens once every month?
I tested this recently, my 6 year old Dell runs Ubuntu 2022 and has 16G RAM and nVidia with 4G VRAM. It runs a 2G VM running Ubuntu 2022 running Apache, Dovecot, postfix, MySQL and Postgres, for multiple domains. The host also runs all of those for local email.
Both the VM and the host runs Docker and containers. The host also runs k3s (Kubernetes single cluster) continuously for me to do various container running comparisons vs plain Docker.
With me logged in watching Netflix in a browser full screen it gets around 1.5 - 1.75 hours.
I guess if I were to just stream full screen without the VM running it'd run somewhat longer.
I installed PopOS (I know there’s some absurd punctuation involved in the name but I don’t remember what it is) on my 5 year old MacBook Pro and it feels like a brand new machine. The UX feels better to me than MacOS which is starting to feel more and more like Windows imo.
You should look into enabling Wayland, which PopOS! disables by default. That should give you silky-smooth 60fps desktop transitions like MacOS, as well as 1:1 trackpad gestures. Happy hacking!
Yep. I'm not a huge fan of Wayland personally, but if you simply want "more Mac-feel" then it's probably perfect. Enabling it in your config allows you to switch between x11/Wayland without a real risk of borking your desktop.
I specifically searched for "Pop" in this thread, because I wanted to give them a thumbs up. In recent years I've been moving on from macOS to Linux, and I'm so pleased with my new Thinkpad running PopOS (and Nordic theme). It just works - quiet technology.
Nordic is lovely. One of the few stylesheets that really solves default usability issues while looking gorgeous at the same time. Props to the maintainers, whoever they are!
I can't believe I'm saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn't have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there's numerous speakers, some of which aren't active under Linux, and/or a similair issue with woofers. I've tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I'm running 5.19...
From what I can tell, it's a growing issue, affecting laptops from multiple manufacturers often with "Dolby Atmos" printed on them. The result is very poor fidelity, low volume audio.
That was only an example, you want to find the article for your specific laptop (you haven't mentioned the model, so I can't help!) and try the instructions there. If that article does not exist, or is not useful, you could always try this generic PulseAudio virtual device solution: https://askubuntu.com/questions/78174/play-sound-through-two...
(Side note: intel refers to the sound card, not the CPU.)
Not to be dismissive, but I have. I've tried instructions from my laptops "parent" and "brother" units and the instructions don't work. I've spent an hour or two on this at different times and I know everyone says this, but I usually always figure this type of thing out when I get stuck on it. I've tried Arch wiki, Ive been through some LKML threads, some long RH bug, etc. I can actually see in my NixOS config other attempts I've made previously. I've even tried custom snd.conf, doing things in Windows, etc. A bit crushing at this point, I just grabbed a spare set of BT earbuds that are probably just as fine a solution. (Until I accidentally boot to windows and realize how decent it can sound)
I have an IdeaPad Flex 5 running Fedora 36 with zero audio issues - in fact, it is where I run Bitwig (a DAW) and Arturia V Collection 5 (an emulation of classic synths spread across a couple dozen VSTs that I run inside WINE). You may just be out of luck there.
Could you get them to work properly in Windows? I have a Legion and an IdeaPad both of which have audio troubles because the speakers are just that bad, and no matter how much I messed with drivers, they didn't work. Audio is chopped off, although the 3.5mm audio/HDMI/USB outputs are fine.
With my 3 years old work Dell, I can't say that it has improved in any way. Suspended laptop basically scrapes over the week-end, a 3 day week-end will see me booting from shutdown on the first morning.
Dunno, in the last 10 years I've had a ThinkPad T530 and an Acer Swift 3 (AMD), suspend has worked just fine on both (Ubuntu and Fedora). My girlfriend has a Dell running Windows she always manually turns off because suspend is flakey...
At this point whether or not suspend works really depends on the laptop and there's plenty of reports of Windows users having the same issues.
On modern Thinkpads, less that 0.5% of the battery per hour is expected, so if you disable automatic suspend to disk (aka "suspend to both") to save a few TBW from your NVME, expect to lose about 10% per day.
