Unfortunately laptop driver support is often rough. I used an XPS 9343 (one marketed as supporting Ubuntu) but I faced issues with popping speaker sounds and mobile data tethering sucking GBs of data for some crazy reason.

Thats why I changed to thinkpads. They seen to use less weird hardware with no support. But I had to do some concessions. I don`t use notebooks with discrete gpus, since NVIDIA optimus have shit support.

Thinkpads have ACPI bugs that transfer to Windows too, it's amazing.

I've been using Lenovo's Legion devices instead. They don't run this horribly bloated BIOS, they run the much less critically acclaimed Insyde BIOS, but guess what, it just works. I've not had an unexpected wake-crash in years (aside from nvidia drivers with the mux switch on, but just use amdgpu instead). Desktop grade processors, weight comparable to a T420. Definitely not a device to use on the go, but very capable if you just need to carry a computer to the office.

I think the new Framework laptops might be better than Thinkpads now.

I'd use one in a heartbeat if they had a trackpoint.

I have been using the HP Elitebooks provided by my company and works well with Ubuntu. No complaints. I even upgraded my RAM to 64 GB.

Is amatter of time before someone provide a keyboard with one.

And also impossible to buy in Brazil. So for a while,, I will still have to relly on thinkpads.

At least with some ThinkPad with discrete GPUs they put a BIOS option for toggling whether to use integrated graphics, discrete graphics or both which means you can avoid Optimus if you want. I've had other laptops without such an option and then you have to deal with Optimus or some other workaround. It's not perfect though because often video outputs will be routed through one card or the other so if you want to use the Displayport out you have to use discrete graphics.

I'm on a Lenovo Yoga 5 Slim now. Cheap for the specs, needed some tweaking to get suspend working, otherwise works like a charm out-of-the-box.

My everyday beater is a Thinkpad x250. Small, ligth, not exactly top of the line, but works for most aplications. Only thing I suffer is running Android studio in it.

For some reason I've never really had any issues with any of the many many laptops I've used over the years. Various HP laptops in the past, mostly, and DEC laptops back in the 20th century. Lately a private NEC laptop (all parts Intel, everything worked out of the box), and my work laptop is currently a Fujitsu Lifebook. No problems with anything. It Just Works.

Dell XPS have great drivers support in kernel, but I actually found the vanilla Mate DE experience to be a downgrade from Ubuntu 18 to 20, I needed to do an unusual amount of tinkering. I am convinced this will always be the case for Linux DEs unless some company starts to sell support packages for properly tested configuration combinations.

Buy hardware for the software you want to use for your comfort and security.

It can't be an afterthought.

Same goes for phones. Buy the right phone, don't be upset you can't load GrapheneOS on your cheap Samsung handset.

Right, that's why it was disappointing that a laptop so clearly marketed as supporting Ubuntu (XPS 9343) didn't even have decent sound support.

For the remote data thing -- I ran into this a few years ago on Fedora when I was spending a lot of time away from the house, and buying 5 GB at a time for wireless data. I eventually had to write a script to sound an alarm when data usage started increasing, and caught the culprit program in the act. Was one of the background Yum / DNF update processes. Ended up killing Packagekit, and problem went away.

Had a similar experience with a Dell preshipped with Ubuntu. Also wouldn't go to sleep when I got it, was crazy. Eventually started working maybe after bios update but was pretty frustrating

Have an XPS 13 9310 running Ubuntu 20.04 and it runs flawlessly. Things like sleep were a little rough when it was first released, but updates by Dell since have made it rock solid.

No popping sounds in headphones/speakers from the realtek driver?

Nope, none.

Indeed. I'm a web developer and my tools genuinely work better just under native Linux than they ever could with WSL etc.

Would love to, but my employer has complex network settings (using 802.11X..), specific vpn client, im software, hw auth tokens with specific drivers and Windows shares and ntlm proxies all of which that makes integrating to the internal network with Linux a part time job. I gave up and set up a vm with Linux keeping windows do its thing.

