Comment by pizza234
11 hours ago
I had the opposite experience.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.
WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).
The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.
I'm surprised to hear that about laptops. When I first switched to Linux in 2003, laptops were supposedly a somewhat iffy thing. When I got my first laptop in 2007, I had to do a bit of research, but ultimately ended up with a ThinkPad where everything worked fine, modulo the need for proprietary graphics drivers as was common at the time. Since then, I don't think I've ever stressed about whether a laptop would be properly supported. I am easily believe that maybe some things are a little better in Windows (maybe automatic firmware update, or the CPU governor), but which laptops are "not very well supported" by Linux these days?
I never trust people saying "it works well". Heck, even Canonical lies in their certification program, since they may test with custom distros that they may not release (yeah, it's this crazy).
My last machine, according to reviewers, worked "well" on Linux. After I purchased it, I've found that the battery lasts half of what it lasts in Windows. And other stuff.
No doubt that there are 100% compatible machines (Thinkpads, typically), but again, it limits choice.
In the mid to 2000's at IBM, many of us developers and even quite a few regular business people in marketing ran Desktop Linux on Thinkpads, it worked extremely well. I assume they still do.
Does Linux support hibernate or suspend well, 30 years after both technologies have been introduced?
I don't know what "well" means, but I suspend my laptop whenever I move it around, travel, etc. I used hibernation a lot many years ago, where it worked as perfectly as I would expect.
Not even Windows hibernates or suspends reliably. Apple seems to be the only vendor that can get this right.
1 reply →
Hibernate and Suspend never worked well for me or my coworkers or relatives when we tried it on Windows.
I never understood the point of hibernate/suspend. Just turn off your laptop when you are done.
> I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported.
No, that isn't a fact at all. I use Dell laptops and have run Desktop Linux on them (Ubuntu past years and more recent switched to Kubuntu) and all of the hardware has worked well, even for gaming, even for my laptop with nVidia built in.
Dell, having one of the most popular engineering laptops of the past decade (xps). It's not surprising that it would have better than average support.
me when i lie