[guiambros]

I simply can't get Ubuntu 14.04 to hibernate and resume reliably. 1 out of 10 times it's dead on resume. The culprit seems to be fglrx (as usual), but no decent solution other than to give up on AMD and go back to Nvidia (not gonna happen).

We've come a long way since the first Slackware, but Linux on the desktop is still a hot mess, particularly in terms of WM. I sincerely wish we had less options, and some of the "it just works" from Macs.

[xorcist]

That neither fglrx nor the proprietary Nvidia drivers works well with the rest of Linux is hardly a secret. The fact that there is a special tainting mechanism so you won't get support for that configuration should be regarded a big warning sign.

Linux, just like MacOS or Windows, needs supported hardware to run. Since the past 8 years or so, that has meant Intel. It can be confusing that Linux "supports" every hardware under the sun, which can sometimes be true of only select versions.

Run a supported configuration and it'll "just work". My bog standard Thinkpad has suspended many times a day for the past five years and I haven't even once had a problem with it.

[guiambros]

> Since the past 8 years or so, that has meant Intel... Run a supported configuration and it'll "just work".

Intel is a joke in terms of GPUs, and absent in terms of desktop GPUs.

What you call a "supported configuration", I call "you're lucky... For now". Wait until your next distro or hardware upgrade.

[xorcist]

> Intel is a joke in terms of GPUs, and absent in terms of desktop GPUs.

That's not really a useful thing to say. Intel GPUs started out as useful only for office and programming work (still an overwhelming majority of use cases). Now it's good enough for pretty much anything that's not among the most performance demanding.

If you need a workstation with that extra performance, you probably have an application which only supports a particular configuration anyway (Nvidia on Red Hat for example, for a popular CAD/CAM tool), if which case the question isn't really relevant anyhow.

What remains are primarily consumer gaming, for which you should better stick to Windows which by far the dominating platform for it. I'm told Steam makes a difference here, so perhaps that's worth checking out, but I'm not in the industry so I have no idea about that.

> What you call a "supported configuration", I call "you're lucky... For now". Wait until your next distro or hardware upgrade.

You might be tempted to think that's so, but that's the whole idea why Linux is such a work horse on well supported hardware.

For another popular operating system, you pretty much have no guarantees that whatever drivers you require for third party support will be available in the future.

Since the well supported drivers on Linux by definition is open source, you are guaranteed (either explicitly by your support provider, or implicitly by the way development works) that it will be supported for the forseeable future. That's why I can use a ten year old printer on Linux, for example, which lost its Windows support two generations ago. Or a ten port serial board, which is probably just as old.

[vacri]

Suspend (low-power standby) and hibernate (dump ram to disk) are different things.

[guiambros]

Correct. I meant suspend, not hibernate. Hibernate works well; suspend is the one that causes trouble with fglrx.

[martey]

If I was using a Mac and a poorly supported closed source third-party device driver was causing problems, I would be more apt to blame the driver's creator than Apple. I also would not assume that my issues meant OS X was a "hot mess".

[frozenport]

Perhaps the Linux driver architecture encourages poor drivers? For example, Windows retired VxD drivers, and MS worked to get drivers certified.

[tom9729]

Have you considered just using the open source driver?