Any reason to not use wsl? I’m forced to either use windows/Mac at work and chose windows with wsl. Works reasonably well. I just live in WSL and use office (which is better than MAC office by a large margin)

wsl needs to be administrator if I'm not mistaken, plus needs internal network which may/may not be allowed by the antivirus/firewall package, I prefer no to spend too much neurons on windows debugging / internals and keep them for linux

High DPI displays support can be quite rough in Linux, along with slowish GUI. Some apps are fine, others less so. Last time I was using Mac - it was constantly overheating, then the battery inflated itself, Docker performance was awful. I went with Windows 10 + WSL2 ~ year ago (some for compatibility reasons, some because curiosity) and it's working OK so far. Most of my time is spent in WSL2 + VSC with rest being mostly for browser and running some VMs. It works surprisingly well. Well enough I don't feel any urgent need to go and install Linux (except the one running in WSL). I did look at Mac options ~ year ago but it just wasn't worth the money. Its price tag + effectively locked HW platform is just not worth it compared to what I currently use. It's not like I can't afford it, there's just no added value in it, at least for my type of work (DevOps,SysOps). I won't be upgrading to Win11 anytime soon though, I'll probably switch back to Linux sometime in the future.

> I can only see there being an advantage for some game developers to be using it these days

Maybe for developers writing games in C++ or their own engines (or small time engines), but for many, how is it better?

As far as I know, out of the most popular engines, only Godot actually offers out-of-the-box Linux support. Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and the others don't offer Linux support for their editors, although some give you access to the source code so you can build it yourself on Linux, but that's often not so trivial.

while this data is 5 years out of date (and I was writing C++), the sdk and toolchain for PS3 and PS4 was only installable via windows (even though they're BSD platforms, go figure).

The same was true for wii/wiiU (linux under the hood) if I recall correctly. I'd be shocked if that weren't also the case for xbox* though I don't remember that specifically.

Unity has fairly good support for Linux editors. I've been working in Unity on Linux for years now, without any major issues.

Unity has supported Linux for a few years now.

> Yeah, the answer is to simply not use Windows.

Yeah, no.

You either switch to Mac and lose 99% of your applications and some of your hardware.

Or you switch to Linux and lose 90% of your applications and latest hardware; And enjoy random problems and figuring out which of hundred answers online is right. Answer could be none, because for example Wayland support for multiple monitors sucks.

If you want to run Linux on a computer, you do your research and build/buy one where the hardware support is there. Most people don't need "latest" hardware; hardware from 2-3 years ago is fine, and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too -- again, if you do your research.

Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine (especially if it's a laptop) will often fail, and that's why people spend hours on forums looking for answers.

Long ago I tried to run Linux on Macs. I would always get it to more or less work, but it would take a lot of time and toil. I had the patience for that back then. Now I just buy a Dell XPS 13 and stop worrying about it, because everything works out of the box. It's not my favorite piece of hardware, but it's fine.

I also do wonder where all these critical Windows-only applications are. I spend 90% of my computing time in a browser, terminal window, or text editor/IDE. Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without, but the vast majority of users out there don't.

> and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too

True: a bit more than a year ago I bought a new computer with (I think) a B550 chipset motherboard which was very recent.

Wasn't supported by Kubuntu 20.04, I just had to install Kubuntu 20.10 and that's it.

IMHO Linux hardware isn't a problem at all. Software is more problematic (I had a lot of side projects WPF apps that can't run on Linux and I'm a bit lazy to port them to another framework or language so I have installed a Windows VM.

> Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine

Not random, but my current machine. How else am I (or random person on the Internet) to migrate to Linux then?

Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

E.g. You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away. Get AMD. Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I honestly dread switching to Linux.

> Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without

Stuff like Office (not online ones), Adobe suite, video editors, sound editors, etc.

