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Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

>I'm not really sure what to do.

Get any of the modern laptops with good battery life, install linux + Elementary OS without any hacks or workarounds (or better yet, i3wm which is the best window manager for laptops), and never look back.

Or do what I do, which is buy $200 dells/thinkpads of ebay, and for anything requiring CPU, just ssh into your home server.

Personally I went a step further and use a lapdock with a samsung phone - acts like a laptop with Termux, and I can do pretty much everything with good battery life, because lapdock battery also charges the phone.

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I used to be in this camp until I tried and bought an M1 Macbook as my daily driver. I thought I was going to be Thinkpad/XPS w/ Linux until I die. I don't love MacOS but POSIX is mostly good enough for me and the hardware is so good that I'm willing to look past the shortfalls.

Seriously I would love to switch back to a full-time Linux distro but I'm more interested in getting work done and having a stable & performant platform. Loosing a day of productivity fixing drivers and patching kernels gets old. The M-series laptops have been the perfect balance for me so far.

>Loosing a day of productivity fixing drivers and patching kernels gets old.

You are talking like it was 1997.

The typical linux users don't have to do that. Only those who buy unsupported devices on purpose for the challenge to make them work.

That’s just not true. Every coworker I know who use Linux[1] have occasional issues with webcams, mics, Slack notifications, whatever. It’s all fixable and this kind of inconvenience can be worth it when balanced with the perceived advantages, but saying driver issues are a thing of the past is just a lie.

[1]: I’ve seen these issues on Dell (XPS 13), Thinkpads, and HP laptops

That's funny because you sent me comment a few hours after I struggled at work with a webcam constantly freezing on windows/teams.

Webcam that has always worked flawlessly on Fedora on my other laptops.

Also Teams was much more reliable for the last 5-6 years or so I used it with ungoogled chromium on Linux than it did for the last 6 months using the official app on windows. I have had to kill it an awful number of times after struggling with unrecognized audio device, freezing video, or eveb freezing everything except sound.

I've been using Linux for 25 years and I think its been nearly that long since I had kernel issues that required patching the kernel (if ever). Maybe back in the 2.5 days?

The only drivers that I've had memorable issues with over the years are printer drivers, but those have nothing to do with the kernel. And printers are pretty cursed on every platform.

Every coworker I know who use Windows have occasional issues with webcams, mics, Slack notifications, whatever.

Well you should tell that to Dell because I have coworkers with a range of their models that are constantly fighting with webcams, audio, bluetooth, wifi, and Nvidia driver updates.

If they're new models, the webcam issue is not Dell specific, but an Intel / ipu6 thing. It should be integrated into most systems by now though, even as an out of tree module. The rest should just work, especially on xps machines. Without specifying the models/issues, it's hard to take it as more than an anecdote.

I am surprised. My former employer game me a Dell and the experience was quite smooth on Fedora.

They have a line they sell with linux pre installed. Those always work fine. It takes so e work to figure out which old ones on ebay were in that situation.

Im really not sure why you have to lie to make your point. Just to be clear, you never tried a modern laptop with linux. Because you certianly don't have to patch kernels or deal with drivers anymore. The only time you have to deal with drivers is if you want to game on linux, and even then most of that is covered by modern distros.

This was me too. It just works and it's nice to use. Sometimes life's too short to be hacking around all day.

I'm not really sure what you mean? I've been in fast and crazy startups now years, all the time ton of work to do. Never having issues with Linux, the CachyOS and Fedora spins I run just keep on chugging day to day.

Using a workstation and an AMD Thinkpad.

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