can you please talk about what linux refuses to do that you are trying to make it do?
or in general what is wrong with it, i am sincerely curious
or in general what is wrong with it, i am sincerely curious
I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile.
Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes. Out of 4 laptops in 7 years, the only one that supported this incredible future technology was my Lenovo Carbon X1, the two Dells and the Asus all repeatedly tried to commit head-death suicide in my backpack.
My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland.
It's the worst operating system in the world, except for all the others.
I can nitpick and find issues with all of these systems. I think there is a bit of a little saying that sometimes go around that, "all OSes just suck." On Windows 11, I've got ads, inconsistency between different windows provided by Windows (some have the newer UI look and some are still stuck with their Windows 7 like when adjusting print settings or advanced settings), and I can never get Bluetooth headphones with a mic to just work consistently (same with my co-workers). On macOS, the reorganization of settings have sucked for a number of settings, clicking with my mouse half the time does the view where it shows all the applications in my virtual desktop view (don't know the proper name of this) and having to augment macOS with Magnet. With Linux, some of the pains you've already mentioned. And of course those are same what even worst on desktop BSD. If I sit down I can probably think of more for all the platforms.
At the end of the day, all of them suck, its just a pick your pain. So just as you said, each one is the worst operating system in the world, except for all others.
Initializing hardware is hard, reinitializing hardware is harder, so now when chips are power focusing we can just ignore the annoying steps :)
Laptops have been successfully closed to sleep, and inserted into backpacks for literally decades.
My 2024 Lenovo X1 Carbon has not ever woken up and tried to commit heat-death suicide.
I am quite sure this isn't a widespread problem with Apple products.
I can't imagine what the hell people are even doing with laptops if they don't consider close-to-sleep, wifi and bluetooth bare minimum functional requirements.
Wait, what?? Just re-discussed the other day:
State of S3 – Your Laptop is no Laptop anymore – a personal Rant (2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442490
> S0ix would be great if it worked. But unfortunately it does not - laptops die from overheating, draining their battery in the process.
> This issue is not limited to Linux, as Dell officially warns to power down your Laptop before placing it in a backpack.
IMO one of the best reasons to prefer to buy/use a laptop from a Linux-first laptop company (Framework, Tuxedo, Slimbook, Starbook, System76, etc) is a better chance of sleep/suspend working properly. Even then, though, with the abandonment of S3 and the push for S0ix, it can mean that even "properly" working sleep can basically drain your battery overnight (sleep-to-hibernate can be set, but can be complex). For those interested in characterizing their laptop battery drain in Linux, I wrote a utility to help: https://github.com/lhl/batterylog
For Wifi + Bluetooth, I've found always swapping to an Intel card to be the best bet for stability, although BT still is always hit or miss for me.
I had some crazy intermittent crashes on suspend w/ one of my dev laptops, turns out that was a problem Nvidia introduced w/ their v550 drivers at the beginning of the year that still hasn't been fixed yet. That was pretty maddening: https://mostlyobvious.org/?link=/Reference%2FHardware%2FRaze...
Back then of course it was simple, closing the lid instantly wrote RAM out to the HDD and shut everything down.
In the name of copying the iPad's instant on, we've killed countless batteries and made countless laptops completely useless.
Progress!
> I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile.
I had a Windows laptop that came with broken wifi and bluetooth as well as a BIOS-enforced wifi card whitelist that prevented me from swapping out the wifi card.
> Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes.
Yes, so does my Windows laptop. It's why I always shut it down completely before going anywhere.
> My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland.
An NVIDIA update gave people with my laptop model a blackscreen. NVIDIA only fixed this half a year or so later.
* Active Directory / Group Policy has no equal to the point where FreeIPA and sssd threw in the towel and supplement AD and support group policies directly.
* RDP is the better technology full stop. X forwarding is really cool and VNC is… there but RDP got the abstraction right.
* SMB for all its warts is better at file sharing than anything that Linux has to offer and FUSE, while great, is a band-aid over the wrong permission model— why Linux does mounting a filesystem have security implications? Why after 30 years do we still pretend the filesystem is reliable and paper over the reality that it isn't.
