I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.

It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.

I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.

Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.

But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.

Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.

I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.

I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?

  • bitwolf@lemmy.one
    0·
    7 months ago

    Unfortunately unless you buy hardware with the intention of running Linux on it you’re rolling dice.

    It is very likely your laptop can work well with it but unless you buy a Linux certified laptop you’re going to have a few quirks. Generally, if it comes down to it, the Kernel code can be adjusted to accommodate the quirks of incompatible hardware but that requires reporting the bugs.

    This is why people say Linux works great on older devices. It’s because Linux users got the laptops brand new and put in the time to report the bugs the needed parties so they get resolved and included in newer Linux (kernel) versions.

    Actually a lot of these issues stem from a long history of Microsoft breaking standards and manufacturers catering to Windows. This is especially apparent with ACPI which ties into power consumption and sleep reliability among other things.

    If you buy supported hardware, manufacturers specifically test and align better with standards (often offering a Linux mode in the bios). Linux actually “just works” better than MacBooks do. Some laptops Ive owned and loved are:

    • Thinkpad t480
    • Dell XPS 13 (Developer Edition)
    • Framework Laptop

    The last two of these go the extra step to publish their bios updates through “LVFS” which means I can get bios updates, OS updates, AND app updates all from the “app store”. This is so underrated and a far cry from the windows experience.

    If you want to use Linux without quirks and you have the capability to, consider getting a Laptop that ships with Linux. Key things that play into this are wifi and sleep compatibility.

    Please don’t judge Linux unless you try it on hardware that is all supported by Linux. (The great thing is you can take action, even without coding experience, to make your hardware work if it does not today).

    As for the software experience, Nvidia is notorious for difficulty with Linux but have been taking strides to change that. I feel that in a years time things will be better.

    This specifically affects the Wayland compatibility (modern display stack), which also influences the touchpad experience especially around multi touch (Wayland is paired with libinput a modern input stack).