Elementary OS didn’t work for me (broke during install – people online said it was video drivers), and on mint and Ubuntu gaming wasn’t working exactly right. In pop os 85% of my games run though
Correction: POP!_OS has their own APT deb farm that has the latest hardware stack. This includes the proprietary 535 nvidia driver and later as well as the kernel and mesa.
This is part of the history of the distribution as it was made to support system76’s latest hardware lineup on top of an Ubuntu base.
Nouveau is the libre driver for Nvidia on GNU/Linux with Nvidia slowly segregating their proprietary driver into a firmware blob.
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.
The first thing I installed windows on was an discarded office tower that I had to put new memory And hard drives in. Shit was ancient and specifically did not want anything but windows installed on it. Installed Linux anyway. Works great. No specific hardware
I've yet to run into a CPU that doesn’t work with 11
Every AMD processor from the Ryzen 1000-series and older. I'm not sure where the line is with Intel processors, but requiring TPM excludes a lot of otherwise useful hardware.
Looking for a more stable distro could be a good idea. Some distros are pretty much only PoC, or too niche to have a good support, or the beta channel of another, better supported distro.
You’ve moved the goalposts. CPU is one thing that is objectively wrong. My older gen i7 doesn’t work with Win11 and has no problem with all the distros I’ve thrown at it.
Nvidia GPU is totally different from CPU. I think most reasonable Linux folks will agree that Nvidia drivers can be problematic and that is a weak point.
I’ve always found the Tpm complaints a little suspicious. The same people who go on and on about how much they worry about security and privacy and how MS doesn’t care, suddenly just don’t give a shit in these cases. I assume they mostly just want to shit on stuff.
It’s a good to push to make it standard and hardware manufacturers wont without a good old shove.
I complain about TPM because it made my system unable to boot without desactivating it, i don’t really care about TPM but the implementation seems disastrous
I think the main trouble makers for consumers are the odd network or bluetooth controllers, especially in laptops, which often come with some exotic bullshit.
I have a lot of trouble with Bluetooth on laptops so I tend to run 2.4GHz wireless peripherals instead of Bluetooth. That’s my only complaint these days.
I remember when you had to use this newfangled “kernel module” business if you had two Ethernet cards using the same driver, because a non-module driver would only detect one …
shit like this comment thread is why regular people use windows. who the fuck wants to learn about this kind of stuff when you can just point and click? especially when the people who should be helping you post brain-dead self-congratulatory gate-keeping shit like this.
if y'all want people to use linux maybe make it palatable instead of maintaining its difficulty so you can get a chubby about how smart you are
You said people wanted to point and click. I agree: I’ve seen many Windows admins VNC to a desktop environment to get to a shell rather than use SSH
So if everything in Linux was accessible from a GUI, would that make it better? Because Windows does similar things, and so does Mac OS. They just use pretty pictures instead of words.
ah, i see now. it's more about things just working and it being right there
even what distro to choose is already a thing people have to actively research. most people are more interested in just having the thing simply work, than they are having it work in a way that they've customized, if that road takes more than minimal effort. i think that the divide is actively growing now, and that the easy access of smartphones and most apps not having much customization is probably part of it.
Things on Windows and Mac rarely just work, especially when you're talking about kernel extensions. In fact, one of the first things you do when troubleshooting a Mac is to start up without extensions by holding the shift key.
And this is almost entirely the fault of the hardware manufacturers. They could write drivers for Linux that would work as well as their drivers for Windows. They don't do it, so amateurs have to reverse engineer the hardware and try their best to get it to work.
If, like with Mac and Windows, hardware manufacturers offered actual support for Linux you would not see these issues. The problem isn't with Linux, it's with the hardware makers.
I will agree that smartphones have made people know less about how computers actually work while increasing usage. And this is because they've obfuscated things to the point where they "simply work" with "minimal effort." Maybe we should stop doing that.
The reason Linux only grew with the Steam Deck is because an operating system only grows if it’s preinstalled on a popular device. Average users do not install their own OS. If you were actually in tune with average users, you would know this. It has nothing to do with Linux users making jokes amongst themselves.
i sort of get them, actually. as a nontech person who shifted to Linux out of necessity, i just wanted it to work.
i dont have to imagine not knowing what a kernel module because i still dont, despite using it for years.
if y'all want people to use linux maybe make it palatable instead of maintaining its difficulty so you can get a chubby about how smart you are
I wont speak for others but personally, I'm not really interested in point and clickers using linux - there are people who work on mint and ubuntu and stuff for them.
again, personally, i don't think linux is the right choice for people don't want to learn some of that and who won't ever use Command line interface.
I wouldn't recommend it for them - tbf mostly because I've no interest in being tech support for them, just like i didn't for windows back when i knew how to solve some problems ( type "regedit").
unless they only have a potato, then i think linux is more likely to fit a decent amount of their needs.
though i would normally say it costs them little more than a few hours to test out a live usb boot system.
but the main point is that the linux community is very diverse, as are all the different distros and projects - so it is not easy to pigeonhole all of them as sharing any one sentiment.
some of the people and distros will be supportive of those users, others won't.
it's a bit like most collections of humans in that respect.
shit like this comment thread is why regular people use windows
No, regular people use Windows because that’s what their device they purchased came with. If they bought a Chromebook instead for example, they’d be using ChromeOS which is based on Linux, and if they bought a Smart TV, it’d probably be running some sort of Linux-based OS as well.
Regular people don’t know or care about Linux, nor what operating system their device is running - they just want a device that’s easy to use, looks good, has a good price and can let them use Facebook, Zoom etc or whatever it is they’re expecting from that device.
who the fuck wants to learn about this kind of stuff when you can just point and click
There’s no need to learn about this stuff, Linux is already just point and click. The main hurdle these days is installing it on a PC, egular people don’t mess around with the OS on their device, they just use whatever it is that came on their device. They shouldn’t have any big issues using Linux (especially if it’s a user-friendly distro like Zorin OS), as long as it’s already installed on their machines.
if y’all want people to use linux maybe make it palatable
It is already palatable, we just haven’t gotten mainstream manufactures to sell preloaded devices to the masses. There are some OEMs like System76 that are doing a good job, but they haven’t hit mass market yet. What Linux needs is a partnership with mainstream manufacturers and some big $$$ invested into marketing, plus partnering with retail outets like Best Buy etc. And maybe have a hardware certification program, like how Windows has the WHQL. Market the hell out of it, pass out shiny “Linux compatible” stickers to vendors, put Linux on sleek and shiny MacBook-like devices, and you’ll find regular people getting into Linux.
also the front page of this very community has multiple posts from people whose systems aren't working, or who are worried about software being incompatible with linux. it's still not easy. and Ubuntu came pre-loaded on computers a decade ago and that didn't really do anything.
this is copium my friend. look at these forums, you don't find people talking about proselytizing ubuntu and mint, it's people circlejerking about how cool they are for using kali and arch and knowing whatever minutiae of computing
Some builds can get really tetchy about laptop hardware, but that's almost always older hardware.
Though I will say it took entirely too long for most builds to have a "change what closing the lid" does menu option rather than making you modify a .conf file.
And don't get me started on resolution switching when hot swapping display inputs.
You can’t use PowerShell or CMD like you do with bash, there are problems also using different commands like SSHFS and other super useful tools, it’s like the WSL, they can say they have it, but it works awful. So what’s why I say it’s a pain…
Same… The principal engineer on this project also referred to me learning C# as my first exposure to a “real programming language”
After already being advanced in Python
And familiar with C, C++, JavaScript.
I think what he meant by “real” is it comes out of the box with proprietary windows components that aren’t going to work anywhere else and don’t have human readable code.
I’ve used Linux on my private laptop for the past few years, never had any major issues. Work desktop is running Ubuntu, no major problems except for the odd bit of poorly maintained software (niche science things, so that’s not really a Linux issue). Laptop breaks, I get a Windows 11 laptop from work…and I’ve had so many problems. Updates keep breaking everything, and I’ve had to do a factory reset more than once since the recovery after those updates also always failed. Wish I had my good old Linux laptop back :(
Hell, i personally run into MORE issues on windows than linux which is why in 2020 when proton became pretty big news i made the final switch and have not looked back. I use windows in my work laptop cause work makes me, other than that i dont touch windows based systems and i live with more stability running mint.
Lol, my power supply on my desktop died earlier this year and I work from home, so I had to come up with something fast. Booted up my Raspberry Pi and connected it to my monitor, ran it as my Linux desktop for 3 days while I waited for the replacement. Did everything I needed and was able to handle my browser games to boot.
I mean it’s to the point that if you’re willing to install an operating system (a smaller sunset of computer users overall) , you can go with Linux no problem
Well, in the real world, Windows has won. It’s the default desktop OS. Whatever Linux distro is trying to take over needs to be just as simple to use, and needs to be designed so that most of the knowledge that your grandma has regarding her Windows computer can transfer over. Once that happens, and the only difference between Windows and Linux is the cost, then Linux will win.
