It’s kind of sad that getting things to work on Linux almost invariably ends up requiring taking magical incantations from a dozen different sources in the hopes that it will fix your problem.
When something breaks on Windows, the situation is no different and in fact possibly worse. Since it is proprietary, you have far fewer people who really know the innermost guts of the system and can help. Microsoft's own forums are practically useless for non-paying 'users.' As for the rest of the Internet, it is the same as Linux:
"Run this command and tell me the output"
"Run this script as admin/root"
"Go into these folders and delete these files"
"Add these lines to these files (Linux)/Registry (Windows)"
and of course the famous:
"Reset/Refresh/Reinstall" catch-all.
The problem is exponential complexity of interactions of various systems, hardware and software, and almost nobody really seems to know the exact workings and interactions of the system. At least no one on web forums.
Things very rarely break, either it works or it doesn’t (cue the people who will say an update ate their homework...).
The big difference is that the chance that ALL devices on a brand new laptop will work out of the box (including all the bells and whistles like sleep modes, audio routing when adding/removing Bluetooth gear, multiple external displays with different DPIs, etc) is nearly 100% on Windows and in my experience nearly 0% on even the most up to date linux distros, at least unless you did very careful research before buying your machine.
This isn’t a criticism of linux desktop distros vs windows but it’s pointing out that the most important things you need when making a desktop OS for general purpose hardware is a big market share and relations with hw vendors. It’s a chicken and egg problem for linux.
Also: people generally aren’t interested in understanding or properly solving some problem. If a reinstall solves their problem that’s in many cases easier for most than editing a config file! Windows Systems are (can and often should be) ephemeral. I wish windows would make the nightly-wipe I have seen in university classroom installs of windows the default for home editions.
>The big difference is that the chance that ALL devices on a brand new laptop will work out of the box (including all the bells and whistles like sleep modes, audio routing when adding/removing Bluetooth gear, multiple external displays with different DPIs, etc) is nearly 100% on Windows and in my experience nearly 0% on even the most up to date linux distros, at least unless you did very careful research before buying your machine.
I'm going to disagree with you on this. But first I need to point out that if you mean literally "out of the box," then I would certainly agree with you; but I'm going to assume by "out of the box" you mean "fresh install."
I run a small computer repair/assistance shop and it is my experience that very few laptops, new or otherwise, work 100% with a fresh install of Windows 10 or 7 (we do very little with 8). BUT the crucial difference between the non-working devices under Linux vs Windows is that on Windows the WiFi and/or ethernet card (almost) always works right away which then allows Windows Update to find drivers for the non-working devices. Under Linux, the Wifi card will often not work with a fresh install which then makes getting the other devices working extra difficult. It's even worse if the ethernet port also doesn't work.
Yes, I meant including downloaded updates both from Microsoft and from hw manufacturers. Hopefully most of them are automatic but in some cases they are not. Without internet connection I wouldn’t even bother switching on a new laptop, it’s usually a race to get a new firmware before the machine bluescreens. As you say the whole process hinges on the fact that network adapters both wired and wireless usually work out of the box (in the literal sense).
Ah, yes. Downloading updates from HW manufacturers... Nothing like obtaining kernel mode code over unencrypted http from a random server in Taiwan or even China.
This applies to all OSes if you use binary proprietary drivers. But it’s of course the same also in the case of firmware/bios updates that are even lower level than kernel.
But on the other hand - If hackers own the hw manufacturers systems in Taiwan, chances are your original firmware was already bad.
Not really - this is a different issue : generic problems vs out of the box behaviour.
I expect Bluetooth to work out of the box on a Lenovo laptop in 2018, while I don't expect Linux to work well at all. I've been using linux since 1996, and things haven't changed : unless hardware makers start supporting it natively, we'll always have problems.
Now, I may be very wrong on the windows side of things : I expect it to work, but maybe it doesn't!
I just cringed a bit remembering my idealistic but ultimately doomed mission in the early 2000’s to convert an entire organization to Linux on the desktop, complete with a test group of forward-thinking, masochistic users who I encouraged to jump off the cliff with me. In a parallel universe I’m on the phone with a user at 3am cheerfully explaining how to use pico to edit their /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf!
