Comment by ryanmarsh
7 years ago
Slightly off-topic, is anyone using Librem laptops? What has your experience been? They look nice.
I've always wanted a nice secure Linux laptop to work on but I'm not eager to waste hours upon hours getting the drivers to behave (my experience with Linux on the desktop is a bit dated).
I bought Thinkpads for work, installed Fedora on them and everything worked out of the box, right down to the keyboard backlight dimming.
The things you have to watch out for are: * Use an up to date distro with an up to date kernel (e.g. Fedora) * Graphics are the only real driver issue. Easiest solution is to buy something with integrated Intel, but some cards are well supported, you just need to check * Battery life will be worse compared to Windows on a machine normally sold for Windows. This situation may be better on things designed for Linux, like Dell Sputnik stuff and Purism, but I have less experience with them
your experience is more than 20yrs out of date. And i am not even exaggerating.
Drivers in linux normally gives you less problems than OSX or Windows (latest graphic cards model excluded)
My less than 5 years experience is still waiting for the beautiful AMD open source drivers to give me back the video acceleration and OpenGL Features from fxglr.
One of these days, the laptop will just get back W10 with its DirectX 11 drivers.
Dunno about that. I have a Dell XPS 9350 - to get a stable wifi connection under Linux I had to pull the Broadcom wifi card out and replace it with a much nicer Intel one (good luck doing that on the 2018/9 model - it's soldered in).
For a couple of years, the internal NVMe drive wasn't supported unless you changed from "RAID" to AHCI mode - unknown performance and power effects. It looks like that's changed recently.