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I get suspicious when everything just works on a laptop.
I never had anything NOT work on a laptop. I installed Linux on 5 of them.
These days, that’s pleasantly true :)
15 years ago was a different story. You’d have about a 50/50 shot of your trackpad working, one in three that your WiFi would work, and if you were hoping for a working webcam, you should just forget about it.
So even in modern times when you do an install and everything mostly just works, it still feels suspiciously miraculous.
These are the kinds of things that remind us how far we’ve come :)
It’s wilder when it works in the installer, but not on first boot.
Ah yes, the ‘Arch Linux’ experience. To be fair, your machine boots really really fast when you don’t read the install guide carefully enough and fail to put a network stack on. Valuable learning opportunity.
I have yet to be brave enough to try. I’m not sure my ego can handle how bad I’ll fuck it up.
To be fair, their installation page is excellent, but it does require close reading. Where I’d messed up was the “install essential packages” section, where it just says to “consider installing” stuff which is essential really - firmware, network stack, a text editor. If you’re able to access the internet and adjust configuration files, then you can install everything else you need.
Their suggested disk partitioning has a gigabyte for efi, which is twice what I’d recommend, and includes a swap partition, which I would not create. A swap file is just as good, and more flexible. Otherwise yeah, if you can install Arch, you can probably do all the Linux maintenance you’ll ever need to do, and it’s not that difficult - practise in a VM if you want - and will make you much more skilled and confident.
The amount of times I’ve pulled the trigger only to have to delve into forms and git repos trying to find a driver.
I have altered the drivers, pray I do not alter them further.
This was Zorin for me.
Dual screen worked without issue on live USB. Installed on metal and dual screen no longer worked…
Never got it figured out. I just moved to a different distro.
impossible! jkjk
Funnily enough, me with Alpine Linux
I threw it at my laptop and it just worked without a hitch
Endeavour
Regarding the title,
If you’ve enough distros then you must’ve encountered the scenario where the driver worked in installer but did not in the final installation
I literally ran into this last night trying to install Cachyos on my old surface. I was relieved when the wireless worked in the installer and so incredibly confused when it doesn’t now… I’m still trying to fix it lol.
Lol yea, I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that, but at least then it was usually a “Why didn’t you just install it‽” rather than a 6 hour marathon of patches and drivers compiled from source or some shit LMAO
So Linux Mint then!
I’m actually having a better time of it after switching to Bazzite. I had a bunch of strange little issues on Mint that seem to be gone after switching. I switched as a hail Mary for an issue where 3D Games would freeze randomly, and that seems to be gone too thankfully
also, your system is immutable now, so
you CAN’T break it
Give me an hour I’ll see what I can do.
Yeah, two seconds in: “no, you’re not supposed to do that, obviously it’ll break if you do that”
Ok then. When you install Bazzite into a VM/a real pc, that’s when your timer starts.
(or maybe this comment shall go to c/wooosh)
Must be a thinkpad lol
Dell surprisingly lmao
As far as I know DELLs are decent, especially latitudes.
Their corpo stuff is (incl. Latitudes). Their consumer stuff (like XPS) apparently not so much.
My current and previous laptops were/are Dell and I can count on one hand the number of hardware issues I’ve had with Linux (minus the Nvidia GPU but yknow. Nvidia.)
I have a latitude 5290, the only issue is with sleep on the Intel kabby-lake, but it isn’t a Linux exclusive, as the drivers on windows include the issue bypass.
Debian 13.
Tried open suse, but on my laptop it was slow and loud and the battery would die almost instantly (had to make it hibernate rather than suspend if I wanted it to make it through the night).
Installed Debian 13 and it feels like a new laptop. Not sure what exactly made the difference between the two but I’m not complaining…
Tried to install Debian 13 yesterday
Didn’t even boot xD
Since I needed something stable, I installed Fedora Kionite and it worked flawlessly on the first try
I’ve had a similar problem trying to install Debian 12 in the past…
Turned out it was the USB drive, I think. It didn’t have a problem booting and installing Mint, but with Debian it just wouldn’t boot. A different drive and it worked right away and flawlessly.
Oh shit. I’m better at installing Linux than Linus. That’s freaking amazing!
I threw together spare computer parts and a new hard drive, installed Bazzite, Steam, and did an entire Dark Souls 1 playthrough without issue using an xbox controller.
Waiting for things to go awry now. Kinda feels like an Ambrose Bierce story playing out.
I had this experience with my l14 thinkpad and Fedora.
I was shocked that even the fingerprint reader worked… well like half the time, but I don’t like using it anyway.
This was my experience with Ubuntu, my beloved. :)
Ubuntu catches some well earned flak, but afaik it was the first distro to have an effortless Gui setup wizard that “just worked.”
I remember using one of their ubiquitous install CD back in the mid 00s to bring an old laptop back to life, and literally changing my life.
I keep reading this, but why?
Edit: The flak
Couple reasons people dislike Ubuntu/Canonical. 1) they’re just popular, but also they went their own way with the Unity UI hoping to score a BMW touchscreen contract, they went their own way with snaps which are much worse than flatpak, they added ads for “Ubuntu Pro” in the distro (notably in the terminal).
I think they have a reputation for going off and doing their own thing rather than working with existing solutions.
I’m having a hard time understanding the criticism on them working with companies, or developing tech towards it, though. I thought it would be a good thing if a Linux company introduced systems for general use, same with Edubuntu. Having Ubuntu on school PCs is definitely better than Windows for example.
Edit: The rest makes sense!
If it weren’t for Ubuntu, I’d wager half or more Linux users wouldn’t be Linux users. I have no hard data to back this up and I’m willing to be told I’m wrong. But most of the stories I hear are “started on Ubuntu back when they were mailing out free CDs” and “tried a few other things, gave up until I found Ubuntu”
It’s barrier to entry was so long for Windows users, and it allowed people the time and space to get comfortable with being on something not-windows, and sure, eventually a big chunk moved on, but it got them to this side of the fence, and that’s admirable. Wubi (a dual boot installer you could run from within windows without a CD a thumb drive) is what really got me on Linux, and eventually I stopped dualbooting altogether.
So, are you trying to say it’s the year of the Linux desktop?
Lemme have a seizure real quick
This is what I think is holding back Linux adoption for end user devices. Only a handful of hardware suppliers cater for Linux directly, the rest are supported by the Linux community developing drivers where needed which will always be a cat and mouse situation.
I believe as adoption rate begins to intensify, hardware companies will take more notice and Linux adoption will increase exponentially. I think we are already beginning to see this starting.
This isn’t only an issue with Linux, it’s an issue within the whole technology industry. Simple things like Wi-Fi cards and the like, should be all standardized.
Hardware shouldn’t be catered to any particular os.
That would be great, but then you’d also need to standardise driver api’s across all operating systems for it to be seamless.
driver APIs*
See, this is why I like Linux Mint. I’ve gotten lazy in my old age and just want things to function.