Thankfully on this front most of the desktop environments have come a long way, one can give a user a laptop running Debian or Fedora and that user will be able to install software right in Gnome Software, change wifi networks, display resolution/configuration and so forth without ever using their keyboard.
Its feasible in 2018 to give your aunt a laptop running Linux (just so long as its not Hannah Montana Linux or Gentoo) and expect her to be able to go about her normal Facebook browsing, document editing routine without much issue.
Agree that Windows works out of the box far more often than Linux, the reason precisely being what you said, that hardware makers do not release drivers for Linux for the most part, or even enough specs to write one without buggy reverse engineering. The situation is getting better but rather slowly. And when new hardware comes out, we go right back to square one again.
But when Windows does break, the troubleshooting is, in my experience, even more obtuse than with Linux.
The situation has been "getting better" for 10 years, it still terrible experience and will probably forever :(
The only solution is to buy native Linux devices such as from Dell, system76 or tuxedo. Any other device which only supports Windows toddler OS will be a terrible experience. I'm writing this from a $2k razer blade stealth which has been a horrific experience with ubuntu (NEVER gonna buy a razer again).
WiFi and Bluetooth only worked with the Dell drivers for example; I accidentally removed them due to an apt-get fuckup and it was hell to get it back.
I also had a lot of problems with the audio; I don't recall what the issue was there exactly (it's been 3/4 years).
I also had a XPS 15 at my current employer (not with Linux pre-installed), and that was even worse. The screen kept flickering (but only in Linux). I returned it to my employer and just got the x270. Been happy ever since :-)
And this is on a Lenovo Thinkpad that (with XPS and System 76 laptops) is one of the few popular enterprise laptops that is known for supporting linux out of the box.
I love Linux, but the amount of time it takes to make the system run as I like is unreasonable even the more tech savvy folk out there.
Is it really that difficult to support a linux distro (at the very least) out of the box ? Is it the OS's responsibility or that of the manufacturer ?
IME this is not typical (on supported hardware) but even on supported-but-not-ootb hardware, a couple of hours for 2-3 years of service does not seem unreasonable to me.
It's more than Windows (sometimes) but not outrageous.
no - this is very specific to lenovo. they enforce a whitelist of wifi and bluetooth cards to create a forced obsolescence event.
usually this means they will use cards that are not very common and popular. i still dont understand why they do this. That's pretty much the only reason why Dell XPS are now the cool developer laptop for Linux.
Dell XPS 15” has a crappy WiFi card and needs some magic setup incantations for Ubuntu (fortunately enough people have these laptops that the bash scripts are easy to find). The chipset to switch between the nvidia and intel video is still not stable AFAIK.
Even worse, I asked about their business line of laptops that officially support Ubuntu, but they come installed with 16.04 and that is what is supported (as at November this year anyway).
I have run Fedora for the last 3 years on my XPS. I do hang out at /r/dell and /r/fedora and havent generally seen anyone having any issues. Fully out-of-the-box performance.
I havent used Ubuntu for a long time, so im not sure what the issues are. But I like Fedora for their professional distros.
In fairness, Bluetooth is a bit of a train wreck. Bluetooth on FreeBSD is pretty much unmaintained these days. OpenBSD gave up on it entirely and purged the Bluetooth code.
So the fact that newer versions of Bluetooth (there is like, what? 4 versions?) work at all on Linux counts as an accomplishment.
"
The company computer was broken, and no one could fix it. They call the old repairman, who takes a look, and says he can fix it for $5K. Desperate, the company says "Anything, just fix it!". The repairman squats down at the main console, opens the hatch, and replaces 1 single bolt holding some boards together. As he closes the hatch, he hears the cheers as the computer starts up, from all but the manager, who says "What? $5K for that?". The repairman silently hands him the bill:
1 Bolt $1
Knowing where to put the bolt: $4,9999
"
In a similar vein, knowing which option in which config to change in which way is really the hard part, and changing the wrong one in the wrong way will make it worse. And in every problem I run into, each source, somehow, has a different recommendation, often without explanation as to what the change will do or why. So I see the original author's point, and had an excuse to trot out this old, shopworn joke.
