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Comment by the_hoser | Hacker News Reader

For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.

I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.

And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.

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To temper expectations a bit, I’ve installed Linux recently on my HP Omen to pretty decent results. Still having some lingering issues, e.g the WiFi adapter going dead after a sleep. But have found the experience relatively similar to my recent windows installs.

For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless experience (laptops!!) that you’d expect from posts like these.

For a Linux savvy user, it’s definitely worth the switch. I haven’t had any ads in months and it’s magical

See this for something that might help your Wi-Fi issue. https://gist.github.com/gornostal/192e2ae29af3da1baeea384d0f...

I had the same problem on my new Yoga laptop with Fedora and an Intel BE200 Wi-Fi card.

Thanks, will give that whirl. Appreciate the info

Holy shit that did it, really appreciate that link sir

Sleep and suspend are still kinda buggy on Linux, and probably will be for the near future. This is more of a vendor thing (as most of the annoying problems in Linux) than a dev thing. To the point where I mostly avoid it, I either shutdown the laptop completely or just let it plugged on a desk 24h

Things are improving, and we should see this fixed in the next years I assume. This is the good thing about it, Linux will probably be fixing all annoying bugs in the next few years.

This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.

The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.

I left desktop Linux in 2010 because everything did not just work. Looking at the responses to your comment, it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work. If it's been true since 2010, I think the problem is systematic, and won't go away with "just one more year".

A lot of the WiFi and BT issues were due to proprietary firmware blobs which weren't included in package management repos either due to licensing issues or decision not to pollute OSS repos with nonfree software.

This has mostly been solved by either putting them in the nonfree repos or just the fact that WiFi hardware vendors aren't using such stuff anymore.

I still remember pulling firmware blobs for my Broadcom cards, then it magically worked fine. It was far from trivial and I think that's what caused a lot of people who tried Linux on laptops in early 2000s to turn away.

If you mean with ”just working” that any distro works out-of-the-box with any piece of hardware ever existing, then obviously no, that won’t happen. It won’t happen with any OS ever.

I have never had any issues with any Linux-distro regarding WiFi. Most hardware I have used has been largely compatible even. Maybe I have just been lucky, but it seems there’s millions of us who are really lucky these days.

What has also changed from 2010’s is that the documentation like Arch wiki is a lot better. You can also ask an LLM to help you configure things - obvs the docs are better and safer - so if and when you do have a problem, there’s actually sources to help you fix it.

> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work

This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with

Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air

Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI

Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.

I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).

Counterpoint: I've been using enterprise thinkpads for the past 15 years and never had issues with wifi, or suspend. So again, it's about how you choose your hardware so it works with Linux...

I've also used enterprise thinkpads for the last 10 years. No wifi issues on those, but sleep and bluetooth issues as described. I have no idea if Windows would have been more reliable.

I had a Thinkpad T480s that was absolutely perfect with Linux (Mint), although very underpowered, but that was due to Intel CPU.

This year I got a T14s Gen6 AMD as a replacement, and it's essentially unusable on Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Mint), but works fine with Fedora and with Windows.

On Ubuntu and Mint, X just locks up every 80 seconds or so, and I have to hard-reboot it (or switch ttys and restart X). Nothing in syslog, nothing in dmesg, nothing in X.org.log to show what might be going on.

I have the T14s Gen3 AMD and everything just works with CachyOS and Fedora. In general I tend to use as recent kernel as possible with AMD. They do update their drivers a lot in every Linux version.

This was true in 2010. I use to have a USB wifi adapter that was specifically meant to make sure linux would always work. I lost that adapter years ago.

I can't remember the last time I tried a distro that didn't just work on a random computer with a random wifi but it has been several years now.

Nvidia cards on the other hand...last year I had to try about 10 distros before I found something that wasn't a huge pain in the ass.

> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work

This is why I don't use Windows. Early last year I paid for a copy of "Windows 10", and it didn't support most of the hardware in my laptop. Even plugging in a mouse I had to use keyboard shortcuts to let it load a "driver", and after that it still didn't support the scroll wheel. Wifi didn't work at all, and wired network was painfully slow. It did at least support FHD resolution in 24-bit colour but very slowly.

My audio interface was completely unsupported, my MIDI interfaces were completely unsupported. Eventually I gave up attempting to run it, wiped the laptop again, reinstalled Ubuntu, and went for Bitwig instead of Ableton, and I've had no problems since.

Maybe one day we'll see the year of Windows on the desktop, but this isn't it yet.

I wanted to try Fedora recently but it crashed over and over in the install on the screen where you select a time zone. Looked it up and tons of people had the same issue and didn't find any fix that worked for me.

Turned me off Fedora completely.

Tried two other distros on the same machine right afterwards with no problems though.

I've made the complete switch recently (been using Linux on and off for years, including WSL as well) after my pleasant experience with the Steam Deck and it's been fantastic, but not without issues. A recurring issue over the years of trying Linux has been WiFi drivers; I really can't afford to have WiFi not work as I can't run an Ethernet cable to my computer room. I get that Linux heavily relies on volunteer work, but a broken WiFi driver due to an update is a big roadblock.

Beside that though, I'm happy to have left Windows behind completely.

>> what really blew me away is that everything... just worked

It has improved greatly over the years. When I was using it relatively regularly in the mid-00's it still took a lot of effort to get everything to work.

But long-time users being amazed that buying a brand new linux laptop in 2026 'just works' says a lot about how far behind it is/was. PC's that 'just work' have been available for 40 years. That should be the starting point for any shipping product.

I had a similar experience after switching to Fedora Silverblue (but any of the immutable Linuxes will probably do - and over time, I'm sure most will be like that). Had set aside a bunch of time to do a major version update, everything fully backed up, and then it was done in a couple of minutes. Literally no different from any other update.

I've done more than a handful of major version updates since then, and almost don't bother to backup any more.

Which laptop was this? Could you share the exact model?

> I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed.

Could you share the model, please?

yeah, the "it actually just works now" is quite a powerful transition. for all my hardware, that happened like 3 years ago, but I've been Mac-bound for a decade until recently so I'm only really sinking in now.

Yeah I started in 98 or so and stopped in 2009. I should check back in.

That brings back my memory (again) installing Mandriva on my old old old computer which has a NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card. It was a completely nightmare back then to install driver for it in order to get it to output at the correct resolution and refresh rate...

Now I have a Thinkpad T440p with a GeForce GT 730M dGPU which NVIDIA no longer provide driver for newer Linux kernels, so I have to use slower nouveau driver.

Ah, something never change.

I recall my older brother and his friends trying to install Linux on a system with a Matrox S3 graphics pn our families computer, HP Pavilion 133mhz with 16mb RAM.

Back when X was Xfree86 and you were required to create the X configuration without internet.

Oh yeah, the Internet... is was very hard to get things set up if you changed one file and then it turned to a command prompt with no possibility to access a browser, LOL.

Now days when the same thing happens, you could just grab the Internet phone located right in front of you and search away. Technology really changed life.

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