Hacker News Reader

> Don't assume your laptop will work.

Agreed. Note though that the Ubuntu live installer has a "Try" mode that gives you a nearly normal desktop experience without installing, and is an effective test environment to discover what will work and what won't. Wifi, graphics and suspend are worth trying out this way.

This is good advice and I should have done that. However, most of the issues I had only showed up after some time of using it. For example, a big one was wifi and it was very intermittent and hard to debug. I think it was going into low power mode in some circumstances and my wifi speed would randomly drop to 100kbs or less. Sometimes turning wifi off and on would fix it, sometimes a restart was required. Thankfully I did fix it eventually but I have no idea which of the many things I tried ended up working.

One thing I didn't have major issues with was my Nvidia graphics card, which was a surprise.

Ah, the issues you mentioned are the top 3 nvidia issues :P

- wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization

Nvidia's proprietary crap has always worked badly, the re-implement everything and put all their development effort into NIH syndrome instead of playing along with the already existing open source stack.

> - wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization

Now I'm a desktop user, so the first two don't really impact me, and the rest has been working fine for the ~2 years I've been in Wayland+Arch+Gnome across 3 different NVIDIA GPUs. Not sure why virtualization is there, but it also seems to work, although via WSL2 is slightly buggy, but I blame that on Microsoft rather than Linux/NVIDIA.

I don't know about that. If you search around you'll find that the two most common problems people have even installing linux (any variety) on a laptop is wake from suspend and power consumption. Very few of these laptops have discrete GPUs.

As to sudden restarts, this has never happened to me.

Yup, I'm very fond of Dell's Ubuntu laptops. Ubuntu just works, and I rarely need to mess with anything. (I have had occasional hardware problems over the years, but they have an on-site support option that works well even in rural areas.) I honestly have more weird software issues with my work Mac.

Random Windows laptops have been slightly more frustrating. Hibernation may not work out of the box, and sometimes one other piece of random hardware won't be usable. For a laptop that basically lives on a desk, you might get away with it.

Desktops are usually easier. They don't have as much built-in hardware, hibernation to disk may not be necessary, and it's easier to replace a webcam or something if you need to. I'd still check the graphics card, especially if it's an expensive one.

In my experience the linux way is finding things that don't work and, after not being able to fix them, deciding that you don't need really them after all.

Personally I focused on reducing the boot time when the suspend never worked properly.

I'd wager that a lot of your issues could boil down to GNOME and the ancient software stack that Ubuntu is infamous for. I would recommend giving a more sensible distro like Fedora with KDE a try, or even CachyOS if you're not afraid of the terminal.

GNOME is just as maintained and up to date as KDE.

Not when it comes to Wayland support.

How so? GNOME defaults to Wayland.

GNOME is one of the most aggressive pushers of Wayland if anything.

That doesn't mean they're ahead of KDE. Check out the KDE blog announcements, they've always been ahead if GNOME (at least in the last couple of years) in implementing various Wayland features (like having proper HDR support).

> Don't recommend other people to install Linux on random laptops, they'll probably have loads of minor and major issues that you don't have if you bought hardware specifically with the goal of running Linux.

I think this is a wrong approach. These are the first two thoughts that come to mind: 1. A major reason for migrating from Windows 10 to Linux is avoiding e-waste and by encouraging others to acquire a device specifically for Linux causes more e-waste to be generated (I don't deny the benefits of picking special hardware, I just think this it something worth pointing out). 2. Linux generally has excellent hardware support in my experience and while not everything may be plug-and-play, it's usually easy to get it working. I've installed Linux on an old no-name laptop with really unusual hardware and while Windows required special drivers (which I couldn't find) for audio, webcam and wireless networking, with Linux all worked out of the box. Many issues with laptops running Linux have already been solved. You might find the Laptops category in the Arch Wiki [1] useful.

> A lot of minor display related issues (mostly involving using an external monitor as my main screen) were solved when I switched to Gnome on X11 instead of Wayland.

