I have no issues with battery life, wifi, or BT or anything else. The first ~6 months of 2014 was a rough ride, because the hardware was so new there was no proper support for it in the kernel, but the team @ Dell managed to upstream all the required stuff, so depending on their custom Ubuntu release is no longer necessary. Everything should just work out of the box.
Once I done that, I now have the perfect developer laptop (in my opinion of course :-) )
Unless one wasn't "wrestling" with Linux in the first place, because things tend to just work these days.
> While Linux certainly works on laptops it doesn't work well. Wifi and battery life are absymal
That's blatantly untrue. Given the right laptop, Linux is on par or excels. Given the wrong laptop, an install from scratch of the Windows operating system is likely to be far worse.
> problems seemingly totally out of nowhere
So problems that arose without any changes to the system?
> there's nothing.
Well, there's full access to your own system.
> Drivers [..] are running in Windows
Never run old hardware or peripherals? Because if you do Windows is a world of pain filled with drivers sourced from questionable download sites.
I'll assume good faith here instead of astroturfing, but you might want to tone down the unwarranted praise of X over Y when describing your satisfaction with your current setup, especially when you're apparently not really familiar with Y.
Yes it is very nice to have 1, 2 or even 5 Laptops which work with linux.
Windows still runs on more devices, better.
I had never the issue, that i had to sit it out that a specific bug came into the release cycle of a windows update but i had this 4 times in 3 years with arch linux.
And i also have a strange experience with linux: One ssd does work flawless under windows and under linux it creates minilags of the whole system.
While i like my linux machine and i use it daily @work and also daily @private laptop, it takes more effort and more knowledge than windows.
It's been a long time I haven't seen a general purpose laptop or desktop that didn't work flawlessly with both Ubuntu and Fedora. The only one I have is the MacBook Pro in front of me, but it comes with a decent OS anyway.
> Windows still runs on more devices, better.
Can it delete open files now?
Does it matter? And how is this related to the rest of the discussion? :)
Samsung 840 series? Well-known bug in their firmware. Update your firmware.
It's got variations of: "It works for me!" "You chose the wrong hardware!" "Well you can fix that because the source is available!" and "But Windows is worse!"
But it's missing: "Try distribution #132!" "You don't actually want to do that!" and my favorite: "Maybe you're just too stupid to use it!"
Dual-booting on an XPS15. Running Ubuntu and Win10. I've had fewer problems with Ubuntu than Win10.
Had a HiDPI version of the same laptop at the last gig. Both Windows and Linux had some issues which were easier to overcome.
Windows definitely gets better hardware support.
However, having my local "dev" environment be native Linux is glorious. No weird Docker issues. Python is legit. Don't have to mess with Homebrew.
Wifi, Bluetooth, HD resolutions, keyboard buttons, printers, everything just seems to work in Ubuntu, and this has been the case for quite a few years now.
$ git clone ssh://blahblahblah.space/repo.git
[...]
$ code repo
Part of the issue is that using Linux exposes you much more directly to the quality of the hardware (and the associated firmware and drivers). The hardware that "just works" on Windows might be horribly engineered, but Windows and the proprietary drivers might cover over the problems. On Linux, bad hardware is more likely to just work badly.
Isn't Arch specifically for users who don't mind things breaking and going deep into internals to fix it?
More of my thoughts on Arch:
In my 4 years using mint / ubuntu, an update broke my machine once, and that was when the power went out during an update.
Arch apparently works great for a lot of people, but I'd urge caution.
Arch is a rolling release that many choose to update daily, or on a fixed schedule, like once a week. That updates sometimes can break a thing or two, out of hundreds of updates, is to be expected. If that sounds scary to you, Arch is certainly not for you. That said, it has rarely happened to me, and any breakage is usually minor and easily fixed. It's not like you have to even figure out how; it's laid out for you on the Wiki, Forum or Arch's homepage. My experience with other distros has been far more troubling, except Slackware. Arch's strengths easily outweigh occasional inconveniences. Not having to deal with anything Ubuntu or Canonical is a great bonus.
With Arch, installing a package just unpacks the package files and runs a few innocuous post-install hooks, mostly to rebuild indexes (mandb, fontconfig, etc.) and compile DKMS-based kernel modules. But nothing potentially destructive like `systemctl start postfix`.
Also, it installs exactly what you want, instead of dozens of tangentially-related "suggested packages". If you `apt install rsyslog`, it pulls in an entire MTA because somewhere deep in rsyslog, there is an option that might send emails, so Debian in its unending wisdom determines that you MUST HAVE an MTA beyond this point. In Arch, `pacman -S rsyslog` installs just rsyslog and a few required shared libraries.
So does Debian, if that's what you tell it you want (either on the config file or as a CLI argument). Even without that, while it may suggest a full MTA by default, you can ask it for another solution and it'll suggest a simple mailer (like bsd-mailx).
I don't dispute that Arch's defaults guide you to a simpler system, but it's not really hard to start from Debian netinstall and add just what you need, package by package.
Exactly. The correct solution for me is "no mailer at all".
For many years (roughly since systemd) I hoped there's a kind of "modern Linux handbook" especially when people come up with solutions to problems seemingly totally out of nowhere but turns out, there's nothing. Some people have knowledge of narrow areas but the entire modern Linux is a frighteningly complex monster. And when you realize your fractions of knowledge makes you one of the experts, that's even worse: when I ask about DisplayLink in Linux, I am redirected to the relevant Arch Wiki page where the meat of the page was written by me years ago...
I set up Windows 10 to my taste https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi... and it's a better world now. Drivers and GUI programs are running in Windows, daemons and CLI tools are running in Linux, switching to a brief game session is trivial.