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A comment on If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter. Parent comment

Re:If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big th... by mattlondon on Monday November 15, 2021 @03:35PM (#29232344)
My work Linux laptop frequently (several times daily) breaks Bluetooth, breaks audio, does not wake from sleep, wakes from sleep but only shows the mouse pointer on a black screen, stops throttling the CPU down, resets the DHCP-specified DNS server to 0.0.0.0, sends stuff to printers that cause them to just spit out endless blank sheets of paper. The "solutions" to all of these are multi-step manual disasters... uninstall pulse audio, restart cinnamon, reinstall blueman, upgrade Jack, manually create config files from copying some file on a GitHub repo, downgrade to some specific version of CUPS, mess about with apt-get repos to not get the latest version of whatever...wtf?! That is not user friendly.

My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.

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Re:If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big th... by smallerfish on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:20PM (#29234289)
Sounds like a truly broken install. What's the maintenance history of the machine? Have you been patching it from third party repos? Why are you running Jack on a work computer anyway?

Back up your documents and do a fresh install. It'll take you an hour and you'll regain stability.

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Re:If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big th... by BenoitEssiambre on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:51PM (#29234605)
I mean, I admit you do have to start with known supported hardware. I have no patience for having to install drivers but like I said, for the last decade, it has been easy to find a computer where most everything worked out of the box (Bluetooth maybe the exception but it doesn't seem to work half of the time on any pair of devices/cars regardless or software being open source or not). System76 laptops are great when you want something specifically designed and tested for Linux. Before that, I used to bring a live Ubuntu CD to Bestbuy, pop it in computers to see which one would run everything out of the box. I would say success rate was higher than 50%.
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Re:If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big th... by mattlondon on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @02:09AM (#29237759)
Corporate centrally managed install. Dell hardware.

Jack is apparently needed to get Bluetooth to emit audio reliably... but I would not put much trust in that since it didn't fix Bluetooth not working.

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Re:If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big th... by smallerfish on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @06:30AM (#29239356)
That's annoying. Honestly it sounds like your IT dept is missing some expertise, and maybe tried to be too clever by installing some hacky add-ons, which destabilized things. It seems like something of a ridiculous stretch on their part, for example, to think that Jack would be required for bluetooth.

That said, as long as they're willing to be hacky: bluetooth audio worked reasonably well for me _until_ I got a headset with its own dongle. At that point the original bluetooth dongle stopped pairing reliably with the speakers I was using. That prompted me to switch to pipewire and it's been rock solid since. You might suggest to IT that they experiment with pipewire (since it's the new hotness, they may actually take you up on it.)

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