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

Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;s AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver&#x27;s rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn&#x27;t update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it&#x27;s a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can&#x27;t connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.<p>Granted, I&#x27;ve always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it&#x27;s improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there&#x27;s caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.

I have the reverse...<p><i>Unless</i> you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you&#x27;ll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you&#x27;ll still have to live without some features.<p>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 or USB stuck at USB 2.0 speeds. Have fun with the fan stuck on either max or zero, or the CPU stuck at the lowest clock speed.<p>There are still lots of things you have to go hunting for the right old firmware version for.<p>I think Linux is only great if you have whatever hardware distro developers have, because that will be all that works out of the box.

The laptop: &quot;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.&quot;

I find the comments so strangely defensive. How can one even start to compare MacOS, which needs to support exactly one (1) vendor with less than 10 models with a kernel with the widest hardware support on the planet? Noone would test-drive a new car and expect all the buttons and dials to still be at the same exact positions, but when it comes to trying out a different OS, it sure seems like lots of folx assume it&#x27;s going to be just as their old one. The immense improvement in documentation provided by ArchWiki, ThinkWiki, Gentoo Wiki and wiki.instalgentoo.org shouldn&#x27;t be understated. Almost all models are documented to the point where 30 minutes of research will teach you everything you need to know about the hardware and its capability to run whatever distro you want to. Going from a ton of older Dell models, then to a T420, to a T450s, to a T530, most of the features I ever needed as a developer and netadmin have always been readily available, with the rest of them being delegated to cloud services and&#x2F;or remote (sometimes virtualized) machines running a Linux distro or a BSD. Windows has the definite advantage of being a market leader with the longest run in the history of personal computing, but there is definitely something to be said for the immense development that the *nix side of things has been exhibiting compared to 15, 10 or even just 5 years ago. The year of Linux desktop and laptop is still far away, but at least we&#x27;re seeing goodwill both from software and hardware vendors, and it would be a real shame we throw the good trends away at this point in time.

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 &#x2F; integrated switching, Bluetooth, webcam settings all these are broken.<p>Stop defending the state of Linux in personal computing.<p>The best we can do is to put it in a VM and run it in a OS that has actual hardware support.

I recently streamed some OuterWilds (great Myst style mystery &#x2F; puzzle game) on Linux with Wayland and OBS. The game is only officially available for Windows, but Steam&#x27;s work on emulation has done a lot for Linux. Wayland asked for explicit permission to allow OBS to record the game window, something that X would not do. While playing full-screen if I pressed the &quot;super&quot; key on my keyboard the game window would instantly shrink and tile with the rest while still rendering the game in real time. I was quite amazed it all worked so well. But I was playing on a System76 desktop, so it was built from the beginning to work well with Linux.

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&#x27;s gonna be a ride. You are of course more likely to have good hardware support on very old devices.<p>Windows has its faults for sure, but it&#x27;s much better in my experience as far as just working on any type of hardware and accessories. If it doesn&#x27;t just work already, drivers are generally easy to find and install.

I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m saying this, but after a decade of claiming I didn&#x27;t have driver issues, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get decent audio on newer Lenovo laptops (usually IdeaPad line). Supposedly there&#x27;s numerous speakers, some of which aren&#x27;t active under Linux, and&#x2F;or a similair issue with woofers. I&#x27;ve tried everything from half a dozen pages of results from Google and I&#x27;m running 5.19...<p>From what I can tell, it&#x27;s a growing issue, affecting laptops from multiple manufacturers often with &quot;Dolby Atmos&quot; printed on them. The result is very poor fidelity, low volume audio.

I just received my Framework laptop recently, installed Fedora 36 + KDE Plasma, and even though it took some tweaking to get a close to my Mac behaviour, it works perfect. I had 0 driver problems. So it looks like Linux on the desktop seems to be getting there. And the best part, with this laptop, no shop needed to replace the battery, I can do it myself.

Yeah, even a broken clock is right twice a day. OP got lucky with some crusty laptop and drew a wildly expansive and inaccurate conclusion.<p>Maybe true for old machines, but definitely not true for newish models.<p>Not even for machines being sold with Linux preinstalled.<p>My Linux Dell XPS from ~5 years ago required me to buy and install a different radio because the Broadcom one didn&#x27;t actually work with latest Ubuntu (at that time).<p>The next XPS I got mostly worked, but had lots of audio issues.<p>The Inspiron was horrible. Touchscreen fails, audio fails, radio fails, sleep fails.<p>My custom Ryzen 3900X workstation has ongoing issues with sound and sleep (yes, latest kernel, latest drivers, latest LTS OS).<p>My most recent laptop purchase from earlier this year either had no wifi in Ubuntu or no Bluetooth in Fedora. I was able to force Fedora to work after a week of messing with it. Still have intermittent sleep and audio issues.<p>FWIW, I&#x27;ve been running Linux in various roles since the late 90&#x27;s, so not a noob and definitely not complaining.<p>It&#x27;s free, it&#x27;s open source, package management is awesome. The command line is irreplaceable.<p>I use Linux on the daily and deeply appreciate all the incredibly hard and thankless work that so many people put into it.<p>That said, Linux still does not have anything close to the level of polish that MacOS delivers and it definitely doesn&#x27;t get out of the way to the extent that it can be called boring.<p>YMMV

I would add that the linux-ready boutique vendors like system76, tuxedo computers, framework are also options if you don&#x27;t want to fuss with drivers and what not, but still want to run linux. I definitely agree that linux doesn&#x27;t run super smooth on all hardware, but it&#x27;s not hard to find hardware these days where it does run smooth.<p>I came across tuxedo computers randomly one day, and gave it a shot. Very impressed, and am extremely happy with my tuxedo pulse 15 gen2 - running their supported version of Ubuntu+KDE, that just works out of the box. Only thing I can complain about is that: speakers are not great (but I use headphones 90% time anyways), and KDE doesn&#x27;t support independent resolution scaling (I need 125% for laptop display but 100% for external monitor), so it&#x27;s a bit hacky to get scaling the way I want. However, everything else runs perfectly and smoothly.<p>It&#x27;s best laptop I&#x27;ve ever owned for linux. It is quite, portable, moderate power laptop, for fair price. I gave my wife my Macbook air M1 over this one. While the M1 CPU&#x2F;GPU is a little more powerful than Ryzen 5700U (8 core), I get more ram (32gb 3200mhz), bigger and faster disk (1TB 980 pro pci 4), more battery life (18hr idle, 10+ working) for similar price. It&#x27;s also repairable, w&#x2F; removable standard components (not cpu tho). Linux running SMOOTH.<p>Basically with these type of vendors, you don&#x27;t need to struggle or sacrifice (much) to run linux anymore. Tuxedo computers [1] has many more models worth checking out, like with high end GPUs or smaller&#x2F;more portable (even one that support external liquid cooling and an rtx 3080ti lol).<p>[1] Tuxedo Computer (notebooks) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Linux-Hardware&#x2F;Linux-Notebooks.tuxedo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Linux-Hardware&#x2F;Linux-Note...</a> [2] Pulse 15 gen2 : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Linux-Hardware&#x2F;Notebooks&#x2F;15-16-inch&#x2F;TUXEDO-Pulse-15-Gen2.tuxedo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;Linux-Hardware&#x2F;Notebooks&#x2F;...</a>

We burned an evening just last week tracing an Intel wifi driver issue to missing kernel headers that required upgrading <i>the kernel</i> to a new, non-LTS version. And only then did we move on to Nvidia drivers.<p>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.<p>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.)