Yeah, but XP was on the tail end of operating systems that still needed their users to understand what’s going on. Back then, you HAD to be “tech savvy” (at least relative to today) in order to get your computer set up. People understood what a file was. What a file format was. They needed to understand what folders were on their computer and how to get to them from different applications. The kind of knowledge that you’d think people still have.
Since then every single UX designer has been working towards making everything “just work”. So, at this point people just assume that technology is doing what they intend it to do in their heads. Everything auto opens, auto updates, auto installs, and auto syncs. In modern operating systems you don’t control over anything, but everything is done for you. Obviously that’s not really the case, but that’s the design. And now, most people don’t even have a desktop in their home. Most people do everything from their phone and use a tablet for anything that the phone is too small for. And because of that, many people coming out of school don’t know what a “file folder” even is. What it means to put a file onto a flash drive and move it to a computer. It’s old people nonsense to them.
I hope that we can bridge this gap, but I don’t know how that would work.
You make a very valid point, I didn’t think of that problem before. My mother learned how to use a PC back in 1988 when we had XT and Wordstar. It’s obvious that she understands the basics of OS and filesystems, but I guess that skill is now becoming quite fringe.
you use a system like mint and it is as easy if not easier to use that windows and the local application search bar actually works decently and doesnt bring up a bunch of useless fucking web results.
I guess the last thing is to get some company to install it on laptops and sell them at Walmart. Because the “normies” are not going to go out to install something themselves.
How about for gaming? I will admit that I haven’t tried a distro in almost a decade, but I was hearing that back in 2010, and tried to migrate to Linux in 2014 and EvE Online refused to work on either Ubuntu or Mint
I think if you come from Windows to Linux, there is a change of mentality as Linux works different from Windows, different apps and philosophy, for gaming, you should check the proton community here www.protondb.com/app/8500 and check what they say. Linux has a lot of communities, wiki and guides to get help, that’s what I miss on Windows… their official website s*cks a lot… never helped me unless for basic commands like “how to enable OpenSSH”… you will need to re-learn the OS basics if you plan to move to Linux.
Well, is not super common for sure, but Dell sure sell the same laptops with Ubuntu pre installed, they’re a bit cheaper too. At least in here South america they do, pretty much every single computer they sell has a Linux option from the box.
But I also can’t think of any other big brands that also do that, so you have a point, Asus and Acer have some models, but they’re harder to find, even online.
They have a point. I’m in the market for a new laptop and I have, so far, returned two of them.
First, I tried a Huawei Matebook 16. I was foolish, but I thought it was “easy”. No NVidia, no dGPU at all - just part that looked very standard. It was based on the info I had gathered from a few years of Linux usage: “Basically avoid NVidia and you’re good”. It was anything but. Broken suspend, WiFi was horrible, random deadlocks, extreme slowness at times (as if the RYZEN 7 wasn’t Ryzen 7-ing) to become less smooth than my 5 year old Intel laptop, and broken audio codec (Senary Audio) that didn’t work at all on the live, and worked erratically on the installed system using generic hd-audio drivers.
I had a ~€1500 budget, but I raised it to buy a €1700 ThinkPad P16s AMD. No dGPU to speak of, sold with pre loaded Linux, boasting Canonical and Red Hat hardware certifications.
I had:
Broken standby on Linux
GPU bugs and screen flickering on Linux
Various hangs and crashed
Malfunctioning wifi and non working 6e mode. I dug, and apparently the soldered Wi-Fi adapter does not have any kind of Linux support at all, but the kernel uses a quirk to load the firmware of an older Qualcomm card that’s kinda similar on it and get it to work in Wi-Fi 6 compatibility mode.
Boggles my mind that the 2 biggest enterprise Linux vendors took this laptop, ran a “thorough hardware certification process” on it and let it pass. Is this a pass? How long have they tried it? Have they even tried suspending?
Of course, that was a return. But when I think about new laptops and Windows 11, basically anything works. You don’t have to pay attention to anything: suspend will work, WiFi will work, audio and speakers as well, if you need fractional scaling you aren’t in for a world of pain, and if you want an NVidia dGPU, it does work.
Furthermore, the Windows 11 compatible CPU list is completely unofficial arbitrary, since you can still sideload Windows 11 on “unsupported” hardware and it will run with a far higher success rate than Linux on a random laptop you buy in store now. Like, it has been confirmed to run well on ancient Intel CPUs with screens below the minimum resolution. It’s basically a skin over 10 and there are no significant kernel modifications.
To be clear: I don’t like Windows, but I hate this post as a consumer of bleeding edge hardware because it hides the problem under the rug - most new hardware is Windows-centric, and Linux supported options are few and far between. Nowdays not even the manufacturer declaring Linux support is enough. This friend of mine got a Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition, and if he uses ANY ISO except the default Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 audio doesn’t work at all! And my other friend with a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has various GPU artifacts on the screen on anything except the relative Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 image. It’s such a minefield.
