I always find it strange reading (negative) articles about Linux's hardware support. I've used it for almost 15 years now, and in my experience the hardware support is unparalleled. Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new. I loved never having to scour the web for drivers on the manufacturer support websites. I use Ubuntu for minimal effort installations, and so I can focus on my work. I have tried other OS's like macOS and Windows but the development experience is painful (coming from feeling right at home with the GNU coreutils and full control of my OS with all of the relevant source and debugging tools).
It was pretty finnicky for me. I tried switching 2 years ago, which I wrote about here[0] but also ended up going back to Windows and WSL 2.
I couldn't get my USB audio interface to work with my hardware combo without getting a ton of crackly sounds and pops that happened every time I recorded my microphone when screencasting. This was after literally an entire week of troubleshooting and trying every audio thing I could think of.
I think that's the main problem with Linux hardware compatibility. A lot of devices work in isolation but certain combinations don't work. The USB audio interface I have is known to work trouble free on Linux and I know some folks using it based on what they say on YouTube but for me, it didn't work. Was it due to my motherboard or something else who knows, but it works in Windows.
I'd rather not stick with Windows, but the reality of my current situation is there seems to be a hardware incompatibility for this box to run native Linux.
why are you and the guy below trying to use debian, and then complaining about hardware? using old kernels and drivers with newer hardware and then complaining things aren't smooth?
People new to linux don't necessarily know that debian comes with old kernels, or what the consequences of this are. When I got into linux (admittedly, around 9 years ago), it was quite hard to come by information on what the appropriate distros for which situations were. Heck, at the time, I thought distros were just different skins for the computer, no thanks to the *buntu panel of distributions.
I wish the linux community did a better job explaining that Debian is generally not a good fit for desktops/laptops, and that distros geared for this use-case should be used instead, like Ubuntu or Fedora.
"Debian uses old drivers" is a pretty big meme. If you're the kinda person who reads Hacker News or messed around with USB Audio Interfaces, it shouldn't be that hard to d a quick search on what the best distros are.
Ubuntu. Mint. PopOS. Manjaro. Covers like 95% of use case syou could ever have.
> why are you and the guy below trying to use debian, and then complaining about hardware?
Ubuntu and Fedora, actually, FWIW.
I do like Debian on really boring servers, for the stability, though I'm (slowly) trying to switch anything I can to FreeBSD, because I don't like most things Poettering comes up with, and Wayland looks to be a slow-motion garbage truck crash that might, might sort itself out, as far as its overall ecosystem, in a decade or two, possibly even before the next thing comes along to replace it (I'm sure it's working alright for a lot of people, and that's good). Then there's the new cross-distro application packaging systems, of which only AppImage isn't comically bad.
> Why are you and the guy below trying to use debian ... using old kernels and drivers with newer hardware and then complaining things aren't smooth?
The blog post mentions I was using Debian Unstable btw.
Using a different distro wouldn't have gotten me a newer kernel at the time of when I wrote that post. The post was written in Jan 2019 and I was using Linux kernel 4.19 back then which was about the latest stable Linux kernel at the time. I think 4.20 might have been out but in either case all of my hardware was around for years prior to that kernel release.
Was it a HP by any chance. I got a Zbook and its the first laptop in more than a decade i can't get to work with linux. Starting 20 or so docker containers with docker compose kills something and makes it freeze / lock up.
I didn't think it was hard not to be compatible i suppose HP tried their best.
Booted one minimal Debian-derivative (without SystemD!1!!) from USB-keychain into RAM 124 days ago. Still running, no reboots, but no suspends/resume either. Though it's ancient. But all Intel-components, and working flawlessly with LTS-kernels.
Hardware support has been great. I have a linux laptop now for home use and am quite happy with it.
Someone left a hp1200 laser jet on our buildings swap table. I couldn't leave it... schleped it upstairs and plugged it in (popOS). It found the driver and I can print. Is a little slow for graphics, but its quite old (8 mb ram...) I got a USB headset/microphone as a gift. I plugged it into my machine and it works like a charm. Its kind of remarkable.
Bad HW support is a meme, granted NVIDIA is its own issue.
I’ve installed all sorts of linux distros on all sorts of old and new hardware. And I have never had an issue regarding stuff like bluetooth or wireless or cameraa or anything else I keep hearing about. I might be lucky but I’d rather think Linux has been more supportive than not.
At least on Ubuntu, and possibly on Debian, the Bluetooth stack has been broken until around 20.04. It's still partially broken as of 20.04 (the discovery module is incorrectly configured). This applies to any machine with such distro(s) installed.
I have the reference Ubuntu-supported laptop, and it's misconfigured by default, so that on standby, the battery drains very quickly. The keyboard lights also are buggy. And something else I can't remember.
Oh, and just for reference - Nvidia users can hardly even start a standard Ubuntu, because Nouveau has poor compatibility (GT 710? Nah, and let alone the RTX cards...). Nvidia's ferociously guilty in this case, but to a end user, matter-of-factually, this is a Linux problem.