Personally, I like that Windows suspend to disks can be setup to only kick-in if a specific power budget has been exhausted: if the laptop has been sleeping for 5 days while disconnected, with 50% of the battery gone, it's neat to suspend to disk so that a week later (or more) it has enough power to resume work.
The HP laptop I was running Fedora on had some kind of low power mode on the CPU that would cause linux to crash and require a hard-reset to recover. That meant no idling/sleeping/hibernating without a kernel crash.
Zero issues with Fedora 36 regarding that. I do have a Wi-Fi issue where sometimes I need to re-associate, but that typically happens when I move between two APs with the same SSID and seems to be a known issue for that Wi-Fi driver.
I have a laptop from System76 (which is a linux vendor). Suspend usually works, but once in a while the graphical UI does not come back. I can ssh into the laptop and restart gdm and it's fine after that.
I needed to do some additional steps to enable hibernate because the drive is encrypted and the default swap was not big enough to hold the RAM. But after that hibernate doesn't appear to work if I have any USB devices plugged into the laptop.
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...
Works on the 4.75 year old machine (Sagar/Clevo) I'm typing this on right now. Worked on my 14 year old machine (Sagar/Clevo) that just died last month. Works on HP Omen 2020 unit.
I've not had hibernate/suspend problems in 7-ish years?
I had them for my windows laptop from work. Close the lid with no power connected, put in my laptop bag, walk back to hotel from office, and the unit was very hot. Profile was set to hibernate/sleep on battery with lid closed. Never got that to work. Replaced that monstrosity with a M1 Macbook Pro (work machine).
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.
Yea, hibernate/suspend issues are by far the biggest problem I have with Linux on laptops. Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me.
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.
I use XPSs for home and work, and my understanding is that they don't implement one of the sleep state capabilities properly in hardware so full "deep sleep" , next to zero battery mode isn't possible.
That said, my XPS 13 will suspend for a couple of weeks on battery once it's configured, even given this caveat. I haven't shut it down when I finish using it since I bought it in 2019. I run Ubuntu LTSs.
> Years of being in the mac ecosystem where you can just close the lid and it'll barely have lost battery over weeks of being idle spoiled me.
Funnily that's not at all my experience with an M1 MBP. It either sleeps when lid is closed even with an external screen, or never (even if i explicitly click on the sleep button). And even if I manage to get it to sleep, Bluetooth is always on and battery is at 0% after 2 days.
Similar. The only thing I find problematic is fingerprint readers, which Linux doesn't yet support very well. Literally EVERYTHING else works fine: power-yes, sleep-yes, sound-yes, video-yes, network-yes, tablet keyboard-yes... (My preference is LinuxMint.)
Is that actually true? What does it say that I immediately recognize that T420 from the image?
Maybe the title should be changed to "Linux on the X220 and T420 ...". Even on these devices I've had some problems. Due to experiences I've made I'm sceptical that there are no issues with Fn keys, Trackpads, Display brightness, power consumption, connectivity... on random laptops - especially the lower-priced ones.
I'm currently running ZorinOS on a GT610, fairly old and obsolete and can be considered legacy but it works great. The drivers came pre-installed in the distro so I had 0 problems installing and using the OS.
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.
My favorite bluetooth issue is with MacOS. On my M1 Mac Mini, my Logitech MX keys and MX Master 3 mouse are not recognized after a reboot. So I have to attach a corded keyboard to my Mini to log in. Because when it goes to sleep after a reboot, it does not wake up for the logitech kit. Which is explicitly supporting MacOS.
Its not just linux where bluetooth sucks.
I opened a ticket with Apple on this, gave them my notes, and they still haven't done anything about this.
Bluetooth on linux sucks. As it does on MacOS. And windows.
Recently installed Linux on my 2011 MacBook Air and loving it. Faster than MacOS and all drivers just worked (Ubuntu 22.04).
The only issue with the setup is me! Daily driving new hardware for work makes it difficult to adapt to an older display, keyboard and trackpad. laptop hardware really has come a long way in the past 11 years.