To make a long story short: I bought a laptop to run Microsoft Office a couple of years back. Being a Linux user, I quickly became frustrated with Windows. Being a slightly rabid Linux user, I bit the bullet and installed Linux on a machine that was not purchased with Linux in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked well. Office was a dual boot away, but that was the price to maintain my sanity.<p>Now Windows users would probably find issues with Linux on this machine. That&#x27;s fine. The thing is, I am not going to miss a feature under Linux that I never even used under Windows. Audio, video, and networking meet my expectations. Sleep and hibernate work, and appear to be more reliable under Linux. I have never felt the need to compare battery life under both operating systems since it is acceptable under both operating systems.<p>As for that dual boot thing: I ended up giving up on the standalone version of Microsoft Office. Online solutions are better for anything that involves collaboration. LibreOffice documents exported to PDF works perfectly well for anything where the product is what matters. The option to dual boot is gone.<p>There is one big difference between the article&#x27;s author and myself: after trying a couple of the boring distributions and finding they didn&#x27;t meet my esoteric tastes, I settled upon the exciting route. Tweaking my workflows is fun as long as it doesn&#x27;t interfere with my ability to work.

Things changed sometime circa 2018.<p>Previously I had to check and ensure online if the laptop runs linux and then buy it.<p>Now I don&#x27;t. I just buy it, and know it will run linux.<p>Fedora distribution is the most compatible one that I have found.

How nice for OP.<p>Just a handful of my issues:<p>- only one speaker works so volume is low<p>- finger print scanner doesn’t work<p>- battery life is poor compared to Windows on same machine<p>- suspend and hibernate doesn’t work<p>- random freezes<p>- charging indicator unreliable<p>- trackpad wrist filtering is very poor<p>- boot failures after OS updates<p>I have now switched to a Mac with Apple Silicon.<p>I really tried with Linux for philosophical reasons, but honestly what professional developer has time for all this?

I don’t know about that but I appreciate some things about Linux, specially the fact that the OS is not creepily trying to sell you something. I have an Asus G513 that I bought specially for Linux. It a Ryzen laptop with a discrete Radeon card. Nice performing machine, although its easy to thermal throttle it so tunning thermal profiles is often necessary. Its not perfect but it works.<p>Out of curiosity I’ve decided to use Windows for a while. Well, anyone here probably knows how Windows became Bonzi Buddy OS but that’s not the worse of it. On Linux I had asusctl to control fans and keyboard lights. For this functionality on Windows I had to install something called Armory Crate from Asus. I shit you not this app sends product offers as system notifications. Things in Windows land also tend to ambush the user at every opportunity to create an account or associate their social media profiles.<p>When I compare the professional presentation of Fedora or Pop OS default desktops with the hysterical ad show of Windows and its third party tools having to live with one or two things not working correctly is a tradeoff I gladly take.

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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Due to the vagaries of needing to use something supportable and normal for work, and because this has become not only my &quot;daily driver&quot; but my &quot;BYOD&quot; device for work, I decided to abandon Linux and install Windows 10 on Christmas Day last year.<p>I may never run Linux again on a personal machine, but I don&#x27;t regret 30 years of &quot;Linux on my Desktop&quot;, and I&#x27;d recommend it to any burgeoning hacker type!

I&#x27;ve been running Linux on Dell XPS laptops with only very minor issues since 2016. Currently on an XPS 13 9310, everything works perfectly.<p>...and that&#x27;s with debian sid, a btrfs rootfs, and rebooting into whatever &quot;git pull&quot; in the kernel git repo gives me most weeks. I do that because I want to help fix bugs, but I honestly haven&#x27;t found anything to fix in years: it just works.<p>Interesting that everybody with problems in this thread seems to be using thinkpads. Maybe they aren&#x27;t what they used to be?

How to get linux on your laptop without any issue: buy a good laptop from a reputable vendor that comes with linux out-of-the-box.<p>Buying a laptop that came with windows and installing linux is not the way we should do it these days.

Just an anecdote: got my Framework laptop the other week. Installed Pop!_OS. That was the only step. Everything works. Suspend&#x2F;resume. WiFi. Audio. Webcam. Funky dongle ports.<p>This is something I had already experienced with my older System76 laptop. This is the first time for me experiencing it with another brand.

&gt; <i>It was not always thus. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, installing Linux on one&#x27;s home computer was a rather terrifying affair, requiring a ton of abstruse tweaking using the command line.</i><p>For those not in Linux back then, here&#x27;s some examples from that era:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;linux-thinkpad-560e&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;linux-thinkpad-560e&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;cheap-pc-2000&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;cheap-pc-2000&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;lab-linux-1999&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;lab-linux-1999&#x2F;</a>

That’s a great story, and I’m happy that this is possible today. There is nothing technically limiting Linux desktops from offering a fantastic experience apart from walled gardens trying to keep eyeballs in their corner. Speaking of, unfortunately, Microsoft will be retiring Teams for Linux later this year<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omglinux.com&#x2F;the-official-microsoft-teams-app-for-linux-is-being-retired&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omglinux.com&#x2F;the-official-microsoft-teams-app-fo...</a>

In my experience, Linux on laptops is fine if you use it like a desktop. If you want all of the fancy features of laptops, like being able to close the lid and have it go to sleep, a lot of luck is involved. Small differences in hardware have profound effects on Linux usability, so the &quot;just use a Thinkpad from 2008&quot; crowd are naturally the happiest.

Two days ago a friend found Spotify installed on hers Windows 10 laptop, pushed by Microsoft, even on the taskbar. That&#x27;s insane. Windows 10 will be my last Windows ever.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.com%2Flinux-on-the-laptop-works-so-damn-well-that-its-boring-29014b347941" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fclivethompson.medium.c...</a>

So damn well if you don&#x27;t care about: sleep working reliably, waking from sleep working at all, Bluetooth, high-dpi without flickering, visual artefacts from igpus, vanishing mouse pointer, audio failing mid video call, webcams failing mid video call, no CPU scaling, crashing <i>hard</i> when the battery hits literally zero (without warning) causing BIOS corruption etc etc etc.<p>I dumped my recent dell Linux laptop for a M1 Mac. Not my preference but at least the Mac works.

I have been running Ubuntu on laptops for over a decade. No major issues, at least as of past 8 years. Great hardware compatibility.

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.

<i>Linux worked out of the box (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu) with:</i><p>- Lenovo ThinkPad T41<p>- Lenovo ThinkPad X61s<p>- LenovWo ThinkPad X220<p>- Lenovo ThinkPad X230<p>- Lenovo ThinkPad X1<p>- DELL Latitude E7762<p>- DELL Latitude E7480<p>- Apple iMac 27&quot;<p><i>Problems encountered:</i><p>- 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).<p>- Couldn&#x27;t install any Linux flavour on the Microsoft Surface 3 laptop. It was painful to get rid of Windows and UEFI boot, and apparently a kernel patch is needed to go further (according to Microsoft support, who didn&#x27;t provide said patch). Does anyone here have that patch BTW?<p>Generally speaking it is getting harder and harder to install Linux, due to Microsofts efforts to make PCs &quot;more secure&quot; (which - oops - prevents the installation of competitors&#x27; OSes, how convenient).

