Hacker News Reader

Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

But this is not true on laptops though. Right now, my sister is restarting her studies (or rather starting, after working 5 years as a chef), and had to pick up a laptop. I lent my old one, with windows by default, and dual boot to linux. She was only using it for internet, matlab (or scilab, i'm not sure) and dropbox. My brother advised hare to take Joplin for notetaking, tried it on both limux and windows and now, two month after my initial loan, she bought a computer with linux.

Because while on desktop, you might have compatibility issues, on a good laptop you won't.

View on HN

Updating to newer kernels than 5.8 (first ubuntu 20.04 hwe) ruins my almost 5 year old laptop's ability to connect a monitor through USB-C. 4 years of using Linux on it it couldn't detect that my laptop has bluetooth after restart, only from cold boot (was fixed with ubuntu 20.04's first HWE).

and it's top of the line dell xps 15 2017 (13-inch version of this laptop even comes with ubuntu pre-installed and officially supported).

on desktops you can choose specific parts you know will work with linux. on laptop you're stuck with a laptop either working or not. newer versions of linux can bring you more issues on both tho.

Edit preamble: I am referring to the last 4 laptops I have owned; havent had a desktop in a decade.

This hasn't been my experience. Multi-monitor and hidpi only worked out of the box on one distro (pop_os!) and printing to an old brother laser printer only ever worked from Windows.

That said, if I was doing scientific computing via matlab or what not, I would probably grab pop_os over windows too. I still do most of my development work on linux, and video / gaming / home office from the windows partition.

I have never touched a hidpi display, but using multiple monitors has worked quite well for me, both on desktop machines and laptops. Including attaching a display on a running desktop session.

Brother printer usually supports linux. Sometimed you have to run their installer or copy their printer files in a cups folder.

Yeah, matlab might be the reason, i did not really use Linux when i was a math student so i did not really feel the pain at the time.

My experience is the reverse. I've set up a few (custom built) desktops with Linux and they worked great, but recently wanted to repurpose an older laptop and it's been a mess with a few different distros (doesn't boot with hdmi plugged in, the touchscreen doesn't shut down with the lid down, the keyboard backlight doesn't turn on, etc.).

Unfortunately ended right back at Windows 10 since I did want to make use of that device and not keep futzing around with distros and various out of date configuration files and settings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com