Two of the reasons I eventually gave up on Desktop Linux, were virtualization getting good enough for just keep using Windows instead, back in the day with VMware Workstation and Virtual Box, nowadays with WSL (macOS is anyway UNIX enough for me to care otherwise).
And exactly the same experience with OEM vendors that were supposed to be Linux friendly, on my case the whole netbooks effort, where graphics, video decoding and wlan never worked as well on Windows, even though they were supposed to.
Dell XPS also had their issues for something that was supposed to be Canonical certified as running GNU/Linux properly.
It seems Android, ChromeOS and WebOS are the only ones where OEMs actually care to make it work properly, naturally the cloud and IoT vendors with their custom distros as well.
I've been running Linux on my laptop and on my workstation since the 90's. Still using it as my main driver. Fedora Kinoite is my distro of choice, and Lenovo AMD Thinkpad T14s the laptop. Everything works flawless, and it's still pretty fast even though it's two years old already.
And I do not miss at all the Microsoft bullsh*t on tracking and advertising. Or the general sluggishness of Windows.
I used to be quite cynical about these posts. I used Linux as my main desktop from 1994-2007 and switched to Mac then. I would periodically try on laptops Linux again, but there were always things broken in bad ways.
Early this year I bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD. In contrast to when I had a T14 Gen 1 AMD early 2020s, everything just works. All the hardware works, suspend/resume works, all the hardware comes up after a resume, etc.
Lately I have been using my ThinkPad much more than my MacBook Pro. NixOS is a superpower to me and having NixOS on a laptop is living the dream.
I’ve used it from probably… 2010 or so, to now. I recall some stuff like WiFi being vaguely annoying in the beginning. But, things seemed to get pretty good post 2015.
You were here for the really hard stuff, and missed the beginning of the good times, I think. Unlucky! Oh well. Welcome back!
I did use a Ryzen Linux desktop from ~2018-2020 besides a MacBook, but Apple Silicon was so insanely good when it was introduced that I went back fully back to Mac on the desktop. But Ryzen mobile APUs have been catching up.
I have also used headless Linux machines throughout my Mac vacation :).
With regards to the hard stuff. 1994-2007 was from my 12th to my 25th, basically overlapping with when I was a high school/university student. So, plenty of time and not enough money for a Mac or some commercial UNIX system. That period was also super exciting, especially up till the dotcom crash a lot of people thought that Linux was going to take over the desktop (anyone remember Corel Linux and even WordPerfect on Linux?). Linux did take over, but in different ways than we imagined, the server was kinda expected after the mid-nineties, but Android not.
The only problem with this approach is that I don't want to use Apple's software, or rely on a commercial operating system. The hardware is great, but not so much the software.
- Fully declarative. I can bring up a system in 5-10 minutes (depending on internet speed) and the system configuration is exactly as any other system.
- Great modules for programs/services in NixOS and home manager. So I typically do not have to figure out what configuration format something uses. Most common options are exposed as module options and for options that are not exposed, it's often possible to write the configuration in Nix (or worst case a string that gets added to the configuration). I can access the documentation of all modules with a simple _man configuration.nix_ or `man home-configuration.nix`.
- I can override arbitrary packages with custom build options, etc. I don't have to maintain separate .spec/rules files or anything. I can just put a somePackage.override/overrideAttrs somewhere in my system configuration and the package customizations are there with my system configuration and always get built with the system.
- Packaging something to hook it up in my system is low-effort. nixpkgs is the largest distribution package set (according to repology). But sometimes something is missing or I want to add some of my own projects as packages, unless it's some insanely bad proprietary application, I can do it in a few minutes.
- Atomic updates/rollbacks.
- Ad-hoc or project-specific development shells (though that is more Nix than NixOS).
I know that the learning curve can be steep, but once you really get Nix and NixOS, it's kinda like being the master of the universe, erm, I mean your systems.
I don't think anybody ever sold nixos that good to me before.
I might try it again. Last time I really did not like that any minute config change would take 15s to apply.
