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Comment by snemvalts | Hacker News Reader

Just wait until your wifi or suspend breaks on a distro change on your 5 yr old laptop.

Wifi is the worst. I had a wifi driver fail on me the other day after the updates included a newer kernel version that didn't work with the current wifi driver. Newer ones were available on github, but downloading requires wifi. Eventually I managed to make a hotspot out of my phone and connect to github via bluetooth.

Otherwise, no complaints.

The reasons for this are not technical though. Modern WiFi cards don't have firmware in ROM or flash but in RAM (loaded every time you turn it on) and due to the closed source nature they can't be included with the OS.

"Due to the closed nature of XYZ" is one of the stupidest reasons ever for breaking the computer of your users. They could have an automatic check for incompatible drivers and cancel the kernel upgrade, or even provide a checkbox somewhere in the settings where users can click "I don't care if my drivers are closed source or not" that would automatically also update any closed source drivers. I personally derive some perverse pleasure from learning obscure Linux kernel stuff, but I also 100% understand if some cook or a high school French teacher would throw out Linux forever and go back to Windows or MacOS the first time this happens.

(Also, I just double checked and the drivers in question are licensed under GPLv2 so the licensing is unlikely to be the issue)

The drivers are licensed usually but the firmware blob often is not.

But yeah this depends on the distro. Ubuntu is very liberal with this, it simply has a tickbox to enable non-open parts. Others like Debian are stricter. It's up to them really.

I have had terrible luck with suspend/hibernation on all of the laptops I have used Linux on, so I just resort to shutting down and starting up... I have SSDs so it is not that big of a deal, but still. I cannot wait for the day I can simply close my laptop lid and have the battery not drain ~12% an hour.

Which laptop do you have? I'd like to keep clear of it and its manufacturer when I'll have to buy a new one. My nearly 8 years old ZBook from HP loses maybe 3% per hour with 32 GB RAM to keep powered. It was much less with 16 GB. Don't you have a 128 GB laptop, right?

More seriously, did you check if people have the same problem with that laptop and Windows? Or some firmware update from the manufacturer to fix the battery.

Never happened in 10 years. I recommend to try hardware designed for Linux and not "Windows certified". Ideally, with preinstalled Linux.

Happened to my x220

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