Sleep has been working on my last ~10 laptops and desktops, it's a non-issue at this point unless you have brand new exotic hardware. I did have a motherboard issue on a first-gen Ryzen that required a bios update to get it working.

hi-dpi works very nicely if you use GTK or Qt. For the other apps, it really depends how they are implemented. For me it has been working better than Windows.

These are strawman agruments. Give Ubuntu 20.04 a try an you'll see stuff pretty much just works on any common hardware. You can even use slackware and get everything working with a bit of fiddling.

MacOS is a very nice OS but it isn't FOSS and it isn't more capable at this point, it's just a personal preference. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

> you'll see stuff pretty much just works

The problem is the "pretty much" part.

We all know what that means in practice. That's why OSX is popular.

I switched my AI workstation to Ubuntu 20 last week, and the experience was fast and great. I can now run docker containers with cuda, use PyCharm to coordinate everything and have code completion as if the code was local, even if it's executing on a docker worker node in our data center.

200% scaling on my 4K screen looks great, wifi, network, sleep, gpu all worked out of the box. And the IDE behaves exactly like on OS X.

The only thing I disliked was the default Ubuntu color scheme, but that was easy enough to change.

Then you cannot possibly have used MacOS. There is plenty of flakey edges, that actually don't work very well.

Fucking multiple desktop shit.

My MacBook Pro can't even remember the order of my monitors when it goes to sleep, or between reboots. Even Linux can do that.

OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software.

Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows.

Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible.

It does however, 'pretty much' work on most hardware.

And if you buy a machine from a vendor that actually supports/pre-installs/tests linux, all of the hardware will work out of the box.

It's that "pretty much" that's the debate.

I recently switched from macOS to Ubuntu 19.10 and then 20.04 as my daily driver and it's way flakier and has far more random app crashes than macOS.

That said, the system is fast, the UX is way further along than I expected -- in some ways it's got a better UX than macOS. It's way, way faster at nearly everything.

my point is that if you want to do better than 'pretty much', you should buy a machine from an OEM that actually supports linux

If you're installing it on a random windows laptop, you're never going to get better than 'pretty much', because the OEM doesn't support linux or test their hardware with linux.

Sway does HiDpi nicely as well, so you don't even have to use the Gnome/KDE pair.

When was the last time you gave KDE a try? I just switched from using a tiling window manager and was impressed by how much stuff "just works" and the degree of customizability.

>the degree of customizability.

That's part of the problem. Customizability is good, but in return you get inconsistency that you can't fix. And even if all system default apps looks the same (they still look horrible in my opinion), 90% of 3rd party apps look and feel different. You can hardly name a linux (qt or gtk) app that can be name elegant or at least thought through (UI wise). Almost all applications still look like they were build to be used on some factory terminal.

Last time i used KDE for a significant amount of time, something was distracting. Then i realized what it was: the "system tray" icons were erasing themselves and then got redrawn one by one and readjusted their position with each redraw. Distracting as hell when you're trying to concentrate on the code in a nearby window.

Mind, that was in 2013, and hopefully KDE has improved since then. Perhaps it has even reached the level KDE 3 was at? It's been downhill from there.

Btw, I switched to Macs from running Linux with KDE as my desktop of choice full time.

Sleep usually works, assuming you get a laptop that's known to with with Linux. The arch wiki is good for this.

HiDPI is hit and miss. Some applications work, some (especially Java) break badly. Expect to need manual, fragile configuration. You also cannot set scaling per-screen, so you're SOL if you have heterogenous monitors.

Personally I use Windows. I check back in Linux every few months, but WSL seems to be improving far faster than native Linux is, so there's not much reason to use it anymore.

Even once HiDPI works, assuming that happens, by that point I'll have HDR and VRR as requirements... and I have no confidence that those will work anytime soon.

Some people at my work use Linux laptops. Judging by the Linux slack channel, no sleep doesn't work reliably yet, external monitor support is terrible and touchpads still suck. No idea about HiDPI but I doubt it works reliably.

Whenever you bring anything like this up though you'll just get a load of "When was the last time you tried it? It works perfectly for me" replies. Linux users don't want to admit its flaws.

It's pretty difficult to acknowledge a supposed flaw pointed by a guy who knows a guy who uses Linux when you have never had it yourself.

I used Linux at work for years. Sleep just works, external monitor also just works. HiDPI was rough at the start but works fine now.

Touchpads do kind of suck. I generally really dislike the default mouse acceleration. Font rendering is still so so if you don't have a HiDPI screen and the most popular desktop environments are still kind of terrible.

But sleep definitely does work.

> Whenever you bring anything like this up though you'll just get a load of "When was the last time you tried it? It works perfectly for me" replies. Linux users don't want to admit its flaws.

Are you implying that those users are lying?

I'm sure sleep does work reliably for them.

'Does sleep work on linux' is a fallacious question to begin with, because sleep working/not working depends on the hardware.

On some configurations it works flawlessly, on others it doesn't. Therefore you will always have some people saying it works, and others saying it doesn't. FWIW, my current laptop is a machine that ships with linux (system76 darter pro) and sleep works 100% reliably.

In my experience, when sleep doesn't work reliably, it's usually due to buggy firmware behaviour because most vendors don't care about supporting anything other than windows.

Along those lines, since most OEMs don't ship/test linux, it's simply not possible for every single hardware configuration to work flawlessly with linux.

Sleep works fine, since many years, but the Hibernate button should get renamed to "Crash now please and Again on the next restart"

You know, many things changed since time Slackware was installed from floppies. Even Macs got working virtual memory meanwhile.

It is hard to improve things when everyone is on other platforms.

I am mostly on Windows devices, and use a GNU/Linux aging netbook for travelling.

In what concerns this Asus 1215B, everything works, with the exception that the open source AMD drivers were a downgrade from the binary blobs (OpenGL 4.1 => OpenGL 3.3 without video hardware decoding).

However I still kept it around, because although I don't target GNU/Linux as part of my work, I wanted to give Asus the message that selling GNU/Linux laptops might be a relevant business.

Eventually when it dies, I will be Windows/Android and occasionally macOS only user/developer, but I am not using any of these platforms to emulate GNU/Linux, I use them for their own value.

If you want a good experience with Linux on an ultra book, you need to buy hardware designed for Linux. System76 or Purism are my recommendations. I don’t trust Dell.

This is the only way to do it.

The kernel devs or distros can't possibly support every hardware combination and BIOS bug for each hardware manufacturer.

For Windows the hardware manufactures have a reason to make the drivers bug free, its where they make most of their money, and Microsoft has the capacity to help them get it fixed if needed.

This doesn't exist for Linux unfortunately, unless you buy a laptop where Linux is fully supported (and you use the supported distro and kernel version most likely).

I have to say the main culprit for issues is usually power saving. I assume that's because ACPI is often badly implemented and power saving requires a lot of separate components to function together, to specification. Likely one doesn't, and the laptop comes out of sleep with the touchpad not working, or something worse.

> Btw does sleep work on linux laptops these days? How's hi dpi support?

Both work out of the box with Ubuntu 18.04 running Gnome on a Thinkpad x1 carbon.

But having to flip a few switches is a funny excuse to handcuff yourself to OSX and the hardware required to run it.