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Comment by kybernetikos | Hacker News Reader

Fifth reason - many many laptops have at least some piece of hardware or behaviour that requires fiddling to get to work on major linux systems. Sometimes it's power management, sometimes it's running with multiple monitors or 3d acceleration or the touchscreen, sometimes it's getting the touchpad to work properly or the fingerprint reader.... In my experience, there's usually something.

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While this may be true, we should still be impressed by the number of laptops Linux operates flawlessly on. Very few people would expect Windows to run properly on a MacBook and far fewer would expect macOS to run on a generic PC. Yet people expect Linux to work flawlessly on almost anything thrown at it. From my experience, it does a very good job of this (at least in recent years).

This is actually an excellent point that rarely sees the light of day.

From a technical perspective it's a marvel, but as a user, "works flawlessly on the device you have," beats, "mostly works, but with daily annoyances, on your device and many others."

I started to reply earlier in the thread and then decided not to, but basically what I wanted to say was this.

I have used Linux as a daily driver desktop for years, but I don't just buy random hardware and expect it to work. I do some research first and make sure what I buy works well enough with Linux to meet my needs.

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