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Comment by ratherbefuddled | Hacker News Reader

> Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features.

I've had it work first time, perfectly on:

   - Tongfangs, 3 different models   
   - Lenovo, many different models    
   - Clevos, 2 different models   
   - Asus Zenbooks, 2 different models   
   - Too many Dells to count   
   - Asus Zen2 desktop

I have yet to find a device it doesn't work on. I've never had to mess about with the kernel params or do anything clever with fans except install the sensors package and run it.

The only shortcoming I've noticed is it the fingerprint readers were hit and miss, but this is mostly because the device manufacturers didn't bother with drivers.

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"I've had it work first time, perfectly on"

In my world, running perfectly means, runs at least as good as windows.

Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.

And I doubt that.

Not because windows is so awesome, but because hardware manufacture write and optimize their drivers for windows. And linux is a way smaller market and one with intentional no stable driver ABI (to force the vendors to open source their drivers).

That is the situation. And it sucks, because I do not like to use windows, but I need my mobile devices to be reliable.

There are often things that do not work under Linux on different laptops and it depends on what you need and expect. However, consistently over many laptops (I am a computer hoarder and have 100s of laptops), after running my post install script, battery life always easily beats windows. For old and new laptops.

Recent example; someone gave me a cf19 which had a dodgy battery; it had the official Panasonic windows install with the Panasonic drivers and optimiser and the battery went from full to 0% in about 15 minutes; I did a windows 10 install, again with the official drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did a windows 10 install without drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did Ubuntu install with my post install script and get consistently 3.5 hours. Yes, I know this is a weird case; I bought a new battery by now and still get the same behaviour; no clue what’s up. I thought it was funny though because ‘windows better battery life’ people.

And this always happens; my x220 runs 8+ hours under Linux while barely getting to 4 under windows for the same work. GPD pocket 1 runs over 10 while under windows getting not even 4. And these are the ones I use all the time for work. I consistently see this and have no clue what people are doing who claim windows has better battery life; must be much different workloads. I use i3wm (which I believe makes all the difference; with Unity, battery life gets slashed by up to 80%), code in vscode and vim and browse in Firefox; but I do that under windows as well.

You are free to have a look at my devices, but I did manual optimizing, tld, thermalD, optimized grub settings, allmost bricked devices with it and still even stock windows is better.

But a proper installed windows, without bloatware and updated drivers, always won by a large margin.

And the bigger showstopper are standby/hibernation. Touchscreen glitches etc.

So I have 2 devices, one lightweight chromebook. A bigger windows laptop and manjaro on the desktop.

I very much prefered to have manjaro only.

Yeah, the things like standby and hibernation and touchscreen are major issues especially in new laptops. But I never use these features myself. Guess I got used to it. Which devices (specifically) do you have? I might have one or both or know someone who has.

Acer Spin 5.

Out of the box linux experience is actually quite good. Performance loss I can handle, but standby-resume reliably introduced touch screen bugs and other annoyances. Or did not wake up at all. I actually just recently gave up with linux on it and installed windows.

(which was surprisingly a big huzzle, I had to resort to third party software to get the right windows drivers. But now it runs way better - and more importantly, more stable.)

I get that; a computer is a tool; it might be a love but mostly it’s a tool and it just has to work. That is really why I installed Linux in the first place back in the day but maybe things did reverse. I have a script which just makes any apt machine into mine; it is something I cannot do on Mac and win anyway and that is enough reason; I can get a laptop and run that script giving me a full working station in about 10 minutes. That is already nice. But then I don’t have much wishes; if it’s very heavy, I will offload to servers and I don’t need a lot of graphical stuff outside a modern browser.

" I can get a laptop and run that script giving me a full working station in about 10 minutes"

I even made my own manjaro (arch linux) version. So I have a USB stick with all my setup and programms, I can plugin and go hacking on any computer. Or directly install it. Takes only 3 minutes ;)

Of course that is freaking awesome.

> Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.

Other hardware can be sketchier, but I've found power handling much more reliable on Linux than Windows. It just works on my Linux boxes, whereas my Windows machines I would regularly notice that my previously suspended laptop was 130F+ roasting its bag and emptying its battery, or I'd find it completely dead after the same thing had happened and I didn't catch it in time.

I've got a Zenbook flip, I'm really impressed with the Linux performance. It even doesn't suck too badly as a tablet, which exceeds my expectations.

After 20 years of luck with Linux on many laptops, I couldn't get any Linux to Microsoft Surface 3 Laptop.

Aren't those just surfaces with a keyboard -- like, same bespoke hardware and similar?

I have been using this on Intel SL3 works great https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

Also works on AMD but did get crashes sometime and sometimes need to boot into Windows to reset audio….

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