A fair description of Linux is that its compatibility is "fine". More than that... it's a stretch. Nonetheless, I'm still a Linux hardcore user :)
The 5.13-oem kernel fixed a bunch of niggles for me with bluetooth, an RX 5700XT, CPU temperatures, and USB audio. (The last is still not all the way to where I want it, but that's down to it being really hard to figure out how to tweak Alsa.)
I agree with your assessment. "Fine" (with the quotes) is about right.
In my experience, the key is to not run cutting edge hardware, particularly networking and graphics hardware. Especially not on older kernels, like on Ubuntu 20.04.
A good point to recall is the author mentioned they stopped using linux around 11 years ago, which is when there were hardware issues. I see the exact same comments that get upvoted here about how they used linux in 2010 and how suspend didn't work/wifi didn't work/xyz didn't work.
Long gone are those days, now the issues are primarily games and...I think that's it? Although games often don't work on macos either.
With all the work that's gone into Proton over the past few years, the vast majority of games Just Work and there's very well-documented tweaks for making the vast majority of the rest work as well. It's relatively rare to have a game that's completely unplayable on Linux, unless it's hampered specifically by anti-cheat software that doesn't like Linux.
But this post is dated July 31, 2021, and the author is discussing problems with crashing around July 2020 after building their new desktop.
Certainly, one anecdote here is not data, but it's also not really relevant to point out that "some" comments are from 10+ years ago unless they all are.
No. Linux still has plenty of hardware problems. It just is "incomplete" . My main pc is a custom desktop PC where I run Linux Mint. I mainly play Cs:Go so I can do it in linux. But using it daily I've experienced problems here and there.
The latest example is that you cannot connect a secondary monitor to the iGPU when using an external gpu. There are some textile editing/console mangling "solutions " floating around the internet that don't work.
Its 2021. I should be able to plug the 2nd monitor and use it right away.
There have been several other issues that I cant remember now. But that one is a really big one for me.
Same, not to mention the issues OS wise I've had on linux where a achievable to fix with cmd lines or a config file away and was usually my fault for rushing and not reading. Where when something is wrong at an OS level of windows its exponentially more stressful, little to no description or so specific your googling hoping that the one response you found actually applies to you
10 years ago I thought Linux was "ok", but that Windows and MacOS "just worked".
And I loved my Snow Leopard Macbook like crazy. At the time, MacOS felt like the best Linux distro available.
Sure, I could make Ubuntu look and work however I wanted, but I didn't have time for that. MacOS wasn't perfect, but it was pretty close. Losing customization is a small price for "just works".
Last year, after fighting with weird OS bugs on my newest 2019 Macbook Pro, and fighting constant frustrations and issues in Windows 10, I realized that they no longer actually "just work".
I was putting up with an inability to make things work _better_ based on an outdated notion that things work well to begin with. And when they don't, it's a black box that I can do nothing about.
So, cue the XPS 13 with Ubuntu (that I since replaced with Manjaro) and I have something that takes a little bit more work, but actually _works_ once I do. I get to now be in charge of what does and does not work, with my time being the limiting factor. Time that is valuable, for sure, but a small price to pay for not putting me at the mercy of a tech company that may or may not even fix the things that I need fixed.
It's still not perfect. Nothing is. And I look forward to an M(2+) Mac at some point for iOS development.
But for now, Linux has progressed enough, and Windows and MacOS regressed enough, that Linux is now the side of the line on which I fall.
I built a machine to try desktop Linux last year. I wanted it to double as a gaming machine, so I got an ATI/AMD card that's supposed to be well supported.
1-2 crashes from both Wayland and Xorg on two very different distros, per day. Unusable for any purpose.
Win10 on the same machine is perfectly stable.
So I'm back to Win10 for gaming and macOS for work. I ran Gentoo on a Thinkpad and later an HP laptop for years, but I just don't have time for this shit anymore. I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that.
I also had to manually intervene with my old Gentoo skillz to get Debian to install on my boring, old (used) home server. It couldn't install Grub, on repeated attempts. All I did was drop into a shell and do exactly what the installer should have been doing, with no changes to config. Worked first try.
Ubuntu on an early home server managed to render itself unbootable after an update. No idea what happened with that but it solidified my mistrust of LVM (who knows, may not have been its fault, but life's getting too short for me to want to find out)
My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.
Last time had a mac book (2015) the experience was terrible. The wifi would drop every few hours, it was such a painful experience, it even froze on me during a national conference presentation which was hell of embarrasing. This was after years of seeing comments like this and deciding I wanted to see whether macos really was unix but better. In my experience it wasn't.
So finally, the problem with personal experience is it's just that. Vast numbers of people use linux everyday without issues. And...apparently, numbers of people use macos everyday (and wifi doesn't cut out every two hours??? after my experience it's hard to believe but idk, people on the internet say it's true, right)
Macs have problems. My current one (an M1 air) requires me to switch networks, or disable-then-enable, wifi, to get it working if the laptop is on battery and goes into any level of sleep.
