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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Even when bought with support, it might come with surprises.

I got the Asus 1215B with Linux, then Ubuntu decided to replace the perfectly working wlan driver with a FOSS one, except it took half an year to reach parity with the proprietary one.

Likewise, they decided to replace AMD driver with the open source one, goodbye OpenGL 4.1 now it doesn't do more than OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video decoding is still not a thing.

At the same time, the Windows DX 11 drivers shipped with the same hardware (it was Windows 7 back then), still work on Windows 10.

This kind of settled Linux on desktop for me, now it belongs to VMs, and on ChromeOS/WebOS/Android it is anyway just an implementation detail.

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I get your frustrations, yet your problem is with proprietary software and proprietary drivers. I’m sure there’s a way for you to go back to using the old drivers if you’re set on using the latest capabilities of your hardware (without it being FOSS).

You don’t have to be the guinea pig, let others do it if it’s not your thing (many programmers do seem to enjoy it, and see it as a challenge).

That sounds a little like telling someone that their problems are that their cows are not spherical. For graphics drivers specifically, having tochoose between FOSS and something that works is very frustrating.

The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for years.

I would have agreed with you but sound input broke for me (Lenovo flex 14 with AMD R5 3500U) on fedora with kernel 5.8 and didn’t get fixed until 5.9. That was months of something being broken. How did this happen and more importantly did we learn anything to prevent this from happening in the future?

For now fedora is on an old desktop machine with an ancient i3-2100 processor and I just ssh into it.

Some Intel GPUs only got Vulkan support on Windows.

> The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for years.

Intel has a random lock up in the Mesa. It had this lock up for several years. It has not been fixed. I have a 4k laptop with it, it is incredibly frustrating that I cannot use kitty or alacritty on it because of that crash.

AMD driver crashes on modern cards every few weeks.

If you want to have a "What are you talking about, it just works?" experience, you buy an NVidia card with proprietary drivers, slap X11 on it and you are off to the races. It just works (currently driving 4x 4k monitors). Last crash was about 11 months ago. The crash manifested in a freeze for about 20 seconds, followed by it recovering by itself.

OSS graphics drivers are just not as good as people claim.

Fortunately with AMD GPUs on linux you get both, as the proprietary driver simply adds some opencl support if my memory serves well.

Nope, older GPUs just get basic support, while the older proprietary driver, more feature rich, don't work in modern kernels.

Yeah, unfortunately it is not backported for older GPUs. But it doesn’t make the case of supported hardwares worse.

It does, because the hardware support for OpenGL 4.1 got broken due to ideology.

Well, it is still open after all, given you are a very experienced guy you should consider rolling the sleeves and sending some patches to fix that, right?

Giving back to the community for something you get for _free_ is nice.

My gratis work is done for things that really matter to fellow humans, like charity, poor people on the street and not so lucky people that need an helping hand to get back into society, refugees that almost faced death running away from oppressive regimes.

That is where I can gladly give my skills and money.

Fixing code on Internet for free ain't it.

Look buddy, your experience (having a bad time) with Linux seems to be quite frustrating, I couldn't find one positive comment about Linux from you in this post.

Maybe I'm very lucky with Linux, but I don't agree that it is as bad as you are saying.

I'm sorry for you, maybe you should stay with windows indeed. :/

My dear, maybe you should stop assuming you know anything about the experience of others.

Experience as in "things you are facing" not as "knowledge" or "know how" ;)

What I mean is more like "I would have a bad experience if I put my hand in the fire".

I edit my post to be more clear

I get it, you are happy with your Linux experience and think you know better than someone with 30 years UNIX experience, no more to discuss.

I don't, I just think that too much experience can cloud our vision or close ourselves from having better/new experiences in life.

From your friend over the wire.

There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support.

Proprietary software for 1215B, e.g. Windows, is working just fine with Windows 10, even though it was originally released with Windows 7.

So we are talking about Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and several Windows 10 releases, all supporting the original Windows 7 drivers for Asus 1215B.

I have been a Linux guinea pig since Slackware 2.0 came on Linux Unleashed book, eventually one gets tired of the Linux Desktop meme.

Linux was anyway just the way I got cheap UNIX clone at home during my degree, professionally I have spent more years using commercial UNIXes.

Nowadays any POSIX clone will do the job, or as alternative we stuck the Linux kernel into a VM.

Have you tried to install AMD proprietary drivers?

Did you installed the firmware for your WiFi card?

By the way you complain about Linux seems that you really don't like it and that nobody can convince you te opposite, but I believe that if you manage to learn the basics around it it pay off in the long run :)

Missed this remark?

> There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support.

My dear, my first UNIX experience was with Xenix back in 1993, I also used DG/UX, Tru64, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, Slackware, Red-Hat, Yasdril, Mandranke, SuSE, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, OS, Scientific Linux.

Back in 2002 - 2003, I wrote cluster simulation software while at CERN running on Linux, followed by other examples of deployment of Linux based software into production, like Nokia's NetAct cluster monitoring platform.

I think I can manage with the basics.

Sorry, I didn't though that would offend you.

I just think that those issues are relatively easy to fix and that you can still have the proprietary gpu modules to get OpenGL 4.1 back.

For the wifi to work well with the open module you could have installed the firmwares.

That's what I mean by basics, I didn't meant to put down your credentials :)

Sorry again for my poor writing

None taken, and it is easier just to re-install Windows with the proprietary drivers than hacking a modern kernel to run fxglr.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD

I don't think judging the Linux experience based on an EeePC is fair.

That hardware always felt like a throw away when it came out during the netbook boom from a decade ago.

I judge my Linux experience starting in Summer 1995, the year I got my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0, that makes a couple of years in experience.

I wish you can give another try, much has changed since then.

For me Debian Testing with Gnome is being a very nice experience (enjoyable ride).

Again don't assume you know anything about me, I have enough Linux appliances and the office has enough distributions to try out.

I'm not assuming, and that is ok.

Try to not see everything as an attack against your identity, detach yourself from it and don't take yourself too seriously. Been there, done that.

Now I have a way more pleasant life experience and people takes me seriously without having me needing to assert who I am. Life is lighter now and I have more friends, people few more comfortable around me.

I'm giving this feedback because I think it will make your life better too.

Was nice to chat with you, now I'll go out for a bike ride while I still a bit of sun over here.

Happy Easter!

Ah okay, thanks - then my take was a bad take.

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