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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

How's things like sleep, hibernate, system wide touchpad gestures, HW video decode and fractional scaling working in the land of linux these days?

I know if you can live without those then Linux is daily drivable for a long time, but I need all of them to work flawlessly, and every time I try Linux on my bare metal laptop a lot of those features are still missing, janky or require research and tinkering.

I really want to make the switch but I also need 95% feature parity. I don't game much so I don't care how many Steam games now work on Linux via Proton if the basic features of an OS that I mentioned before are not there out of the box.

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> How's things like sleep, hibernate, system wide touchpad gestures, HW video decode and fractional scaling working in the land of linux these days?

I use a ThinkPad, so I prefer the TrackPoint and rarely use the TrackPad, but everything else works excellently, especially with KDE.

>but everything else works excellently, especially with KDE

Everything else? Including Wayland, fractional scaling on non-Qt apps, sleep, hibernate and HW video decode?

Yeah, I know if you have very common HW and restricted use cases, like track-point, USB mouse, display without fractional scaling, not using sleep/hibernate etc, then everything just works but those also "just worked" on Linux for the past 20 years.

I need linux to work on modern HW with modern quality of life features enabled that all the other OSs have out of the box, not to have to go back in time on how we used PCs 20 years ago just so Linux can feel at home.

If stuff like hibernate or mixed-DPI fractional scaling is still a foreign concept to it, then it's not year of the linux desktop for me.

GTK3/4 don't have proper fractional scaling anywhere, as far as I know. Also pretty sure it's not planned before GTK5.

Hence my annoyance.

As always, everything just works on Linux with the caveats that as long as you stay on the very fixed beaten path, never stray from it, only use X,Y,Z and avoid A,B,C, then everything just works, sure, but I'm not a college student anymore and my time is too valuable to tinker and find that new specific Linux path where everything just works in order to get the same desktop usability that Windows has out of the box with zero time investment.

It is what it is.

Almost all my applications are Qt; I have a new ThinkPad with an AMD 7840U and, yes, everything Just Works. Linux will always require more tinkering than Windows or Mac, and this machine didn't Just Work for the first two months that I had it as the BIOS needed updates and the Linux kernel needed them too, but I'm golden now.

Touchpad gestures - improved a bunch around 2021 thanks to efforts mentioned in https://linuxtouchpad.org/ .

Sleep/Hibernate - I remember hearing about some issues a couple years ago but haven't seen them lately, I think Intel has finally fixed some issues https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-S0ix-Linux-Failure-Hot

(Bias: went from being fairly attached to macOS to switching to Linux a couple years ago)

No issues with sleep running Ubuntu 22.04 with GNOME; I never shut down my PC.

As for touchpad gestures, both GNOME and KDE have 1:1 gestures if you are running a Wayland session. If you are not running Wayland, you can install something like Touchegg or use another distro with built-in gestures. Linux Mint and Elementary OS both have great gesture support.

Hardware acceleration works great! Before I switched, Firefox didn't have it and in Chromium, you needed to turn on an experimental flag.

I can't comment on fractional scaling because I use two 24", 1080p monitors.

>No issues with sleep running Ubuntu 22.04 with GNOME; I never shut down my PC.

Ubuntu, and most other distros don't natively support hibernate. Sadly, that's a no go for me until they fix this (probably never) as I put my laptop in hibernate on longer journeys or over the weekend.

>I can't comment on fractional scaling because I use two 24", 1080p monitors.

Also need mixed DPI fractional scaling for my laptop and monitor combo.

If you want to be 100% sure these things work, a number of companies are selling computers withnlinux preinstalled.

Support is also usually easy to check beforehand with a web search.

What does the support of fractional scaling or touchpad gestures have to do with the laptop you're running on? Either the OS supports them or not, no need to buy a new Linux laptop for that, that's crazy.

Fractionnal scaling and touchpad gestures have been supported for years. But obviously it depends of the desktop/wm used.

Supported YES*. Working flawlessly out of the box, NO.

Don't forget HDR on monitors and gesture support on trackpads.

Out of your combined lists, HDR is the only one that would cause issues. Although it really depends on the distro.

Yup, and I fully expect that to be solved by end of 2024. I have already fired up Halo Infinite on NixOS with a patched kernel and have seen HDR working via gamescope. Just a matter of ironing out kinks, KDE is already in progress, I expect Cosmic to start supporting soon, too.

Are you saying all the sleep/hibernate, touch-pad, wifi, etc. issues that have plagued linux on laptops for decades at this point have now been resolved?

I haven't had issues with any of that stuff (using Debian) for years. YMMV, of course.

It did vary, last time I checked, but I'm not up to date.

Maybe time to try again.

With Debian, the key thing is that you usually have to install the non-free-firmware package to make things like WiFi work (anything that needs a proprietary blob). This isn't done automatically.

Yes, Over the years I've been through that (and other distros versions), downloaded/built alternate drivers etc.

Last time I tried a few years ago, it still seemed pretty hardware dependant as to whether you could ever get it all working quite right.

Now that I think of it, there have been two times relatively recently that I've not had something work "out of the box".

One is for a WiFi dongle: it needed a driver that wasn't in the non-free-firmware package, and the manufacturer's Linux driver was too old to work with modern Linux. Fortunately, someone had written a replacement driver that I could get from github. That involved compiling the driver code, though, and the process wasn't something a non-geek could be expected to do.

The other wasn't for a laptop at all, but a tower. I'd installed a WiFi card in it that didn't work out of the box -- I had to copy the firmware from the CD that came with it onto my machine to make it work. That was easy enough to do, though, that my grandma could have done it without a problem by following the readme on the CD.

That said, I run an abnormal number of Linux machines, and two hiccups out of a dozen or so seems like a decent track record to me.

> and two hiccups out of a dozen or so seems like a decent track record to me.

certainly better that the good (bad?) old days! At one point with laptops at least it seemed to be no better than chance. Maybe worse.

Never used hibernate or touchpad gestures since touchpad sucks on my thinkpad, but sleep and hw decode works fine (i'd say sleep works much better since my windows install randomly started up the machine for updates until i killed all the scheduling tasks and did some gpo stuff to prevent all this nonsense). To be honest, I consider sleep to be completely broken on windows. I am using 1080p display, so i dont use fractional scaling (also still running x11) on popos 22.04

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