... but that's the only problem with it. And it's perfectly consistent, both the problem and the fix, so fairly easy to live with. It doesn't do any number of little weird things I used to tolerate without thinking much of it, in my Win + Linux years (I was fairly late to the Mac train).
Some models have definitely been complete duds, though, that's absolutely true. Frankly it annoys me that even when they fuck up, everyone else is so far behind that I don't realistically have options to switch to that won't amount to cutting off my nose to spite my face. As happened when I tried to cheap out and switch back to Linux this time. Yet again. :-/
I doubt it. In your first post, you said you have a work losing crash once a year on your Mac. Sounds like a problem to me. (That’s never happened to me once on my Linux or Windows desktops.)
You also had to build another machine just so you can play games and try out Linux. That you can’t just play games under macOS sounds like a problem too.
I’m also sure that you’ve had problems just like everybody else has had with Macs, from updates that break software and services that you’ve installed. My Macs have been broken numerous times by this bullshit whereas my Linux and Windows machines just keep trucking along like they’re supposed to.
> I doubt it. In your first post, you said you have a work losing crash once a year on your Mac. Sounds like a problem to me. (That’s never happened to me once on my Linux or Windows desktops.)
I didn't write that. Quoting myself:
> I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that.
I was being conservative in my claims but did not write that I see a crash a year. I'm pretty sure I could count the total crashes I've seen in macOS/OSX on a half-dozen machines (work and personal) in ~10 years I've been using it, on one hand without using all the fingers. Three, maybe? Two? It's extremely uncommon. I don't remember when the last time was. It's 100% for-sure under once a year.
Meanwhile, how... have you never, ever had that happen on a Linux or Windows desktop? X has never crashed? Windows has never crashed? How long have you been using them? I'd say I've had hundreds of crashes of the OS or of the GUI desktop system (may as well be the same thing, on a desktop machine) in ~26 years of using Windows and ~21 years of Linux, across perhaps 40 desktops and laptops, personal and work-provided. Granted they're way less common now on Windows than they used to be, especially pre-WinXP (about the same on Linux as they've always been, though).
> You also had to build another machine just so you can play games and try out Linux. That you can’t just play games under macOS sounds like a problem too.
I didn't need to do it to try out Linux. I was trying to cheap out and use the same machine for gaming and for work, ideally without dual-booting, so Windows wasn't an option (for the work part, that is). I should have just bitten the bullet and shelled out for another Mac to begin with, but I thought I'd give Linux (yet) another shot. I was a mostly-Linux user for most desktop/laptop/workstation purposes (except gaming) for most of the 2000-2010 decade, so it's not unfamiliar territory for me.
> I’m also sure that you’ve had problems just like everybody else has had with Macs, from updates that break software and services that you’ve installed. My Macs have been broken numerous times by this bullshit whereas my Linux and Windows machines just keep trucking along like they’re supposed to.
I've had to run a trivially-googlable one-off command to fix homebrew permissions a couple times after OS upgrades. I think it broke badly on an update, requiring more intervention, exactly once, years ago. But the system was still fine, only Homebrew had trouble, and in the worst case it's really easy to just blow it (homebrew, that is) away and start over (which IIRC I've never had to resort to, though).
Dropping 32-bit support sucked. Macs were finally kinda, sorta, almost usable as gaming machines. Not everything was available, but the library had grown large enough that there was tons to play. All wiped out at once. Oh well, all my Macs have always had embedded graphics so I couldn't play anything fancier than Kerbal Space Program or Minecraft or most Unity-engine games, anyway, so it's not like I wasn't still going to need a separate box for that if I really wanted to scratch the PC gaming itch.
Macs do have problems (ugh, those first-gen butterfly keyboards...) but I've yet to see them be bad enough that I wouldn't still be making things a lot harder on myself by going back to Linux for work of any sort, and if I'm just gaming on something it may as well run Windows (which is unsuitable for any work I do or want to do, for a ton of reasons).
I'm an exclusive arch user and very happy with my time but your comment pisses me off. You had a poor experience with MacOS and a great experience with Linux so naturally the OP must either be misrepresenting their experience or "doing something wrong"?
Why on earth would anyone want to purchase another computer for the sake of using an OS that they already have been soured on, especially when they could just spin up a VM? That's just being wasteful regardless of how expensive it is (computers also occupy space, energy, and time).
No, I've had poor experiences with every OS. The difference is that macOS problems are the worst type of problems that can't or won't be solved because Apple will just pull the rug out from under you at any minute. That and there are just too many things which macOS simply cannot do.
> ...so naturally the OP must either be misrepresenting their experience or "doing something wrong"?
Nope. I said that they're most likely doing something wrong. You added that bit about them misrepresenting their experience.
> Why on earth would anyone want to purchase another computer for the sake of using an OS that they already have been soured on...
Well gee, I thought this was a forum for tech enthusiasts. And didn't the guy say he has like 47 years of Linux and Windows experience combined? Doesn't sound sour to me... Sounds like he kept trying for a reason and that reason is obviously that a Mac couldn't fill his needs this time for a few different reasons.
> especially when they could just spin up a VM?
