Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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If you want to run Linux on a computer, you do your research and build/buy one where the hardware support is there. Most people don't need "latest" hardware; hardware from 2-3 years ago is fine, and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too -- again, if you do your research.

Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine (especially if it's a laptop) will often fail, and that's why people spend hours on forums looking for answers.

Long ago I tried to run Linux on Macs. I would always get it to more or less work, but it would take a lot of time and toil. I had the patience for that back then. Now I just buy a Dell XPS 13 and stop worrying about it, because everything works out of the box. It's not my favorite piece of hardware, but it's fine.

I also do wonder where all these critical Windows-only applications are. I spend 90% of my computing time in a browser, terminal window, or text editor/IDE. Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without, but the vast majority of users out there don't.

> and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too

True: a bit more than a year ago I bought a new computer with (I think) a B550 chipset motherboard which was very recent.

Wasn't supported by Kubuntu 20.04, I just had to install Kubuntu 20.10 and that's it.

IMHO Linux hardware isn't a problem at all. Software is more problematic (I had a lot of side projects WPF apps that can't run on Linux and I'm a bit lazy to port them to another framework or language so I have installed a Windows VM.

> Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine

Not random, but my current machine. How else am I (or random person on the Internet) to migrate to Linux then?

Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

E.g. You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away. Get AMD. Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I honestly dread switching to Linux.

> Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without

Stuff like Office (not online ones), Adobe suite, video editors, sound editors, etc.

Worth noting a lot of people had to upgrade their computer for Win10 (2 of my relatives were told they had to buy new computers by Windows but I managed to upgrade them with out after lots of fiddling), a lot will have to upgrade for Win11 (to get TPM2 modules).

I think the answer to the last one is if you need Microsoft software then use it. Not much you can do if your chosen vendor doesn't support other OS (WINE, VMs, and such aside).

TPM 2 plus a BIOS update for any board made pre August of 2021, & 60GB or so of free space on their OS drive, which these days is also more of a rarity since the trend has been small OS SSD drive with large secondary & storage drives.

Honestly, your machine will probably work. Linux supports a lot of hardware. Nowadays it's rare to find any that doesn't work.

> You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away

Nvidia works fine (it has to, lots of ML shit on GPUs is done on Linux), you just need proprietary drivers. If anything their support on Linux is probably better than AMD's.

Why? Just make an Ubuntu startup stick and try it without installing... Nothing lost except maybe 10 minutes of your time.

> Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I've used dual monitors on my linux setup for years without issues. Is this a common problem?

I've been using dual screens on Linux since 2009 and for the last 2 years triple screens.

My current PC is using and nVidia 1660 GPU to drive this.

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04. It wasn't out-of-the-box easy to install, but running installer in safe-mode worked and regular boots are as normal.

Even on laptops dual screens work provided the laptop supports it.

There is a problem if there is a mismatched DPI between screens.

I've rarely seen it as i usually dock the machine with duplicate monitors.

This used to require some tweaking under gnome (different DPI), but is nice and smooth under wayland.

> Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

I understand what you are saying but it is not such a big deal in practice as it may seem. You migrate if your current machine supports linux (you have to do some research), OR you migrate the next time you switch machines.

Linux is my daily driver for 15+ years now and the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't bother me at all. I am currently using two xps laptops and one custom built desktop - everything worked out of the box. I had good experience with thinkpads in the past.

It all comes down to the time you are willing to dedicate in learning something new.

For most of the stuff that runs on windows and mac there are alternatives on linux, some equal, some worse, some better. I have been mostly a linux users for years. I still have one laptop with a dual boot on windows...for only one use case: music production. Not because there are no music production software available, not because they aren't good, quite the contrary there are fairly decent tools both opensource and proprietary, but because I don't know them well. I only do music as a hobby in my free time and so far I have been too lazy, or more interested in producing music than learning a new workflow. I admit it is mostly about laziness and time to dedicate to something new. I intend to correct that because I don't want to feel forced to use windows, which I mostly hate for anything else, for that.

What on earth are you talking about? I am running Ubuntu 21.10 with triple monitors and a Nvidia 3090.

You're just making stuff up now. I bought an RTX 2070 (nvidia, as you know), and it worked fine, runs all my games, under archlinux just fine.

Same with dual, triple monitors, etc.

> You're just making stuff up now.

Linux Desktop evangelists being like this also makes people not want to switch. Who wants to deal with a community like that?

For you. On your hardware and your distro. I've seen and heard stuff going south from word go.

If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

If it's a laptop then buying an entire machine is the norm.

If you want to test hardware you already own, then just do it. No need to do any real research there.

> If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

Should isn't won't.

https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M

I don't recall that series having much in the way of hardware problems, excluding the goxlr and such because that's not part of the desktop.

If it was unclear that my sentence was in the scope of hardware, sorry.

I remember Luke saying multiple monitors broke at one point on his laptop, but that was a laptop.

> where all these critical Windows-only applications are

The vast majority of users would suffer if forced to use only Linux apps. Think Office Vs LibreOffice or Photoshop Vs GIMP. A lot wouldn't be able to work at all, like the folks who use Solidworks.

Let's not pretend that browser/terminal/IDE is the most common usage of PCs.

I would suffer if I had to use Windows applications. Because having to pay (or even pirate) quality paid software that I have to sit and learn is less convenient than downloading pretty good free (as in beer) software that I've used for the past 5 years and I'm very comfortable with. GNOME applications are surprisingly polished and good, and I'm not getting that on Windows.

I'm one of those who use Solidworks and there are no Linux equivalents, let alone polished ones. So, as in everything, YMMV.

100% fair.

Krita and Blender are pretty sweet though. And you can use some versions of Photoshop via Wine perfectly fine. The same goes for Office.

When x570 was just released, I bought all the newest stuff from AMD, and everything just worked, if you were on a recent kernel. Similarly, when I got a Thinkpad, I just bought it and everything worked. Not saying that this is a representative sample, but I've been successfully skipping the part where I spend months researching if the hardware I buy will work.

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