I think that there should be a list of officially supported laptops and if you bought anything else then it is your problem and you are welcome to write necessary patches.<p>It is unfair when people install Linux on an incompatible hardware and then complain.

Boring is good when it comes to tech because it means you&#x27;re not spending time trying to make things work. Save the excitement for the stuff that pays your bills.

The combination of Mint (Ubuntu) and dwm hovers around ~400Mb RAM when idling, and feels so incredibly nice to work with even on decade old machines.<p>I only switched from Windows a few years ago after some 20 years, and in retrospect I can&#x27;t believe how many hours I wasted trying to run things on Windows that &#x27;just work&#x27; on Linux.

My experience <i>sharply</i> differs and that was also on a T420 (later a T420s, same difference). In my experience there is a <i>very</i> narrow usage where ChromeOS does not suffice but Linux desktop does. If you fall into this -- and no doubt a lot of people do -- then things are peachy. But step aside and you are toast.<p>I worked for a company running a certain F5 VPN and their 2FA didn&#x27;t have a Linux client. I managed to make it work by running an ancient Firefox which still could run old style extensions -- and ran it as root. <i>Very secure</i>.<p>MFC devices break all the time.<p>And so forth.

Used ubuntu on thinkpad for work for the first time. Just got back to windows as I am x10 more productive there.<p>Besides the fan&#x27;s noise, I struggled to find a calendar app that just shows alert for my meetings, and that is not buggy as fuck. I windows, Ms Mail just works. then I got the frustration when rust ins installed but not work (should install gcc ...) Linux is great free software, but I am not using ut just because it is great free, I am using windows because it is consistent and I just need to focus on my job

Also related: Linux Subsystem for Windows works in similar manner (at least for me!) - I&#x27;ve switched couple years ago from Linux -&gt; OSX -&gt; Linux -&gt; WSL (when WSL was in 1.x version at the time and lacking from couple features) and gosh, I&#x27;ve never looked back since then<p>(disclaimer: I&#x27;m a front-end developer (and making games in my spare time using various tools) and for my needs I&#x27;ve never found a serious complain about how WSL works)

It&#x27;s not boring.<p>I use Arch Linux sway on my Framework laptop. I have 23 virtual screens (one for each digit, one for each function key and an additional one), and they have different scaling. This means on some screens I don&#x27;t need my reading glasses. For that I wrote a script which is invoked by sway&#x27;s event handler triggered by virtual screen switches. I find this exciting.<p>It&#x27;s not perfect. I still miss the smoothness of Apple&#x27;s trackpad.

I am disappointed in the number of people hyping up Lenovo&#x2F;Thinkpads in this thread. Lenovo is not IBM and their quality is not that great. Some models are good, but plenty of others are bad. Dell has been shipping linux for decades now and Lenovo only announced partial support on some models a year or two ago. Don&#x27;t fall for the hype. Not all Lenovo&#x2F;Thinkpads are good for linux (or good at all).

Perhaps if you leave the defaults alone this is correct. Even defaults aside sleep and hibernate don&#x27;t work well. Don&#x27;t even get me started on secure boot.<p>I&#x27;ve used Linux for over a decade so I am used to turning off random things I don&#x27;t need, changing defaults, hardening my setup,etc... and it is more unpleasant than ever before. There is less debuggability( if that&#x27;s a word) and it really does take a while to get things operational.<p>For example on my debian laptop, I have secure boot and apparmor working. A lot of things broke when I removed software I don&#x27;t need that is running by default which meant a lot of googling and searching for help but it all works now, I mean, to be fair I only struggled for one whole weekend only on it, which is an improvement, but, regardless of the DE I have to wait for at least 5 minutes after login staring at the wallpaper. I just accepted my fate now. Nothing in X11&#x2F;xsession logs, dmesg, journalctl, lxdm logs, I have tried everything short of stracing random processes or attaching gdb.<p>I mean, for personal use it beats windows and isn&#x27;t locked down and unfriendly like macos.

I agree largely with this (as another T420 owner). My only problem is finding new, high-quality battery packs.

The most important thing I think when it comes to getting a Linux desktop that just works, is to buy a laptop that has little-to-no issues with Linux in the first place. As someone who struggled with linux on his existing Windows laptop, I made sure that my next laptop had very few issues on the Arch Wiki, and I installed Arch onto it. Works perfectly.

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.<p>They are great $300 computers for when you&#x27;re between jobs and moving to a place where you can use the work laptop for personal things. Or a pentesting machine. Don&#x27;t see too much use for them otherwise.

Yes. Until you want to do anything gpu accelerated. You&#x27;ll be lucky to setup hw video playback, and when you do hevc isn&#x27;t supported. You want to watch your videos&#x2F;or game in HDR? ,, banish those silly thoughts from your mind.<p>Emulating graphics hardware (GPU passthrough) with qemu is a pita.<p>You want to emulate Android apps, the best solution (Waydroid) only works on Wayland. Though this wouldn&#x27;t be a problem if Xorg wasn&#x27;t holding out. And Nvidia had played nice with Linux.<p>Memory and OOM situation management is a sham and another pita just waiting to bite. This could make you lose all your windows and in some cases even data as the solution involves forcing a reboot from your machine.<p>I could go on and on.<p>A lot of improvements have however been made in the usability aspect, main one being flatpak packages. But there&#x27;s a terribly long road ahead to make Linux desktop feel less of a second-class citizen compared to other operating systems.

Get a new xps, and let&#x27;s talk about compiling 5 different things to make webcam work

I run Gnome based distros on Thinkpads and Dell XPSs and they are the breeze to setup and use.<p>Nvidia drivers are always a concern, apart from that in all ways superior to Windows OSs on these same laptops.<p>Personally i find myself more productive with my Linix workstation but the M1 Mac I use for official work is also quite good.

I found the article to be very well written and I overall agree with it. Years ago (2016) I bought a Lenovo Yoga Pro 3, with an Intel M processor. It had Windows 8, which I almost immediately upgraded to Win10. It was dreadfully slow with both O.S. from the beginning but I used it for 2 years, just sucking it up and enjoying how small and portable it was.<p>At some point I installed Ubuntu, and it gave the laptop a whole new life, HOWEVER... for me it always needed some crazy things to be done in the terminal in order to make things work properly, the wifi, the bluetooth or something else, at some point just broke, and it was a little field day everytime to make it work again.<p>I still have it and it still works OK!<p>So does Linux on laptop work well? Yes. It works TOO well? In my opinion, NO, it really depends sometimes.<p>But I believe it&#x27;s a great O.S.

The fuck it does.<p>I have a lenovo t14 something or other. I have to fiddle with the bios to get suspend work. This means that the battery lasts about 4 days.<p>However whenever it resumes, the touchpad appears to only work at 5 frames per second.<p>Moreover, its impossible to hibernate with secure boot.

&gt; <i>Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring</i><p>Until there is no NVidia&#x27;s legacy GPU&#x2F;video card inside that laptop.

Ya know, Linux isn&#x27;t for everyone, but I like it. I get to do what I want, when I want, and my OS doesn&#x27;t stop me. I haven&#x27;t had any issues with hardware so far, because I bought a laptop from System76 and they do a lot of work to make things usable without fuss. I am sure I can&#x27;t do everything everyone wants to do with a computer, but I don&#x27;t care because all I do with my laptop (work and home) is read Hacker News and random programming documentation and then program stuff. I guess for me, I could be using a smart toaster from 2012 and probably be happy.

