I use linux myself, but when people I know try it out, they immediately leave after encountering problems with audio, dpi scaling, etc
I have a Dell XPS15, specifically chosen because the XPS line is supposed to work well with Linux. Numerous problems, all related to drivers. But the main problem is that every time Windows updates it wipes out GRUB.
I figured that my problem is that every laptop I've bought has been designed for a non-Linux OS. So I've ordered a Purism laptop, which should arrive any day now. Hopefully actually buying a laptop designed and built to run Linux will provide a better experience.
It really does feel like a OSX level premium feel. The only bit I am missing is fractional dpi scaling which is apparently on the way but turning on big text in accessibility mode works well enough for now.
Distros are all either Ubuntu LTS or Linux Mint with default DEs. I am pretty sure one fellow switches to a tiling WM some of the time, but I forget which.
Can’t promise projectors will work, but I would expect a thunderbolt -> HDMI adapter will work just as well as the Displayport one does.
From my experience, this issue is from trying to use an MBR on Linux while Windows uses an EFI. I've never seen Windows mess with another EFI on the ESP. This issue is made worse by programs like unetbootin being terrible at using EFI.
I am swearing much less now I don't use Windows so much (even though Windows was in a VM).
If your problem is dual-booting Windows, then why would you dual boot? For games, get a gamer PC. For work, use a VM.
It seems a little harsh to blame Linux for Windows killing your boot ;-)
I'm travelling at the moment, so a desktop games machine is not an option. And I have to test stuff on Windows. But when the Purism turns up I'll relegate the XPS to games machine duty ;)
The only think that doesn't 100% is the fingerprint reader, apparently you need to setup your fingerprint on Windows first.
But here’s the thing. Linux has won. Desktop is a dying market. Linux is literally the most used operating system on phone and in the data center, which is where it counts.
The DE has gotten much better transitively from all the work that’s gone into those other use cases. But we still have a gamer market that is incredibly proprietary holding up the middle finger to those of us who think proprietary drivers and codecs are evil relics of a less open world.
If you really want to see Linux on the DE, boycott NVIDIA, or write them a letter.
I was watching a video on youtube (can't find it now) about gaming on Linux, and it suggested to update the PPA and install the latest drivers. (this was after I refreshed my desktop to be Ubuntu Budgie)
So I did that, installed latest NVidia Drivers. Tried out some steam games, and went to bed. Next day I couldn't boot into the desktop, got stuck in a loop, couldn't remove the drivers and get into desktop at all. It completely bunged my computer. Apparently alot of people had similar issues.
I have NEVER had a plug and play solution for display from my laptop. I do expect to be able to plug in an HDMI cable and be able to give a presentation. And I expect to be able to do this with an nvidia card. But they have always failed me and I don't understand why this problem still exists (I would actually be interested if someone knows).
Unfortunately, Nvidia's so dominant (and rightly-so from a price-per-performance unit standpoint).
Also, though: would someone on Ubuntu or a point release distro (which is the majority of Linux end users) have these new firmwares, ever, until they reinstalled to the next OS version? Since hardware driver support seems so tied to the kernel version, I would think not unless they manually updated the kernel (which, not only is that scary on a distro meant to run with a specific kernel but it's something they have to go out of their way to do), which also means they'd miss out on DE improvements and other hardware/protocol support by as much as a year or more, depending on their upgrade cadence. TL;DR: rolling release provides the best Windows-like experience, and an Arch-based distro that emphasizes usability and mitigation of updates that break the system is what best fills that niche, so Manjaro master race.
And rightly so, like you said. That's why I can't take the other user's advice and just shell out money to AMD.
And while I do love Manjaro, I still have this problem. In fact I get no detection of my HDMI port. When I had Ubuntu I could (sometimes) get it to display if I restarted the computer with the HDMI plugged in.
I'm also not sure why the linux devs don't take this (or at least not that I've seen) as seriously. Linux is in such a good state now that it is easier to convert people. But this problem prevents A LOT of people from switching, and rightly so.
As for the NVIDIA sucks and doesn't play nice. There needs to be a better argument than that. Like why? There's so many people developing on linux with their cards. They are dominant. Most gpu programmers use cuda and a significant amount of ML researchers are using linux boxes. It doesn't make sense (to me) to just say f you to all those developers. Nvidia doesn't have a motive to push people to Windows.
I'm not sure about the price-per-performance. I just bought a new system with a Vega 64, and if you take into consideration I could use FreeSync instead of paying an extra $200 for GSync in a monitor, it works out better.
On Windows sure (I assume), but that goes out the window when you use Linux. On Linux with an Nvidia card you're paying for more downtime/breakage, much worse performance with the FOSS drivers, incompatibility with wayland, etc.
You know... If the thing doesn't work, price doesn't matter that much. I prefer something more reliable that's not as fast (I've been using Intel GPUs for many years now)
One thing that doesn't seem to work is hardware acceleration for Youtube videos in Firefox. Playback in a window is fine, fullscreen isn't. Another is that dual-link DVI did not work, so I had to change to using DisplayPort instead, though that issue may have been fixed in the current driver, I haven't checked. For me that's fine, I wanted to switch to DisplayPort anyway, to use the audio output on my monitor.
Those are incredibly minor issues compared to the woes of using the proprietary Nvidia driver. Not to mention the sordid history of graphics drivers on Windows.
[¤] KDE Neon, which is based on Ubuntu LTS.