It depends on the laptop. I tried with several older machines (2015 era), with several distros and never got it to work right (though my scenario is a bit weird, I have the laptop closed with an external monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up).
Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...
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 out to be a minor error on my part; CentOS was too old to support the modern T580's hardware. I struggled briefly and then realized that Fedora would be a better option in this situation. I ran Fedora for 3 years, flawlessly, effortlessly, and yes, boringly.
Due to the vagaries of needing to use something supportable and normal for work, and because this has become not only my "daily driver" but my "BYOD" device for work, I decided to abandon Linux and install Windows 10 on Christmas Day last year.
I may never run Linux again on a personal machine, but I don't regret 30 years of "Linux on my Desktop", and I'd recommend it to any burgeoning hacker type!
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.
I'm not surprised, I've never used a system76 laptop, but they always looked like chunky "portable workstations" rather than mobile computing devices. After dealing with the horrible battery life, weight, and fan noise of a Thinkpad with a discrete GPU and fast CPU, I decided that I would ignore that segment of the market in favor of the small and light category.
I get 15-20 hours of battery on my laptop running Debian, at say 30% brightness, with an open ssh connection or two over wifi. So, there are clearly circumstances where it is fine, though I'm quite sure there are cases where it isn't, too. Use the tools that work for you when they work for you.
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 has its faults for sure, but it's much better in my experience as far as just working on any type of hardware and accessories. If it doesn't just work already, drivers are generally easy to find and install.
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...).
About the only games I've had any troubles with lately have been those which include ridiculous DRM or anti-cheat (and even many anti-cheats work fine on Linux these days). Between WINE/DXVK and Valve's Proton, I find the vast majority of my game library from my Windows days now run fine.
(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.)
Different laptop, different issues, similar outcome. I ran into issues with Windows corrupting the EFI boot entries, even on a dedicated install. I have also had Windows fail to enter sleep or come out of sleep when the lid is closed. I have never had these issues under Linux on the same hardware.
Having investigated problems with Windows, I think it is fair to say that Linux is more reliable on supported hardware. The main problems with Linux are: some hardware is not supported, and sometimes Linux only supports a subset of the functionality of hardware it does support. If you're careful with what you buy, your experience can be just as good (if not better) under Linux. If you're not careful with what you buy, you can still luck out and have a positive experience.
I have two Dell laptops and a Dell tower, all of which run flawlessly on Linux, all hardware supported out of the box. Everything I've plugged into them (most often via USB) or paired via Bluetooth also works without hassle (and never once did I have to search any manufacturer's websites for drivers).
I bought a very expensive 2018 XPS15 4K Dell 9570 fully loaded - bought for its good Linux support (although not officially supported by Dell).
Minuses: Many many issues with 4K support and Linux. 1 year ago hardware fault with screen getting black lines (very very disappointing for a premium laptop treated very well). Suspend never worked great (Windows not much better AFAIK). Some recent WiFi problems - probably hardware - will replace. Needed JackHack96’s patches installed when bought. Noisy coil hum (top problem mentioned for years on forums for many models of XPS, ignored by Dell through many model releases, maybe finally fixed now?).
Pluses: Worked with Linux. Dell kept improving Bios for 2 or 3 years, and many of the fixes were Linux specific.
I wouldn’t buy Dell again.
I would use Linux for a laptop again (Windows gives me hives, Apple pisses me off).
Yeah, well, it's been that way for me for many years now through many machines of varying brands. These Dell machines are just the most recent, and I was shocked at how effortless the whole install process went this time around compared to way back when I first started using Linux. It really was a huge hassle back in the "olden days" of early Linux… Nowadays it's proven pretty "plug and play" all the way around every single time I've installed a new Linux rig.
Whatever… I'm glad to no longer have to fight my operating system to work with my hardware like I always had to on Windows - "Plug and Pray" was a joke for a valid reason. Installing drivers is for rubes. I'd rather plug stuff in and just get to work without going on a freakin' scavenger hunt for drivers… If you hate Linux so much, then just don't use it. Simple, yeah?
I greatly prefer Linux and use Windows when some software forces me to, but I don't feel that your comment is constructive in this conversation.