I always enjoy the crapshoot of installing linux on random (recycled) laptops. I&#x27;ve been doing this for decades and I&#x27;m always pleasantly surprised at how far we&#x27;ve come. Glitches abound, but so do solutions, and the general robustness is awesome.<p>So thank you, kernel and other devs, your work is hugely appreciated, even in moments of raging frustration (I just blame the short-sighted CxO&#x27;s who delegate responsibilty to overworked product managers that are often just over-promoted engineers).<p>Yay GNU&#x2F;Linux! Freedom for everyone with a bit of patience and a wilful curiousity :)

Get a laptop that is sold with Linux. Don&#x27;t expect Linux to work with literally everything. Drivers.<p>If you get a modern xps or thinkpad it&#x27;ll work just fine. But your mom&#x27;s acer laptop she got from Costco. Maybe not :P

I wish Ubuntu didn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s all about Docker, VMs, or WSL nowadays yet Wubi covered a niche segment which was pefect.<p>0, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hakuna-m&#x2F;wubiuefi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hakuna-m&#x2F;wubiuefi</a>

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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csdvrx.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csdvrx.github.io&#x2F;</a>) but the asymmetric CPU architecture gives me ideas about core pinning for some daemons.<p>On Linux, right now I&#x27;m looking at why the i915 style GPU (9840) gives me &quot;Failed to get size of gamma for output default&quot; in xrandr, which prevents redshift from working.

The most dificult thing to believe is the Ms Teams working without problem.<p>&quot;The Linux works in a 11 year old ThinkPad, so it works easily in any computer&quot; is a quantum jump to conclusion.

Your Mileage May Vary, and may vary <i>a lot</i>. 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:<p>- keyboard not working<p>- speakers 50% not working<p>- mic not working<p>- bluetooth not working<p>- standby not working<p>And probably something else I&#x27;m missing.<p>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.

Linux still can&#x27;t handle out of memory issues gracefully.<p>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.<p>Mac and windows both manage to handle this gracefully by force suspending background processes it seems.<p>This makes Linux on the laptop hit or miss, multitask too much and your system effectively locks up. Laptops tend to have less ram available.

I&#x27;ve had linux on the desktop as my daily driver for 12 of the past 14 years.<p>Yes it takes a little bit longer to setup. But once I do it it&#x27;s just so much more comfortable for me than Windows. Faster, easier to maintain, insanely better UI all configured in my dot files.<p>So yeah, there&#x27;s a ramp up, and you need to be a bit resourceful. And it&#x27;s probably not a great strategy to just choose any old laptop.<p>But I still love it. 2022 is yet another happy year of the Linux Desktop for me.

IDK, maybe it is boring for a guy who has nothing better to do than to fuck with configuring software he uses. But I kinda tricked myself into thinking GNU&#x2F;Linux is an actually usable OS, like, to live with it without noticing it too much. Now, after 15 years I&#x27;m way too attached to it to sell my soul to Microsoft, but I&#x27;m still waiting for that &quot;year of Linux on desktop&quot;. I don&#x27;t want to configure anything anymore, I have my life, man. I&#x27;m too old and too busy for this shit. I just want it to work, on its own.<p>Yet, I&#x27;m still occasionally struggling with hardware compatibility and Ubuntu package manager issues. And I won&#x27;t even complain about that one time I was foolish enough to set-up ZFS on a laptop: after all, it was offered in &quot;Advanced Settings&quot; tab and I should&#x27;ve known better. Suffice to say, that buying basic consumer-grade hardware I still cannot assume that it will work reasonably well with Linux.<p>Honestly, I&#x27;m almost for real offended by someone daring to say not having to spend my life solving Linux problems should be qualified as &quot;boring&quot; — especially when it&#x27;s not the case, and when I still often find out that stuff that had me struggling with it for hours, days, or even turned out to simply not work on Linux at all — is basically plug-and-play on Windows. I mean, if you think about it, there&#x27;s no reason to expect it not to be the case, but it is exactly the headlines like that, that trick you into believing this and buying stuff before meticulously googling everything and making sure it can be used with Linux in the first place (which is often not Google-able as well, when it comes to a bit less common items, than, let&#x27;s say, top-100 products on Amazon).

Wow, I wish.<p>I&#x27;ve been using a couple of ryzen laptops (an HP with a 2500u, then an HP with a 3700u) for about 5 years.<p>It works pretty well, except:<p>When the laptop wakes up there&#x27;s a good chance that the UI shows up but I can&#x27;t click on anything or type.<p>I can then reboot by holding Alt-SysReq and typing REISUB.<p>Or: The screen is still black, and nothing works, as above.<p>I can run games, though if I play something like GTA-V, it will eventually get too hot and I have to hard reset.<p>This is because the fan control doesn&#x27;t properly work.

&gt; I tell this anecdote to make a point that will be obvious to nerds, but may still be news for everyone else: Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days.<p>Which one? Because you can&#x27;t download and install &quot;Linux&quot;, there is no linux-stable-09-2022.iso that you download from linux.org that you then use to install a full OS that &quot;just works(tm)&quot;. In fact, if we&#x27;re talking about an 11 year old laptop, the actual version of Linux installed on it might not even exist anymore, but happens to have been set up in a way that it can use still maintained PPA. And which laptop, with what hardware? Because it&#x27;s trivial to support a generic network adapter and an ancient 1200x800 WXGA screen, but good luck getting linux to &quot;just work&quot; with your wifi6e and retina 4k screen.<p>Downvotes notwithstanding, as an anecdote this post effectively undermines itself, because installing Microsoft teams worked <i>contrary to the author&#x27;s expectation</i>. They expected this to be hard, so concluding that Linux on a laptop &quot;just works&quot; based on a single activity unexpectedly not being an absolute nightmare is not drawing a reasonable conclusion.<p>(Not sure I buy the argument that Linux works so nicely, because &quot;Most software has migrated to the browser&quot; either, that feels like a false equivalency routed in anecdotal evidence for what &quot;most&quot; means to the author. Some productivity apps have decent webapp equivalents, but they all suffer from the fact that they run in the browser, and folks aren&#x27;t going to run dedicated browser processes for each web app, so the regular browsing on the side can, and will, stall or even crash the browser)

Unfortunately have to disagree, connecting to my wireless scanner&#x2F;printer is way too complicated, no driver frontends for my mouse&#x2F;keyboard, when multiple sound devices are connected, it&#x27;s so bad to swap between them. When I connect to my home projector, it didn&#x27;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.

Sure, the overall &quot;eventually stuff gets supported&quot; story is good. And people hold on to hardware a lot more than they used to. This guy&#x27;s using a T420. <i>That&#x27;s an 11 year old machine!</i> Older hardware has always worked much better under Linux than newer hardware (sometimes for longer than it&#x27;s worked well on Windows).<p>It&#x27;s also pretty amazing that there are now some major-vendor Linux-out-of-the-box laptops. But the pool is still not all that large.<p>I was just looking at an Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED and Google suggests ... nah. Very un-boring.<p>E.g.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zentalk.asus.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;discussion&#x2F;63549&#x2F;linux-on-zenbook-s-13-oled" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zentalk.asus.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;discussion&#x2F;63549&#x2F;linux-on-zenboo...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linuxhardware&#x2F;comments&#x2F;wv2c28&#x2F;anyone_using_one_of_these_new_um5302_from_asus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linuxhardware&#x2F;comments&#x2F;wv2c28&#x2F;anyon...</a><p>Fun shit like &quot;keyboard doesn&#x27;t work yet&quot; plus various other nothing-surprising-to-me-after-doing-this-for-20-years stuff like weird audio driver patch crap.

