[mercurialmaven]

In my experience, Ubuntu, or Linux in general, works great on desktops but very poorly on laptops due to lack of hardware and driver support. Not a hardware engineer myself, I think this is because desktop hardware is more standardized while laptop hardware is more proprietary, advanced, and custom-made to different makes and models. My previous job was the first job I had wear a company-supported Linux laptop was even an option. I absolutely loved it, but fully admit it was incredibly difficult to set up and maintain. Most devs continued to use Macbooks.

One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering. It turns out, software rendering makes your browser really slow and makes it burn tons of battery when not plugged in. I eventually figured out how to enable most acceleration for Chrome. However, there were several electron apps like Zoom that didn't expose any option to enable hardware acceleration. The zoom desktop app was completely unusable for me on Linux. Instead, I used the browser app exclusively.

Slack was similarly unusable without hardware acceleration but to its credit exposed an option to enable it.

[techrat]

> One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering.

https://i.imgur.com/u1sKBiu.png

[mercurialmaven]

I don't remember the details, but I remember it wasn't nearly as simple as toggling a switch. I remember it involving a mixture of:

* Setting custom startup flags to chrome

* accessing a hidden dev-specific page and turning on acceleration features that were deemed unsupported or experimental.

This page looks related though I don't remember if these exact instructions worked for me or not: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware.... I had to do a bunch of research before I arrived at a working solution.

After I enabled these features, my desktop started encountering a problem where I would have to kill and restart the display manager once, and thereafter the display manager would occasionally hang and I'd have to restart it.

It was manageable with a few days research and technical skill, but it's not the kind of thing you would expect most people to put up with.

Another thing to note, Chrome's software renderer didn't seem to play well with my skylake? integrated graphics. Not only was it slow, but buggy with screen tearing and other visual artifacts. So I had to get acceleration working so my browser would both render properly and be reasonably responsive and performant.