* NTFS got the permission model right where for the most part Linux is still clunking along with chmod. You don't have to deal with user ids sharing a single global namespace. Directories only being able to be owned by one group. NFSv4 even adopted NT ACLs wholesale as well as NT's identity model.
* Windows has undergone truly heroic efforts to make remote home directories work where Linux you will never stop dealing with issues.
I think the, deserved, Microsoft hate has blinded folks a bit to the good things Windows has going for it. I know, tragic, the worst person had some good ideas.
So I guess I could either go back to X and have uncomfortably large letters or stick with Wayland and tolerate slightly off colors. Yay.
The IME shows Korean characters in slightly wrong size whenever I type and gvim keeps throwing UI error messages in the console. At least it allows the input to go through, so I guess it's fine?
Hibernation used to work, and then stopped working for about two years, and then started working again after the latest upgrade. No idea why, I'm not gonna question the system when it works.
(BTW, I think the last time I had to worry about IME or hibernation in Windows or Mac was about twenty years ago.)
This suggestion comes up implicitly in a lot of weird hardware cases. It really isn’t a selling point for a user wanting a good first (or recurring) impression.
Just to call out: X11 isn’t all rainbows and unicorns either. Wayland (for the various defects I’ve encountered) is a desperately needed improvement.
Okay, so you're willing to change your whole operating system to something which is quite different than what you're used to.. but you're not willing to switch off of Wayland even though you know you don't like wayland and know the alternative fixes your problem, because you feel somehow compelled to stick with a default? Makes no sense. You should either not use wayland, either by sticking with windows or switching to X11, or buy hardware that supports wayland better, or learn to live with wayland as it is without feeling sorry for yourself. Using wayland even though you don't like it is 100% a self-inflicted harm. Nobody is making you do that, the "push" is in your head. Just stop doing that.
NixOS plug: If you swap kernels it'll automatically build the nvidia bridge code for the kernel and it'll work.
I wouldn't buy nvidia for Linux still, but it's hardly the issue it was
A few distros/DEs have straightforward ways to do this with a GUI but there's no universal solution, and this is something almost anyone using Linux for a home media server is going to run into.
If you aren't using one of the big two, it's your own fault (or the fault of whoever sweet-talked you into trying their non-mainstream DE).
On Windows, it's just an AutoHotKey script. On Linux? Literally impossible. I've spent days dicking with various config files, rebooting and relogging dozens of times. Even got so desperate I asked chatgpt. Gave up after a week or two.
To anyone else reading this: this is not an invitation for fixes. Whatever you're going to suggest, I've already tried it and I'm super not interested in any opinions about it.
It runs in the background as a systemd service, and the config is just:
$ cat /etc/keyd/default.conf
[ids]
*
[main]
capslock = end
No mention if you tried to compile the firmware, or use the custom mapping configuration available to your keyboard, what kind of keyboard you have, or what specifically hasn't worked.
Where I think the friction is the distance between new migrants coming to linux with glowing advertisements of it mostly being a drop-in replacement for windows but the GUI not offering everything, and crucially not hinting where to go to find things, so people head off to do web searches and play the lottery of if they get good/recent information appropriate to the distro and version they chose. Linux seems to be polarized between great for simple use cases (browser, gaming within the steam walled garden, etc) and those willing/able to dive into the terminal, but between those can be a wide gulf which is hard to cross.
Then there's the minute ambiguities that continue to perplex me, which are mostly down to lack of standardization across distros. Most distros come with a bunch of premade user groups, but good luck figuring out what each of those groups give access to. The actual purpose of various root level folders is inconsistent, making manually installing programs confusing, and oftentimes figuring out where the package manager put an installed program is vague as well. The other day I installed openSUSE on a server, went to disable password access in /etc/ssh_config, only to find it doesn't exist. Had to google around before finding out they moved it to /usr/etc/ssh_config. I am used to googling as part of how I navigate daily life (so much so that I pay for it with Kagi), but most people don't want to be arsed with googling things.
Dotfiles are also annoying, and I think that is a universal complaint among users given how many dotfile management solutions there are around. The fact that you have to edit config files at all is a turnoff for many people (I prefer the benefits config files bring, but not everyone is so easily convinced). Things like this are navigable with enough experience, but people have gotten so used to Windows' quirks and error resolution process that learning a new system with a whole new set of pitfalls just isn't worth it.