| I said that linux mostly works out of the box, but your "edge cases" where in this case: All lenovo yoga x1 models from the 8. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 2 years All lenovo carbon x1 models from the 10. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 3 years I'm pretty sure it also affects all newer hp and dell models since at least ~2023 It's great that your choice of laptops are never the ones that are broken, but then again, I never said linux never works. Even if you set aside the webcam problem, the lenovo laptops who where always called out for their good linux support had problems: The 2016 yoga x1 model couldn't get to sleep (s3i problem which many laptops had) and if it good back from sleep it need a special command to reconnect trackpad and trackpoint. There where some special patches to make it work and after about a year it worked, still not a possibility for non technical people The 2016 thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 model sometimes needs a special command to reconnect the trackpad and trackpoint, think that got fixed after ~3 years. Neither of theses devices have a working fingerprint sensor, I can't even think of one that works with linux Neither of these devices had a supported mobile (lte) modem, as the built in modem wasn't supported and you can't change it because the bios has only whitelisted the preinstalled model. The new s3i sleep modus also made it impossible for linux laptops to sleep for about a year until it was fixed. Did all of this get better over time? Yes Will every big new hardware thing still mean that some linux things are broken for some time? Yes Again, linux works for most of the hardware most of the time, but this will bite you when you expect certain things or devices to work. |
Let’s take an extreme example of that same argument: If someone’s only experience of macOS was manually installing on hackintoshes then they’d say macOS was hard to use too.
And by that same token, I can tell you from experience that manually installing Windows on new hardware isn’t a piece of cake either. You have the same bullshit experience trying to locate drivers.
The common theme here is that nontechnical people wouldn’t be building their own OEM systems or wiping laptop drives and performing fresh installs. Regardless of whether that’s Linux or Windows.