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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices.

It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years.

Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the stuffed-full-of-garbage oem installs I've found it way more likely that I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.

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I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done. Stuff like finger print readers and often web cams not working is borderline expected. On OLED monitors you can expect brightness adjustment and often sleep/wake to not work quite right if at all, etc.

> I think in general Linux users develop a tolerance for stuff not working so they say "This works perfect" when the reality is that a lot of the features are not working but they are still able to get day to day work done.

For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most. On Linux I get better window tiling than on Windows, and shortcuts for navigating directly to a virtual desktop, and no shenanigans with WSL2 having a separate memory pool from the rest of the OS. And I don't feel like the entire OS is antithetical to how I use a computer like with macOS.

But a bunch of more mundane things become a lot more fiddly or flaky. E.g., this week openSUSE Tumbleweed pushed out Gnome 43 before any of my extensions got marked as compatible and now they just won't work for a little while. That's easier for me to live with when the OS is well suited for me most of the time.

> For me, every OS has rough spots and it's about which ones I can tolerate the most.

+1 if you're looking for some anecdata. The thing that finally pushed me from Windows to Linux was a privacy setting not actually being persisted (after a long battle to find the relevant settings). The fact that some wireless network cards don't work yet is definitely a rough spot, but I can also just buy a new one or write a driver, whereas getting Windows to care about my privacy or MacOS to care about basic usability with respect to keyboard remapping or window positioning seems unnecessarily daunting.

> I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.

If you've got an Android phone and a USB cable, you should be able to USB tether to your phone's WiFi connection. This should work out the box on Linux and Windows.

Snappy Driver Installer has an offline driver package made just for that situation that I've found quite useful.

man i remember those days when you had to go and find all the software you use from random sites and same with drivers, then having issues you can't figure out because of a outdated old driver vs Linux where you just get the latest stuff all in once place.

how do people on windows figure out what driver has updates? do you guys check the version installed and go to each manufacture to see if there is a new version>?

Now this is usually (but not universally) handled by windows update, but I too remember the bad old days of manually tracking down drivers.

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