Perhaps you can read one of the 32 replies that "handrous" wrote in this thread to find out why he didn't use a VM. If you can't think of any reasons why someone might not want to use a VM for their combined gaming and workstation experiment, then I probably can't help you answer your question.
> That's just being wasteful...
Incorrect. That's just being pragmatic. Hey, I hope you enjoy being pissed off and sour with the other guy though. I'll continue being happy and living the easy life with my single OS computers that do what I want them to because I keep things simple.
Instead of pulling "obvious" reasons out of your ass, how about listening to the guy's explicitly given reason instead - specifically that he wanted a gaming rig and didn't want to pay the "Apple tax".
There is also PCI-Passthrough so you can in fact use a VM for gaming but it's rather cute that you're attempting to paint me as the one who is somehow failing to understand why a particular system might not fulfills their needs.
Also, which "other guy?" Handerous himself? I don't recall him ever expressing being "pissed off and sour" so either you just assumed guilt by association or your reading comprehension is way off.
Also, you literally painted a crash a year as if that's a real problem with MacOS or really any desktop OS. Don't pretend like you're being objective when you are clearly not.
It's great that purchasing multiple devices for each OS suits you. Not everyone is you or agree on what a "simple" scheme is.
Hmmm, well one doesn't pull obvious reasons out of ones ass. Obvious reasons are made obvious by simply existing... and the "Apple tax" seems like an obvious problem to me which is why I referred to it as being obvious in the first place.
Nobody said you or he couldn't use PCI-Passthrough? I honestly don't care what you do - but if and when that doesn't work for you and you come complaining, I'll be glad to share my own experience wherein I don't use such convoluted garbage and my stuff just works.
You yourself claimed he was sour and that you were pissed. Your words, not mine.
A crash a year or every other year is a problem and I'm absolutely, objectively certain of that. Sounds like you have the same problem since you think it's normal. I don't have these problems and I'm betting that's because I keep things very simple. So in my opinion, you're both probably doing something wrong.
> It's great that purchasing multiple devices for each OS suits you. Not everyone is you or agree on what a "simple" scheme is.
It doesn't just suit me, it's empirically better since my machines run for years without crashing. I'm fine with people not agreeing on what's simple because at the end of the day, my stuff is running fine and whatever you guys are doing is not working because you're pissed and he's sour with machines that you can't keep running properly.
I'm not trying to paint anything though. I do enjoy responding to angry frustration with cool, level headed guidance though because I find that it helps those who can be helped. Perhaps that won't work here, so I guess go ahead and get that last word in, I know it's important to some.
Glad to help, but I'm honestly not sure exactly what I said that could be construed as a personal attack or a flame. My best guess: saying that I think people who are having problems with their computers are doing something wrong?
No problem! I'm sorry too. I am not a master of disagreeing well. I got better at it in person, but online I still just sort of let my opinions out. I've sometimes had a habit of being a harsh critic and I've had to temper that over the years. I suspect that I'm a little bit on the spectrum as well and I don't always pick up on social clues.
I find that video cards are the reason for the overwhelming majority of stability issues on desktops and laptops for at least the last 15 years (they didn't seem quite as bad when those cards were much simpler), across all operating systems, including macOS (how many models have had stability issues related to discrete video card heat management or other shittiness? But windows laptops with discrete cards tend toward similar problems) so I'd bet it's that. Luckily, since I don't do anything with machine learning or 3D modeling or any of that, I can usually get away with using ultra-stable Intel video or something similarly bland. I only put a fancy card in this because I wanted it to double as a gaming rig.
Win 10 on the same machine? Zero crashes in about a year. Linux in a VM on the same machine, hosted on Windows? No crashes. So it's probably the video card driver in Linux, not the hardware's fault exactly.
Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine. Probably would have gone Nvidia but I'm aware which one works better on Linux has flipped sharply since Way Back When, the last time I ran Linux on a machine with a discrete video card. Didn't matter, still broken. No clear cause of crashes. Would crash in a game, crash while browsing, crash editing text. Often I've been able to track Xorg crashes to a specific action (playing Flash on the first version of Ubuntu to use PulseAudio, for example) but not this time. Driver is (or was, for the couple months I made a go of it) just absolute shit with this particular card, I guess.
("but that's AMD's driver, not Linux's fault" OK, but that doesn't matter from my perspective, the machine was unusable for either work or gaming with Linux on it, unless, maybe, I crippled the hardware by using an open-source driver)
[EDIT] that it did it in both Xorg and Wayland is another indicator it's likely a driver issue. It's that or bad memory, but Windows and Linux-in-VirtualBox-on-Windows don't crash, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.
> Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine.
AMD Navi cards have a known issue that causes those crashes[0]. It's believe to be a hardware issue since RMA'ing the card normally fixes the issue, but you're right in that it's something that only the linux driver seems to trigger.
So you’re saying Linux will crash frequently (1-2 times per day) with an RX 5500 XT?
It shouldn’t be that hard to track someone down with that card to see if that’s true.
Not that I think you’re lying, but you seem convinced that it’s the card’s fault while it could be something else.
