![]() So previously, these laptops would ship with a special Windows 7 driver that would handle the backlight. I think I know what happened in windows: windows itself has no backlight driver, and the standard GPU drivers have no backlight handling (or do, but its disabled by default). So my laptop didnt "just work" on a fresh installation, but I was able to fix it. linux has all these options set up, but it has to pick one by default. Theres a lot of different laptop configurations of who powers and who runs the backlight. This tells the GPU to control the backlight, and everything works. it was early 4.x), but I was able to fix it with a kernel boot parameter (acpi_osi=linux acpi_backlight=video). I dont know what changed in linux at kernel 4.2 (or maybe it was 4.1 or 4.3? I dunno. On Linux you'll have this problem _very_ rarely, if ever, as hardware support (among other things) keep improving over time. For example: Have an older Samsung laptop, wanna run Windows 10? Tough luck. In addition hardware support on Windows gets worse over time. Instead, you'll have a fun time hunting bloated driver packages from some slow obscure chinese FTP server. You'll also usually find pretty straightforward instructions how to get things going quickly if they do not work out of the box, or the simple fact that the machine is not well supported.Īlso, if you had done enough Windows installs you'd know that things very seldom "work out of the box" if you do a clean install, especially with laptops. That increases the odds of getting a "it works out of the box" experience. Google the laptop model + Linux before you buy it. >Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to "just work out of the box". How do you type a literal asterisk on HN? Backslash and double-asterisk don't work. And tired of Apple, who has the best unix/linux operating system, fucking us over with every hardware release. I'm tired of waiting for the open source world to try - and fail - to gather momentum. We need another closed-source unix/linux-based operating system that throws away X.org and its attempted modern replacements, that can directly compete with OS X. What we really need is a BSD/unix/linux competitor to OS X. Is a "pre-installed" linux laptop even cross-distro compatible? If the laptop comes with Ubuntu pre-installed, what are the odds I can replace it with CentOS or Arch? Is the laptop "designed for linux", or "designed for exactly what is factory shipped, and nothing else"? Can I even do a fresh install of the shipped operating system, or do they hack in additional manufacturer packages/kernel drivers that require you to never reinstall on top of the shipped install? How about OS upgrades? Are they reliable, or do you risk running into compatibility problems, even with a new version of the same distro? I can't see how it's ever supposed to be "the year" for linux when just getting it to run properly on hardware requires buying OEM meant-for-Windows, but we-promise-it-works-with-linux garbage. Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to "just work out of the box". OS X will work on any hardware it is permitted to operate on. Windows will work on practically any combination of hardware. The fact that hardware - though much improved in the past 15 years - is still a crapshoot on Linux, particularly when it comes to laptop hardware, is so frustrating. YMMV of course.Įdit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar. Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I've tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. Not saying this is commonplace, but I've NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot.Īgain, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it's worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. It's gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn't reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion.Īs far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |