Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfim | Hacker News Reader

> The trackpad does two-finger scrolling (with inertia!) without having to add some random crazy guy's PPA and install extra packages. It picked up my Wi-Fi network and joined it without requiring me to do anything other than supply the passkey.

> Is it bad if I say that I was impressed that sound worked right out of the box?

> The XPS 13 easily handled repeatedly being put to sleep and awakened without throwing a kernel panic or otherwise exploding.

Is this the usual experience installing Linux on a laptop?

(Not trolling, I've only ever used Linux on desktops/servers)

View on HN

I don't have any experience with multitouch touchpads, but everything works out of the box on my Latitutde E6500 as well as on my coworker's various other Dell laptops. This laptop has the nVidia display (I historically have avoid nVidia, but the company is opening up and the non-proprietary drivers are getting better), bluetooth, WiFi, SD card, etc. all Just Working. I am running 12.04.2 with the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel - I installed the linux-lts-quantal package to pick up the updated kernel and xorg drivers (better nVidia support).

Thinkpads historically have been very compatible with linux (our family machine is a T61 I bought off of eBay very reasonably). Also nVidia display (very nice resolution LCD).

I also have a [edit] XPS M1210 vintage 2006 that also works very well, has since I bought it. I initially dual-booted, but then never used the WinXP boot and ultimately booted it off the island.

The only niggling problem I am having at this point is getting the bluetooth mouse running after a suspend/resume. Something is not coordinating in xorg - the work-around is to flip to a different virtual console and then back to the primary X11 console (<CTL><ALT><F1> <CTL><ALT><F7>). There is also something wrong with the bluetooth mouse battery display in the applet which can crash the machine(!) on resume on my XPS13. I'm not seeing that on my other laptops. The work-around is to not turn on the mouse until the machine has fully resumed. This problem came in with the linux-lts-quantal software upgrade and I expect it to be fixed Real Soon Now.

The key is to get a fairly generic laptop. I don't buy Sonys, for instance, because they have a long history of using oddball proprietary peripheral chips/configurations that don't work well with linux.

Linux just doesn't seem to do laptops very well.

I used to have a little Asus EEE PC, for which I downloaded a community-generated EEE-specific Linux. EEE Ubuntu, I think it was. All your EEE-specific drivers pre-loaded, no extraneous junk, no funny business! So I had high hopes for this one, on account of the very limited number (3!) of different hardware configurations the distribution had to support. Surely nothing could go wrong!

Once I'd installed it, I found trackpad touch-to-tap didn't work. At all. Well, OK, the trackpad has buttons, so I suppose I'll have to live with that.

It wouldn't detect my wi-fi network, and in fact as far as I could tell wi-fi simply didn't work in the slightest. Fortunately, I have a long network cable, and I mainly used it fairly near the router anyway.

When I tried to suspend to disk, it claimed it was out of swap space, and proceeded to just shut down normally. Hmm, never mind, I can just close the lid and leave it plugged in, it's no big deal.

When I closed the lid, it crashed.

10.04 works pretty seamlessly on my eee901.

> Linux just doesn't seem to do laptops very well.

Linux doesn't do 'random, low-priced consumer laptops' very well. It does regular business laptops very well. I've been installing Linux on Thinkpads from the T20 days all the way to the current T430 and I've been incredibly impressed with how well everything runs.

Even cheap laptops run pretty well these days, at most you'll wrestle with the wifi drivers. The problem is the low-end market for laptops is so varied you don't get a lot of developers who get hands-on time to get the drivers working well.

Popular laptops will usually have great support unless they've got some hardware where the vendor doesn't want to play ball. But any cheap machine that's sold a lot of units will have a forum where users explain everything they've figured out.

In the old days you could buy two network cards, keep one and send one to a developer as a gift, and you'd end up getting a working driver out of the deal. Some people did that with entire laptops.

That's much too sanguine.

Have been running Arch and Ubuntu on Thinkpads for over 4 years now, which are known for being Linux friendly. And, to be fair, it works, but it doesn't just work. Power management issues abound: out of the box, Ubuntu on my Carbon X1 was regularly using over 10W, and it was only with substantial tweaking that I could get it to 5.5W-6W consistently. Anytime I need to restart, I need to go through the Powertop suggestions again. Certainly could write a script for that, but it doesn't just work. Suspend doesn't work all the time: I've had days where I've charged the computer overnight, thrown it in my bag, and by the end of the day it was entirely dead, complete with some minor but obnoxious filesystem corruption. Using the hardware mute button fucks up PulseAudio.

I'll point out that the Carbon X1 is hardly some "random, low-priced consumer laptop." Probably a bit less Linux friendly than more traditional ThinkPad offerings, but if you go any more higher end with Sony or whatever, I would be very pessimistic about it working, just or otherwise.

Now, for my purposes, other alternatives just don't work. I don't know an easy way to have a Windows or OSX system to throw up a private virtual cloud over LXC on your notebook so you can work from a networkless Koh Rong beach. Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) makes this trivial. Everyone else has shitty window managers, while dwm is heaven.

In that respect, Linux works. And nothing else mainstream does. But universal mediocrity isn't an excuse for mediocrity.