I gave up Windows entirely; between unavoidable telemetry, embedded ads, and poor service pack QA (especially printers), I&#x27;m done. I&#x27;m not paying to rent an O&#x2F;S and sell my personal habits regardless of what Microsoft thinks I should do.<p>I use a Macbook Pro for work. I don&#x27;t really care for MacOS, but they&#x27;ve got a real bash shell at least, and I like the consistency of clipboard handling in MacOS. I don&#x27;t get to dictate my work environment, but thank goodness it isn&#x27;t Windows.<p>I&#x27;m running Devuan at home on a recent AMD 550 board with a 3100, and also on an older Macbook Pro. The only real issues I have are around getting wifi working during install on Debian and Devuan, due to firmware open-ness issues. I doubt Ubuntu has these issues.<p>After install, though, the OP is correct, it&#x27;s wonderfully boring. Install TLP and a recent 5.x kernel on laptops and power issues just disappear. Install Steam and use Proton, even with games from GoG, and everything that I own works.<p>It&#x27;s always jarring to help someone with a normal Windows machine; the ads, the o&#x2F;s response times, the forced manufacturer bloatware really shocks me.<p>I don&#x27;t miss Windows at all.

Is that actually true? What does it say that I immediately recognize that T420 from the image?<p>Maybe the title should be changed to &quot;Linux on the X220 and T420 ...&quot;. Even on these devices I&#x27;ve had some problems. Due to experiences I&#x27;ve made I&#x27;m sceptical that there are no issues with Fn keys, Trackpads, Display brightness, power consumption, connectivity... on random laptops - especially the lower-priced ones.

Of course, like many others in this thread I strongly disagree. We are talking here of 20 years that Linux desktop has been mostly standing in place (and going backwards as well). I’ve used Linux in the 90’ and the early 2000’ so I remember well. The thing is it might be Microsoft putting sticks in the wheels of open source by planting it’s own people in the industry.

I&#x27;ve had mixed results on laptops. I&#x27;ve never bothered to make the fingerprint reader work, that just isn&#x27;t my thing. I&#x27;ve had decent luck with all the standard functions <i>video, audio, storage, keyboard, mousepad, wifi</i> on most models of Lenovo and Dell in the last decade. I&#x27;ve had mixed results on Asus laptops, especially the recent ones. The biggest challenge I&#x27;ve had is finding out ahead of time what wifi chipset is used and this has only affected me when using tools like aircrack-ng [1]. The chipset can vary even within the same make&#x2F;model of laptop depending on when it was manufactured. The way I quickly test how a laptop will behave is to boot Kali Linux [2] into ram. Sometimes a sales person at a computer store would let me do this on a demo model even though they probably should not.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aircrack-ng.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aircrack-ng.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kali.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kali.org&#x2F;</a>

Thesis: &quot;Linux on a laptop or desktop computer works amazingly well these days.&quot;<p>Evidence: 1 data point, my own 11-year old laptop<p>This article is not notable.

I had the following - and luckily they worked great under Linux (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu):<p>Lenovo ThinkPad x61s Lenovo ThinkPad x220 Lenovo ThinkPad x230 Lenovo ThinkPad Lenovo ThinkPad x1 DELL Latitude E7450 and similar<p>Problematic:<p>Lenovo ThinkPad x240 - hypersensitive touchpad makes mouse pointer jumpt while writing text

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.

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&#x2F;mouse hooked up).<p>Love Linux on the server, but we need more driver support from manufacturers for laptop support...

Ludicrous. On some, it does, on others, otherwise there&#x27;s minor issues, major issues, sometimes regressions. Linux is very clearly a second class citizen on the PC, with hardware only coming with support for the current gen Windows. Some doesn&#x27;t even work with Windows well, and that&#x27;s the supposedly supported platform.<p>I _do_ use Linux on everything, mind you. But I also keep a file where I collect my fixes for the different systems, so that I won&#x27;t forget them when I reinstall. And I accept that sometimes things don&#x27;t work, like a fingerprint reader, and I live with that.<p>One such random thing from the notes is that the touchpad wouldn&#x27;t come alive after a sleep. The fix is the &quot;i8042.nomux=1&quot; kernel parameter. Hours of duckduckgoing went into that. I like to tinker, but it&#x27;s not working &quot;so damn well that it&#x27;s boring&quot;.

It depends on the hardware. If you buy one of the certified machines maybe, otherwise you&#x27;re in for a painful treat. IMO my requirements are pretty low: i3 window manager, chrome (sorry), a terminal, audio and multiple displays. To be honest Linux is not able to provide a fully working experience for those things.

Oh really ? Then you&#x27;re lucky you don&#x27;t have one of those &quot;gaming laptop&quot; especially the ASUS TUF models (I am not a gamer at all but yet i decided to get an asus Tuf505d) and believe me setting up Linux on it wasn&#x27;t boring at all. I actually learnt a lot while doing it.<p>Because once you&#x27;ll figure out why the wifi is shutting down every x minutes. You&#x27;ll then have to find what&#x27;s wrong with the Bluetooth who doesn&#x27;t activate.<p>And of course at some point you&#x27;ll want to connect an external monitor right ?<p>If you thought plugging an hdmi cable and pushing some keys would allow you to display your stuff on your projector... Well think again.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong I love Linux.. I have been using it for the last 12 years (switched to Ubuntu recently)<p>While it&#x27;s amazingly easy and smooth on my rpi4 (for my personnal use). It can be boringly complicated on some laptop brands

Uhm, how about suspension&#x2F;hibernate? That was pretty lame even 2 years ago and I&#x27;m not seeing it improve

I want this to be true very badly. I’ve been a Linux user for nearly 20 years and I’ve never had an install that “just works” to the level of macOS or even Windows.<p>Although there was a while there in like 2006 where I had a pretty solid install of Ubuntu on some HP laptop I had at the time. That’s the closest I got.<p>This is of course extremely anecdotal. Everyone’s on different hardware and therefore has pretty different experiences.<p>I hate Windows as a development OS but I’d rather deal with that than some odd update that breaks my install completely, or spending hours reading forum posts to try to make my Bluetooth driver less shitty, etc etc.<p>I just use macOS for dev and Windows for gaming and they stay out of my way. I’ll keep trying Linux again once a year or so, but I’m not optimistic on it. It’s a moving target too due to varying hardware support over time.

Linux on the laptop instantly triggers nostalgia.<p>I was 15 in 1998 and had just worked our families root beer and popcorn concession stands for 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair. Every penny I earned was used to purchase a brand new iMac in bondi blue.<p>A year later I sold the iMac via the newspaper classifieds. I used that money to buy my first used laptop and proceeded to install Linux.<p>I got my Linux distro, Redhat, from a CD-rom inside a book purchased at Barnes &amp; Noble. I must have reinstalled Linux 100x on that machine. I remember using it to take notes in my PSEO (college in high school) classes at the local tech school. Fond memories.<p>I’m sure Linux has come a long way. I still use it every day on the server, but switched back to mac on the desktop when apple went to Intel and could just run Linux&#x2F;Windows in a VM when necessary.