You wouldn’t be super happy if you just bought that PC, you’d understand thou. Another example if you buy a car and it doesn’t have android or Apple integration you’d be “damn I should have researched it”
Not really. The problem is NVIDIA doesn't give a crap about good user experience. The AMDGPU driver is pretty good and open-source to boot.
[1] This one: https://newegg.com/products/N82E16814150794
What makes this such a victory? The fact that Android uses a Linux kernel is totally meaningless to the overwhelming majority of Android users. The bootloaders on their phones are almost always locked down and even if that weren't the case, if their kernels were swapped out with something BSD derived how many people would actually notice?
What is the objective with promoting Linux? Adoption for the sake of adoption? Getting the Linux kernel onto the largest number of CPUs, just to make that number go higher and higher? Is pursuit of some number the real goal, or is the goal actually something to do with user empowerment and liberation/freedom? A billion tivoized smartphones with linux kernels certainly optimizes for that number of CPUs, but from a user liberation/freedom standpoint Linux/Android is virtually moot.
That Android gives the user more freedom than iOS is completely incidental to what kernel it uses. Android could be a platform open to third party app stores and sideloading that ran on a BSD kernel or even something completely different. To the average Android user, their Android phone is actually less open than Microsoft Windows, which also allows third party 'app stores' (e.g. Steam) and 'sideloading' (so normalized on Windows that it doesn't even use a special term like that.) Whether a system will be open to third party developers without any gatekeeper is a matter of company politics, not something that's emergent from what kernel is chosen.
So yeah, pop open the champagne. Linux won and I'm going to need a lot of champagne to enjoy this hollow victory.
Google's implementation is derived from Apache Harmony. Is the same true for Apache Harmony?
In neither case it is 100% compatible with fulll standard Java API and JVM bytecodes.
Partially is the keyword here.
So what happens if/when Google switches to Fuchsia on their phones?
This would just cause even more fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.
I doubt very much that SoC/smartphone would bother to contribute to microG instead.
Apple's PPC to x86 transition was successful, as was their Carbon to Cocoa transition. If you want device driver specific examples, Microsoft's Win9x to XP transition was successful, if lengthy, as was its transition to WDDM for video drivers.
SoC and other hardware vendors go where the money is; they may grumble and drag their feet but they will make the transition if it's required of them.
Android might run on Linux kernel, but that is a minor detail to userspace, and might be on the roadmap to be replaced by Zirkon.
So no, it wasn't won anything besides server room.
That is more due to how OEMs lock out non-windows OSes from running on their hardware. If users were given a choice, the "windows tax" alone would be enough to convince people to give linux a try, particularly in the low-end segment.
* Android is technically linux, but typically smartphones are locked in.
* All apple products are notoriously locked in.
- Linux is an implementation detail in Android, isn't exposed to userspace (not part of Java/NDK official APIs), Treble made it even less upstream like and who knows, it might even be replaced by Fuchsia's Zirkon
- Apple products being locked in doesn't have anything to do with laptops and 2-1 devices being the future desktops
Screen rotation, pen support, virtual keyboard, they're all there and get the job done. The only thing that doesn't happen out of the box is that my keyboard remains activated when I switch to tablet mode.
I'm having way more issues with proper scaling on my 4K screen than I do with the 2-in-1 support.
Actually, tablets are a dying market.[1] Laptops are a declining market. Fewer desktops are being sold, but they're lasting longer because there's no reason to replace them.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2016/01/22/resistan...
And your 3 year old hardware probably will work a lot better than it does under Windows ;-)
Do you have any stats on this? As far as I know Windows and Linux are very competitive on the server and depending on the analysis Windows comes ahead.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/
I assume this is true for most other cloud providers. But that doesn't take into account all the companies running racks of Windows servers in their basements.
I'm not sure that is the win OP was looking for.
It "counts" for whom? It sure doesn't count for me as an end user who wants to run some bloody programs on my laptop.
Also whether it's Linux or anything else on the phone it's totally irrelevant to the end users. The actual layers the users see are the Google stuff and the Google Java etc APIs. By porting these they could -- and will -- move Android to Fuchsia tomorrow and nobody will even notice.
When we wanted Linux to "win" in the 90s it was the whole desktop Linux (or, if that was there at the time, a mobile phone Linux), complete with desktop environment, userland, etc.
Not as a backend that might or might not be Linux for all the user's care.
Amazon could rebuild AWS on top of hypervisors, BSD or what have you and none of those users would notice, unless they would be doing some native FFI.
Um, what?
> BSD or what have you and none of those users would notice
FaaS and CaaS doesn't negate that there is a kernel API you're interfacing with. It absolutely makes a difference. Claiming that kernels are completely interchangeable is extremely naive, but then again, your first statement about hypervisors is so absolutely, confusingly incorrect that it's difficult to take what you say seriously.
>FaaS and CaaS doesn't negate that there is a kernel API you're interfacing with
Only in as much that it can't itself be emulated...
Since phones are completly locked down, and Linux is the symbol of freedom by software, I'm not sure of that.
Besides, companies still needs desktops (or laptops) to work. Nobody is going to do accounting on Android or iOS. And I'm certainly not going to dev on something else than Ubuntu.
From the moment I bought a Dell Developer Edition that was built specifically for compatibility, the experience had been fantastic.
The issue isn't even remotely just poor hardware support.
IMHO, Ubuntu is particularly bad about this. All I can say is what I use everyday with no problems.
So, no. It does not have "the best" hardware support and no distro has "by far" more hardware support than all other distros.
Disagree. At least traditionally package choice and configuration by distro maintainers made a huge difference, as proven by the fact that problems could be solved by just fixing a config file or adding a package from the standard repo.