Windows is generally a smoother experience. Linux is generally not ready for the average user with a randomly picked computer, as much as we'd wish it is.
Except that windows is demonstrably a less smooth solution these days, regardless of Linux even existing. Windows just sort of fell over and started stabbing itself and bleeding all over the floor, so a dead windows is just no use at all. They even removed the start control panel stuff, just gutted and useless now. It really feels like Microsoft went out on a mission to literally destroy everything they built while still mandating OEMS to suicidally preload it on all hardware anyway, and people still buy this stuff.
When are people going to state the braindead obvious that it’s never going to be the year of the windows desktop ever again, as Microsoft has committed to utterly pooping on all its users henceforth forevermore or?
Yeah, well, I don't really feel that Linux gettin' shit on every single time it's mentioned anywhere is entirely constructive, either. I been using Linux for many years, and over that time it's quite simply continued to improve in areas where Windows was always a huge pain for me (and most all of my family and friends with few exceptions). Most notably, that whole "Plug and Play" hardware thing. In this most recent decade or so of my Linux use, that got to be a total non-issue with hardware I've bought ranging from cheap random Chinese garbage to high-priced high-quality hardware devices. I plug them in, and they work. On rare occasion (like with printers or NVIDIA cards) I'll have to install drivers (direct from my package manager), but even then, it's light-years ahead of any experience I've ever had with drivers on Windows. Is Linux perfect?Hell no! No operating system is. Is it the best operating system for me? Absolutely. It Just Works™ in my personal experience, and that's all I care about. I'll keep using it, and I will keep defending it to those who keep spreading decades old no longer even remotely true FUD. Don't like Linux? Don't use it. Period. Don't gotta keep telling those of us who do like and use Linux (for the billionth time) how much better Windows is. It isn't better - just different, and in some ways decidedly worse than all of it's competitors. But if it's what you need or want to use, then use it FFS. Just don't come to evangelize Windows to people who used it for years and learned to prefer something else because it straight up worked better/more reliably for them than Windows did. It gets beyond old to keep hearing that bullshit after a while.
It's not shit on every time it's mentioned. Only when people post nonsense like this article. Do you expect people to just go "yep, Linux has no hardware issues, you're right".
Of course not! That doesn't mean they hate Linux, just that they aren't delusional about it's level of hardware support.
True though. Half our team runs Linux with minimal issues across a variety of modern hardware. Infosec consulting, so pretty demanding users, but also pretty experienced with Linux. there are caveats and small things, but I will take them over Mac or Win these days.
The same is very much true for macOS and even Windows. Obvious flaws and mistakes are ignored by statements like "I just bought this $5 app" and "I use this freeware program from yetanotherstartmenureplacement.xyz".
People just like what they like and fix their problems in their own way and that's fine. Some people aren't annoyed enough to fix their problems and that's fine too. Just because someone else's fix doesn't fix your problems doesn't mean the fix is bad.
> I have a feeling that the overall reality is far more hit-or-miss than the author implies.
I really think that is the state of the matter.
Personally, I have been using Linux as main OS since 2000, so when I buy new hardware, I know it will be running Linux and I do my research on the hardware before buying anything. When you do that, chances are you'll end up with hardware that is supported and works well on Linux. The last 15 years I have been using high-end Dell Precision laptops through my employer and those run linux just fine; it's already been several years now that you can actually order them with Ubuntu.
Still, I've been on location where they used USB-C docks to access external screens and the network. The network was working fine out of the box, but for the screens I needed to install DisplayLink drivers, which was not a nice experience. It also did not work out of the box with xrandr. And then I got a linux kernel upgrade and it was no longer working. So, while the laptop itself is working just fine on linux, and is working out of the box with external screens connected through a cable (HDMI, DisplayPort), you still don't have good support for something like DisplayLink, which seems to be used more and more because it allows user to project wirelessly on a screen.
I try to avoid depending on closed source drivers in Linux. I did use Nvidia long time ago, but switched to AMD for that reason. In a way, it's nice that companies support Linux and that they are releasing closed source drivers. It is better than not having any driver at all. But depending on closed source drivers is misery sooner or later, so I avoid them.
