I absolutely love the direction KDE Plasma Wayland session is headed; I think it looks great, it definitely runs great, and it really is just packed with features. I do have some personal KDE gripes I'd like to work on, mainly just improving the KIO fuse integration more, but wow have things progressed fast.

Still, I caution people to not just jump to Linux. The actual very first problem is not software. It's hardware. Firstly, running cutting edge motherboards and GPUs requires a more bleeding edge setup than typical LTS distros give you; you'll be missing audio codec drivers and the GPU drivers will be missing important updates, if things even boot. Secondly, NVIDIA GPUs are currently in a weird place, leaving users with trade-offs no matter what choices they make, making it hard to recommend Linux to the vast majority of users with NVIDIA GPUs. Thirdly, and this one is extremely important, nobody, Nobody, should EVER recommend people run Linux on random Windows laptops. This is cruel and unusual punishment, and it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea even if Arch wiki says it works pretty good. It's a bad idea even if a similar SKU works well, or hell, even if a similar SKU ships with Linux out of the box. It's just a bad idea. The only two big vendors that even really do a good job here are System76 and Framework, and they still have to use a bunch of components from vendors that DGAF about desktop Linux. It is impressive that you can more or less run whatever desktop hardware and things usually work OK, but this logic doesn't apply to laptops. This point can't be stressed enough. I have extensive experience with people trying to switch from Windows to Linux and it's genuinely a challenge to explain to people how this doesn't work, they don't have the frame of reference to understand just how bad of an idea it is and learning the hard way will make them hate Linux for no reason.

Still, even with good hardware, there's plenty of software woes. You'll be missing VSTs. You might have to switch to Davinci Resolve to edit video, Krita to do digital painting, and Blender to do... Well, a lot of stuff. All good software, but a very non-trivial switch.

I'm really glad to see a lot more people interested in running Linux and I hope they have a good experience, but it's worse if they have inflated expectations of what they can do and still have a good experience with. Being misleading about how well Linux or WINE will work for a given task has never really helped the cause, and probably hurt it a lot.

I won't argue about Proton/Steam, though, that shit's miraculous. But honestly, a lot of people like playing competitive multiplayer games, and those anti-cheat vendors don't give a damn about your Linux, they're thrilled to start integrating Secure Boot with TPM attestation as it lets them try to milk more time out of the "maybe we can just secure the client" mindset. (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer it runs on, but we'll see I guess.) But for me who doesn't care, yep, it's pretty good stuff. Whenever there's a hot new thing out chances are it already works on Proton; been playing a lot of Peak which was somewhat popular in the last couple months.

▲

qiine 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer

I pray you are right, I fear other bullshit excuses will be found though..

▲

JanisErdmanis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What issues have you seen recently in the wild where Linux just does not work on a laptop? I have pretty good experiences just putting Ubuntu on old laptops for people who asks me to fix their computer.

▲

jchw 2 days ago | parent [-]

For old laptops it's significantly less bad, but definitely old. 5+ years old is usually a good start, though these days it may be better if it's even older.

The most significant issues:

- Peripherals simply don't work at all, as in, no touchpad or keyboard, or at least no touchscreen. This is definitely an issue with a variety of laptops including some Microsoft Surface and Dell laptops.

- Power management. Frequently, machines fail to sleep or resume reliably.

- Audio is low quality and quiet. This problem was publicized pretty well by the Asahi Linux project, but it is far from unique to MacBooks: a lot of laptops now require OS-level audio processing to have good audio quality. Even my Framework 16 partly has this issue, though it can be alleviated partly with a BIOS option. I believe this also impacts some System76 laptops.

- WiFi/Bluetooth instability. This issue is probably worst with some Realtek radios, but I've also seen it from time to time with Mediatek.

- Sometimes, issues booting at all. Yep. Sometimes it just won't boot, as sometimes the kernel will just break support, and maybe unbreak it later. That's the nature of just running random shit, though.

I think that illustrates enough so I'll stop there, but also don't forget the hurdles to even get started. Often times the very first thing you want to do is disable secure boot which differs a bit per system. This isn't always truly necessary, but even if you're using a Linux distribution that works with Secure Boot it's often a good idea, as there are a variety of things that you can't do easily with Secure Boot on Linux.

Older laptops are less of an issue since Linux tends to get a lot more mature with older hardware as time goes on, but it's still a little hit or miss, especially with vaguely recent laptop hardware that has weird stuff like Intel IPTS. But that having been said: Linux doesn't support old hardware literally forever, either. Old hardware sometimes stops working and gets pulled from the kernel, or moves out of mainline Mesa, and so forth. So even that isn't a 100% panacea.

▲

chem83 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not trying to contradict anything you’re saying, which I agree is true for Microsoft and Dell machines, but to provide an anecdotal counter-example, the Asus Zephyrus, Flow and ProArt lines run pretty well on Linux provided you replace the Realtek WiFi.

One place to check is the nixos-hardware repo for machines with reasonable support.

	▲	jchw 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I use nixos-hardware. Definitely useful. > to provide an anecdotal counter-example, the Asus Zephyrus, Flow and ProArt lines run pretty well on Linux provided you replace the Realtek WiFi. I should be very clear here: what I'm trying to caution people not to do is set people up for the expectation that random Windows laptops will run Linux well. Specific Windows laptops absolutely do run Linux well sometimes, just by virtue of using parts that are very well-supported and somehow having firmware that isn't full of 100,000 bugs. (I love Framework but there are some occasional issues i have with my Framework 16 that really seem like they can only be issues with the firmware rather than Linux.) That said, I still think you should consider tempering what you tell people, especially people you don't know well. The vast majority of users are not the type of people to disassemble their laptop and replace the WiFi card. And while I don't doubt what you're saying is true, I also think it's important to note that laptops vary a lot from SKU to SKU and revision to revision; the vendors typically don't support or test Linux, so there's absolutely no reason they wouldn't break it in a minor revision of hardware or firmware, either. Telling people that ThinkPads generally work well on Linux isn't necessarily unfair (They usually do, even today) but it's not as much of a sure thing as everyone portrays it, there are exceptions. And also, when you say they run "pretty well", you may have more reasonable expectations for what "pretty well" means than the average person. For one thing, I've found that the average person simply lacks the creativity to imagine the ways in which operating system compatibility issues can manifest. For another, these minor usability problems can profoundly impact how one uses their computer. For example, if sleep/resume works 99% of the time, that's actually not great. What happens in the remaining 1% of the time, you lose all of your work unexpectedly? Does your laptop melt inside your bag? Maybe, if you are profoundly unlucky, it could even light your damn house on fire. Of course, Windows and Windows laptops have plenty of problems with sleep/resume these days too with no Linux involved, but I still believe strongly that users who have never experienced broken sleep/resume will have a really bad time here. And again, since these laptops only support Windows, any random kernel or BIOS update could kick things into a bad state. (Immutable OSes will at least save you from having to guess, but I use NixOS and sometimes my intermittent hardware issues are really hard to pinpoint, which is observable for anyone who looks at the history of kernel versions on some of my less Linux-friendly devices.) I think people evangelizing open source and Linux are very well-meant and often times manage to really help people escape the abusive relationship they have with Microsoft, and I want it to continue. I just want people to be careful with how they message Linux on laptops. If you are really sure someone will be highly tolerant of working through problems, maybe you need to caution them less. But, for other people, I just think it's better to be very careful and fully not recommend laptop vendors that don't support Linux. These laptops don't work well with Windows by accident!

▲

trelane a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This illustrates why Linux users should buy Linux hardware, not just slap Linux on Windows hardware.