[bboygravity]

> I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.

I literally looked at it last week. Spent multiple days on it. Tried Mint and Zorin (full install, not just live).

This is on a brand new Lenovo p16s Gen 4 with AMD (no nvidia). That laptop didn't even exist before this year.

List of problems I encountered:

-- Multi touch not working (fixed by switching from Mint to Zorin, upgrading mainline kernel in Mint did not help).

-- External monitor not working (had to install display link drivers by going into terminal and running scripts and all of that other classic Linux usability) .

-- Hardware video acceleration not working (scrolling super slow, maps super slow, entire system super slow). Had to install AMD display drivers for that separately. Upgrading mainline kernel worked for Mint, but not for Zorin. Installing AMD drivers in Zorin involved downloading the drivers, !editting an install script that is part of the drivers! and then having an LLM guide me through the rest of the extremely elaborate process of installing the driver.

-- And to top it off, my classic pet peeve: there's no way to configure something as basic as scroll-lines (mouse scrollwheel speed) through a GUI in ANY of the distros. It involves installing imwheel, !writing a script!, setting the script to run on boot and then rebooting (and/or restarting the script).

So no. There's definitely no "it just works". Not even on a laptop that is supposed to have official HW vendor support for Ubuntu.

Also, I only ran it for like a day. I'm sure that I'll run into tons of other issues if I use it a bit longer.

Good for you and lucky you that you got it to work. But for most of us Linux is "nice try, but it's not finished yet" .

[fsflover]

> That laptop didn't even exist before this year.

Here's your problem. The hardware wasn't designed to run Linux and you gave Linux no time to fix the related problems. Try older hardware or wait.

[ForOldHack]

It works for me, said every Linux zelot ever. NVidia acceleration is horrid. The only thing that worked was directx on zorin. AMD? Only a few machines, even fewer models. What all the zelots we're running is built in Intel. "It works for me." Followed by bins by the truck full of unsupported hardware.

ThinkPads? Perfect every time? Dell? Have you configured you bios lately? Unsupported AMD? Grab your crayons on a race the old hardware will loose.

Linux has had 10 years to run on 10 year old hardware. Linux is not an OS. It's an attitude, and it's not a reflection on the technology, it's a reflection on the lowest common denominator.

Windows 10? I still have another 14 months left, and mass*.dev to thank.

Hardware that was built to run Linux? Drivers? If you have an AMD card and any interest in Linux, pull the card and prepare to trash the entire system, like the HP sitting on the sidewalk last night. Bye.

[fsflover]

> ThinkPads? Perfect every time? Dell?

System76, Purism, Taxedo, Pine64.

[bboygravity]

Which brings us back to my initial point: it only runs properly without fiddling on a tiny minority of very specific hardware by a tiny handful of vendors (who often ship to only a tiny portion of the globe).

[bboygravity]

To be clear: I got it to run eventually after hours/days of fiddling.

Do I like it after all this effort?

No.

But sure, I'll wait. I've waited for Linux to become truly user friendy for 3 decades and I really really want to love it, so I'll wait some more. No problem.