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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

I really feel this. I manage about a hundred computers for scientists/students. Total free reign. Some want to use linux. I’m sorry, you will never have working audio. Oh. It looks like the available linux drivers don’t play nice with this sandy bridge mobo and the dm will fail to initialize. The list goes on.

Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here.

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"you will never have working audio" - what you mean by that? Some specific software not working on Linux or complete lack of audio?

I run into some cases of software refusing to run on Linux (though curiously, I switched to Linux due to software refusing to work on Windows).

I run into wifi/printer issues (but both on Linux and Windows) and I managed Linux to Work, while Windows remained resistant to debugging and kept failing with contentless errors.

One example I found recently is bluetooth headsets: On Windows it by defaults uses the high quality audio output profile, but switches to "headset" profile when an app requires a microphone and picks the headset. On Linux (Ubuntu to be precise) you have to manually pick the profile somewhere deep in Pulse, making the usage of the microphone pretty hard as you first have to figure out how to change it and secondly need to manually change it every time you get into and out of a call. I quickly gave up and now use a separate mic.

Its all kind of small things like this that make Linux grind just a little bit more for me than Windows, not saying Windows doesn't have its issues though, just a lot less.

With the advent of more people working at home, with a greater variety of headphone/headset devices it's even more of a hassle to use linux for daily work tasks. Not that you can't, obviously, but if you're not a developer or sysadmin-inclined, it's a mess trying to get a linux desktop lashed together.

Bluetooth audio in Linux is strangely good in a point: LDAC support. Windows/macOS doesn't support LDAC but (GNU/)Linux has ported LDAC support from Android.

> Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here.

Ever since the 2004 windows update, the dGPU in my windows laptop randomly turns on after sleep. If I try to force it off, it bluescreens. Battery life has gone from 10 hours to 3.

Tell me again about how good Windows' drivers are?

That is not due to drivers, and nobody negates how bad Windows 10 is and that it becomes worse with every update. Still doesn't address the fact that you dGPU probably wouldn't work on Linux at all, or, more probable, would stay on all the time.

The only laptops that old I know still run just fine are all Macs, props for keeping that thing alive, I usually give laptops about 6 years tops before I consider them dead (they usually die on their own for various reasons).

"2004" means a build of Windows 10 originally built in April 2020.

Weird. Outside of wifi Debian and Fedora always just work for my exotic configs.

Ububtu is almost exclusively requested. I wouldn’t say most of these configs are exotic, just legacy.

You must be filing a lot of tickets then.

Yep. In my experience, Linux (mainly Fedora) has been a "just works" experience for a good 15 or so years now. Wifi, sound, hibernate, etc, all work fine for me on a variety of hardware.

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