[mediumdave]

> And if you want a portable computer (which by the way are demonstrably more secure in the face of physical tampering) you basically relegate yourself to terrible battery life, poor display support, dicey sleep support, and the fixes for these often compromise performance.

This depends a lot on how well supported your hardware is. I run Linux Mint (MATE) on a Thinkpad T430 and have had 0 issues with displays, sleep, battery life, you name it.

[vocatus_gate]

Running Linux Mint MATE 17.3 on my ThinkPad T530 for a couple years now with no problems. I even game on it with Steam (XCOM runs OK on the integrated Intel graphics). Been very happy with it.

[criddell]

I have a T520 and last year I tried to run Ubuntu, but my battery life was around 20% worse than under Windows 10 (and the Windows 10 battery life wasn't great either). You say you haven't had any batter life issues. Does that mean it isn't worse than Windows?

[KirinDave]

Have you plugged in an external monitor and not had an issue? I think that's not the norm even for that setup.

[semi-extrinsic]

What do you mean by issue? After a couple of xrandr invocations to configure them, which could be automated by some GUI app if I were so inclined, I've never seen external monitors have issues on either of my Linux laptops.

[PeterisP]

Requiring an xrandr invocation equals to having issues. Perhaps it's a small problem, perhaps it's a very easy problem, but it definitely is a problem.

Not having issues means that you arrive at the hardware (which you may have never seen, e.g. at a customer's site), plug the wires, and it works immediately.

More importantly, not having issues means that you can rely on being able to just plug the wires and have it work, and that you don't have a risk of being unable to make it work immediately even if you forget the right invocations and are offline and can't look them up.

[semi-extrinsic]

> plug the wires, and it works immediately

How does it work immediately? How does it know of I want to clone or extend the display? If I extend, do I want the same resolution on both screens, or different? You'll have to set that somehow, and whether it's a GUI or a CLI tool doesn't matter.

Forgetting the invocations aren't really an issue anymore either, my shell (zsh) has autocompletion of xrandr outputs, modes and resolutions.

[tracker1]

With OSX/Windows, it tends to mirror by default and/or present a window asking you what you want to do.

Requiring a CLI to connect a monitor/projector is a UX fail.

[lorenzhs]

There are plenty of tools to automate that. arandr is a very simple and powerful tool to arrange monitors with a GUI. Gnome has its own, much simpler, monitor configuration dialog. My system defaults to extending to the right, by the way, because that's generally what I want when connecting a projector.

None of this is new, and the whole point of this discussion is that Linux desktops are much better than they were ten years ago. It is that old state that many folks have in mind when criticising Linux distros' usability. It's just not a very interesting discussion to have.

[unhammer]

On my Thinkpad's X200 (VGA) and X220 (VGA, DisplayPort), plugging in external monitors has always Just Worked. I've been running Xubuntu on them for about 5 years.

It even worked on the first try from the X220's DisplayPort through a DP-to-HDMI-cable onto a TV.

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I've never had to use xrandr or any command line tool to select displays – on Xubuntu, there's this little graphical dialogue: http://netupd8.com/w8img2/xfce-mini-displays.png that pops up (or you can force it to show by hitting that key on the Thinkpad keyboard with the picture of an external display).

OTOH, I did just a month ago for the first time actually use xrandr, but this time it was because I wanted to write a script that set my windows and monitors up "just right" for how I like it when I'm at the office. I love how easy Linux makes it to do that stuff when I find I do want something automated.