I mean it’s not surprising if theyre not actively trying to troubleshoot their problems. I run Linux on both my desktop and laptop and I never had a perfect experience with either. On my laptop a few years ago I tried installing Ubuntu but my trackpad sensitivity on linux was way too high with no easy way to change it. I also needed fractional scaling and at the time Ubuntu used X11, I found some command on the Ubuntu forums to enable scaling in the settings and it gave me screen tearing. After a few hours of playing around with different commands I gave up and weny back to Windows.
On my desktop I use Nvidia and have two monitors with different refresh rates. That causes a lot of issues and I just have to put up with it.
Edit: I use Arch on both of them now and have found solutions to my problems but especially my laptop issues were very annoying.
Most likely. There are distros that just works namely Mint. Follow the official guide and the computer is ready for use in less than an hour. And ‘for the last twenty years’? I just don’t believe it.
I struggle to believe it, too. I can think of four laptops I’ve installed Linux on - one Macbook, two Dells, and one Lenovo, and all four of them worked perfectly without additional tinkering. Even the touchscreens on two of them worked without intervention. I’d talk about my desktop and server, but I haven’t upgraded the hardware in them in …a long time. 8 years would be my guess. I’ll have to look it up.
Desktop linux was my daily driver from about 2006 to 2016, then I was dual booting from 2019 to 2021 or so before it became my daily driver again. Choosing Linux-friendly laptop hardware is a compromise.
From 2006-2009, I had a few issues with a shitty wifi driver. Then I bought a “built for Linux” laptop that worked well enough for my purposes, but still had a few minor limitations: shittier battery life, no Bluetooth, and a video card that NVIDIA eventually dropped support for. Even when using the proprietary driver, I couldn’t use Wayland or KMS. During that era, it took a while for font rendering to look as good as Windows, and it never quite caught up with font rendering on Macs.
Then I bought another laptop and had to deal with trying to get the user experience with High DPI screens not to suck (it’s OK now, but took a while to get here). I don’t have a Wifi 6E access point yet but I’ve seen from the forums that it’s sometimes buggy with the 6E channels.
Basically, Linux support for laptop hardware and experience seems to lag behind, and actively selecting for best Linux compatibility is also a seriously limiting filter when buying hardware.
I don’t mean to be rude, but you are likely the problem—not Linux. If you haven’t tried using them, there are lots of great YouTube tutorials.
I mean it’s not surprising if theyre not actively trying to troubleshoot their problems. I run Linux on both my desktop and laptop and I never had a perfect experience with either. On my laptop a few years ago I tried installing Ubuntu but my trackpad sensitivity on linux was way too high with no easy way to change it. I also needed fractional scaling and at the time Ubuntu used X11, I found some command on the Ubuntu forums to enable scaling in the settings and it gave me screen tearing. After a few hours of playing around with different commands I gave up and weny back to Windows.
On my desktop I use Nvidia and have two monitors with different refresh rates. That causes a lot of issues and I just have to put up with it.
Edit: I use Arch on both of them now and have found solutions to my problems but especially my laptop issues were very annoying.
Most likely. There are distros that just works namely Mint. Follow the official guide and the computer is ready for use in less than an hour. And ‘for the last twenty years’? I just don’t believe it.
I struggle to believe it, too. I can think of four laptops I’ve installed Linux on - one Macbook, two Dells, and one Lenovo, and all four of them worked perfectly without additional tinkering. Even the touchscreens on two of them worked without intervention. I’d talk about my desktop and server, but I haven’t upgraded the hardware in them in …a long time. 8 years would be my guess. I’ll have to look it up.
Desktop linux was my daily driver from about 2006 to 2016, then I was dual booting from 2019 to 2021 or so before it became my daily driver again. Choosing Linux-friendly laptop hardware is a compromise.
From 2006-2009, I had a few issues with a shitty wifi driver. Then I bought a “built for Linux” laptop that worked well enough for my purposes, but still had a few minor limitations: shittier battery life, no Bluetooth, and a video card that NVIDIA eventually dropped support for. Even when using the proprietary driver, I couldn’t use Wayland or KMS. During that era, it took a while for font rendering to look as good as Windows, and it never quite caught up with font rendering on Macs.
Then I bought another laptop and had to deal with trying to get the user experience with High DPI screens not to suck (it’s OK now, but took a while to get here). I don’t have a Wifi 6E access point yet but I’ve seen from the forums that it’s sometimes buggy with the 6E channels.
Basically, Linux support for laptop hardware and experience seems to lag behind, and actively selecting for best Linux compatibility is also a seriously limiting filter when buying hardware.