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Comment by lkramer | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, why not simply run Linux at that point?

I use both extensively but settled for windows + WSL2 for now. In the end it's the little things:

- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well. - the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though. - (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying. - Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.

With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.

Because the experience is terrible for the uninitiated. And this is coming from someone who ran Arch as their primary OS since I was 10. Laptop Linux on the whole is not a fun experience for those who just want a machine to work (which was what MacBooks were supposed to be about).

I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.

It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.

I must disagree with you. I have been installing Linux for people who barely know how to use a mouse and the experience was always successful. Of course, I choose a distro with simple UI and software with GUI every time. I don't want to get into the typical "if my mom gets it everyone can" (also because she is a power user) but trust me, the people I installed it for had the same problems they would have had with any OS (some quite funny).

I attempted to but the driver support just wasn’t there for my laptop.

WSL2 works fine and it also means that when I want to game I have a wider selection of games to play.

Yup, I'm not a gamer anymore and when I was I used a PS, true.

Anyhow, my target initiating Linux to wasn't precisely gamers either.

What is your preferred distro?

It's been Xubuntu for almost a decade, I think. I tried Lubuntu but, at least at the time, it had no pulse audio which wasn't great. I tried Budgie but it has some paper cut bugs that I couldn't live with (some might).

Yeah, I guess the experience differs...

I run Ubuntu on my work Dell Latitude (i3wm), Debian on my personal System 76 (Mate) and both work more or less flawlessly, although I do agree with the guy who said Battery is not great.

I also have a Desktop with Windows and Linux dual booting, and while I agree Windows is quite polished when it works, I also find a million little annoyances.

With laptops, you need to buy hardware designed for Linux if you want a good experience with it. System76 and Purism make great machines. With Proton, Windows games run effortlessly from Steam on Linux.

It's simply not true. Install Ubuntu or Fedora, run Gnome 3 and everything "just works". You can't use Arch as an example here - it is intentionally very basic, and takes a lot of effort to learn as you do almost everything from scratch. While many people appreciate that level of control, it is unnecessary if you're just trying to get work done.

Not with the ongoing Wayland, Systemd, Pipewire, etc, rewrite-from-scratch work.

e.g. I don't have working VNC server at all on latest Fedora, with either X11 or Wayland, and no sign of it being fixed anytime soon.

And that is just one of many irritations with desktop linux, that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA

> that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA

You're comparing an OS that hasn't had a major release in almost 5 years to a bleeding edge Linux distribution. Install an older LTS version of Ubuntu or Debian and things will be quite stable.

Actually, no, I havent had an out-of-the-box working VNC for more than 5 years now, through various Ubuntu LTS releases and now Fedora.

Every single one of them has had various annoying bugs that would not have survived decent QA.

But your point is partially correct - at least the LTS releases had workarounds for the problems, whereas with Fedora I am SOL

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on a built-for-it new Intel-based machine. The amount of "just works" is surprisingly good. But when it goes downhill, it goes downhill steeply. Took me a day to figure out why it wasn't connecting to my Exchange server (TLS 1.3). No screen sharing on Wayland. Etc.

I'm not using Arch as the baseline - just saying that I'm familiar with Linux.

I made the jump and it's been mostly smooth (7th gen X1 Carbon with Fedora).

The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw).

Stuff that worked without any extra config that in the past might not have been so smooth: wifi, fingerprint reader, thunderbolt dock with keyboard, mouse, monitor, external USB soundblaster and network cable plugged in), sleep, hibernate.

Thinkpad = Linux these days sadly...

Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges...

For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G):

* Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states.

* Wifi diconnects randomly.

* Hotkeys don't work

* Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tricky to fix.

* Bluetooth doesn't work

* Hibernate and sleep are disabled by default and you have to go into a config file to enable them. SD card doesn't work after sleeping more than 3 times.

* Fans don't work at all. System throttles almost immediately under any load.

* There must be some issue with the SSD losing writes because even journaled ext4 seems to get data corruption after an unclean poweroff.

* External monitors don't support hdmi audio.

* of the 3 USB ports, 2 don't work for anything more than charging devices.

* webcam LED state seems random, and does not correlate to webcam usage at all.

All on one device!

Linux on Thinkpad is great. Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.

From personal experience, I've only had that many issues once on a bleeding edge MSI. It took about a month to work out the issues. Every other system I've used has had a much smaller subset of those issues (I'm not using a Thinkpad). Namely Bluetooth or the fans not working, and individually resolvable.

> Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.

Running on 2 old Dells and an Asus with no problems (Ubuntu 18.04, upgraded in place from 16.04). Your statement is absurd on its face just based on its generality.

Of the things you've listed, I can't say anything about external HDMI audio because I don't have one, and the default hibernate thing I can confirm. Every other one I've never had, much less daily.

I use Linux on a dell e6400, I'm not a kernel dev, it's completely fine. Same with several other laptops I've owned.

Nitpick: Wayland doesn't define how the compositor should scale the displays.

Fedora's compositor is Mutter/Gnome Shell, which the above critique seems to be about.

A huge number of small annoyances during "normal" usage of a computer. Issues with sleep, displays, hi DPI, even my wallpaper and fonts don't always display correctly...

Just don't buy "Windows certified" laptops...

Upd: why downvotes? My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux.

I had Lenovo T530 and it worked OK, but with half the battery life. Then I had XPS 15 and I got it working after a lot of fiddling, but with a third of battery life and with hidpi issues on wake up.

The battery thing is really a killer for me.

> "Just don't buy "Windows certified" laptops..."

All x86 servers, PCs, and laptops are designed to run Windows by adhering to a specification issued by Microsoft and certified by running a suite of compatibility tests provided by Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/). The free OSes are piggybacking on that; there is no independent, neutral standard for the architecture of x86 PCs.

> "My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux."

Linux isn't even listed as a supported OS for the T400 on Lenovo's support site: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd005598

I have issues with Sleep and Displays on my macbook, and I had to pay extra for the privilege of having windows snap to the sides, easily the best innovation in window managers since being able to put them over one another.

For me, it limits the laptops available, with Windows I am pretty confident that any reasonable config laptop from Dell or Lenovo will not give me any issues. With Linux I have to be extra cautious while buying it. Also I am used to MS Office and occasionally play Age of Empires and Minecraft.

Enterprise software you need at work?

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