[annzabelle]

On the desktop that's true, but when I last used linux laptops (Debian, probably in 2021 or so), there were significant driver issues for the touchpad, touchscreen, buttons for brightness, and audio on every laptop I tried.

I eventually gave up and bought a Macbook and installed Homebrew and Rectangle on it. I haven't thought about drivers or firmware updates for that device since I bought it.

If I did own a desktop, I would use linux on it, and I solely use linux when I'm using VMs or cloud providers.

Recently started working at a company that uses windows and .net and it's so bad.

[edg5000]

Did you install the nonfree Debian ISO? Debian back then by default did not ship non-free drivers, meaning half your stuff won't work.

You should have used their special (released by them) nonfree ISO or Ubuntu and you would've been fine.

Your stuff is probably supported by official debian repos, just not ones that are enabled by default.

Try Linux sometime again! You won't regret it.

[Grombobulous]

I would say even 2021 is long enough ago for that landscape to have changed quite a bit. For one thing, Framework was barely a company back then, now they’re a mature and highly viable OEM choice.

As a small tip, I prefer using Arch-based distributions as they get new kernels rapidly and therefore new hardware support comes fast. They’re also an obvious choice for people who play games on Steam since SteamOS is arch based.

In the AI age, almost any problem with Linux is a quick query or copy/pasted error message away. The days of spending hours on troubleshooting are over.

If you were willing to buy a whole new piece of hardware with a MacBook, perhaps you’d be willing to buy a Linux-first laptop in the future? For example, the Framework 13 Pro has purportedly caught up to many of the advantages of a MacBook Pro (battery life, haptic trackpad, CNC aluminum chassis), judging by early press impressions. Over half of Framework 13” customers install Linux and it’s Ubuntu certified. Besides being the premier Linux laptop, you also get all the repairability and modularity benefits the brand has on offer.

I personally own the current non-Pro model and despite its shortcomings that the new model doesn’t have (I have my preorder in), the overall package is a pretty modern laptop where 100% of the hardware works flawlessly with Linux.

Even if you aren’t looking for that type of machine and just want something from a more common OEM like Lenovo or ASUS, I have found that solid Linux support is not tough to find. Basically any common laptop that’s older than 6 months old is well-supported. One of my friends bought a $500 ThinkPad T14 on eBay and of course 100% of the hardware works.

Macs are the gold standard for not having any need to mess with drivers, but I have found my AMD graphics driver to be a lot more stable in Linux than in Windows. That was the major decision point in wiping my desktop gaming PC and installing CachyOS.

My “final straw” motivation to leave macOS on my laptop last year was Liquid Glass. Other motivations included my frustration with certain Apple services and the level of abstraction and lock-in they have, running out of storage space in my system, as well as frustration with my laptop being capable enough but unable to play any of most of my PC games from a software standpoint.

Returning to speaking of something relevant to this article, now that I have no macOS or Windows, I am no longer tied down with Thunderbolt as the only viable desktop email client anymore as I don’t need to support all three operating systems. I’m enjoying Evolution a lot more than Thunderbird, but of course there are numerous Linux-only choices I could have gone with.