Also,
> My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.
That conclusion is not supported by anything you’ve written. All you can say is that, based on your limited testing (and many assumptions), the RX 5500 XT linux drivers were unstable at some point last year.
For the record, I’ve been using desktop linux (Kubuntu) for the past 6~7 years with an Nvidia GTX 980 with zero issues whatsoever. I use it for both gaming and work, and never had the system crash on me.
I even upgraded the CPU/Mobo/RAM and GPU (originally had a 970) during that time without any issues. No need to reinstall linux or anything ridiculous like that. It just worked as expected.
And when I eventually decide to upgrade again, I’m extremely confident that I wont have to do a reinstall either, or worry about system stability because in my experience, Linux is very stable and has excellent hardware support.
I've run Linux on lots of machines over a lot of years. It was my main desktop (well, laptop) OS on two devices over an ~8-year span, even. I don't think, based on fairly extensive personal experience, it's had a great position compared with Windows, on the stability and ease-of-maintenance dimensions, since Win7 came out and that OS got way more stable (arguably, since one of the service packs of XP, I forget which one—2, maybe?—whipped that OS into pretty decent shape, or maybe since 2K if we're allowing non-home-targeted versions).
I'm not a Windows fan at all, but it's gotten far more stable while Linux in my substantial experience hasn't made much progress on stability, in a desktop OS context, specifically, where applications crashing with greater frequency or the windowing system crashing count against a platform, not just blue-screens and kernel panics. Major distros also have a bad habit of backsliding temporarily, but significantly, on stability with upgrades when major subsystems are changed out, in a way and to a degree that Windows and, say, macOS, do not (this is not a claim that those never have issues of this sort, mind you, they're just less frequent, less severe, and less long-lived, typically), and the alternatives are to use slow-changing distros that leave you hunting for sources for modern software to run on them when you need it, or stuck on old kernels without newer hardware support, or rolling distros, which are their own special stability risk.
Meanwhile, most of the progress Linux has made on the desktop in the last 15ish years as far as features is lame, unhelpful-at-best GUI churn (to be fair, macOS and Windows are guilty of plenty of this, though not as much) and stuff that macOS and Windows already did better (very ordinary and basic wifi use not requiring you to learn yet another command line tool for something that's two clicks in a point-n-drool interface on other operating systems, stuff like that). Hell, one feature I'm now very interested in, which is X-Window-style remote applications (as are others, see: remote-Chrome-as-a-service as a business model) is stagnating tech that's on its way out, on Linux, not something the community is running forward with as a differentiator.
Hmm, with my 5600 XT I've never had a problem with Xorg or Wayland. I can't remember the last time my computer crashed. Just another data point, not trying to claim this wasn't happening for you.
If you did your research (/r/linuxgaming), you might have found that an nvidia gpu would have better choice if you wanted to run a distro with old mesa packages.
If you're so old and your time is oh so important, maybe you should learn to measure twice and cut once, instead of blaming your tools.
I'm not sure where you're getting which distros I tried on the machine out of that post (it was then-current versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, for the record).
[EDIT] If you read quickly, you probably just missed that I related three instances of Linux problems across three of the four x86 machines I've run Linux on at home in the last ~decade, since it stopped being my primary OS for most purposes. Only one's a hardware problem, but the other two are failures at doing extremely basic things like installing its own boot loader or not rendering itself unbootable on a system upgrade. One of those is running Debian, that's true, but I wouldn't try to use that on a machine with a very modern video card, you're right that that'd be a recipe for trouble. The only one that wasn't a bigger pain in my ass than it was worth was a trash-tier Chromebox I installed Void on. That was basically fine. It's consistently good on Raspberry Pis, too, since that hardware has a lot of eyes on it and is very stable over time. Sorry I snapped above, no excuse even when insult is perceived, I've modified it to take that out.
The GP just offered his experience on why he went back to Windows. Reacting with hostility seems like a way to trap yourself in a world where you never hear of problems with desktop Linux. You will then be constantly puzzled why Linux is not more successful.
the poster made a snarky comment, i got annoyed, made a snarky comment back. i don't care about evangelizing linux or converting people. as for losing users like him/her, for every 4/5ish of them there are 1/2 helpful people who aren't so self important
> I loved never having to scour the web for drivers on the manufacturer support websites
That hasn't been a thing on Windows for 10+ years, so glad you got ~5 years out of that.
> Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new
I remember the olden days when hardware wouldn't work on Linux, then eventually someone would make a driver for it. These days, it's arguably worse. Nobody writes drivers for modern hardware without the aid of the manufacturer. So some hardware, including virtually all "Amazon's Choice" USB wifi adapters on Amazon, don't work on Linux without hacky unofficial drivers on github, which haven't been upstreamed or vetted for backdoors. (Plus you get to compile and load them into your kernel yourself, which is beyond the ability of most users)
This is one of the I like about Linux, as well. One of the pain points in the past, however, was printing, but since 2010 every printer I've owned supported IPP Everywhere[1] driverless printing that works flawlessly on Linux. Even the Brother and HP printers that had their own Linux drivers did, too. AirPrint also works on Linux.
