Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

> Windows has known issues of waking a sleeping laptop.

Doesn't Linux as well?

I'm on Lenovo Yoga 6, Gentoo, 6.12 kernel, 4.20 Xfce. Sleeps works perfect. Same on my Asus+AMD desktop. I've not had sleep related issues for years. And last time I did, it was an out-of-tree Wifi driver causing the whole mess.

I'm on Ubuntu 25.04, 128GB RAM, pcie 5 SSD, NVIDIA 5080, 9950X3D.

I discovered over the weekend that only 1 monitor works over HDMI, DisplayPort not working, tried different drivers. Suspend takes a good 5 minutes, and on resume, the UI is either turn or things barely display.

I might buy a Windows license, especially if I can't get multi-screen to work.

Try a lower version of the Nvidia driver. The newer version was causing me and folk I work with a lot of problems.

This has been a pain point for us and our development process… not all versions of Nvidia drivers are the same… even released ones. You have to find a “good” version and keep to it, and then selectively upgrade… at least this has been the case the last 5 years, folks shout out if they have had different experiences.

Side note: our main use case is using cuda for image processing.

Make sure your device is compatible with WSL this way, its very fragile and prone to breaking

Install Pop_OS! for better OOTB NVIDIA support.

In my experience Ubuntu has the worst issues with displays of any distro.

To be fair I stay away from NVIDIA to, I would probably run a separate headless box for those GPU workloads if I needed to

Yeah, Ubuntu used to be the distro that "just worked" while nowadays that crown has passed to Fedora.

> In my experience Ubuntu has the worst issues with displays of any distro.

In my experience, it has zero issues. I use nvidia binary build. I have since 2006 through various nvidia GPU's.

Be pragmatic, use the binaries provided by nvidia and not the ones provided by Ubuntu.

Or use Suse, only distro that manages that well. Forget PopOS. Really, either binaries or Suse.

If someone else here is entrenched on Arch, do this: https://github.com/Frogging-Family/nvidia-all

If on Fedora, just use the binaries... trust me.

Hope this helps someone.

Ahhh, the famous "Works on my machine!" stamp of truth.

"Works on my machine!" is stupid when it comes to software running under an OS, because a userland program that is correct shouldn't work any differently from box to box. (Exceptions you already know notwithstanding.) It is very different when it comes to an operating system.

I know people here hate this, but if you want a good Linux experience, you need to start by picking the right hardware. Hardware support is far and away the number one issue with having a good Linux experience anymore. It's, unfortunately, very possible to even set out to pick good hardware and get burnt for various reasons, like people misrepresenting how well a given device works, or perhaps just simply very similar SKUs having vastly different hardware/support. Still, i'm not saying you have to buy something from a vendor like System76 that specifically caters to Linux. You could also choose a machine that just happens to have good Linux support by happenstance, or a vendor that explicitly supports Linux as an option. I'm running a Framework Laptop 16 and it works just fine, no sleep issues. As far as I know, the sole errata that exists for this laptop is... Panel Self Refresh is broken in the AMDGPU driver. It sorta works, but it's a bit buggy, causing occasional screen artifacts. NixOS with nixos-hardware disables it for me using the kernel cmdline argument amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10. That's about it. The fingerprint reader is a little fidgety, and Linux could do a better job at laptop audio out of the box, but generally speaking the hardware works day in and day out. It's not held together with ducktape.

I don't usually bother checking to see if a given motherboard will work under Linux before buying it, since desktop motherboards tend to be much better about actually running Linux well. For laptops, Arch wiki often has useful information for a given laptop. For example, here's the Arch wiki regarding the Framework 16:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Framework_Laptop_16

It's fair to blame Linux for the faults it actually has, which are definitely numerous. But let's be fair here, if you just pick a given random device, there is a good chance it will have some issues.

I recall having a sleep issue with linux 15 years ago, I think its been fixed long ago, except maybe on some very new hardware or if you install the wrong linux on an M series Mac you could have issues with sleep.

I had these issues with Windows, but with Linux Mint it works perfectly.

Not of you don't buy Windows hardware and slap Linux on it.

Unfortunately, most (almost all) hardware is Windows hardware. So far, System76 is the only one that I've had actually work.

System76 seems janky though if you use anything but PopOS

I run Gentoo on all but one of my system76 boxen, and have not seen any jank

I am running ChromeOS with Debian 'slapped on it' and that also experience sleep related issues.

Big fan of Linux, but saying that Linux works on system76 while they have a tiny sliver of the Linux market share seems like a nonstarter.

Turns out you get what you pay for.

You can either get hardware that works or you can deal with breakage.

ChromeOS, where sleep presumably worked, is also Linux. You just exchanged a working Linux for a distro with more bugs. The fact that you're able to do that is pretty cool.

That's not to detract from the larger point here though. It's pretty funny that all of the replies in this thread identify different causes and suggest different fixes for the same symptom. Matches my experience learning Linux very well.

I have Linux on MacBooks from 6 different years. They all work flawlessly. I also have a Lenovo that works well.

Sorry you have had such bad luck.

The less coupled software is to hardware, the less likely it is tested in that hardware and the higher likelihood of bugs. Linux can run fine but arbitrary Linux distros may not. This is not the fault of hardware makers.

Tell me how its not their fault ?

Hardware support is more than just kernel support. Additionally, not every kernel release works well for every piece of hardware. Each distro is unique and ensuring the correct software is used together to support the hardware can be difficult when you are not involved in the distro. This is why vertical integration between the distro and hardware leads to higher quality.

Firmware also plays a huge role these days (fan curves, ACPI, power management, etc.)

But saying it can vary largely by distro is overstating it by a lot. Mostly, distro issues are going to be based on how old their kernels are.

But definitely, modern hardware is much too complex to just slap Linux on Windows (and vice versa).

> The less coupled software is to hardware, the less likely it is tested in that hardware and the higher likelihood of bugs.

Yes, exactly! There are whole teams inside Dell etc. dealing with this. The term is "system integration." If you're doing this on your own, without support or chip unfo, you are going to (potentially) have a very, very bad time.

> This is not the fault of hardware makers.

It is if they ship Linux on their hardware.

This is why you have to buy a computer that was built for Linux, that ships with Linux, and with support that you can call.

You can force it to behave on Linux ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com