Worth noting a lot of people had to upgrade their computer for Win10 (2 of my relatives were told they had to buy new computers by Windows but I managed to upgrade them with out after lots of fiddling), a lot will have to upgrade for Win11 (to get TPM2 modules).

I think the answer to the last one is if you need Microsoft software then use it. Not much you can do if your chosen vendor doesn't support other OS (WINE, VMs, and such aside).

TPM 2 plus a BIOS update for any board made pre August of 2021, & 60GB or so of free space on their OS drive, which these days is also more of a rarity since the trend has been small OS SSD drive with large secondary & storage drives.

Honestly, your machine will probably work. Linux supports a lot of hardware. Nowadays it's rare to find any that doesn't work.

> You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away

Nvidia works fine (it has to, lots of ML shit on GPUs is done on Linux), you just need proprietary drivers. If anything their support on Linux is probably better than AMD's.

Why? Just make an Ubuntu startup stick and try it without installing... Nothing lost except maybe 10 minutes of your time.

> Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I've used dual monitors on my linux setup for years without issues. Is this a common problem?

I've been using dual screens on Linux since 2009 and for the last 2 years triple screens.

My current PC is using and nVidia 1660 GPU to drive this.

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04. It wasn't out-of-the-box easy to install, but running installer in safe-mode worked and regular boots are as normal.

Even on laptops dual screens work provided the laptop supports it.

There is a problem if there is a mismatched DPI between screens.

I've rarely seen it as i usually dock the machine with duplicate monitors.

This used to require some tweaking under gnome (different DPI), but is nice and smooth under wayland.

> Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

I understand what you are saying but it is not such a big deal in practice as it may seem. You migrate if your current machine supports linux (you have to do some research), OR you migrate the next time you switch machines.

Linux is my daily driver for 15+ years now and the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't bother me at all. I am currently using two xps laptops and one custom built desktop - everything worked out of the box. I had good experience with thinkpads in the past.

It all comes down to the time you are willing to dedicate in learning something new.

For most of the stuff that runs on windows and mac there are alternatives on linux, some equal, some worse, some better. I have been mostly a linux users for years. I still have one laptop with a dual boot on windows...for only one use case: music production. Not because there are no music production software available, not because they aren't good, quite the contrary there are fairly decent tools both opensource and proprietary, but because I don't know them well. I only do music as a hobby in my free time and so far I have been too lazy, or more interested in producing music than learning a new workflow. I admit it is mostly about laziness and time to dedicate to something new. I intend to correct that because I don't want to feel forced to use windows, which I mostly hate for anything else, for that.

What on earth are you talking about? I am running Ubuntu 21.10 with triple monitors and a Nvidia 3090.

You're just making stuff up now. I bought an RTX 2070 (nvidia, as you know), and it worked fine, runs all my games, under archlinux just fine.

Same with dual, triple monitors, etc.

> You're just making stuff up now.

Linux Desktop evangelists being like this also makes people not want to switch. Who wants to deal with a community like that?

For you. On your hardware and your distro. I've seen and heard stuff going south from word go.

If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

If it's a laptop then buying an entire machine is the norm.

If you want to test hardware you already own, then just do it. No need to do any real research there.

> If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

Should isn't won't.

https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M

I don't recall that series having much in the way of hardware problems, excluding the goxlr and such because that's not part of the desktop.

If it was unclear that my sentence was in the scope of hardware, sorry.

I remember Luke saying multiple monitors broke at one point on his laptop, but that was a laptop.

> where all these critical Windows-only applications are

The vast majority of users would suffer if forced to use only Linux apps. Think Office Vs LibreOffice or Photoshop Vs GIMP. A lot wouldn't be able to work at all, like the folks who use Solidworks.

Let's not pretend that browser/terminal/IDE is the most common usage of PCs.

I would suffer if I had to use Windows applications. Because having to pay (or even pirate) quality paid software that I have to sit and learn is less convenient than downloading pretty good free (as in beer) software that I've used for the past 5 years and I'm very comfortable with. GNOME applications are surprisingly polished and good, and I'm not getting that on Windows.