Were you using a mainstream desktop Linux distribution? Those are generally configured to handle things like graphics cards, sound systems, power management, and dynamic hardware coming and going (including monitors). That is not meant to say they always get it right. There are very few vendors who will test their products with Linux, and the community hasn't necessarily tested it either, but they usually do a fairly good job.
The reason why I bring this up is your description sounds like the experiences of someone who has used Arch or Debian or another distribution where there is a lot of configuration to be done out of the box. That is not necessarily a bad thing if you have the time or inclination, but it is also the sort of thing that desktop distributions are intended to handle for the end user.
I tried, Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat and Mint (and Slackware, but a long time ago) if memory serves right. There's always something wrong.
The feeling I got, is that I was always tinkering with something rather than getting the job done.
Windows is not a lot better, just a little bit better (I used all of them, starting on DOS).
MacOS so far has been the one that's out of my way most of the time when I want to get shit done. I love Linux for servers, but for notebooks it kind of sucks (or to be fair, is the worst one of the big three OSes).
I always toyed with the idea of getting a System76 laptop, but at the time I was shopping, the price was close to a MacBook Pro at similar specs, with worse display and uglier.
On the upside, the memory/CPU specs were really nice.
I had the same experience on computers I've built myself. On some laptops, though, it's not been smooth sailing. I don't blame Linux for that, though; it's rather the fault of laptop manufacturers and their use of uncommon hardware because it's what they can get cheaply and in bulk.
> Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new.
This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. But there's a lot of random junk around that is just very unlikely to get meaningful support.
> This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually.
Can we actually make that assertion? For the most part, we hear of problems because people are trying to deal with those problems. Only a handful of people will pipe up to say everything worked for them, and it will usually appear in conversations like this one rather than being self-initiated.
I am in the everything-works-for-me camp. In the past, I could have attributed that to avoiding iffy types of hardware and sticking to vendors that usually have well supported hardware (either by the vendor or by the community). That being said, I've had to go out on a limb a few times due to the events of the past year. Each of those hardware purchases could have resulted in switching to Windows. None of them did.
It all leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth about these anti-Linux rants. Are these people who have had a bit of bad luck, and think it's representative? Or are these people who are actively looking for problems to gripe about? I mean, it is possible that I have been lucky. I just find it difficult to believe that I have been lucky for a quarter century. I also suppose that it is possible that I have some sort of gut instinct about what hardware will be supported, but it would be just that. I rarely put much thought into my purchases beyond whether I need it.
Yeah, every amd64 box I've bought recently has had everything working out-of-the-box; weirdly, my desktop actually has much more trouble booting the Windows installer ISO (they ship it as UDF without a FAT32 ESP, so the for-consumers Asus mobo doesn't think it's bootable?)
I'm pretty happy with Linux on my desktop - I use it for development, making music (Bitwig - I have a full studio hooked up to it, using an audio interface, a midi interface, a control surface, a variety of midi controllers, and sufficient VSTs, all over out-of-the-box ALSA), CAD (qcad), voip (Jami), and general web related stuff. Wifi hasn't been an issue for me since the days when you used iwconfig from the command line, which was what, 2006? Network Manager is generally good software (otoh I don't love systemd-resolved's ownership of DNS, and have had intermittent issues with that in the past couple years.) I use my wife's mac occasionally to upgrade firmware on my hardware synths, since synth vendors don't tend to support linux.
On one of my laptops, there's been some intermittent nvidia driver issues (leading to screen tearing), but they're only an issue on one of the compositor options in KDE (I don't remember which). I also have it installed on an intel nuc (which is acting as a print server for an old/reliable but unnetworked laserjet), an MS Surface go, a chromebook, and a few older laptops.
In many cases you buy a windows computer with the OS pre-installed. That almost never happens with linux (I will probably buy my next laptop from system 76), so it's always smart to either run a live boot to check on driver/hardware compatibility, or do a little digging up front to find out the state of hardware support for the configuration you're planning to build. You can certainly end up with hardware that isn't supported.
Ah man I had such a bad experience with ubuntu with my 3700x and 5700xt. Years ago I had issues with Nvidia and purposely went AMD at recommendations of AMD cards being better with linux.
However most of the issues are just ubuntu. Switching to manjaro resolved 95% of my issues and steam out of the box ram games much better.
Never tried fedora tho. No one has ever recommended that to me.
In my experience, with fresh AMD cards you will have to upgrade both kernel and mesa drivers after a fresh install of Ubuntu. This holds even if you install the .10 version. After that things work just fine.
Though upgrading kernel was a bit of a ride the time when it wasn't even possible to boot to console with the freshly installed system..
Possibly. The last version of ubuntu I tried was 20.10 and that was when I threw in the towel and went Manjaro.
While on 20.04 I did attempt to upgrade the kernel which fixed some issues but introduced others. For me I just got to the point where fiddling and fixing was no longer fun and I just wanted to use my computer without it randomly freezing, rebooting, low FPS.
