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Comment by random_human_ | Hacker News Reader

I have installed different Linux distros in 4-5 devices in the last year, including a laptop with an Nvidia GPU and a random NUC off Aliexpress. In all cases everything worked out of the box after a fresh installation--and as far as I remember the situation was the same ~10 years ago, when I first started using it. There are hiccups here and there, but nothing I cannot live with. I do tech support for my girlfriend'd mac, and there are just as many small issues there.

All this wall of texts to say that, respectfully, when you write >Earlier this year I built a new desktop and installed my normal Linux distro and the screen wouldn’t work after login the issue might simply be that you are doing something very wrong and/or not following the proper instructions for whatever distro you are using.

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I can only speak from personal experience.

But I've had multiple Lenovo laptops not work with Ubuntun or nixOS in multiple situations.

Any new yoga variants just always had trouble.

E.g. my yoga slim 7i had a keyboard issue in Ubuntu such that for the first minute, I can't use my keyboard. Had to change boot configbto use "dumb keyboard" or something

The yoga also had speaker issues in nixos as the drivers haven't been mainlined yet. It was onenof those 6 speaker (2 tweeter) setups. I had to download a random driver and chuck it in my nix config to get the subwoofers working.

I gave up after mic issues in multiple zoom calls or gmeet calls.

You can say it's all skills issue, but Mac worked first try.

Laptops notoriously have rare hardware with poor or non-existent drivers. For laptops, you do need to do research with Linux to make sure things outside of the CPU/GPU work.

And, of course macs work first try. Apple makes both the hardware and software, if it didn't work it would be extremely impressive. The fact it's working is expected, not exceptional or noteworthy.

> I have installed different Linux distros in 4-5 devices in the last year, including a laptop with an Nvidia GPU and a random NUC off Aliexpress. In all cases everything worked out of the box after a fresh installation

How interesting! This mirrors my experience with some of my devices, and not with some of my others.

> All this wall of texts to say that, respectfully, when you write >Earlier this year I built a new desktop and installed my normal Linux distro and the screen wouldn’t work after login the issue might simply be that you are doing something very wrong and/or not following the proper instructions for whatever distro you are using.

Ahh yes, the complicated instructions of writing the ISO to a thumb drive, running the installer, and trying to login after the installation is complete.

My sin was using a current gen nvidia GPU (a 5080) and a 4K monitor with high refresh rates. This unprecedented combo fails to make the transition from SDDM to Plasma Wayland with the latest (at the time) nvidia drivers baked into the distros I tried. Fortunately, I wasn't alone in this issue based on the forum posts across a couple of distros, so I can be confident that at least some others failed to hold it right as well.

Yes, using an Nvidia GPU is absolutely failing to hold it right. Nvidia has shit support on Linux and they do it intentionally, everybody knows that.

You can blame Linux all you want but there's nothing anybody can do except Nvidia. The whole thing is locked down, no distro or developer on Earth can save Nvidia users.

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