But the biggest issue for me, is that right now I have a good enough solution, that allows for config file update from applications. I have a small git repo, with one shell script, that symlinks config files, and even generates a few. And so backing up the latest config changes from KDE, freecad, etc, is a git add & commit away. I have another shell script to setup the base Ubuntu the way I want. And my data is replicated via syncthing.
NixOS gives you the ability to define your system declaratively, upgrade or tweak without fear of breaking anything, and the ability to launch shells with arbitrary and well defined sets of dependencies.
10+ years of T440s here. Most of the time a Fedora base. Both batteries at 50% health but the only thing that really is noticeable over the years is the missing hardware for todays video codecs.
I know, there are dozens on Linux forums, every time I was searching for workarounds.
Also it isn't as if I haven't subscribed to Linux Journal during its whole lifetime, or LWN, or even used to write M$ on email signatures and Usenet messages, for that matter.
Signed someone that knows Linux since kernel 1.0.9, yet has better things to do than making it work.
It's funny, for me it's just like you said but with the commercial offerings. I just can't get them to work as I want, like with Linux. To each of its own, but I doubt I'm the only one sharing this issue. I don't have time to deal issues with macOS or Windows, I have work to do...
Before the Tuxedo, I used an old Lenovo. I didn't check before if it works well with Linux, but it worked flawlessly. I am so used to devices working well and not having to think much about drivers. That's probably why I am disappointed by Tuxedo. They market themselves to Linux users but until recently they did not emphasize upstreaming and embracing standards.
What I love about Lenovo besides PSRef and all the maintenance/repair manuals (with part numbers, so that you know what to get if something needs to be replaced), etc. is that they often certify laptops for Linux.
They also seem to really care about supporting Linux. E.g. WWAN modems need proprietrary unlock procedures these days thanks to the FCC [1]. Most vendors would shrug and say 'sorry, we only support Windows', Lenovo has a repo with Linux support for all the modems that ThinkPads support (you can only use supported modems, because the FCC apparently only certifies laptop/modem combinations, not individual modems):
I ran a Dell XPS (not even the Canonical certified version) for a few years at a past job, and everything worked pretty well under Ubuntu. But it's always a matter of which exact hardware combination has mainstream support, and if the version you get doesn't e.g. have a shitty WiFi chip with bad support.
Yes. This is why I rather check Linux support od chips in a machine that I am planning to buy. Not that much work but you will not get unpleasant surprise when Wi-Fi do not work.
Funny to read replies to your comment. One can be sure that on HN for every single critical comment about Linux viability one gets multiple responses claiming that Linux is perfect and without issues.
Inb4: I have used Linux exclusively from 2019 to 2024. It wasn't that bad but it wasn't flawless. At least once per month I met some issue that took few hours to solve. Currently on Win11, zero problems (yes, I am using pirated LTSC IoT version, how did you know?)
No system is without issues. We used ThunderBolt docks that worked perfectly with macOS, until one major release they became a hell to use because Apple broke something (which manifested as a display not coming back after resume, requiring several plugs/unplugs).
As everyone knows, Windows has its own fair share of issues. The first is that it is not a Unix :).
Lol. I'm unplugging and re plugging my HDMI display for like 3 years now. Thanks Apple for being so stupid that you can't even get external displays to work properly
In this case it turns out they got… one comment that was strongly pro-Linux, one that mentioned they didn’t have trouble but only as an aside before going on to discuss Tuxedo, and one that was softly positive but acknowledged the trouble of checking hardware beforehand.
And exactly the same experience with OEM vendors that were supposed to be Linux friendly, on my case the whole netbooks effort, where graphics, video decoding and wlan never worked as well on Windows, even though they were supposed to.
Dell XPS also had their issues for something that was supposed to be Canonical certified as running GNU/Linux properly.
It seems Android, ChromeOS and WebOS are the only ones where OEMs actually care to make it work properly, naturally the cloud and IoT vendors with their custom distros as well.