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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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."

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