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.

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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!

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trelane a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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