Display issues are indeed one of the weak points of Linux, frequently due to the need for proprietary graphics drivers which may not even be available on Linux. X11 is more stable in this regard, as it is way more mature, but Wayland is catching up quickly.

Linux isn't perfect and you can certainly improve your experience by preferring well-tested setups, but existing hardware can be brought back to life, which is important. Not everyone can afford new devices.

> if you want to use Linux, you need to buy certified hardware

Or test yours with a live distro beforehand

Or use hardware a year or two old. If your hardware is bleeding edge you’re going to have a hard time. Or if you depend on some peripheral that’s not “mainstream”. The thing windows always, always had going for it was driver support. Linux never had that so it’s always been a game of catch up.

My laptop is about five years old.

And if it doesn't work, check again with a distro that uses a newer Kernel.

That can often make all the difference, but it's not intuitive for Windows people who are used to install hardware drivers.

Especially for hardware like new Bluetooth or Wifi chips, fingerprint readers, but also when there is a new Intel or AMD CPU generation and chipset.

E.g. instead of Ubuntu or Mint, try Fedora or CachyOS. Or even Nobara or Bazzite for gaming-specific optimizations.

> I still can't get my laptop to wake from sleep, I have to do a hard reset if it sleeps

This is the weakest point of modern Linux - suspend/resuming not working properly on many machines. And the systemd-logind / inhibitor architecture makes it incredibly hard for non-technical users to opt out of suspend.

I had issues as well when I was attempting to transition over 15 years ago. Made a few false starts trying to use Ubuntu. What eventually did it for me was switching to Zorin OS for a few months, and then Kubuntu which I've been on ever since (back then, and I suspect even now, Ubuntu had limits primarily stemming from software principles, such as no mp3 support) without issue.

Honestly, nowadays, for new comers I would not advise to use Ubuntu anymore. It is just a shadow of itself, most often than not inconvenient and broken for user in term of ux.

I would suggest to use Linux Mint or Pop_os for example.

Some days ago I just mentioned that Linux Mint is a great entrypoint for people and it was quick to get replies about how that's an outdated distro still on X11 instead of Wayland... like if the tech stack behind a product mattered at all to new people. And here we are, replying to someone who had to drop Wayland because it was simply not working for them. Oh, the irony!

Why? The only complaint I hear about and sort of agree with is that they use snaps, and that's not always a good idea for some packages. But otherwise, for regular users, I'd say Ubuntu has much less foot guns than even Mint. Everything just works, and it's easier to find support and help online whenever something doesn't. I

Pop_os is in a weird state right now too, with the upcoming migration to their new GUI framework

Mint is pretty much Ubuntu with a saner DE. But don't underestimate the benefits of the latter.

I wouldn't say "saner", I think it's just more familiar for Windows users.

to fix the wake from sleep issue you will likely need to change a setting in 'grub', but what that is depends on the ubuntu version and your hardware.

Wifi never seems to work 'out the box', so be ready to connect to the internet using ethernet to download the latest drivers and thus get wifi to work.

Wifi works most of the time out of the box, for many years now. That was different two decades ago, but that's a long time.

But if it does not work that is highly annoying of course.

Ah I think what is happening is that a brand new laptop may not have had its drivers added to the latest download/image version of your chosen distro. Hence the need to connect and update to get those drivers.

For me, it was a ThinkPad X1 Gen 11 and Mint 21.2 (MATE) about a year ago.

Yeah, absolutely. And with very new hardware it absolutely depends on the distro as well, how new the kernel is.

> Linux Mint 21.2 features a Linux kernel 5.15 and an Ubuntu Jammy package base.

That's from Oct. 2021, so it wasn't new a year ago.

Ah indeed - actually 2 years ago. I believe 21.2 (Victoria) was released in 2023:

https://tuxcare.com/blog/is-linux-mint-based-on-ubuntu/

Doesn't time fly!

That is just plainly not true with USB WiFi adapters because the vendors constantly switch chipsets, and not all of them have good (or any) support.