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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Every time Linux gets brought up, there's always somebody who says "I've had no issues ever!"

Good for you - but it doesn't take super-exotic hardware at all to run into problems. Having problems doesn't make your hardware exotic. I tried running Linux a decade ago and none of them would have Wifi because they had Broadcom cards without some patching and package installs on Ubuntu which didn't come with the packages needed on the ISO. I tried running Linux again only to find that I couldn't use Wayland on my GTX 1050 because NVIDIA.

That means I have hardware that doesn't run well on Linux, not that I have exotic hardware.

Edit: Also I forget to mention that sleep/hibernate is seemingly always broken whenever I talk to people about Linux. All the time. They don't have exotic hardware.

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> That means I have hardware that doesn't run well on Linux, not that I have exotic hardware.

As with most things, it's worth trying again every so often. You'll be surprised how easy it is for even your mother-in-law to use Linux nowadays.

Thing is, I'm not my mother-in-law[0], I have a different use case for computing than that strawman does so the suitability of Linux Desktop to that person has no bearing on its suitability to me.

[0] I really hate when people use this kind of term. 'Normal people', 'grandma', 'non-technical users', etc. It's inherently drawing an unnecessary us/them line to service an argument and which, I believe, is an attitude that directly contributes to the suckiness of modern desktop computing, particularly as regards Linux.

> it doesn't take super-exotic hardware at all to run into problems

Why do people demand that Linux must work on all "not super-exotic" hardware in the world? It's just impossible with their resources. Just get a compatible device.

> Why do people demand that Linux must work on all "not super-exotic" hardware in the world?

Why do Linux people come on threads like this and say that if you have problems, it must be because you have exotic hardware or that it's a really rare issue when it's dirt common?

Edit: I guess my point is, the Linux community's definition of "exotic hardware" is extremely broad in real life. It's almost like if Apple called PCs "exotic hardware" for MacOS.

> it must be because you have exotic hardware

I never said that you had exotic hardware. Your hardware is just not designed to be used in this way by the vendor. Why does Linux community (for free) has to invent the workarounds for you to use this machine? Linux is free software. You can improve its source code yourself, or pay someone to do that (unlike with Windows).

And yes, your MacOS will certainly not work reliably on a Windows-certified laptop.

> has to invent the workarounds for you to use this machine?

I never said they had to. They don't have to support it or any machine.

However, that doesn't change that there are problems that can be attributed to Linux. For example, sleep/wake's incompatibility with the "Modern Standby" is a Linux problem that affects a wide variety of laptops.

It also doesn't change that it is tiresome when people come on to internet threads and say "I've had no problems - you must have exotic hardware!" We don't have exotic hardware - Linux just doesn't support certain common-enough hardware well. That doesn't necessarily mean Linux is to blame for it, but don't blame the user's "exotic setup."

Edit: On the contrary, it's often the people who say they have no problems who have the real exotic hardware - because they bought System76 or Purism or an XPS or something designed to be Linux-friendly.

> problems that can be attributed to Linux. For example, sleep/wake's incompatibility with the "Modern Standby" is a Linux problem that affects a wide variety of laptops.

How can you attribute these problems to Linux? The "Modern Standby" relies on proprietary drivers and closed specifications, which are only shared with Windows developers under an NDA. Linux community has to reverse engineer the hardware to make it work. You should not expect that it will be successful for "a wide variety of laptops" for free.

> On the contrary, it's often the people who say they have no problems who have the real exotic hardware

Yes, but it does not matter whether you have "exotic" or "not exotic" hardware at all. What matters is whether it was designed to work with Linux.

P.S. Standby and wake-up work 100% of the time on my Librem 15, which was designed for Linux.

> What matters is whether it was designed to work with Linux.

I 100% agree with you! I'm trying to say that whenever Linux is mentioned, there's always a Linux user who dismisses people who have problems as having "exotic hardware" because they've not had any major problems.

This is aggravating because "exotic" implies that most hardware is compatible - you were just unlucky with a particular purchase choice. Never mind that about half the GPUs you could buy would give you a hard time. I'm trying to say these users should stop defining "exotic" so broadly - just say "you probably need a machine designed for Linux. It could work on your computer but you'll probably have issues." It's so much clearer and more honest that way.

Edit: That's very different than "you should download Linux and install it today, stop sucking up to our corporate overlords! Have problems? Must have been that exotic GTX 1050 or that exotic Broadcom Wi-Fi card!" Instead, please say, "you should see if Linux will run on your computer well, we don't support a lot of hardware people expect (though we do support quite a bit). If you aren't sure, you should buy a machine built for it instead of trying to get your current machine to work, which will probably be an exercise in frustration."

I mean, Linux supports more hardware than any other OS out of the box.

> It's almost like if Apple called PCs "exotic hardware" for MacOS.

Ummm, good luck running modern MacOS on PC hardware.

It's perfectly possible. I ran Mojave and Big Sur on my Thinkpad T460s for a few weeks, and even the ACPI tables worked out-of-the-box.

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