I have effectively added €500 to my budget, to now reach an outrageous €2000 for a premium Linux laptop with no significant trade-offs (mostly, I want a good screen and good performance). I am considering taking a shot in the dark and pre ordering the Framework 16, effectively swaying from traditional laptop makers entirely and hoping a fully customized laptop by a company that has been long committed to Linux support will be different.
Why would you throw away so much money for new and shitty hardware, if Linux runs perfectly on old robust devices, which can be bought for a fraction of what you invested?
Probably marketing speech for “an intern tested it once with the default setup and he reported there were no errors”
Broken standby on Linux
That is sometimes broken because of broken UEFI/ACPI implementations which the Windows drivers were made to respect and work around, but the Linux drivers who are often developed not by the hardware manufacture himself but rather 3rd parties who implement them according to the available docs/specifications, will then result in a semi-broken functionality because implementing something according to the specification doesn’t mean much unfortunately if there are quirks or bugs you have to circumvent as well. This improves over time though with more adoption of Linux. When you compare the hardware support of Linux today vs. 20 years ago, it’s become much, much better already due to more developers and users working on it / reporting issues, and also more and more hardware vendors becoming actually involved in the Linux driver development.
GPU bugs and screen flickering on Linux
Various hangs and crashed
Definitely not normal. But it’s likely that it’s just a small configuration or driver issue. Since you didn’t provide any details, I just leave it as “easy to configure properly”. I get that it would be cooler if it worked OOTB, but sometimes that isn’t the case. It goes both ways, as well. It’s hard to generalize based on few occurrences, but I also had problems long ago with a mainboard with its Realtek audio drivers on Windows which didn’t work. Don’t remember the details because it was long ago but I had to hunt for a very specific driver version from Realtek (wasn’t easy to find), and couldn’t use the one the mainboard vendor provided as the Realtek driver, nor the one provided by Windows by default. Anyway, of course Windows is generally better supported on most notebooks, I won’t deny that, but that’s simply due to market share, not because it’s somehow made better. That’s important to realize. If Linux had 80% market share, it would be the other way round, every manufacturer would absolutely ensure that their driver will work on all their distro targets and all their hardware models. In the Linux world, the drivers are sometimes made by 3rd party developers because otherwise there would be no driver at all, and so it’s better to have a mostly functional driver than none at all. And that’s also just because the vendors CAN ignore Linux based on marketshare. They shouldn’t, but they can, and it makes short-term financial sense to do so, so it happens. Of course, if they market some of their models as explicitly Linux-friendly, they should absolutely ensure that such things will work OOTB. But even if they don’t, it’s usually not hard to make it work.
new laptops and Windows 11, basically anything works
Only because the manufacturer HAS to ensure that it works, while he DOESN’T HAVE to ensure that Linux will play nice with that hardware as well. I recommend using either notebooks from Linux-specific manufacturers (I had good experiences with Tuxedo for example) or you continue to use the “Linux-centric” notebook models from Dell/HP/… and then simply troubleshoot any shortcomings these might have. I don’t know the model but it’s very likely that it’s a simple configuration issue. And I wouldn’t recommend using the manufacturer’s default OS. Especially not with Windows notebooks. Always reinstall a fresh, unmodified OS, and work from there. I’d even assume that if you leave out any vendor-specific software or kernel modules, your problems will probably vanish already.
I have effectively added €500 to my budget
That’s an unfortunate reality also in other areas. Smaller vendors can’t produce in mass quantities, and so they have to sell their stuff for more money, even though it seems counter-intuitive at first. But this is also the case with e.g. the Librem 5 mobile phone which is also very expensive (but a great option if you want a mainline Linux phone) [in this case, it’s very expensive becaue you not only pay for the hardware, but also for the software development time], or well anything which isn’t cheaply produced on a mass scale where you get volume discounts. So in a sense, if you want to change the status quo, you have to pay extra. So yes, buying a brand new Linux notebook isn’t cheap, unless you want to specifically use an older notebook where Linux also happens to run on. But on the other hand, buying a pure Linux notebook also should generally ensure that it will work well. Similar to how when you buy hardware from Apple, they will ensure that OS X runs well on it.