Someone show me how to get my xps-15 to run Ubuntu with comparable GPU and battery performance to Windows in less than five hours of work and I will be eternally grateful. I gave up and plugged it in permanently for work and use my Mac for mobile.
Does it handle switching the dedicated GPU on and off when needed? Any tips on how to set up? Mine stays on and kills battery in about 90 minutes. I tried the switching and it would always just crash.
Hello! I have been using PopOS which is a derivative of Ubuntu that comes with Nvidia drivers baked in. Setup on every XPS since 2018 (I buy a new one every year), has been about 20 minutes. Dell devices have excellent Linux support. Battery is a problem, I can get 5-7 hours in PopOS vs. 5-9 hours in Windows, depending on what I'm working on by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life (9+ hours on 2021 xps with half cores disabled, running around 6-8 watts). PopOS also offers the ability to turn discrete graphics on or off which can also increase battery life.
Oh wow. I’m grateful you shared this. Wasn’t aware of PopOS and your experience with it sounds promising. I will gladly take 5 hours of battery. Currently I get 60-90 minutes in Ubuntu.
I keep one as a back up and if soneone in my family needs, I'll give it to them. I have another whose motherboard is toast, so it's just sitting there. Can't decide if it's worth $800 to fix it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadDoes anyone have a link to the full text of this article?
It's all a little random on how well different internal components decide to play nice.
All platforms have issues, especially with uncommon hardware combinations. But if you buy any mainstream device odds of it working in linux are probably similar to the odds of it working in windows.
For older hardware the odds are much better that it will work out of the box in linux.
I'll add that all laptops produce noise on the headphone jack as the audio amplifier is preemptively switched on and off. Only difference is that it's normally just barely audible. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say they just choose a crappy IC.
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.)
There are certainly things I can do on my new laptop that was a major hassle on the old one, but web browsing, Python development and day to day sys admin stuff was perfectly fine on the old machine.
For me it's all about the screen, an 11 year old ThinkPad most certainly have a terrible screen (it might not, but most do). Getting a clear hi-dpi monitor is more important than having the latest CPU, GPU or 32GB of RAM, at least for my needs.
I have to disable third party JavaScript, and I have to be careful what software I install, but I love this machine.
I will probably upgrade to an M1/M2 for my next machine, but it’s because of software not hardware. The software, after 10 years, is finally starting to be bloated enough that I feel like I might need more soon.
* No fan control out of the box, so CPU overheats after a new minutes. Fixed by installing a 3rd party fan control package.
* Broken sleep. Always wakes up 2-3 seconds after putting to sleep. Fixed by a series of hacks to disable the keyboard and lid while sleeping. Only the Power button is able to wake it up now.
* Display brightness setting lost after sleep. Always wakes up at 100%.
* Webcam does not work. There is no compatible driver from what I understand.
* Two-finger scroll is awful on Linux, compared to the buttery smooth scroll of MacOS.
* Poor battery life compared to MacOS, I estimate about 25% less.
* It can be tricky to figure out how the Mac keys are mapped to normal Linux keys: Alt, Option, Command. Also tricky to figure out how to remap them so that they are more usable on Linux.
Seriously, going back from a performant arm64 to x86 feels like going back to the POWER architecture all over again. Big bloated chips where every little computation generates a lot of heat and you need big fans to dissipate all of it.
I wish I could do the same, although in the lower end, with my Raspberry Pi 4. Sadly, those laptop cases for the RPi are too expensive, if you include shipping, to justify them.
On Linux, right now I'm looking at why the i915 style GPU (9840) gives me "Failed to get size of gamma for output default" in xrandr, which prevents redshift from working.
https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
Past 5h, irrelevant to me. 5h is the longest continuous amount of time I can work on a hard problem, at least without the modern amenities that come with DC power, like a cold drink, etc.
After that, I get a break, and so does my laptop, for 30 min to 1h during which we both recharge our batteries.
