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Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

I dunno what you're talking about. I have a 2022 T14s with AMD 6850U. It runs fast and battery lasts at least 5h (not epic, but more than good enough for a day, and I've done no tuning whatsoever). As a daily driver, I have not had serious problems with Linux (Ubuntu) on a notebook (though I stick to Thinkpads) for a long, long time. Until about 5 years ago, battery story wasn't great, but no real issues since then. Have not had problems with suspend to RAM or other day to day features in quite a long time. In fact I tried a Macbook around 2000 and it had those problems, couldn't wait to get rid of that silver blimp.

While hacking is neat, I prefer things to just work with an -intentionally- open ecosystem, one that can't be taken away because of a marketing decision disguised as something else, with companies that are there for this fundamental idea first, and am more than happy with the constant ability to manage the system comprehensively.

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It’s not hard to find examples of people having problems with Linux on modern laptop hardware, there are already half a dozen anecdotes as I’m typing this if you scroll down the thread a bit.

I don’t know why this is such a thing in Linux-land, but people love to say, “works for me, case closed”. Desktop Linux is more forgiving with each passing year, but it’s not productive to ignore problems just because you aren’t experiencing them.

Well, in one case you have "it works great, just make sure you have reasonably supported hardware" out of thousands of choices, on the other, you have "You have to use Apple hardware." So I think it's more than reasonable.

As for the "5h is not enough" comments, it seems like a pretty arbitrary number, my work days are not usually longer than 5h per location. USB chargers these days are tiny and ubiquitious, planes have outlets, so it's really not a big deal as a tradeoff for an intentionally open system. People make it sound like they're walking around naked in the world with only their Macbook for weeks at a time and that's the only reality they accept.

If I were doing a weighted choice, at least 5h battery would be critical, but anything more than that is a frill compared to an open ecosystem, which is the world I want to live in.

That is interesting. I have a T14s with 5850U. The high-dpi display was tough nut to crack for me -- I want to use i3, so I need Xorg. Of course, there is also Sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for i3 on wayland. But for some reason Sway never felt as clean, fast and crisp as i3 to me. I can't even quantify it, and maybe it is in my head, but if I can, I will take i3 over Sway. So Xorg it is. After tuning and tweaking font DPIs and scaling factors for weeks, I got brave and tried to hook up an external display to my docking station. Many i3 config tweaks later, supplying a flurry of arguments to xrandr, bound to arcane key combinations, I got it to work, with readable font sizes on both displays simultaneously. Battery life is still crap though (~3-4h).

In all honesty, I find myself using the old T450s with a fat battery pack from Aliexpress more often than my new glass cannon T14s.

Well, you're running your own WM, though that is one of the advantages of the open source world it can also add a lot of overhead. These days I just try to stick to the out of the box experience because I got tired of fussing with everything. If I have workspaces via hotkeys, exposé, and focus on hover I'm good.

The whole xorg to wayland transition is definitely a drag, I have to use waynergy for input sharing until that's figured out. I haven't noticed any problems with external monitors, though it's mostly incidental for me since I use a desktop with synergy/barrier/waynergy (sigh) as the secondary display.

I did settle for the t14s 1920x1200 400nit 100% RGB display (I've got a 5k display on my desktop). If you've got a higher res display on your Thinkpad that could make some difference. I'm not saying the Linux world is perfect, but it's pretty good or great in most categories, and in the category of "open" Mac and Windows are basically silent except for handouts.

>It runs fast and battery lasts at least 5h

That would be a serious downgrade for anyone running an M1 machine. Total non-starter for me.

some good points here, but 5h is just not good enough.

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