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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

Strange.

I've been on Linux some 28 years now, and it used to be like that¹. But today? I haven't had a kernel or graphics driver update failing on me for years. Maybe 10+ years? Granted, my Linux is the most boring, hardly-configged Unbuntu LTS. Boring hardware. Boring drivers. Everything optimized to "Just Work" - My machine pays my bills and if I'm down for a day because I fiddled around with some fancy custom trackpad module, or special Bluetooth whatevers, it's costing me actual money.

I'm certainly in my terminal 80% of the time (developing in nvim etc), so can't say much about how much it is needed by someone who doesn't know or use that terminal.

¹ My personal worst was at a conference doing a presentation for a 200+ audience having to recompile X, while entertaining the audience, because the beamer wasn't found and X crashed on it.

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What hardware? Your experience with Linux can be very different depending on that. For example, my laptop's WiFi refuses to work properly on Linux, so I'm forced to use Windows.

Edit: oh, and not to mention graphics (Nvidia), multiple monitors and HiDPI, especially with fractional scaling and different multiples per display. HiDPI on Linux doesn't work nearly as well as Windows and macOS.

It's funny, I can say the exact same thing in reverse. My two latest laptops are boring: integrated graphics, intel wifi, run-of-the-mill hp "enterprise" fare. One running a zen3, the other an 11th gen intel.

On the AMD, I couldn't use the webcam for a good six months under Windows. It wouldn't detect some part of the USB tree.

On the Intel, for a good year, I couldn't get 4k@60Hz over DP via the HP dock. Then at some point, installing Intel drivers fixed the issue, but Windows would insist on "updating" to the older, borken version every so often. Now Windows also has the correct drivers. A different dock still doesn't work. Then there's the fact that the Windows installation (11 22h2) doesn't support the touchpad, nor the wifi card. Bonus points for the default install insisting on connecting to the internet for the online account thing.

Linux had 0 issues on both since the day I got them.

As for HiDPI, yeah, the Linux story, at least with X11, is non-existent if you want multiple HiDPI settings. But Windows is a crap shoot, too. It's easy to get a blurry mess: just connect and disconnect an external screen, and even the freaking windows 11 start menu is borked. It looks fine when you open it, but start typing something and enjoy the blurriness. Apps will be stuck with either enormous or tiny text. The context menus of the systray icons will appear all over the place.

Some apps manage to combine everything: tiny text, yet blurry, and displayed in the middle of the screen. To name and shame: Fortinet VPN client.

If you know you're going to use Linux before buying a machine, you can generally save yourself all the trouble by simply avoiding broadcom and nvidia. Those two have been the source of the most trouble for years.

Intel for graphics and wifi is generally the safest choice. I pick laptops with those and have great success.

A decade ago I stopped having problems with both BCM and NVidia devices in Linux. Last year I purchased a very recent wifi dongle and had to manually install broadcom drivers, but other than that it's been smooth sailing with no issues.

My current machine is a "clevo". Some whitelabel thing that I bought from a company that delivers Laptops with linux preïnstalled. Intel i7, intel iRIS, etc. It all "just works".

I'm not trying to argue that "Linux Just Works" or that "you won't run into hardware issues on Linux". I'm arguing that by choosing "boring" hardware, and "a boring LTS from a large distro" you won't.

I bet you use stable graphics drivers on older graphics cards and the person your responding to uses newer graphics cards and quickly updates to the latest drivers.

Yes. Hence "boring".

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