No it doesn&#x27;t, even on an Asus 1215B that was actually sold with Linux on it.<p>GL support isn&#x27;t at the same level as the DirectX 11 for the APU, still has some issues waking up time to time (only fixed by taking the battery out), and is the only device that has issues connecting to my router.

I bought a a dell developer xps preloaded with ubuntu. It had issues from day 1, related to sleep, related to bluetooth, related to closing the lid and expecting it to do what I wanted. I fixed some of them after messing with it for weeks, but was plagued by kernel panics in the qualcomm wireless driver that was unfixable. Finally had enough BS and switched to windows.<p>Always kind of aggravating to see posts like OP saying how great linux is as a desktop, ignoring how horrible it is in general across a broad range of hardware. And apparently even direct from dell, in my case.<p>edit: BTW experienced dev using linux VMs, baremetal, and WSL for 15 years. I love linux as a dev, but I will never touch it again as a desktop OS.

Most of the comments here report the opposite of the linked article. Using Linux still seems to involve a significant amount of being your own IT department.<p>I have tried Linux a few times over the years. One test was for almost 2 weeks on vacation, in a developing country, where it wasn&#x27;t safe to be walking around with a MacBook. Another was for a few days as a Linux home theater. After struggling for hours with the sound drivers I gave up. I was frustrated with the amount of trouble shooting involved with Linux. That combined with preferring the OS has kept me on MacBooks for the past decade+.

I get this article, but I also don&#x27;t like parts of it.<p>Sure, everything just works. And that&#x27;s awesome. But it&#x27;s also being sold here as &quot;the poor person&#x27;s OS using janky equipment&quot;. Sure, Linux can greatly help with artificial obsolescence.<p>But the biggest point is that you retain ownership and full power over your data.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this again and again with stuff like Eagle vs KiCAD, and Autodesk software vs FreeCAD. Sure in some cases the FLOSS software isn&#x27;t as &quot;polished&quot;, but when Autodesk decides to arbitrarily change the policy locking you oout of your content, it&#x27;s a matter of freedom and your data.<p>The OS is the &quot;carrier&quot;, and the applications are the actual thing.

So many negative comments. Always preferred Linux whether it&#x27;s Ubuntu&#x2F;Fedora&#x2F;Arch to any windows OS. All the laptops I had were: Thinkpad T450s, HP Spectre 15, Acer Nitro 5. All of them work flawlessly. Windows on the other hand...

Absolutely correct. Funny coincidence that happened to me:<p>Got my Steam Deck on the same day I got an email informing my that one of my university supplied Macs had to go back and be surplused because of our end of life policies. Now, I&#x27;ve typically been able to keep pretty much every computer I&#x27;ve been given if I have a reason (and I teach IT so I always have reasons)<p>Upon informing them that I wiped Mac Os from it and have been running Linux instead, IT services was -- &quot;Ah, okay, fine -- bring it in so we can make sure it&#x27;s updated and you&#x27;re good to keep it. Otherwise it would have to come back.&quot;

Hoping one day soon I&#x27;ll be able to use Gnome on my M1 MacBook with full hardware acceleration and unchanged power efficiency&#x2F;battery life.<p>MacBook laptops feel great to use, their Keyboards, their trackpads, their screens, their battery lives are unparalleled - but MacOS is such a compatibility nightmare. No Vulkan support makes gaming difficult, no kernel support for containerisation makes using development tools like Docker cumbersome.<p>Apple are total dicks for locking down their hardware so tightly and refusing to support efforts to extend support to other OSes.

Haha, sounds super boring compared to 2004 when I bought Fujitsu Siemen&#x27;s cheapest Pentium M laptop and had to build some kernel modules, build custom rules for power saving scenes (as there weren&#x27;t that much of ready rules) and find the most optimal parameters for every module and CPUFreq configs etc.<p>Also, figuring out the sequence of disabling modules etc for suspend to disk and suspend to ram sleep modes with more custom scripts was super fun. Managed to squeeze whole 8 hours from a battery that was supposed to work 4-6 hours in Windows XP. Fun times.

This has not been my experience.<p>When I use Linux for work, I still hit random things that need the command line, and it&#x27;s much less stable than Windows (hard freezes). I tried to use Linux (specifically Mint) as an HTPC to use with Stepmania, but immediately ran into problems with both audio coming through <i>and</i> the TV resolution, and had to fall back to Windows, which worked with no drama.<p>This has happened every time I&#x27;ve tried to use Linux at home: I end up running into random problems that are weirdly hard to solve, or things that won&#x27;t work period.

Reading this post makes me wonder if i&#x27;m absolutely lucky or something because linux always worked great out of the box in almost any computer i ever had, even my new Gigabyte laptop

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.

I installed ZorinOS on a laptop from 2010 and it works like magic!<p>It&#x27;s a bit slow because the software it&#x27;s running is all new but man does Linux feel nice to use on old hardware.

I so wish this were true (and seeing it at the top of HN would make you believe it were true), but my experiences in the last 6 years or so with 4 different laptops speaks otherwise. 2 of those were sold with Linux on them (Dell and Tuxedo), 2 were Thinkpads, and they all had all kinds of issues. The best is the Tuxedo, but even that thing has issues with hybernating. Unfortunately, none of them comparable to the smooth functioning of a Macbook.

Dell XPS 15 9510(11th gen cpu), intel-only with Dell Thunderbolt Dock works with zero issues. I&#x27;m connecting Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and mouse + headphones, external monitors. Yeah, touchpad is not as good as on mac but I don&#x27;t care.<p>UPD: Fedora 36

I have a few old laptops kicking around still. We&#x27;re talking 10+ year old laptops here that weren&#x27;t even top of the line when new.<p>The differences in OS bloat between the two is night and day. The Windows 8 laptop that I swear takes 15+ minutes to boot and struggles to do simple web browsing. It reminds me of what happens to 5+ year old phones where they seem to get slower for no good reason.<p>My linux laptops are still going strong like the day they were new.

I thought Linux was often times annoying with Bluetooth connection issues, sleep related bugs … I enjoy how boring stable it is on thinkpad.<p>Then I bought a Mac m1 second hand for photo related needs and it doesn’t wake up the external monitor on resume from suspend, doesn’t auto switch Bluetooth mic, doesn’t provide volume mixer for hdmi external monitor, can’t manage wifi&amp;Ethernet at the same time …<p>I stopped worrying and am using both happily, with their flaws.

Funny that, when my beefed up XPS 15 finally died, I went on eBay on got one of those Thinkpads dumped by corporations for like £120. I put in the NVMe drive from the XPS and... it was working out of the box. What is surprising that it feels much faster, fans don&#x27;t make as much noise that despite weaker CPU and 4x less RAM. I really like it. I got an M1 Pro as well, but Thinkpad will be a nice backup machine.