I don’t think that you can generalize anything from your or your friend’s experience, so it seems likely that your friend misconfigured something or installed something the wrong way, leading to such stability problems. General tip: stability issues are almost always driver-related. Same as on Windows. So first try to remove all non-essential drivers (kernel modules on Linux) and see whether that improves stability. And, of course, check the logs. In most cases, they will point out the issue. I’ve also installed Linux on several “Windows-only” (not marketed as Linux compatible) notebooks and it ran just fine without ANY stability or graphics issues. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad for work and it runs Arch Linux, it’s probably more stable than the Win11 it’s supposed to run with. At least among my colleagues who run Win11 on it, I’m the only one who didn’t yet have a driver or update issue within its lifespan. One of those colleagues even had to reinstall Win11 after a borked update. I also use Tuxedo notebooks (Linux-compatible by default) personally and they’re great as well. But of course I never use vendor-supplied software, so I’m not affected if such software behaves badly. I always configure my systems the way I want them, starting from a vanilla base.
Have you tried updating the kernel? If it’s been rated to work with a certain Linux distribution and it doesn’t work on yours then chances are that the distribution they tested with is using a newer kernel.
That being said new hardware can be quite problematic on Linux. I personally haven’t had issues with Huawei Matebooks provided I installed the newer kernels, but Apple Silicon was a nightmare.
I’ve thrown Linux on every laptop I’ve ever owned, and a couple of family members laptops as well and the past 15 years and haven’t encountered 1/10th of the issues they you have.
Complaining about broken suspend is funny because Microsoft basically killed S3 sleep in favour of the battery sucking S0. If anything it works better in Linux because you won’t open up your laptop to find that Windows Update fucking ran in the background while it was sitting closed in your backpack and rebooted.
I think your issue might be more of an AMD issue. They have a long history of buggy mobile hardware even on Windows.
I mean hell I threw Fedora on to my Intel MacBook Pro and the only real annoyance I had was not being able to reliably disable the SPDIF light in the 3.5mm jack.
I’m currently using the non-linux version of the XPS 13 2-in-1 and my OS experience is actually the opposite of your friends. I can install any Linux ISO without issue, but the standard Win 11 ISO refuses to work because it can’t detect any storage drives.
As far as daily driving Linux on it, the only things that don’t work are the fingerprint reader and webcam. It’s a bit of a piss off given that non-touchscreen version uses similar spec hardware that does support it but it doesn’t really affect daily use.
I’ve never had suspend work correctly on Linux. It’s always been buggy in Windows as well. You can boot from SSDs about just as fast as waking from suspend, so I don’t even try to use it anymore.
Windows 11 and its goddamn picky-ass CPU requirements… What the actual fuck, Microsoft? Did someone over there drink a tall glass of stupid juice and think, “Hey, let’s royally piss off a chunk of our user base just because we can?” This is tech elitism at its absolute shittiest.
It’s like Microsoft’s throwing a party, and instead of a guest list, they’ve got some half-baked, cockamamie CPU blacklist. “Oh, you’re rocking a perfectly functional CPU from a few years ago? Tough titties! Go fuck yourself with a USB stick!”
This isn’t progress; it’s goddamn techno-discrimination. It’s like being invited to a buffet and then being told you can only eat if your fork is from the latest silverware collection. I mean, who’s making these decisions over there? A drunk leprechaun playing darts with a list of CPUs?
Look, I get wanting to advance, to push the boundaries of what’s possible. But this? It’s like serving someone a gourmet meal and then punching them in the gut for not having the right kind of fucking taste buds.
Windows 11, with its bizarre-ass CPU criteria, is a masterclass in how to cock up a product launch. Dear Microsoft, next time you decide to drop a steaming turd of a decision on your users, at least have the decency to hand out some goddamn air fresheners, because this shit STINKS.
it’s also a case of micros$ucks wants to completely dominate the market and remove any type of GNU/Linux OS competition. They don’t care about the users, they only care about $$$$$
I have some crazy theories about “why” this is happening, I’m not an expert though.
I think that enforcing TPM is part of the end-to-end attestation plans for the Internet: arstechnica.com/…/googles-web-integrity-api-sound… . TPM allows for a full stack, end-to-end, of hardware->operating system->browser trust chain to make sure you’re not rooting your own system to get around DRM.
This sells hardware as “never-linuxers” are forced to upgrade, and people who have been scraping by with old hardware are given an “excuse” to upgrade. I guess that results in profits for partners and also MS?
Maybe I sound crazy. At any rate, I’m really glad for places like Lemmy (and operating systems like Linux) existing, because I don’t trust any for-profit tech company not to ban Firefox/Linux users/Ad block/video streaming/etc.
I use Windows for work and gaming, MacOS for app development (mostly because I can code for iOS and Android in one environment), and ChromeOS for my daily browsing.
I just enjoy how chrome always works when I need to just browse the internet or buy something online without issue.
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