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Comment by Wehrdo | Hacker News Reader

Glad that Ubuntu works well for the author, but I've used Ubuntu on and off for a good 5+ years, and could fill a book with small things that just don't work quite right, and cumulatively makes it feel like I'm fighting the computer instead of working with it.

As a brief taste:

* No trackpad swipe gestures (plus many more subtle trackpad issues)

* Pre-Wayland the only way to attach a second screen at a different DPI was with xrandr that caused random flickering

* Accidentally bricked it once because I restarted while updates were happening in the background (no indication they were, and no prompt to let me know before restarting)

I could go on for awhile...

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On my Dell Precision 6800:

* "Supported" ubuntu was so old that neither Chrome nor Firefox would update

* Latest ubuntu constantly toggled the backlight at 30fps (yes, really).

* They didn't provide a driver package, instead they provided a utility to bake drivers into install media. Naturally, it didn't work, the documentation described a significantly different version.

* All these problems were well-represented in forlorn solutionless forum / stack overflow threads.

Where did you get info on what the "supported" Ubuntu version is? I've installed 18.04 on C2D machines and it looks like your machine has a Haswell CPU. The latest version of any Linux distro you want will work.

Also, did you ever try these utilities to set the backlight PWM? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/backlight#Backlight_PWM...

I think he's referring to the version that Dell ships with the laptop. But that laptop has been out of support from Dell for so long I don't know why this is a problem, it's not like you were going to be able to call them up and get support on it anyway.

In my experience Ubuntu on Dell laptops tends to just work. Even things you might not expect like the volume keys on the keyboard.

Usually Ubuntu takes care of browser updates by itself - you don't (shouldn't) update browsers yourself.

I’d take any notion of ‘supported’ versions of Linux with a grain of salt. It usually just means that those are the only versions that they’ve tested.

my biggest wtf was when after rebooting after an update, the disk decryption didn't like my password anymore. turns out, the keyboard layout was switched and my password contained special characters.

I had something similar happen with a CentOS install. For some reason, the keyboard layout of the installer was in UK English, but rebooting after installation set it to US English, causing my password to not work.

No trackpad swipe gestures (plus many more subtle trackpad issues)

It's amazing how often this gets discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17547817 without, seemingly being definitely resolved.

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