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Comment by jmole

7 days ago

Its not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with laptop manufacturers not caring about designing their ACPI tables and firmware correctly.

6 comments

jmole

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barrkel  6 days ago

If the observable behavior is bad Linux performance, it's a Linux problem.

There's a saying in motorcycling: it's better to be alive than right. There's no upside in being correct if it leaves you worse off.

There are ways to make things better leveraging the Linux way. Make more usable tools for fixing ACPI deficiencies with hotloadable patches, ways of validating or verifying the patches for safety, ways of sharing and downloading them, and building a community around it.

Moaning that manufacturers only pay attention to where their profits come from is not a strategy at all.

  • heavyset_go  6 days ago

    Decompile your ACPI tables and then do a grep for "Linux". You are likely to find it, meaning the vendor took time to think about Linux on their hardware. Some vendors take the time to write good settings and code for the Linux ACPI paths, some dump you into no-man's land on purpose if your OSI vendor string is "Linux".

    It's quite literally a vendor problem created by vendors leading anyone that doesn't run Windows astray in some cases.

    If you run Linux, then dare to change your OSI vendor string to "Windows", you've entered into bespoke code land that follows different non-standard implementations for every SKU, where it's coded to work with a unique set of hardware and bespoke drivers/firmware on Windows. You also forgo any Linux forethought and optimizations that went into the "Linux" code paths.

  • jmole  6 days ago

    I think the correct strategy in this case is to return your laptop to the store if it has linux compatibility issues, and keep trying until you find one that works.

    i.e. don't support vendors whose laptops don't work in Linux.