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Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

For me the "Year of the Laptop" happened ages ago. Everything from old clunkers to a relatively modern HP Elitebook 840 G6... install Fedora, done. I think the fingerprint reader might be tough, and Bluetooth on Linux is truly a sad state of affairs. But everything else works out of the box, and that includes suspend/resume and other power management, the special keys, Wifi and so on. WebGL just works, no need to tweak a whitelist, and battery life is on par with when the thing was running Windows 10. With SSD, and a fan that hardly runs in light use, the Elitebook is a sweet Linux machine.

I even use it on the Displaylink type USB-C dock that my current work laptop came with. Installing the Displaylink driver was a bit of "old school Linux" since the installer was Ubuntu only. But not too traumatic, and dock/undock also works perfectly.

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For whatever it’s worth, newer Intel wifi/bluetooth chipsets (e.g. AX200 or AX210) have consistently worked very well for me under Linux. If your EliteBook has a socketed wifi/BT card, it might be worth buying an Intel card (they’re dirt cheap) and installing it.

My issue with battery life isn’t getting it to match what it is under Windows, but that x86 ultraportables tend to have disappointing battery life under either OS. Linux doesn’t make it worse but doesn’t fix it either.

The existing (M.2) wifi/bluetooth module works just fine. My issue with bluetooth on Linux is that it's never been able to pass this testcase: Use a bluetooth headset as an audio I/O device. Repeatedly over disconnects/reconnects. For the past few years, it works when you first configure it - beautifully, you can choose your codec and so on - but soon stops doing so even if unpaired and re-paired. Maybe "the year of bluetooth" on Linux has arrived and I've just not tried lately.

I'm with you there; simply so bad experience w/BT. And, it often worked at first OS install but then degraded through kernel, BlueZ, and interface updates until it was unusable. Until recently, when it has been solid enough through most? Fedora 39 and now into 40, though I've found at times the config gets confused, forcing me to delete and re-add the device, sometimes manually, forcibly. But still, been solid enough for my daily use mouse and HD-Aptx audio (among others, all while crossing my fingers as 40 ages).

Wonder whether you've ever experienced this problem: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709 (spurious wifi disconnects due to "beacon loss" on Intel cards, been open for 5 years). There were two good blog posts summarizing the situation around that bug but can't find them anymore.

It's been really annoying with my Intel wifi/bt CNVi card for years and there's a lot of people having similar problems...

Don’t think I’ve ever encountered this on either AX200 or AX210 cards.

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