That's far less sexy than a laptop with 24h+ of battery life, but I like to carry my laptop in a small bag, so the AC adapter doesn't intrude much.
Actually, I have 2 bags: both feature an AC adapter. I carry either the "big" bag with a regular Lenovo keyboard (I like it) and a 65W GaN adapter from Aohi (a cube about 2cm per side, that's not your grandpa power brick) or a flat 20W adapter (shaped like a 6mm thick credit card, with foldable blades) that's perfect for my Lenovo that barely sucks 10W (I measured).
With everything else equal, I'm offered a longer battery life with no tradeoff, I'll take it!
However, if I have to use arm binaries instead of amd64 binaries, I'm far less interested.
If I also have to use a laptop where I have little room to adjust the OS defaults, to the point of being in a walled garden, I start asking myself if I need it, and when.
> I don't want to have to find a power outlet
I agree, but TBH with anything over 5h, I rarely need to look for one. Maybe it happens once every month?
Both the VM and the host runs Docker and containers. The host also runs k3s (Kubernetes single cluster) continuously for me to do various container running comparisons vs plain Docker.
With me logged in watching Netflix in a browser full screen it gets around 1.5 - 1.75 hours.
I guess if I were to just stream full screen without the VM running it'd run somewhat longer.
Very annoying to type
It is: Pop!_OS
https://pop.system76.com/
It basically a customized Ubuntu with perfect driver support for System76 hardware.
I use it on a 2015 Meerkat (https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat) and it works great.
From what I can tell, it's a growing issue, affecting laptops from multiple manufacturers often with "Dolby Atmos" printed on them. The result is very poor fidelity, low volume audio.
(Side note: intel refers to the sound card, not the CPU.)
In fact, I have a problem with too much sound. The damn thing has a pc speaker that I cannot completely get rid of.
Perhaps, it's a hardware issue?
At this point whether or not suspend works really depends on the laptop and there's plenty of reports of Windows users having the same issues.
Personally, I like that Windows suspend to disks can be setup to only kick-in if a specific power budget has been exhausted: if the laptop has been sleeping for 5 days while disconnected, with 50% of the battery gone, it's neat to suspend to disk so that a week later (or more) it has enough power to resume work.
I needed to do some additional steps to enable hibernate because the drive is encrypted and the default swap was not big enough to hold the RAM. But after that hibernate doesn't appear to work if I have any USB devices plugged into the laptop.
I'd appreciate any tips on either issue.
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...
I've not had hibernate/suspend problems in 7-ish years?
I had them for my windows laptop from work. Close the lid with no power connected, put in my laptop bag, walk back to hotel from office, and the unit was very hot. Profile was set to hibernate/sleep on battery with lid closed. Never got that to work. Replaced that monstrosity with a M1 Macbook Pro (work machine).
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.
That said, my XPS 13 will suspend for a couple of weeks on battery once it's configured, even given this caveat. I haven't shut it down when I finish using it since I bought it in 2019. I run Ubuntu LTSs.
Funnily that's not at all my experience with an M1 MBP. It either sleeps when lid is closed even with an external screen, or never (even if i explicitly click on the sleep button). And even if I manage to get it to sleep, Bluetooth is always on and battery is at 0% after 2 days.
Maybe the title should be changed to "Linux on the X220 and T420 ...". Even on these devices I've had some problems. Due to experiences I've made I'm sceptical that there are no issues with Fn keys, Trackpads, Display brightness, power consumption, connectivity... on random laptops - especially the lower-priced ones.
It's a bit slow because the software it's running is all new but man does Linux feel nice to use on old hardware.
Until there is no NVidia's legacy GPU/video card inside that laptop.
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.
Its not just linux where bluetooth sucks.
I opened a ticket with Apple on this, gave them my notes, and they still haven't done anything about this.
Bluetooth on linux sucks. As it does on MacOS. And windows.
so long as one doesn't need a working fingerprint reader, otherwise too bad
The only issue with the setup is me! Daily driving new hardware for work makes it difficult to adapt to an older display, keyboard and trackpad. laptop hardware really has come a long way in the past 11 years.
Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...
