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by syntacticbs 500 days ago
I run Linux on my laptop and desktop and have a MacBook.

I wouldn't recommend it for your laptop unless you're an enthusiast. Suspend/sleep is still janky, power saving is poor and dock support is hit and miss depending on the day. And this is after applying a lot of tweaks.

For desktop it's fantastic and I would recommend. It's not without some issues but what OSes is actually without any issues.

For server, I can't imagine using anything else.
1 comments
d3Xt3r 500 days ago
As a ThinkPad Z13 user, I've had none of the issues you've described. I've been running Linux (Fedora + Arch) on it for three years now and it's been a first-class experience. Everything worked out-of-the-box, with literally zero issues. I can't think of a single thing that I'd want to improve, from a laptop user's perspective. For me, this is the definitive Linux laptop experience.

I had a similarly good experience with my previous laptop, an HP Elite Dragonfly. Only niggle was that not all bits of firmware was upgradable via fwupd, so I had to ocassionally boot into Windows to do the firmware updates. But other than that, I don't recollect any issues with it either, suspend/resume/power management all worked as good as Windows. In fact, battery life was better than Windows when I applied powertop's tweaks.

And I'm sure the laptop experience is equally good on "native" Linux laptops, such as the ones from System76, Slimbook, Tuxedo etc.

So personally, I wouldn't make a blanket statement like "I wouldn't recommend it for your laptop unless you're an enthusiast". To be clear, I'm not claiming that the issues you describe don't exist, but at least for laptops known for having official support for Linux, the experience should be good.

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tmtvl 500 days ago
I have a Slimbook Elemental 15 (or some such) and it's crap. The keyboard has a backlight you can change the colour of... with an application which is only available on specific distros (it isn't even on the AUR) and even then half the time it doesn't work.

Its audio system is also fucked, if you plug in headphones tte thing will play from the headphones at the volume of the speakers. The system doesn't see the headphones, it only has a generic audio output and switching between speakers and headphones happens IN HARDWARE.

The battery life ain't great, though I don't know about hibernate 'cause I ain't wasting 32 gigs on swap. Suspend seems to work fine, though I don't know how much power it'd drain over the course of, say, a night.

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