[Waterluvian]

I have a lot of reasons but I'll share the one that always comes first. I have never had a Linux laptop that would both reliably run three monitors and proper power saving when solo on battery.

Every response I ever get is always so disappointing too because it's usually people who think your time is worth nothing and they casually want you to spend hours screwing with Bumblebee or whatever. And when I do build up the patience to actually try it ends up breaking something else about my graphics.

Sorry this is a sore spot for me. I do robotics so using a Mac for years was painful when I had to run ROS, but everything else about it stayed completely out of my way.

Ubuntu is fantastic only when I low-pass my actions, avoiding anything slightly edgy, unusual, out there.

Oh my god I had to compile mouse drivers for my Logitech MX to make the wheel stop screwing up. It's a mouse!!! They were invented in the 20th century!

My Bluetooth driver just crashes once a week. Silently. My mouse just stops working. I have to power it off fully because a reboot won't do it.

I lived in an apartment around 50 or so wifi connections. I would have to toggle wifi on and off over and over the first time connecting because the damn list wouldn't show them all and mine wasn't on the list!

I've worked in product and while I still think so much about product is just utter nonsense, some of it isn't, and it's those practical parts that seem lost on so many engineers.

Why can't I make my damn software Ubuntu update thing not appear every day? I've tried to kill it with stack overflow answers a few times.

Why do I have to pick between chrome having tiny controls and the rest of my UI having massive controls on my 4k monitor?

I don't care about what brand it is. If it's cool. If it's open source or free. I just want it to all just quietly work and stay well out of my way.

No actually I'm not done yet. Why do I have to tell it every time what kind of headphones I just plugged in? And when I leave sleep it forgets and starts blasting 80s eurodisco in the office even though they're still plugged in?

Okay I think I'm done for good this time. Just off the top of my head the things that make me feel like I'm trying to become a master musician by practicing 10 000 hours on a kazoo.

[zhdc1]

I'm running Manjaro (Arch) on a nine year old X220 with almost the same specs as the authors'. I'm getting 4-6 hours on a 4 cell battery (70% remaining lifetime capacity), which is almost two hours more than what I was getting with Windows 10.

Aside from needing to write a quick bash script to get the settings for my trackpoint to stick with systemd after reboots, it's been absolutely rock solid.

I don't know which laptop you're having issues with, but a $120 used Thinkpad (X/T/W430+ for dual external monitor support) and any modern linux distro will work out of the box with little to no fooling around and will keep up with almost any new laptop in terms of performance, reliability, and battery life.

[mike_ivanov]

Almost all of these problems are coming from using either Ubuntu or Unity/Gnome. Don't use that stuff. Try Manjaro, Fedora or Mint and try it with KDE, Cinnamon or whatever else. The difference is huge.

[perl4ever]

I tried a different distribution, but one that had the option to install with KDE or Gnome, and I concur with your opinion of Gnome, because I tried it first and eventually had problems.

But one of the problems I attribute to Linux more generally, is that if you Google for information on something like KDE vs. Gnome, you tend to find discussions where people get into the weeds on things very removed from "which one works and lets me get things done?". The threads are more like sports fans debating the merits of their teams while trying hard to be civilized about it. Which is how I ended up not trying KDE first even though that was the obvious default.