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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Another data point that going with AMD isn't guaranteed that everything works out of the box.

They say they support "RHEL x86 64-Bit" and "Ubuntu x86 64-Bit", and OP was using Debian.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-7700x

Michael on Phoronix didn't seem to have a problem running his tests on the CPU, because it was "working out-of-the-box on modern Linux distributions like Ubuntu 22.04 and newer".

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7700x

This doesn't seem a reasonable notion of "out of the box": trying to use an officially unsupported distribution that doesn't include new binary blobs for new hardware is an experiment, not an update that is expected to work flawlessly: and since the binary blobs are working well and readily available the blame is split among the optimist (mostly) and Debian, not AMD and other driver authors.

Intel 11th gen wasn't exactly totally smooth sailing on the graphics front either. Isn't, in fact: I believe the recent reports of an update actually breaking laptop displays were on those chips.

Another data point that linux is still as amateurish as ever.

Is it Linux, or is it the whole "consumer pc" industry, putting out shoddily engineered product to save a cent?

I have two HP laptops that won't completely work with Windows, even the latest 11 22h2, yet have worked perfectly fine in Linux since day 1. And they're nothing fancy, either: year-old "enterprise" models, AMD/Intel with integrated graphics.

Sure, they don't break on boot (though one requires an external mouse to install windows), but they're clearly not fully supported, even after installing the plethora of HP drivers. The Intel one only recently got a graphics driver upgrade that allows it to reliably output 4k@60Hz over the usb-c ports.

I guess my point is, if all OSs seem equally amateurish, at least on the hardware support front, maybe it's not the OSs that are amateurish?

You surely mean the whole IT industry. The only one that do not issue recalls or warranty refund/ when end product has major issues/misfunction and just tell people to live with those bugs until they potentially fix them or not.

>You surely mean the whole IT industry.

Hehe true, the exception's are probably people who work on rockets and satellites ;)

Well, I think you'll have no end to grief if you try to mix rockets and satellites from different decades together and put them on the launch pad today...

Most of the CPU's are a ~decade old, before you even consider it for a launch.

Yeah this. My old 3700X rig would need to be power cycled 3-4 times before it booted. This turned out to be the Radeon GPU I chucked in it inflaming the boot sequence in some way. Put an nvidia one in and it was fine. The Radeon worked fine on another machine.

Own an M1 MacBook Pro now and never looked back at the hell of custom built PCs favourably.

I have an M1 MacBook Pro and software is annoying me on a daily basis. In contrast, my AMD builds and laptops have been solid.

New AMD GPU releases are crapfor a while. They're getting better fast, though

Annoying edges perhaps but as far as reliability goes, this MacBook Pro is the most reliable thing I've had since windows 2000 on an old Intel 440BX board. That's been a hell of a long journey of crap.

I get the feeling that computers are more and more picky when it comes to working with different components.

I have two HP laptops, both supporting DisplayPort alt-mode over USB-C. I have Windows 11 and arch Linux on both, up-to-date. My USB dock's display out works at 4k@60 with both Linuxes, but only one windows. Go figure.

Yeah I had this problem as well with my old Dell and Windows. Also weird problems with high DPI displays and window sizes. If I unplugged one monitor, the other one would drop for a second and then the menu bars would shrink on the still plugged in display.

Now I have a studio display. Get out of box, plug it in, works. Open laptop, spans display instantly. Unplug, windows move to the laptop. Never goes wrong. No bugs.

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