I'm one of those who use Solidworks and there are no Linux equivalents, let alone polished ones. So, as in everything, YMMV.

100% fair.

Krita and Blender are pretty sweet though. And you can use some versions of Photoshop via Wine perfectly fine. The same goes for Office.

When x570 was just released, I bought all the newest stuff from AMD, and everything just worked, if you were on a recent kernel. Similarly, when I got a Thinkpad, I just bought it and everything worked. Not saying that this is a representative sample, but I've been successfully skipping the part where I spend months researching if the hardware I buy will work.

I have a recent AMD GPU and CPU, which I bought because of AMD's GPU drivers being part of the kernel. I have absolutely no problems with my PC running Ubuntu, it's rock solid and I can play almost any game on Steam via Proton - all while not dealing with Microsoft's shit. Windows where the dark ages for me.

Linux has many challenges, but honestly, Macs are way too expensive and closed system (maybe you don't care if you have an US salary, I do) and Microsoft trying to push for BS every update gets really old.

It depends what you work on. I have installed popos like 2 years ago. I have 0 issues so far. For web development, nodejs etc. Linux is better than windows by a miles.

Not everybody is graphics designer, video editor who needs Photoshop, Microsoft Excel etc.

And, I haven't found any random problems at least on PC. It might be problematic in laptop, which I honestly don't know.

My last and current laptops work completely fine with linux, but I chose hardware that works fine. The old one is a Latitude E5470, and the new one is a Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 ARE (with Ryzen 4700u). Both require no extra drivers, while the new one requires at least kernel 5.10 to work, and works better with 5.13. Both have similar battery life on windows 10 and linux.

Yeah, I run Arch and despite it being a kind of "hobbyist" type system, after the initial configuration, there are no problems or constant maintenance. I have had a few things break sometimes because I accidentally install a partial update, but that's obviously my own fault.

Also, part of the problem people have with Linux is that it does not run Windows programs and they complain because they can't get QEMU or VMware or WINE functioning correctly. You shouldn't need those. When you switch to Linux, you lose your software. It's a reality you accept, because that software you used was not designed for Linux. Instead of trying desperately to get your old software to run, you instead use alternatives, be they open or closed, to run what you want. There are more than a few alternatives, many of them having similar or exceeding the power of paid windows-only products.

Back when the 2070 came out I built a machine with that RTX 2070, i7-9700k, some new ram, some new harddrives and ssd(s), m.2 and not, etc. and I have not had any issues with Archlinux.

Same experience when I bought my thinkpad L14 AMD, no issues either.

Im convinced at this point that the entire "linux is bad on new hardware" is a thing of the past.

The thing here is, it never technically was. The issue in the past was vendors either writing the drivers like they do windows, but for linux, or producing technical documentation so someone could. Instead, there were lots of times years and years ago, where a lot of drivers had to be reverse engineered. So the hardware on linux being bad, was mostly and issue that at one time, no one cared to write drivers or provide the necessary information.

If the drivers aren’t there then Linux is bad on that hardware for anyone attempting to use it. It doesn’t matter to the end user that the lack of drivers is the manufacturer’s fault.

If you don't like to get raped by $megacorp1 buy $megacorp2 instead! After all, consoom you must, right?

What?!

It's just there isn't a good path. So might as well remain on current thing that works.

In my case the $15 Windows.

Aside from some weird GDI printer that refuse to work with any operating system other than Windows I never[0] had any issues with hardware. I recently tried to revive an ancient drawing board and when it didn't work with Linux I - for old habits' sake. Turned out it didn't work with Windows either because it was broken.

tldr; Linux' hardware support is excellent these days.

[0] Since about 2010. Before that I had lots of issues, especially with graphic cards and broken ALSA drivers and stuff. All of these problems have disappeared for all practical purposes.