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 out to be a minor error on my part; CentOS was too old to support the modern T580's hardware. I struggled briefly and then realized that Fedora would be a better option in this situation. I ran Fedora for 3 years, flawlessly, effortlessly, and yes, boringly.
Due to the vagaries of needing to use something supportable and normal for work, and because this has become not only my "daily driver" but my "BYOD" device for work, I decided to abandon Linux and install Windows 10 on Christmas Day last year.
I may never run Linux again on a personal machine, but I don't regret 30 years of "Linux on my Desktop", and I'd recommend it to any burgeoning hacker type!
I bought one of those once (an Acer Cloud Book), and it was great. Not high end though.
Windows has its faults for sure, but it's much better in my experience as far as just working on any type of hardware and accessories. If it doesn't just work already, drivers are generally easy to find and install.
Windows doesn't clearly have such an advantage anymore.
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.)
Having investigated problems with Windows, I think it is fair to say that Linux is more reliable on supported hardware. The main problems with Linux are: some hardware is not supported, and sometimes Linux only supports a subset of the functionality of hardware it does support. If you're careful with what you buy, your experience can be just as good (if not better) under Linux. If you're not careful with what you buy, you can still luck out and have a positive experience.
Minuses: Many many issues with 4K support and Linux. 1 year ago hardware fault with screen getting black lines (very very disappointing for a premium laptop treated very well). Suspend never worked great (Windows not much better AFAIK). Some recent WiFi problems - probably hardware - will replace. Needed JackHack96’s patches installed when bought. Noisy coil hum (top problem mentioned for years on forums for many models of XPS, ignored by Dell through many model releases, maybe finally fixed now?).
Pluses: Worked with Linux. Dell kept improving Bios for 2 or 3 years, and many of the fixes were Linux specific.
I wouldn’t buy Dell again.
I would use Linux for a laptop again (Windows gives me hives, Apple pisses me off).
Windows is generally a smoother experience. Linux is generally not ready for the average user with a randomly picked computer, as much as we'd wish it is.
When are people going to state the braindead obvious that it’s never going to be the year of the windows desktop ever again, as Microsoft has committed to utterly pooping on all its users henceforth forevermore or?
Of course not! That doesn't mean they hate Linux, just that they aren't delusional about it's level of hardware support.
People just like what they like and fix their problems in their own way and that's fine. Some people aren't annoyed enough to fix their problems and that's fine too. Just because someone else's fix doesn't fix your problems doesn't mean the fix is bad.
I really think that is the state of the matter.
Personally, I have been using Linux as main OS since 2000, so when I buy new hardware, I know it will be running Linux and I do my research on the hardware before buying anything. When you do that, chances are you'll end up with hardware that is supported and works well on Linux. The last 15 years I have been using high-end Dell Precision laptops through my employer and those run linux just fine; it's already been several years now that you can actually order them with Ubuntu.
Still, I've been on location where they used USB-C docks to access external screens and the network. The network was working fine out of the box, but for the screens I needed to install DisplayLink drivers, which was not a nice experience. It also did not work out of the box with xrandr. And then I got a linux kernel upgrade and it was no longer working. So, while the laptop itself is working just fine on linux, and is working out of the box with external screens connected through a cable (HDMI, DisplayPort), you still don't have good support for something like DisplayLink, which seems to be used more and more because it allows user to project wirelessly on a screen.
I try to avoid depending on closed source drivers in Linux. I did use Nvidia long time ago, but switched to AMD for that reason. In a way, it's nice that companies support Linux and that they are releasing closed source drivers. It is better than not having any driver at all. But depending on closed source drivers is misery sooner or later, so I avoid them.
Previously I had to check and ensure online if the laptop runs linux and then buy it.
Now I don't. I just buy it, and know it will run linux.
Fedora distribution is the most compatible one that I have found.
Does it handle switching the dedicated GPU on and off when needed? Any tips on how to set up? Mine stays on and kills battery in about 90 minutes. I tried the switching and it would always just crash.
Haha, nice - I imagine it's satisfying to have a reliable and reproducible setup. Just curious, do you sell the used ones, or give them away..?