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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

> I feel too old to compile my own kernel for a glitchy wifi driver, and Windows? Nah, get away...

Linux hasn't had issues with the major wifi chipsets in ages. It's as plug and play as Mac and Windows are. There are plenty of reasons people might choose to avoid Linux, but drivers (outside of specialty, niche or obscure hardware) aren't really a reason anymore.

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Graphics drivers are a constant source of trouble and confusion (so many driver projects and PPAs). My gf has a Linux laptop that stops working after every dist upgrade, and it's always some driver issue (or yet another Ubuntu NetworkManager bug).

Also, if the system isn't shut down cleanly, it will never just boot up again in spite of supposedly using a journaling file system. She always has to run e2fsck in manual mode (i.e confirming every single repair), specifying the address of a backup superblock.

Printing and scanning is broken as well. Not for some niche hardware but for one of the most widely deployed HP printer/scanners.

So on her particular laptop, Linux is anything but plug and play. If you're saying that Linux works well on your laptop I will believe you. It has never worked well an any laptop I owned and drivers have always been the main reason for that.

I believe you cannot simply run Linux any laptop. You have to buy a laptop specifically for Linux.

I've used laptops and desktops with GPUs from all 3 manufacturers. The only issues I've had were either really minor (ie. About the same as the other platforms), or with graphics switching (ie. Bumblebee). If you're just using the recommended drivers for the hardware I'd be extremely surprised if it was as unstable as you describe.

For reference, it's recommended you use the open source drivers for Intel and AMD, and the proprietary drivers for NVIDIA. No PPAs required.

The place where I remember a gap was laptops with dual graphics cards designed to use a low power one for light duty and a more powerful one for heavy duty tasks.

That said, avoiding that mess is fine for a non-gaming laptop. And I've had no trouble installing Linux on Dell, Asus, or Lenovo. Many configurations specifically listed Ununtu as an OS option (but why bother getting it preinstalled), so sure any of those would be fine. They're not especially rare anymore.

> I believe you cannot simply run Linux any laptop. You have to buy a laptop specifically for Linux.

No you don't. Ive had debian on a lenovo laptop for five years with none of the issues you speak of. Printing and scanning work great (dell and brother printers). It boots fine after a hard power off. No update has ever fubard anything. I have no more trouble hooking up to a projector than anybody else (my boss has a mac and complains about hooking up to projectors).

I've also run linux without issue on prior laptops from toshiba, acer and sony and some off brand thing from 10 years ago. I have a brother who runs linux on a dell laptop just fine (and has for years). A co-worker runs linux on a newish sony laptop. I guess I'm just living in the perfect intersection of hardware that just magically always works with linux. Or maybe, linux just works.

> Linux hasn't had issues with the major wifi chipsets in ages.

… except (ironically) if you use Linux on a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. In this case there are severe issues with the wifi firmware making wifi completely unusable: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux#wi-fi

The annoying thing is that for once this is an actual bug in the firmware and the upstream doesn't care about fixing it. It's simply not fixable on Linux side without rewriting the whole wifi stack to use Mac's model. It's not the typical "Linux hasn't got a driver", but without digging into the issue it looks like that.

I thought the whole point of this thread was to avoid using Macbooks so how is this relevant?

Driver for my wifi card under linux crashes. Granted it is a 'staging' driver, but it's still a pretty bad look.

I had a miserable time with the Broadcom drivers as well-- I actually abandoned them completely to instead use an adapter with Ralink driver. No hiccups, let alone crashes, since.

No. It's better than no driver. (I'll assume it works at all in some capacity.) While there are some companies that make wifi cards you can't use easily, that's just one thing you check before buying, just as e.g. general reliability/performance.

That's way worse than no driver. By 'crash', I mean the whole kernel crashes. And, by the way, it does advertise linux support (for linux 4.10, but that's in the fine print).

Linux on Macbooks is still crap though...

Runs great on my 2014 MBP.

AFAIK dual-display over thunderbolt is just not working very well for example (there are issues when going to/back from sleep). I've tried switching to Linux on my 2013 MBP for a couple of weeks, and gave up.

yeah no shit, apple only wants you to run macos on their hardware.

Directly from Apple’s support page.

“Install Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp Assistant”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201468

Has Apple ever officially stated that they support running Linux on Macs?

Well you did say ever....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux

Huh, TIL.

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