I think if I ram ubuntu on my parents computer which is much older they would be totally fine. It’s definitely a lot better now than when I tried switching them 10 years ago. But for me it was a painful experience cos I like keeping my hardware current.
Ubuntu works for some people but it's super broken for others, it is strange for the most popular distro. May be it comes down to which version you use. I use Elementary OS on one machine which is based on an ubuntu lts version while I used ubuntu (albeit years ago) and issues I faced were much worse.
I had issues as well with that card in 20.04. I did some research and there was a fix for my issue that was resolved in 20.10. I still have issues with the card gaming in Windows though. Not completely stable with some games and can’t play Elite Dangerous because it always crashes before I get out of training.
It's important for people to specify which 5700XT GPU, because there are minor variations (ROW, hardware, cooling, etc) between vendors that can wreak havoc if the drivers don't account for these variances.
He even linked[1] the GPU issue he was having in the post. so he's not the only one.
Could you provide some evidence for that statements? As long as the fan curves are good enough to cool the card, then nothing really should be different between different 5700xt cards.
> In short, hardware support remains the biggest weakness of Linux as desktop operating system, just as always.
I hate to repeat it again, but when you choose hardware designed to work with Windows, and Linux has problems running on it, it's the failure of the user, not of Linux. My laptop designed for Linux has been running flawlessly for years with no issues.
My experience with a Precision 5520 (2017) has been _nearly_ stellar (if not for the nvidia card, which, does work but sucks a lot of Power).
The issue is, maybe, that I’m a bit of a power user, when I get an issue I just dive in and fix it — a bit like an old truck.
I almost never have an issue, but when I do I tend to be able to fix it or revert it (if it’s an update).
Comparatively I feel quite powerless on MacOS and Windows.
Not saying mine is “better”, just saying that I don’t really think about fixing my machine so I probably don’t record the frequency of issues internally.
Certainly doesn’t feel like much though, but it’s not insanely rare.
I'm doing the same kind of change from macOS back to Linux, with the new "Do It Yourself" laptop by frame.work. If you like making your own hardware choices, the new laptop is a total game changer IMHO. For the OS I like Manjaro (based on Arch) and Mint (based on Ubuntu).
At risk of being that 'Yer doing it wrong' guy... I really find that the best approach is using the mbp for browsing, email, occasional graphics work. And then living mostly in iterm connecting to Linux boxes.
This way I can avoid all the crappy Linux desktop stuff, and simultaneously avoid all the crappy OSX dev stuff. The hardware I actually look at and touch all day is top quality (because face it, Macbooks are supremely well built and comfortable), while all the mad hacking happens in a serious environment.
But if pressed I'd have to admit to keeping a late model ryzen/win10 machine on hand for entertainment.
The “problem” I have is that I’ve been spoiled by i3/sway and this leads to be being underwhelmed with the state of the window management on MacOS.
I attempted to tame it with skhd, yabai and karabiner elements, but the UI is miles too slow and, crucially, finding my terminals again is a pain.
I think I could live with the window management if it didn’t “feel” slow to open a window. It takes about a second for the laptop to accept a key press, open a terminal, resize that terminal and load my shell.
Sounds silly to complain about it but this is a top of the line (i7/32G) machine from 2020. It should not be at all slow when opening terminals.
> I hope everyone has noticed the shift in macOS to be something more like iOS. That’s good for most users, but not really for software engineers.
I've been saying this for a long time. I find it funny so many developers use and love macOS. You are clearly not the target audience and in fact, lots of decisions Apple makes go against making macOS a nice development environment.
I disagree. I mean, I know we're not the only target audience. But we're clearly an important one. They literally announce their new software releases at their developer's conference. macOS is also the only platform you can develop iOS apps on. So if nothing else, macOS has to be nice to developers for iOS's sake.
For me, the core things that makes macOS great for development haven't changed. All they've really done is make iOS and macOS work together more cohesively.
Windows 10 + WSL2 + VcXsrv is now my desktop setup of choice - I love running server side and workstation style linux setups (workstation as in "give me fvwm2 and ALL the terminals") but have no interest whatsoever in figuring out what would make an acceptable 'normal' desktop setup.
Yeah WSL 2 is amazing. You can even connect to your Nvidia gpu from there Linux subsystem if you want to some local ML training on it. Goodbye dual boot!
Its improved a lot. Ubuntu 21.04 is really great and runs very well on my Dell XPS 13. However, there are constant issues which make it tough for daily use. For example, Bluetooth is really flaky still. If I try to connect headphones they'll invariably stop working before long.
And as the author notes, there are a bunch of apps that just aren't available, WINE has never worked for me, etc. I run a Win7 VM for some of this but it's still a pain.
> If I try to connect headphones they'll invariably stop working before long.
Are you using PulseAudio or PipeWire? I've recently switched to PipeWire and all my bluetooth related issues went away. The progress that PipeWire has made over the last few months is amazing. At least in my case, it went from almost unusable to my daily driver in the span of two or three releases.
