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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

Of course you should use whatever works best for you, but I disagree with your characterization of Linux users as masochists at heart.

I’m very much a person who values technology that “just works”. While my latest Ubuntu installation admittedly wasn’t quite as smooth as running macOS on Apple hardware, the gap has narrowed considerably. Especially for anyone who already possesses a fair amount of Linux experience from working with servers for work, and who sticks with known-compatible hardware, running a Linux desktop can be a delight.

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Linux on a desktop can be fine, depending on what you want out of that desktop experience. But Linux on a laptop still tends to be Sisyphean: by the time you get all the hardware features working correctly and with proper power management and with all the firmware bugs worked around, at least one of the hardware or the distro will be years out of date. The only way to be satisfied is to decide you didn't need that feature anyways, or didn't need that last hour of battery life.

Out of curiosity, does this still hold true if you buy one of the System76 / Dell / Lenovo laptops with Linux pre-installed? I’m currently using a desktop, so don’t have any recent experience with this, but my assumption is the experience has also improved quite a bit on these OEM Linux laptops.

It's better but not perfect. If you tried Linux on commodity laptops a decade ago, you'd frequently run into awful hardware issues. There's less of that now with the OEM laptops (with some exceptions; looking at you, Killer wlan chipsets!).

UI jank is also reduced but not eliminated. Even Pop!/DE Ubuntu have a fair number of rough edges - not so much that you're constantly tearing your hair out, but there's definite room for improvement. Personally, I live with it because I also think Windows and OSX have regressed in usability and stability, but I'd be a liar if I didn't mention all the time spent yelling at things like DPI scaling w/ hardware dock-attached monitors.

e: also, expect to do some manual power tuning if you want anything close to battery life parity.

I never had any problems with my Librem 15.

When it works though, it is wonderful. I still have my G3 iBook that ran Debian Woody perfectly.

This is not true.

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