[qplex]

>Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to "just work out of the box".

Google the laptop model + Linux before you buy it. That increases the odds of getting a "it works out of the box" experience.

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.

Also, 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. Instead, you'll have a fun time hunting bloated driver packages from some slow obscure chinese FTP server.

In addition hardware support on Windows gets worse over time. For example: Have an older Samsung laptop, wanna run Windows 10? Tough luck. [1]

On Linux you'll have this problem _very_ rarely, if ever, as hardware support (among other things) keep improving over time.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/31/windows_10_samsung_f...

[bisby]

My dad and I have the same Samsung laptop from 2012-ish. It came with Windows 7, and after upgrading to windows 8, a lot of stuff stopped working. Samsung didnt have "special" drivers for windows 8, so a lot of stuff (like the backlight buttons) didnt work properly. Eventually they fixed the problem, but they were weird out of date drivers. Windows 10 had no drivers at all.

I moved my laptop to Linux full time around the Windows 8.1 transition (which had also re-broken the drivers somehow). Everything worked great in Linux for me until kernel 4.2 or something when backlight brightness stopped working. Then after a few weeks or searching, I found a parameter that made it work again.

After applying the fixes to my dad's laptop, and setting up a few of his "must have" programs under wine for him, he claims that Ubuntu runs better for him than Windows ever did.

[pawadu]

> Everything worked great in Linux for me until kernel 4.2 or something when backlight brightness stopped working.

Interestingly, this also happened to a lot of Vaios when people upgraded to Windows 10. Now, your Linux was eventually fixed while my Vaio is still running at 0% backlight with zero response from Sony.

[bisby]

I dont know what changed in linux at kernel 4.2 (or maybe it was 4.1 or 4.3? I dunno. it was early 4.x), but I was able to fix it with a kernel boot parameter (acpi_osi=linux acpi_backlight=video). This tells the GPU to control the backlight, and everything works. Theres a lot of different laptop configurations of who powers and who runs the backlight. linux has all these options set up, but it has to pick one by default. So my laptop didnt "just work" on a fresh installation, but I was able to fix it.

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 previously, these laptops would ship with a special Windows 7 driver that would handle the backlight. But its "so much work" to port that driver to windows 10... so they don't. So in this scenario, my laptop originally worked. A fresh installation would require proprietary Samsung drivers, and samsung has stopped providing those for windows 10... literally no fix available (it's possible the windows 7 drivers still work? to be clear, Ive never checked if there are work arounds or other drivers available. I switched to linux before windows 10 came out, and my dad is happy with linux resolving his backlight issues, so Ive never had to look it up)

[pjmlp]

> Google the laptop model + Linux before you buy it. That increases the odds of getting a "it works out of the box" experience.

I would happily do this when was a university student about 20 years ago.

Nowadays, I want to go whatever store (physical or online) and just take what I want to buy.

Yes, there are some online stores for GNU/Linux, but as I discovered with the one I bought (Asus + Ubuntu), it might happen that some things don't quite work.

Also the models being sold aren't that enticing, XPS is the exception.

[luca_ing]

> > Google the laptop model + Linux before you buy it. That increases the odds of getting a "it works out of the box" experience.

> I would happily do this when was a university student about 20 years ago.

> Nowadays, I want to go whatever store (physical or online) and just take what I want to buy.

Well, if you do that little research, I suspect you might be disappointed even if you were to stick with Windows 10. With devices as complex as notebooks, I think a few hours of spec-reading and comparison is warranted.

Otherwise I quite plainly wouldn't know what to grab from the shelf once I'm at the store.

Maybe I'm more discerning (you might say: anal), but I like to do a little research for purchases like this.

[majewsky]

> Nowadays, I want to go whatever store (physical or online) and just take what I want to buy.

If you bring Linux on a USB stick, a good store will let you boot into it on the exhibition piece. At least, that was the case for me, and it definitely contributed to my buying my notebook at that particular store.

[thecrazyone]

I hadn't thought about this. Thanks for sharing :)

[Klover]

>Nowadays, I want to go whatever store (physical or online) and just take what I want to buy.

Look, I understand you that purchasing a Linux laptop with the same certainty of polish that a MacBook has is just problematic. But:

That honestly sounds like a personal problem. And quite a problematic one at that. Do you go into a grocery store and grab the most flashy looking product too? I would hope that you have read up a little bit about nutrition and can take the 5 seconds of your time to see that Flashy Box consists of 90% sugar.

And if a quick Google search of the suggested "model + Linux" is too much time for you whenever you spend $1000+, then how do you find the time to type out this comment?

You merely pointed out one small reason for why you find yourself getting a fully compatible Linux laptop problematic. Your time argument is applicable on the wider issue of not knowing, which you hinted at with your Asus experience.

See: there are a whole lot of things a newcomer doesn't know when they want to get a Linux laptop.

1. They have to know that they have to know beforehand how compatible the laptop is.

2. They have to know how to know how to install additional drivers.

3. They have to know how to revert or otherwise (guess what: I don't know) in case of a similar Wi-Fi driver problem you experienced.

4. They have to know that, in order to get a competitive battery life on the current LTS Ubuntu and Fedora 25, they have to use the terminal to install an additional package (TLP, I didn't know that without it battery life is quite miserable).

5. And this is the summary and the stresser: I don't know what else they, and I, don't know.

Not knowing the things you don't know, that's what you - at least I - don't have time for.

The Chromebooks, those look nice. Linux, without the hassle. I like those. They pass the parent gift test, because it seems like those are the only ones you can just give a family member and never hear about again. No driver issues, no TLP to know to install. And they're so fast! You open the lid and it's ready to go! Why doesn't a distribution pick up Chromium OS and GNU it up, or take the best pieces of it?

As a hardware side note, it appears to be that you sort of get what you pay for. If you want something that runs the seemingly workstation focused Fedora distribution, you probably want a "business" laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell Precision, HP Elitebook). Ubuntu is more lenient when you tick the 3rd party box during installation, which means most laptops worth their salt appear to work, think $1000+ (the non dev XPS, the ZenBook, VAIO). But don't quote me on that.

[gsmiro]

I have a 2013 MBP and mu wife a cheap 14" Dell bought around the same time. Fun fact: using my Samsung TV as a second display didn't work in MBP running Mavericks and worked in the Dell running Win 7. After I upgraded to Yosemite/Win10 things got inverted and now I have to stop coding in order my wife can watch Netflix in the TV with her girlfriends...

Bottom line: windows has crappy driver support for old hardware