>> Now, for my purposes, other alternatives just don't work. I don't know an easy way to have a Windows or OSX system to throw up a private virtual cloud over LXC on your notebook so you can work from a networkless Koh Rong beach.

Run it in a Linux VM?

I've been thinking about doing that, actually, so not knowing of any easy way was a bit of a fib. Very tempting, to say the least, but free software and all.

That's good. No only if they made thinkpads with screen that doesn't make me want to carve my eyes out.

I had an EEE pc 407.

I installed a bunch of different distributions and most of them worked well.

To say that "Linux doesn't work on laptops very well" because you had a terrible experience with a single distribution is odd. Especially when many of those distros have pretty good user communities and wikis that tell you what does or doesn't work, and how to fix stuff that's not working.

But the wider point - there are a gazzillion different distributions and sometimes there's no way of knowing if they'll work on your hardware apart from just installing it. Which does suck.

I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't gelled with just about every experience of installing Linux on a laptop that I have ever read! Broken wifi, broken suspend and broken trackpad seem just par for the course. (I am sure that the 3D acceleration wouldn't have worked either, had I bothered to try to get that far.)

I just thought it was a particularly amusing example of the phenomenon.

Which distribution? What laptop manufacturers? What years?

>> Linux just doesn't seem to do laptops very well.

Actually it has done very well on several of mine from different manufacturers since 2000, odd huh?

Until a year or two ago, yes. I've been using Ubuntu on only two different laptops since 8.04 and the staggering amount of fundamental problems and regressions that occurred and continue to occur is shocking. It's gotten a whole lot better in the past year or so but before then it was Russian roulette to install a new version of Ubuntu on the same laptop hardware.

Today the bugs/regressions usually aren't of the "sound on longer works" type or "my video card worked fine in 9.04 but was mysteriously blacklisted in 9.10" type, but of the UX type. I think a lot of that is due to Gnome 3 and the CADT development model they have, and to Canonical and their clownish Unity engineering history.

I have a rather old Acer Aspire One and Linux has always worked perfectly with it. RE those who say Linux isn't good with cheap hardware.

Oddly enough it's not thin, but has been quite durable and weighs very little (~2 lbs?) and still gets somewhat meaningful battery life even all these years later.

That said, the most recent laptop I tried Ubuntu on was perfect except for the track pad, which needed touch regions to differentiate between right and left click, but instead treated everything as left click. Needless to say I decided not to install Ubuntu on it.

Recent versions of Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint have worked completely out-of-the-box on my Lenovo Carbon X1 and an old HP DV7. The only trouble I have had is with a Samsung QX410 because it has both discrete NVIDIA and integrated graphics with Optimus for switching.

It depends on the manufacturer. For example, I haven't had any issues running Linux on ThinkPads (currently T420).

Also, in my experience, there's a higher chance of Linux compatibility if you stick to the business lines.

Linux is a low priority for hardware manufacturers that target desktops, which sometimes leaves drivers lacking or non existent for such hardware. Many drivers are maintained by the community instead of the manufacture.

A few years ago, I had purchased a "new" laptop with an audio chip that wasn't detected by the latest kernel. I emailed the manufacturer of the chip, who assigned a developer to create a patch that was later submitted to the community driver maintainer. In this case, rather than ensuring driver support prior to release, they waited until a consumer complaint came in!

Not really, unless you picked bad hardware Linux works like a charm on notebooks.

What is "bad hardware"? I tried putting Linux on a Toshiba laptop and I experienced the trackpad and sleep/wake problems, and persistent problems with wifi.

It was three-to-four years ago when I tried running a ThinkPad X61 with Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora) as my primary machine.

The sleep/hibernate and wifi issues never stopped, and I gave up and bought a MacBook.

I might go back for another whirl with an X1 Carbon soon, though. But honestly, I'll probably run Windows as the primary OS and just have Linux VMs.

I contract from time to time, I'm very familiar with Windows 7, used it heavily alongside Ubuntu on a variety of hardware. I find various sleep, suspend and hibernation issues on all versions of Windows from 7 back. Apparently I'm not alone, Google this phrase: "windows sleep problem".

Regarding the trackpad, I had a regression going from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 a couple of years back where the trackpad would freeze without fail during the first few minutes after booting. It took a couple of weeks for an update to fix it. The general support level seems to be improving now though.

Never had any trackpad problems. On rare occasions sound problems occur when using x64 distros. Only Ubuntu 10.something was able to put one of my laptops to sleep/hibernate successfully. I have never managed to do the same with other distros and laptops.

I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on an old LG F1 Express Dual. Everything works, including repeated sleep. Sleep did not work on it with 12.10. It also has two finger scroll with inertia, even on this old craptop.

I've Linux Mint on my Dell Inspiron 1525 and everything works flawlessly.

Unfortunately it is not, especially concerning the trackpad behaviour, it is usually a bit dodgy, unreliable..

No, the only trolling I'd accuse anyone of is the author. I really bore of hearing these tropes. Most of these things haven't been issues in years, certainly on PC hardware. Even on my MBA2012-> make ubuntu usb stick -> insert usb stick -> click "next" a few times, type your name, and a half hour after you started your project you have a Macbook Air, running Raring, fan, brightness, wifi, key backlights, good battery life, suspend/hibernation, etc, etc, all perfect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com