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Comment by tdubhro1 | Hacker News Reader

I used Linux as my daily for 10 years and every time there was a major update either sound or networking or both broke. I love Linux, I still use it regularly, but my experience was that basic stuff kept getting broken. I was using very standard Thinkpad laptops throughout.

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I guess I got fairly lucky when I was using Linux as a daily driver. The only thing that I would need to fix after a major update was my Nvidia drivers, and I ended up writing a Bash script to do it for me since 99% of the time it was just installing the latest version.

Nvidia drivers turned me away from Linux completely.

I dont remember exactly but i think it was Fedora 25 or 26 (or around there) where they removed some symbols because some fucking moron thought "they arent used by anything" so they pushed them to torvalds linux repo. And the changed got accepted.

You know what used them? Nvidia drivers.

So after a couple of hours fixing that, which at one point started involving rebuilding the kernel and other things that a normal user shouldnt have to EVER do, i just said fuck it, and installed Windows. That laptop is still running decently as a browser/media player at my folks

Now im just using a Mac as a day to day pc, and a windows laptop for gaming.

Even if i deal with Linux at work on servers, and with containers and stuff, i'll never go back to linux.

How do you keep your machine up to date across the board? I bet your PDF reader/writer is way out of date.

Windows does not have a proper central packager mechanism so if you let it, your software will get really ... floppy.

They said they used Mac as their daily driver. Anyway pdf viewer is usually built into the web browser now days is it not?

Yet there are millions of us chugging along just fine every day with linux.

I've never used a Thinkpad due to the Linux hostility I regularly read about. I never seem to have problems with HP/E or Dell laptops that I specify nor any old random desktops I grab. I use Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debbie and others. They are all Linux.

I spend way more time doing stuff on Linux than I ever did with Windows. Windows software comes from so many sources and it takes ages to find it and update.

My experience with ThinkPads is the opposite. I found them one of the more practical Linux brands.

Yep, and thing is, if you run RHEL or Fedora or really anything from Red Hat, they have a close collaboration with Lenovo and upstream, so everything Just Works™ out of the box.

I didn't use redhat but arch and ubuntu with my T480 and both of these had terrible battery life and heat management. Throttling was a real issue. Probably a fault of intels but still it was annoying to have to fix.

I never really got battery life anywhere close to windows or macos and my T480 has an extended battery which weighs a tonne.

I had a Lenovo Thinkpad that was certified for RHEL and used Fedora.

- Battery life was terrible compared to Windows (usually 3-4 hours, compared to 8 on Windows).

- The trackpad/trackpoint would often not come back after resume.

- The fingerprint scanner usually worked 20% of the time (while it always worked on Windows) and when it failed, you had to wait for a long timeout, because there is an issue where when IIRC PAM is performing authentication with one module (fingerprint), it cannot support simultaneous authentication through another method (e.g. password authentication).

- I had a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock, which worked great on Windows. On Linux, the lanes were misconfigured and HBR3 was not enabled, so it was not possible to use an external 4k screen with 60Hz.

It was the full Linux laptop experience as I remembered it. I decided to buy a Thinkpad after using Macs on the desktop for ~14 years. I had really good experiences with Linux on my Ryzen workstation as a desktop, so I thought it might be time to switch on the laptop again. Now I am fully back in Mac territory and probably won't try Linux on a laptop for at least another 5-10 years.

I could have kept the laptop since Windows worked very well. But my brain is just wired for Unix, so no dice.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used a slogan that is usually associated with Apple to ThinkPads running Linux. FWIW, I was a huge fan of the IBM ThinkPads when they still had the great keyboards. So what happened to me is that I was excited when I heard about the close collaboration RedHat and Lenovo were doing on the P53 series ThinkPads. And if you have a P53 the experience is pretty good. Not sure about other models.

I've installed various Linux distros on many laptops, and even though I could usually get everything working, the deal breaker for me was often battery life. I wonder what kind of battery life the people with RHEL on a P53 are getting.

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