Comment by guerrilla
18 hours ago
> but Linux hardware support is still crap
What are you talking about? Everything for desktops work out of the box unless you have something weird and proprietary, and even then most distros have support anyway.
18 hours ago
> but Linux hardware support is still crap
What are you talking about? Everything for desktops work out of the box unless you have something weird and proprietary, and even then most distros have support anyway.
By desktop I include laptops (many don't work out of the box) but larger systems can be weird too. Just the choice of CPU can decide whether hibernate or suspend works at all. There's a large ecosystem of accessories which have no Linux support. Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades, famously the reason Torvalds gave Nvidia the finger. Even when something's technically supported, it may require obscure undocumented boot flags, bit-twiddling, userland apps which may not work on the same distro as the kernel you want to use, and of course there's the Wayland debacle (abandoning X extensions that lots of devices used to use to control features from touchpads to input pens)
> Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades, famously the reason Torvalds gave Nvidia the finger.
What are you talking about... The situation is the same as on Windows, an officially supported and maintained proprietary driver maintained by Nvidia. Unless you're trying to run a 12+ year old car, it'll work fine. AMD on the other hand is amazingland and works perfectly, officially supported and maintained open source driver. I LOVE it.
> bit-twiddling
Never happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
> Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades,
Again, I question your experience in this regard. Do you actually use dGPUs on Linux, or are you repeating a 14-year-old meme?
GPU support on Linux is more comprehensive than macOS, and if you don't need DirectX it's arguably better than Windows too. Mesa drivers are unparalleled by Apple or Microsoft, in a myriad of ways.
My experience is using Linux as my primary desktop OS for 25 years, for gaming, 3D rendering, and web browsing. I'm also a programmer and systems engineer, and I've created Linux distributions, as well as contributed over a thousand packages and ports to other distros, and patched/backported drivers in the kernel. I'm not going to detail every single video driver issue I've run into, as I don't want to write a book just to prove to a random person on the internet that Linux does, in fact, have a history of issues with graphics cards and video subsystems. A simple Google search can provide more than enough examples.
But more than that, it's simple logic: hardware manufacturers often don't often release specs or proprietary firmware blobs, forcing kernel hackers to reverse engineer in order to support a device, which often is too difficult, not to mention there's only so many kernel hackers and a lot of devices and hw revisions. There's a famous YouTube video of the most famous kernel hacker telling Nvidia to go fuck itself for this very reason.