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Comment by kaishiro | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, you and I remember 90's Linux very differently.

True, I may be thinking of 2000s Linux. Compiz and the wobbly windows examples were fresh in my mind from the other day's HN discussions.

Aww Compiz. Converted so, so many people to Linux by showing off the effects.

Except those are rose tinted glasses youre wearing imo. Linux isnt worse today than it was in the days of yore, it just hasnt kept up as well in your mind. Computing as a whole has improved so much that linux couldnt keep up with your higher expectations.

Linux today isn't worse, but laptops are much more prevalent now, and they're harder to support drivers for than desktops. Especially Apple laptops which I've been using for a long time now, they're notorious for not being that easy to get Linux running smoothly on. Some people can manage it but more people have trouble. I've wasted dozens and dozens of hours trying to get Linux working smoothly on this thing and I just gave up a few years ago. But when desktops were king and the internet just started to become mainstream and everyone was flooding into that new space, it was a great time for desktop Linux.

Yep. I've been running dual boot OSX/mint for some time and god the hardware has never been happy about it. Especially with regard to the GPU and multi-monitor support but I suspect also with regard to battery usage and other power issues. It always ran just cool enough that I did not do anything about how hot it was. The display issues cropped up so that I could at least anticipate when it would occur and try to minimize that. GPU computing... well these old macbook pros with Nvidia chips were dogs anyway. Would a windows laptop fair any better with Linux? Honestly asking because I really want a solid Linux laptop for HPC/computational engineering development but not sure what to do.

I've never hand multi monitor problems with Linux. I'm running Mint on my MacBook.

The only thing that was difficult for me, was installing my webcam drivers.

Wow - that is interesting to hear. Let me toss in a caveat by saying that I had 2 different multi-monitor setups that I transferred between while running straight off the machine quite often as well. Typically problems would crop up after shifting to or from the non-mac monitor setup. Never tested the cam on the linux side.

Did I mention that I was running mint as well? With 2012 macbook pro hardware.

Compiz is certainly from the 2000s. I think I only managed to make it work on any computer of mine at the end of the decade, but people were all saying nice things about it since 2002-2003.

By 1997 I was able to get X running with xclock and xterm. Any other X application would freeze my computer due to sheer lack of CPU.

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