I'm curious what the author would think of Pop_OS by System 76. I've been using that as my main distro for a couple years now and love it. When paired with one of their machines (I own a Thelio and a Lemur Pro), things are pretty smooth overall.
Linux remains my ideal development environment, but suboptimal for a lot of the things I do outside of dev -- not because it can't do those things, but because it does those things with a degree of fiddliness that I find maddening.
Oh my. This person didn't even get Ubuntu working properly and simply gave up to... use Windows? Instead of macOS? Because they couldn't get their setup straight on Linux?
I don't know what's more frustrating: Reading through this nonsense or seeing it got upvotes.
Even the hardware selection makes no sense at all, with no component but the non-functional GPU benefiting from the X570. The selected SSD is Gen3 and the CPU is a lower-end Ryzen where there's practically no difference between e.g. a X470 mainboard compared to the X570, when overclocked. Also overclocking is probably not what the author intended to do anyway, since there's no info on the cooling whatsoever, making statements like this even appear even more uneducated:
> While portability is definitely a problem with desktops, they also have some cool advantages like:
>
> - They don’t overheat
Clearly the author followed an "let me get the flashiest stuff that is available on Amazon right now"-approach and didn't actually take the time and effort to put together components that actually make sense.
For example, it would have taken literally a single quick search on the search engine of your choice to find at least one Phoronix post about a more recent AMD Radeon RX model that runs perfectly fine under Linux. Not to mention that "StarCraft II, Tomb Raider, Diablo III, etc" (titles that were release ~2010) don't even need a dedicated GPU and would run just fine (>30fps) on a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G APU. In fact, this whole computer could have been a $700 AMD NUC (see "Aspen") and would have been perfectly fine for the workload described by the author and actually run a smooth Linux experience.
Linux is not bad at hardware, it's you that's bad at planning and implementing a solution!
---
This comment was written on a modern Gentoo Linux Ryzen 9 machine with a flawless Wayland setup and perfectly fine 3D hardware acceleration on an AMD GPU.
I have the same reaction towards Apple.
After 20 years of using Apple Computers, the Catalina is the last one that I use.
No more "vertical integration" for me.
Any stable distribution with KDE on top will give me everything I need. Hardware is now powerful enough to run Affinity Designer under VM.
The last app keeping me on Mac platform was Sketch.
I don't like Figma, but the industry has chosen and Figma is in the browser, so on Linux there will no problems at all.
Blender is beautiful. Resolve/Fusion are working well. RawTherapee is on pair with Capture One as a raw processing. Bitwig is capable enough.
I believe there is also a coolness factor at play when choosing any technology, including an OS.
Back in 2004, I flocked to macOS because it was an excellent (and mostly open) Unix that looked like it was going to change the world and gain mass adoption (and it did).
Today, however, macOS feels far less cool to me. But with its rapid evolution this past decade, Linux seems very cool. I switched to Linux from macOS this past year and lever looked back.
> “Back to Linux” is a bit of a misnomer, because of the long period in which this article stayed on my backburner. By the time I wrapped it, I’m no longer using Linux, at least not natively. Due to the GPU driver issues, in the end I’ve opted to switch to Windows 10 and WSL
Sounds about right. I would really like to be using a FOSS OS, but no matter how long I use Linux, no matter how many distros I play around with, there inevitably is something I struggle to do with it that would be trivial on Windows. Sometimes it is hardware, but for me it's usually software. I'm apparently a weirdo because I like to use software that, for one reason or another, isn't in my distro's repo. Older version, newer version, alongside a different version of the same thing, too obscure, etc. I'm apparently expected to install a billion dev tools and environments and compile it myself to support this use case. Ugh. Don't even get me started on trying to do anything as clearly ludicrous as trying to put software on a second disk!
I'm really surprised with the issues with the graphics chip. I have a Radeon 5700XT and have not had any issues with it once the kernel had support for it. (which now that I think about it, I purchased it after the kernel updates were out)
I have a second-hand Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop and I've been very impressed with the build quality (even though my previous laptop was a Macbook so my standards were already quite high). It is also well specced technically, with everything I wanted e.g. USB-C power charging, decent CPU and a GPU easily capable of playing my favourite games. I can easily see myself using this machine for several years at least. Really happy with my decision to go with Lenovo.
I've had a lot of good luck with Lenovo. My personal Thinkpad is now 4 years old and I've had zero issues with it. I've always felt Lenovo's trackpads are really quite bad, but the current gen X1 Carbon (my work Thinkpad) has an excellent trackpad.
It is, unfortunately (for Linux), not just the hardware. It's the vertical integration of whole ownership of the hardware and software.
Apple's OS is designed to run on (and run) their hardware. There are abstraction-breaking software decisions made with the platform in mind (and vice-versa).
To give a concrete example: the OS knows about the M1 Neural Engine and controls scheduling of jobs on it in a way intended to maximize perceived user experience.
> The only issue I have with Linux is the quality of the hardware. Mac hardware is incredible. I have mac's still running from decades ago and used heavily.
There doesn't seem to a contradiction there. I knew people who preferred Linux on Apple hardware. They were very happy with it.