Lenovo ought to know better in 2018. I'd understand if their "consumer" laptops weren't fully compatible, but all Thinkpads should be compatible with the latest LTS release of Ubuntu (or corresponding Debian) out of the box.
I spend 2-3 days around the holidays to revive an old HP laptop with a Debian desktop distribution. I had problems with hibernation / suspend, but what was the show stopper for me was that there is still no smooth scrolling on Linux. [1]
Personally, I wouldn't spend time setting smooth scrolling up, not to mention implementing it. I doesn't seem to have much impact to my reading. The scrollable things I use is the browser and a PDF reader. Firefox scrolls smoothly, while the PDF reader doesn't, but my experience reading with both is about the same. So I sympathize with devs who put their time into solving other problems.
I'd be interested in hearing from people who feel the opposite.
I remember Apple having scads of Bluetooth problems in the first ~5 years, and then off/on problems for 10 years. These days I pretty much expect it to work.
The problem on Linux with Bluetooth is there's multiple kernel drivers involved, one or more daemons, and one or more interface tools. Knowing which component to blame for a bug, is not obvious. Learning about components is tedious: btmon, btattach, hciattach, hcitool...it just goes on and on.
I've filed bugs about random bluetooth mouse disconnects, and it gets blamed on some other component where there's no response from maintainers for basic questions like, how do I get you more information? Things like hcidump will get you metric f tons of information about the connection, way too verbose (dozens of lines per second) but zero information about why there's a disconnect.
And in many bug reports I see maintainers blame hardware, even when the problem doesn't reproduce on Windows 10.
I'm sure it's quite complicated, but there isn't even a decoder ring for how to help users file useful bug reports.
The one that got me was trying to pair an ODBII dongle with a the default Ubuntu bluetooth stack. It's one of the kinds with a fixed PIN you have to use to pair (1234), but the Bluetooth stack insisted on generating a 6 digit code and have me somehow punch it in on a device with zero buttons/switches.
It was annoying, but I figured there must be some commandline utility where I can force the other behavior right? If there is I still have no idea where or what it is. I found some utilities, but they have among the worst documentation I've ever seen for a Linux utility. Just a list of the commands that require options, with no description of the options that I can find no an explanation of what they do. It was kind of surprising because I've become accustomed to stuff just kind of working these days. To have something so broken is a bit shocking.
I used to be a happy x201 user 11 years ago, but nowadays can’t see any good reason to prefer it over a good Macbook Pro (2015?). It’s now more hacky to remove Windows and install Linux in a Thinkpad, compared to setting up a dual boot Arch + OSX system in a Macbook Pro.
Happy Toshiba X30/X40 user here. If you're ever looking for something else to run Linux on, I can recommend them (at least in their current incarnations).
I upgraded from MBP 2012 to the 15" 2015 version the last year. I'm sure 2k15 will be fine for a while, but this is unsustainable with the direction Apple computers are going. It's more expensive than ever; in Europe, I paid 2300 USD for the baseline 2k15 15" MBP; that's just crazy to me, and the baseline newest 15" MBP model goes for 3000 USD.
Also, their anti-consumer practices, such as simply selling keyboards they know will break (and that are also bad! I thought the 2k15 keyboard was already bad compared to the 2k12 non-retina MBP), and not repairing anything in their MBP (check Louis Rossmann's Apple videos), are just a signal for me that the MBPs are not for power users.
At work, I use the X1 Carbon 6th gen with Linux on it, and though I really like OSX, the hardware is starting to be nothing but farce. For that, I think I'll happily buy some Lenovo/Dell as my next personal laptop, and simply fiddle with Linux.
2/3 of the price of a MBP for the same HW at the cost of spending a bit more time with the OS is acceptable to me, personally.
So you end up with an overpriced used Macbook Pro 2015 (looking at eBay) that is comparable to a Thinkpad T440 or W540?
Why would anyone pay 3x to 4x for a device that is a PITA to get most common Linux distros onto, and is challenging to repair? I don't see the value provided, even comparing weight and dimensions...
I have a t440, the weight of the mbp is not comparable. It's more like a carbon and there's huge advantage to being able to move easily without a heavy laptop.
