Hacker News Reader

Comment by earenndil | Hacker News Reader

I've had no driver problems running linux on my laptop, just sayin.

I don't have driver problems if I actively fix them, but I haven't had a linux laptop just work basically ever.

Currently, my XPS 15 with Xubuntu doesn't function after coming back from suspend and I haven't bothered to dig into why. I don't mind, but it's absolutely not a problem I experienced with windows on the same hardware or any mac I've ever owned.

Same, since 2009. Even got better battery than on windows (and by far since windows 10)

But it's true that you better buy a laptop that you know has good support. eg: almost any dell, almost any asus, any thinkpad.

Another comment today mentioned the low quality of asus laptops. I have never owned one, but buying an apple laptop is supposed to relieve all these doubts about good brands, years and models.

Show me a MacBook as robust as a T or W series Thinkpad. They play in the same price/performance class, except that the former has a fancy touchpad and the latter a trackpoint. And it is unlikely to break, and the non-touch versions come with a matte screen that actually works as long as you don't have the sun in your back. And even then, cleaning the screen from dust and increasing the contrast/gamma does wonders.

I've currently got no driver issues per se. But even in 2018 I don't have hibernation out of the box, battery life and wifi are both worse than Windows on the same machine, and the fans are on all the time.

I mean, I still love it and these aren't life or death issues, it's just something fundamental about the nature of Linux in an ecosystem of proprietary hardware specs and commercial drivers. It will always be a fact of life. Just like Linux package management, because the software is open source, will always be better than on Windows or a Mac. That's a fact of life that can't really change because of the nature of _their_ ecosystems.

No harm in admitting the differences, but good for you if everything works out of the box!

Wasn't a Linux laptop with hibernation, sound, and wireless working at the same time one of the UN's Millenium Goals?

That was the original draft, but they chickened out and just decided to halve poverty by 2015 instead.

Err, what do I want to hibernate? S3 is pretty energy efficient and you'd likely want security patches anyway before the battery runs out on LPDDR3/LPDDR4 ram.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com