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Comment by theevilsharpie | Hacker News Reader

The Linux multimedia story improves significantly if you avoid Nvidia GPU hardware. My work desktop (AMD Radeon) and laptop (Intel HD Graphics) work fine, and perform as the hardware should.

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(Unfortunately) unless you're on a laptop and use a browser. Then things like YouTube or Netflix absolutely annihilate your battery

Sound and bluetooth , like , works now? That wasn't my experience back then. Both of them were entire stacks of spaghetti.

This seems like comment from early 2000s. I don't remember last time I head problems with BT or sound, and I went through dozen of installations in last 3 years (for me and others). I had to give up on Nvidia drivers but Intel graphics serves me great.

Bluetooth broke on me:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204875 2015 November

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 2015 December

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210685 2016 March.

And these were times when I needed community help, most of the time I could get it working by pairing again or some such nonsense. It never worked reliably, in general.

Note I switched to Windows as my daily driver in 2018 January.

It seems sound is still a gigantic mess of PulseAudio and ALSA https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

If you things to just keep on working Arch might not be the distro for you. Have you tried something like ubuntu?

Canonical broke wlan and OpenGL for many of us when they decided to replace fully working closed source drivers, with work in progress open source replacements.

So even Ubuntu isn't necessarily a guarantee of stability.

Sigh - I hear you.

Yes. Yes, I did. At least with Arch I could keep on working because only one of BT / printer / scanner broke on update, most of the production bits kept working. When I ran Ubuntu the system shattered every six months so badly I couldn't work for 2-3 days.

I have fairly linux friendly laptop (Thinkpad T480) with Fedora, and GPU driver was broken for whole 5.3 kernel tree...

I have a T480 as well and both the nvidia (closed source) and intel drivers work for me on Kubuntu.

Most of that wiki page isn't important, Pulse largely just works these days without much or any configuration

Been running some flavour of Debian for > 10 years. Now on my dell XPS 13 9350. Upgraded to Debian 10, a kernel regression broke the brcfmac driver for my Broadcom wireless. Now I need to disable power saving on the WiFi card. Still, sometimes the WiFi card just dies. Sometimes reloading the kernel module works, sometimes only a hard reset will do.

Bluetooth has never worked.

Broadcom unfortunately has never been well supported on Linux. I've always used ThinkPads for running Linux and have never had these sorts of hardware issues (and I keep laptops for at least 8 years). You need to buy a machine with running Linux in mind (or more specifically, Debian, which has even less out-of-the-box hardware support for laptops).

You’re right. A new WiFi card is cheap, apparently. Just not available anywhere near where I am :/

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