I don't understand. I run linux on an IBM Thinkpad T40 for the better part of a decade.Then I moved to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon which also runs Ubuntu fine.
IN fact installing linux takes at most 20 min and I am done. Drivers and everything are all automatic.
Windows on the other hand can take hours to install from scratch. God forbid you need a service pack or to find a driver that's not easily found anymore.
People have a cognitive dissonance about what it takes to run Linux. It's by far much easier than people lead on. Yes if you need to get into the underneath of things then maybe it becomes more difficult. But I don't think that's been part of the story for average users for a long time.
>> Yes if you need to get into the underneath of things then maybe it becomes more difficult.
IMO Windows is even more difficult when you want to get into underneath of things. Fiddle with registry settings, services and at times deleting AppData\App folder to get something fixed.
At least in case of Linux you get good set of answers to your Google queries, but that is not as good in case of Windows. Also, Windows and the ecosystem of software around it has a huge reliability and performance problem still unsolved. Freezing, crashing are still rampant with Windows 10. If I boot my laptop after a week Windows Update holds me up for at least half an hour. Every update restarts the OS several times.
That's because it's a Thinkpad. The T-series had been the Red Hat company issue laptop for years, and has had boatloads of internal support as a result.
You're right in that a Thinkpad will mostly work out of the box long as you don't want that Nvidia GPU to work, but everyone else? Good luck. My XPS 15 was a lost cause, losing three quarters of it's battery life under Linux and with countless video problems.
And on a desktop? Hah! Roll the dice baby, and keep rolling them with every update, because sooner or later something's going to break. It always does.
That XPS laptop of yours probably isn't great with OS X either. Yet nobody blames Apple for that.
It's a bit of a double standard. If you want a pain free workhorse, go with something that's supported out of the box. Don't buy that Nvidia GPU if you intend to use it for a Linux desktop, where it is unlikely to be of much use anyway (unless you are one of those CAD people in which case you use what your vendor supports).
Personally I settled for Thinkpads many years ago (the T- and X-series, not non-Thinkpads that Lenovo tries to peddle under that brand name) and they haven't given me any trouble yet. Seeing how Windows laptops sometimes doesn't wake from sleep properly makes me suspect that that's not much better tested either. If it boots, ship it.
Nvidia is more trouble only that you need to install the proprietary driver rather than using what comes with the kernel. You also need vdpau if you want hardware decoding of video.
Has Linux changed a lot? Last I tried installing it years ago, I had to find each driver individually and had to get some stubborn ones working. At the time I thought to myself - no average Joe would figure this out, no wonder nobody uses Linux (and by nobody I meant non-devs)
Had less problems with Linux tyan with Windows for about 10 years now.
Installation is quicker.
No bloatware/scareware to uninstall (bundled McAfee etc).
I've spent more time hunting for drivers on Windows than on Linux the 10 last years.
Linux is also significantly faster for some of my workflows (git commits, anything with maven or node).
For me (partially colorblind, never cared much about fonts, everything is an improvement from what I grew up with) I also find certain Linux DEs a lot nicer and easier to use than Windows and even MacOS. Again this is my personal opinion, but I have used Windows for years before I switched to Linux and I've also been enthusiastic about Mac and Apple and have used it for years, I just happen prefer KDE or a well tuned Gnome, Cinnamon or elementary
The downsides? In my experience Linux is slightly less stable. And there exist stuff that is only supported on Windows (an old scanner I have. Although I should add it is not great under Windows either.)
I did. I like VueScan and had a paid license at that time IIRC. But that particular scanner just didn't work which was a shame since it was supposed to be a good with photos and negatives. And as mentioned above it was good on Windows either.
Edit: I actually looked it up now on the VueScan website and here is what is says:
"VueScan is compatible with the <my scanner model> on Windows x86, Windows x64 and Mac OS X."
Absolutely. I've installed Linux on quite a number of computers, and I've yet to run into a missing driver. It just works. Whereas I've also installed Windows on a lot of computers, and that's far more likely to have issues with drivers...
99.9% of drivers are in the kernel nto downloaded from random spots on the internet. The big exception is proprietary gpu drivers which user friendly distros provide packages for in the repos.