No luck with touch screen in Ubuntu so far. It&#x27;s a combination of the touch screen but not wanting the on-screen keyboard to pop up every time I touch in a text entry widget. I googled all over the place and tried a bunch of things that were suggested. Fortunately I&#x27;ve been trying this while Windows still works on my laptop, so I&#x27;m not desperate, and can always try again at asome point.

my experience has been mostly good. I used to work on a beat-up hp low-end laptop from 2012, on which I put arch w&#x2F; i3-gaps. It had only one issue, a driver that killed the laptop on any sudden acceleration (to protect the hdd write heads on the original machine, I&#x27;d put in a ssd). I found a way to disable it and otherwise had no issues, everything was pretty snappy considering the slow i3 cpu. On my current 2020 razer blade, I&#x27;ve had to create a workaround script for the intel backlight driver not working properly (on boot it maxes out at 30% backlight, but cat 100 to the correct file and the full range is unlocked). I still don&#x27;t know how to handle plugging in external screens (e.g. to give presentations) but that&#x27;s an i3-gaps issue and not the laptop&#x27;s fault, and the battery life is pretty abysmal since graphics switching from the nvidia gpu to the igpu seems to disable using the gpu for cuda workloads (for which the fix is to have the charger with me at all times).

To be clear, i had to wait from 1998 to 2021 before i install linux Mint on my father Laptop (now in his 70&#x27;s). Since this recent move, i never receive a call that something is broken on his old laptop, and i dont need to explain to him that i dont know windows over the air, while he is stressing about printing his latest document to print and send ASAP. Thanks linux Mint.

Yep, writing this on Linux laptop. And this is not thinkpad.<p>Note: do not expect bleeding edge hardware to work 100% well, it takes some time (~3-6 months).

Surface Pro 2017 trip report:<p>Basic laptop functionality works. Battery life is poor compared to when running Windows. Pen and touch required some finicking to get working. No writing apps as good as OneNote. All the ones I tried have enough input latency to make the experience unpleasant.<p>That was a ~2021 Ubuntu. I was unable to reach the desktop in Mint. Kali couldn&#x27;t interface with the network chip.

With the caveat that you have to like Gnome or KDE. They’re both better than Windows but Gnome in particular has gone too far with its ultra minimalist UI design. I just wish there was something built on Sway that’s nice to use out of the box that doesn’t require a witch’s cauldron of dot files. Why are all the cool DEs so allergic to GUI configuration tools?

Medium :-(<p>Does anyone have a link to the full text of this article?

I like to keep one of my personal laptops running Linux, but I won&#x27;t be using one at work again soon unless I have the rights to pave and reinstall. While I&#x27;m more than willing to spend my evenings tinkering issues on my own laptop, I can&#x27;t spend hours of work time debugging a graphics or audio issue that pops up.

In the meantime I was trying to install new fedora kde plasma and it got frozen during the install. You were lucky. I was not.

I miss the old slackware days where nothing works

I was suprised when I upgraded my old Thinkpad x250 to the Inspiron 15 from DEll. Installed Pop Os on it and it worked really well. I could even make the fingerprint scanner run without problem.<p>In the end I endup going back to win 11 because someone wanted me to maintain a vb5 and winform .net aplication, and because Borderlands 3 runs better on win, unfortunally.

I find the headline pretty disturbing because a) no it isn&#x27;t and b) what would be boring is never being able to do anything because you were forced to spend all day &quot;tinkering&quot; with the OS for stability reasons or dismissing a constant barrage of nagware. Linux easily beats windows in this regard.

+1<p>Running Linux on laptops since the late 90&#x27;s. In the beginning I had to tinker a lot, compile custom kernels, etc.<p>Now - for the past 10 years or so - it (especially Redhat&#x27;s Fedora) just works without doing anything, even with the newest laptops.<p>Wayland is not quite there, yet (IMHO), so I&#x27;m still running X11 (thankfully Fedora let&#x27;s me do that).

Recently installed Linux on my 2011 MacBook Air and loving it. Faster than MacOS and all drivers just worked (Ubuntu 22.04).<p>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.

A lot of argument here complaints that Linux is broken outside of Linux specific vendors or ThinkPads.<p>Well, how did it go for you to try and run MacOS on non-Apple hardware?<p>Maybe, sure you get a better experience with hardware supported by Linux. But that&#x27;s a lot of bias in your opinion.

I have an L14 gen 2 amd thinkpad, and have had a ton of issues with the touchpad and occansional issues with the down key repeating for no reason. My wife has an E14 gen 3 amd thinkpad and absolutely no issues.<p>The future for linux on the laptop is here, just unevenly distributed.<p>Both on Fedora 36 KDE.

...unlike the Raspberry Pi. About a year ago I installed a Raspberry Pi 4B+ behind my 40&quot; monitor, with Kodi + some DLNA stuff on it. It almost works, but it has hard fails in enough important areas that I&#x27;ve given up on it.<p>- No sleep &#x2F; standby mode (lowest power is &#x27;idle&#x27;)<p>- No Wake On Lan, so if you power it off completely, you have to cycle the power on the power supply (not easy, since mine is behind the &quot;TV&quot;)<p>- Chromium crashes on YouTube (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.raspberrypi.com&#x2F;viewtopic.php?t=323640" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.raspberrypi.com&#x2F;viewtopic.php?t=323640</a>)<p>- Firefox ESR doesn&#x27;t play sound on most YouTube videos (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raspberrypi.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;109185&#x2F;some-youtube-videos-have-no-audio-on-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-running-raspbian-bus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raspberrypi.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;109185&#x2F;some-...</a>)<p>- Can&#x27;t run Windows apps (eg the amazing MusicBee) because it&#x27;s ARM<p>- Shitty disk support (stuck with SD card or USB)<p>I gave an old ThinkPad T430 to my 9 year old nephews about a year ago, and they&#x27;ve completely trashed it: busted screen hinges, broken backlight and cracked case. I&#x27;m gonna remove the faulty screen and permanently hook it up to the TV as a &quot;headless laptop&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;thinkpad&#x2F;comments&#x2F;jt2p8j&#x2F;i_see_your_raspberry_pi_400_and_i_raise_you_the&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;thinkpad&#x2F;comments&#x2F;jt2p8j&#x2F;i_see_your...</a>). Because guess what? Linux runs boringly well on it. Also: built-in keyboard, low-power standby mode, trackpad, proper SSD and more useful ports than the Pi.

