I’ve seen people say that for 20 years
> This would not have happened 10 years ago.
Funny you say that, as I was installing Ubuntu on peoples laptops and it just worked, like 15 years ago... :-)
"I installed Ubuntu on peoples laptops and was extremely lucky they happened to have compatible hardware or didn't notice the stuff that didn't work and had a non-borked firmware". FTFY.
This was absolutely not everyones experience, including mine.
Re:Linux 7.2 Released
by mschuster91 on Friday August 21, 2026 @06:18AM
(#49386062)
Only on a select combination of blessed components and BIOS/EFI not half-ass broken to the tune it only worked somewhat stable on Windows.
Anything with split iGPU/dGPU was a mess no matter what and where, WiFi that was not Intel was a mess, suspend to ram and suspend to disk were a coin flip if the system would wake up again or if it would decide to wake up on its own and overheat itself to panic.
Re:Linux 7.2 Released
by sscaryterry on Friday August 21, 2026 @05:28PM
(#49393986)
The most fun I ever had with a computer was as a 17-year old, installing gentoo on a P4 machine, over dialup, stage 2 tarball, custom kernel.
This year I have installed Linux Mint on computers from people who wanted to jump from Windows to Linux. Every time I booted via USB, installed Linux and 10 minutes later everything was working. This would not have happened 10 years ago. Back then there would always be an issue with a video driver, WiFi driver or audio driver.
Of course there are still hardware issues for some special deviced, but today Linux just runs fine for most people. And that's a great accomplishment.