The big issue is thus. If you intend to run linux don't buy random hardware and hope it supports linux then complain linux is hard to make work. This is a natural course because people have all sorts of existing hardware and no real desire to buy new. It's also reasonable to try because linux does support a lot of hardware. Try it and if you like how the environment but not how works with your machine buy your next machine with linux in mind.
Linux issues are not about hardware support anymore (well mostly). The guy was talking about ui inconsistencies and overall ugliness of some distros (there are of course exceptions).
I have run exclusively Linux and mostly on laptops for 15 years and it's been about 10 years since I have had problems with packages clashing, except for python pip. (I don't use python though)
It doesn't work well. I use my 2016 MBP with an external monitor and once a month or so I need to hard reboot it after sleeping because it gets confused and won't display anything on the internal screen.
My system76, with vanilla Ubuntu LTS does this perfectly for years. As did my thinkpad before this and the thinkpad before that. Always Ubuntu LTS, without big modifications.
The last time I had 'sleep' issues was with MySQL crashing when it woke up, and it found the os time changed without its internal clock moving forward. IIRC that was over ten years ago.
My main computer for last few years has been an Asus X305 laptop, using Ubuntu 14.04 with the i3 tiling window manager (i.e., there is no desktop). It's best computing environment I've had since I started out on a TRS-80 in 1979.
My i3 setup is not tweaked to auto-sleep on lid close. I'm sure it would have been easy to set up when I installed i3 back in 2015, since the sleep-on-close worked with Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Instead, when I installed i3 I attached sleep function to a hotkey, so before I close the lid I press the hotkey (if I want system to sleep). It is totally not a big deal. The system does autoresume when I open lid, which it also did in Unity environment. But if it didn't that would also not be a big deal.
To me the idea that someone would reject a superior system if it didn't auto-sleep (or auto-resume) on lid close/open is bizarre. I actually prefer to manually control with a hotkey.
My HP Pavilion laptop did this perfectly several years ago, at which point I didn't even know how "lucky" I was that it all worked. Fedora/KDE was the distro.
Can you give us details of laptop and distribution used? Seems hardware is still difficult i.e. trackpads, WiFi, screen resolution, external displays, etc.
I’m on an XPS 13 9370. I like the idea of a Thinkpad but I wanted a laptop that came sold with Linux hence the Dell.
So far hardware support seems pretty good. Not sure my Ubuntu 18.10 install is getting the most out of the GPU but everything works including Bluetooth audio and suspend.
The only issues I have are with the trackpad and the silly keyboard layout.
Trackpad: it’s small, a bit twitchy and not sensitive at the edges when moving inwards but is moving outwards. Driver issue I think.
Keyboard: who thought it was a good idea to split the left and right keys with PgUp and PgDown? Someone who doesn’t touch type would be my bet. The old layout was better.
I think of it as a replacement for an 11” MacBook Air as it’s about the same size but with a 13” screen and a quad-core i7.
Oh also, I got a 4K display and that was a mistake. Raw terminal text is tiny and Gnome currently doesn’t mix monitor resolutions very well. So dual screening with a 1440 monitor is not easy. Ordering again I’d get FHD instead.
I'm running the same laptop with Manjaro and do not have any trackpad issues. So either you're right and there is some driver issue on your system or maybe it's a hardware issue.
Only problem I've encountered so far is that if I unplug my usb/hdmi/ethernet hub while it's in standby then X crashes as soon as I wake it.
Curiously after you asked me this I also tested my trackpad a bit more and it turns out that if I go slowly from off the trackpad onto the trackpad it doesn't register the touch at all.
Not sure if that's some kind of feature intended to prevent accidental touches or a bug. Never noticed it before in my ~7 months of use.
I’m pretty sure it’s a software thing whatever it is because I don’t get the same behaviour in the BIOS pages. The trackpad is pretty choppy there for me but it is sensitive at the edges.
Thinkpads and Dell Latitude series (5xxx something). Currently Thinkpad X220 and L440. Wifi non-free drivers but in most distros, trackpad on L440 seems to recognise multiple finger use for scrolling &c. I admit that I tend to use at most one external display - projector - and that seems to work, I know that the newer hires external displays pose issues around scaling &c
Or I have? Everyone has a different workflow. I've been linux only for 12 years about. I rubbed the license key off my laptop and when I went to re install and I just couldn't afford it. Been using linux ever since.