My non-work laptops all run linux, and have for ~20 years. My oldest laptop is a 14 year old Sager (Clevo) notebook, whose display seems to have just died last month. My newest is a 1.75 year old HP Omen with Ryzen 7 4800H AMD and NVidia graphics. All run linux, specifically Mint. Same release. All (apart from the dead 14 year old Sager) work well.<p>I am typing this on my 4.75 year old Sager (Clevo), running Linux Mint, with an Nvidia GTX 1060&#x2F;Intel iGPU unit, 1.5 TB of SSD (SATA), 64 GB ram, 4 physical cores. Everything works. It worked when I first installed it.<p>My personal office deskside unit is an AMD Epyc 16 core, 128 GB RAM, with NVidia RTX3060 workstation, running Debian 11, as a deskside workstation. I have some older units based upon E5-2687W CPU tech, old NVidia cards built cheaply from ebay parts. All running linux in desktop configs, though most don&#x27;t have a display keyboard attached. I&#x27;ve used all of them as desksides at one point in time or the other, and still use them for larger personal computing projects unrelated to work.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Linux on laptops and desksides for the last 23+ years. My first laptop, was a 75MHz pentium unit with 16MB of ram, I triple booted DOS, OS2, and Linux on in 1996. I had a tiny 20MB hard disk with it. I wrote lots of my phd thesis on that under linux, and my home SGI Indy (the perks of working at SGI in the 1990s).<p>Linux was hard for laptops&#x2F;desktops until about 2004-2005 or so. Then things that were hard to make work, started working out of the box. I didn&#x27;t have to think about installing most drivers, apart for things like some usb based devices. That got better in 2008 or so.<p>Over the last 14 years, everything pretty much just worked. As the OP notes, its been boring. For the most part. Occasionally I&#x27;ll run into a cheap USB peripheral where the driver isn&#x27;t updated, or its missing updated firmware, but this is, and has been for a while, the exception.<p>I know there are many who have disdain for linux desktops. That&#x27;s fine, have your own preferred environment. That noted, please recognize that there are many users out there using linux desktops, successfully, productively, without problems. From installation through normal&#x2F;intense usage.<p>My home office has a Mac M1 Mini running MacOS 12.6 , 1x HP Omen 64 GB RAM, 8 core Ryzen laptop with Nvidia 1660Ti gpu running linux mint, a deskside 16 core Epyc, 128GB RAM machine with RTX3060 running Debian 11. All configured with my various monitors and networks. Its productive for me. We do not have an operational, regularly in use, MS Windows installation. And we&#x27;re happy with this setup. It works. Everything just works. The way it should.<p>[edited to fix HP laptop brand, Omen, not Open]

Neat, I haven&#x27;t read one of these stories since I stopped reading Slashdot in 2008&#x27;ish.

My experience with fresh installs has usually be pretty good on older laptops. However, it always eventually starts to go downhill for me (likely somewhat self inflicted). It would be interesting if the author still feels the same after a year or so.

I had a Dell XPS 13 and tried to get a Linux distributor running on it (not hard) reliably (impossible). This led to hours, days of frustration and I eventually gave it away to someone who spent hours more and eventually put Windows back on it and sold it.

Agreed. That&#x27;s why I turn to r&#x2F;unixporn to vicariously live through alternate setups.

Laptop - I agree, as my Lenovo Thinkpad runs Linux without issues. I&#x27;m having trouble on desktop PC with wake up from suspend (when PC goes to sleep automatically after set amount on minutes) and wireless dropping randomly.

Agree. At least ThinkPads work extremely well. The one thing that keeps me from completely switching is RDP. Is there some solutions that work as good on linux? Tried few but they couldn&#x27;t match RDP on windows, especially with a bad connection.

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.

We use several hundred laptops from Dell that run Linux (Ubuntu &amp; CentOS) as the primary developer laptop in our organisation. They work well. Of course every now and then some user comes up with an idea to uninstall default Python…

It&#x27;s fine. There&#x27;s also still a lot of tinkering you have to do to fully get the Linux experience. There&#x27;s way too many applications out there still that may require you to drop into a terminal to get them working.

Today I found out that my wife&#x27;s 2 y.o. Lenovo IdeaPad reboots Ubuntu so fast that I thought it was just logging out the user session. It was around 3 seconds. It took me two reboots to actually realize what was going on.

&gt; works so well<p>so long as one doesn&#x27;t need a working fingerprint reader, otherwise too bad

The future is a Windows 10 desktop for gaming and most software. VMWare running your flavor of Linux for serious dev work. It works flawlessly and seamlessly.<p>Been coding on my Linux VM for the past two years without a single hitch.

Okay, does hibernation work? How about palm rejection on the track pad? Hi-Dpi fractional scaling? Do I need to read hostile *nix forums to find the right incantation to make Wi-fi work?

On old niche laptops from Thinkpad, Dell, maybe, probably. Good luck with the other brands and fairly new laptops. My best non function is a trackpad not working :P Every damn time

I recently looked into buying a linux laptop and it seems like only unattractive laptops were advised (thinkpads) and that you’d have to install linux on them yourself

I couldn&#x27;t get dpi resizing to work at all. Like when I unplug my laptop from a lower dpi monitor. It was a such a nusance for me I went back to windows and use wsl.

Improve less developed OSes, like Redox, Haiku, Serenety...

Intel hardware was really good on Linux but I suppose that will change in the future because it seems the person responsible for that has left Intel.

It&#x27;s not bad, some things are just missing. E.g Night light doesn&#x27;t work on Wayland with Nvidia drivers.

Linux works so well with old laptops because it took year for the community to solve the problems. thanks to the community

I love Linux on the laptop. I previously used it on a desktop computer for many years and the experience wasn&#x27;t nearly as good.

I must have been unlucky, I battled what felt like endlessly with sound and video card issues until I just switched back to Mac.

That&#x27;s cool, tell it to Linux 5.18.11 which will not detect my ELANTECH i2c trackpad even if I use allyesconfig

Well, author threw a dice and won.<p>Work Sony Vaio also worked perfectly. But seen quite a few people with other that had problems.

It is good it works well so that you can design hardware with the FOSS that is free as in &quot;freedom&quot;

Boring because you dont need to waste hours for configuration and troubleshooting not working drivers?

I have a brand new dell xps 13 and it works so amazingly well I bought another xps 13 for my sister

I have the opposite experience, desktop or laptop I&#x27;ve never had Linux work well out of the box.

lol, reading this as I&#x27;m trying to get the Nvidia driver working on a 2010 mac mini ... if it was an Intel graphics model it would be fine, but non-standard hardware still breaks things, even on relatively common machines

The only thing restricting me to use it at home is the lack of parental control.

i&#x27;m using linux for the first time after years on an old laptop from 2011; it&#x27;s such a pleasure! everything is so smooth and functional<p>Try MX Linux on old hardware, it&#x27;s awesome.

“Software is exists” and “my camera works” are pretty low bars.

Trackpad drivers are still horrible as far as I know

&gt; Linux on the laptop<p>&gt; 11-year-old Thinkpad T420<p>This guy better be trolling.

2022 is the year for Linux on the desktop.

Ah, cue the long thread of “No because my special combination of hardware&#x2F;special configuration demands caused problems so Linux bad!”

MS teams works in the browser...

Everything except bluetooth...

Year of the Linux desktop

But can you print?

How’s the battery life though compared to MacBook Air ?

Except it eats battery. I would not recommend Linux on a laptop under any circumstances.

Damn threads like this always bring out hordes of certain types of posters. For me though it&#x27;s OpenBSD, I don&#x27;t trust Linux any more. PRC&#x27;s a little too heavily involved in the project. I can only imagine the back and forth between their operatives and the NSA&#x27;s, sometimes it flares up on the LKML to the point where it glows brighter the sun.

ITT: bunch of whiners that didn&#x27;t pick hardware that was proven to be compatible with Linux before buying.<p>The solid experience on modern laptops is there, you just have to spend 10 minutes researching compatibility on the laptop before you buy.

I will never buy a Apple laptop again because Apple stops supporting it after a while and you can&#x27;t install new version of the OS on it and new software. This is a deal breaker for me, completely a waste of perfectly fine hardware. Installing Ununtu on it solved all problems fortunately. Same thing with Apple AirPort TimeCapsule, such a waste to buy it when Apple stops supporting it after a couple of years. You might as well buy products from Apple and get the delivered directly to the garbage dump