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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the pattern is that when you start to dig into people talking about their great experience with Linux on a laptop, you end up eventually getting them to admit that there are a lot of annoyances they’ve just resigned to living with

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On some fronts it even feels like things have regressed. Trying to resize an encrypted partition is way, way too difficult. And it seems like GParted doesn't handle LUKS so you're back to manually typing block offsets on the command line.

If you wanted to use a TPM to store the FDE passphrase, well, you have the patience of a saint. Compare this to Mac or Windows where you click a single button and it's all setup, including TPM!

As much as I love linux for server environments, it remains a failure when it comes to modern desktop environments.

>As much as I love linux for server environments, it remains a failure when it comes to modern desktop environments.

On top of what you mentioned, software distribution on Linux is still a nightmare for normal users. Yea apt-get is great for us nerds, but Bob the Accountant has no desire to use a CLI. Linux will not be viable on the modern desktop until the user never has to see a CLI.

Get OpenBSD. FDE is dumb easy. I am not kidding.

from the cursory read of the documentation on the openbsd site it doesn't seem to support TPMs. Setting up the encryption of a disk paritition does seem easier though.

Some of which they are not even aware of unless they have used other systems for some time.

"I don't even have any problems with bluetooth, audio or a secondary display"

Why would you mention these? Why would anybody expect to have problems with that? ;)

FWIW I use linux on laptop for dev, it's great for my specific use case (terminals flying around), I would not recommend it to my family.

i3wm FTW

> Why would you mention these? Why would anybody expect to have problems with that?

Because other people on Hacker News always mention problems like them.

I wonder why they do that.

>Why would anybody expect to have problems with that? ;)

Because you can expect issues with this for example on mac?

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/ekh86o/macbook_...

> there are a lot of annoyances they’ve just resigned to living with

I feel like this is true of every computing platform in general.

I feel the same way. It was the annoyances with Windows that I couldn't resign myself to just live with that pushed me to Linux on my desktop full time. For those unable to make the switch due to some critical application in their workflow, it's easy to see how they'd feel they have resigned themselves to dealing with Windows' annoyances.

OTOH, my work bought me a top of the line Macbook in 2020, and there's been many annoyances I've had to live with too, including strange bugs that Apple never seems to fix.

I also have an older Macbook Air, and when I tried to auto-update it to the latest MacOS, the update process corrupted my partition and lost all my files (thankfully backed up in the cloud).

Also had issues with Windows Update being broken out of the box when I tried to set up a PC for my mom with Windows 8. Seriously, I needed to manually download an update on a thumb drive to fix windows update. Like, how did this OS release ever pass QA?

I would honestly say Linux on the desktop and on laptops is pretty good in my experience, and if it had just a little more support from hardware vendors it would be near-perfect. I would definitely say that compared to Windows, the Linux experience is a lot better.

As opposed to the constant annoyances with windows, and similarly things I don't like in Mac?

As opposed to basic things (like display drivers, hibernation, bluetooth, fingerprint scanners, etc.) working fine on both.

Every OS will add annoyances and bugs on top. But it's on Linux where people usually have to fight/configure/trial-and-error to get basic things working more often than Windows and macOS.

And this is not some Linux hater notion. It has been complained about by people like ESR, Linus, and Miguel Icaza. If the original "bazaar" proponent, the founder of the OS, and the original creator of the still major desktop environment have issues with ease-of-use and just-works, who are we to say otherwise?

The only thing that's never worked for me is hibernation, and that doesn't even work for my windows pc either

> As opposed to basic things (like display drivers, hibernation, bluetooth, fingerprint scanners, etc.) working fine on both.

I have a nice list of issues that contradicts that statement. For example, M1 macs like to kernel panic for some reason.

> But it's on Linux where people usually have to fight/configure/trial-and-error to get basic things working more often than Windows and macOS.

Depends what you are trying to achieve. If you were trying to hackintosh some random ASUS+AMD laptop, your experience would not be nice either. Similarly, when you are trying to use random crap (that's technical term) where nobody ever did any integration with Linux, the experience will be bad (that someone doing the integration is going to be you). If you use either supported machine model (where the machine vendor did all the work), or machine that's very near to reference designs (where the chip vendors did the work), you experience will be much better.

Seconded, but I believe there's more to it than just linux being "bad". I believe the greater problems are:

1. Poor discoverability and ease of use - if you have an issue or a need, it's often really hard to find out how to solve it. Even if you do manage to find a solution, often it's not quite plug-and-play and you have to mess around in configs or compile something yourself in order to get it to work. Fun for college students, but a massive pain for everyone else.

2. Hardware drivers: 50% of my issues with linux come from nvidia being an ass. Fuck you, nvidia. Likewise with other devices that often only get third-party drivers which aren't good enough or require more wrangling, see problem 1.

I'm trying to think of one and literally can't. everything works these days. even Bluetooth audio isn't a problem anymore.

Come on - Bluetooth headsets are unusable with the mic on due to HFP being the only bluetooth profile most Linux distros support.

Nope. I run Pop OS and I get A2DP on all my Bluetooth headsets. I'm running a cheapish Clevo laptop.

Thanks, I'll try PopOS out - hopefully I can finally use the integrated mic on my BT headset.

A2DP works OOB with my Ubuntu 20.10 with Sony WH-1000XM3.

A2DP is an output only profile. For mics you need HFP or HSP but Ubuntu seems to only use HFP (the shitty one).

A2DP doesn't work simultaneously with HFP (i.e. "with the (bluetooth) mic on"). That's not Linux limitation, that's Bluetooth limitation and other OSes - Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows - behave exactly the same.

One solution is getting a wired mic.

What i meant is that most distros use HFP instead of HSP.

Try sharing only a single display of your multi monitor setup on X11. Try sharing a screen at all on Wayland ;)

E: Realised "sharing" would be ambiguous - I mean screen sharing on video calls, etc.

Here's an anecdote: sharing a single X11 display on my two-display setup works just fine with Microsoft Teams, I use it almost daily.

That Linux MS Teams client can only do read-only sharing (no giving control to remote party) is another matter, which bothers me a lot.

Sharing single displays or specific windows on Wayland is easy - Chrome and Firefox, or app like OBS can do it; if your conference app cannot do it, ask the vendor why.

I have a fine experience on my Dell XPS laptop, it doesn't come with an nVidia card but know it would be a PITA if it did.

Better than my colleagues who use a Macbook and can't use Display Ports correctly, can't plug a cable into one side without it ramping up CPU, can't use their keyboards after a while, etcetcetc.

I think it's good to distinguish if the annoyances are:

- a limitation of the laptop

- a limitation of linux

- a configuration issue (limitation of time / person)

So we don't exclude them to make a point, that's also true for Mac and PC laptops.

My XPS 15 wifi won't wake automatically after sleep on Windows. Wifi works perfectly on Linux, but there are things that don't work with the touchscreen in tablet mode on Fedora that I've been told work on Ubuntu.

My T2 MacBooks are little nightmares sometimes, fans screaming during video meetings and crashing and draining battery instead of sleeping, and I still haven't seen a compelling reason to give up my 2015 13". If the second gen M-series solves the weirder problems, maybe.

> So we don't exclude them to make a point, that's also true for Mac and PC laptops.

The 2016-2019 mbp have been ripped on by everyone, Mac fan or not. I'm not sure if they will go down as the worst Macs of all time, but it might the longest stretch of bad Macs in the history of the Mac.

With the M1 that time appears to be over - finally.

Reinstalling a T2 machine can be a real cat and mouse game, especially if 2fa is involved.

  security = 1 / convenience

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