You must log in or register to comment.
I have a kink for installing Linux on Macs. The only thing I ever have trouble with is wifi, particularly on my 2011 MacBook Pro.
Oh, and the trackpad gets significantly shitter, but that’s just life.
I installed endeavouros on my 2015 pro and nothing made the WiFi work. Reinstalled macOS.
After a few days I thought screw it, I’ll try other distros. Popos just boots and works out of the box ….
I kinda wish I hadn’t sold my 2015 MBP Pro when I got my M2 Air. I wasn’t messing about with Linux then, but with hindsight it would have been an excellent machine. I had it running Ventura (I think it was) via OCLP, which was great, but the fans were basically constant. Turns out that it was likely just macOS/OCLP.
Currently running Kubuntu off a thumb drive plugged into my 2011 MBP and I honestly don’t think I’ve heard the fan on it. Running Ventura on the same machine was like trying to work next to a jet engine.
I’m currently still running macOS Monterey on a 2016 Macbook Pro which I use as my general purpose desktop. I’m considering going to Linux on it :)
I have other Linux machines already so this isn’t a new foray - would just be interesting to see how it performs. Battery would be way worse I know, but this laptop serves basically as a permanent desktop anyway, so that’s very much not a concern.
I get suspicious when everything just works on a laptop.
I never had anything NOT work on a laptop. I installed Linux on 5 of them.
These days, that’s pleasantly true :)
15 years ago was a different story. You’d have about a 50/50 shot of your trackpad working, one in three that your WiFi would work, and if you were hoping for a working webcam, you should just forget about it.
So even in modern times when you do an install and everything mostly just works, it still feels suspiciously miraculous.
These are the kinds of things that remind us how far we’ve come :)
It’s wilder when it works in the installer, but not on first boot.
I have altered the drivers, pray I do not alter them further.
Ah yes, the ‘Arch Linux’ experience. To be fair, your machine boots really really fast when you don’t read the install guide carefully enough and fail to put a network stack on. Valuable learning opportunity.
I have yet to be brave enough to try. I’m not sure my ego can handle how bad I’ll fuck it up.
To be fair, their installation page is excellent, but it does require close reading. Where I’d messed up was the “install essential packages” section, where it just says to “consider installing” stuff which is essential really - firmware, network stack, a text editor. If you’re able to access the internet and adjust configuration files, then you can install everything else you need.
Their suggested disk partitioning has a gigabyte for efi, which is twice what I’d recommend, and includes a swap partition, which I would not create. A swap file is just as good, and more flexible. Otherwise yeah, if you can install Arch, you can probably do all the Linux maintenance you’ll ever need to do, and it’s not that difficult - practise in a VM if you want - and will make you much more skilled and confident.
The amount of times I’ve pulled the trigger only to have to delve into forms and git repos trying to find a driver.
This was Zorin for me.
Dual screen worked without issue on live USB. Installed on metal and dual screen no longer worked…
Never got it figured out. I just moved to a different distro.
Yup. Big fan of [distro]. Never had a problem running [distro]. I CHOOSE to open [distro]'s terminal because its so perfect i don’t ever NEED to.
I run Ironman btw.
Fuck [distro] and its fanboys. [Distro 2] is clearly superior.
Fuck [distro], fuck [distro 2], you plebians haven’t breathed until you’ve rolled your own Linux From Scratch
/j
The last time I had something not automatically detected was on a ~2003 obscure “gaming” laptop (or what passed for gaming back then)
Yeah, it’s been pretty straight forward for standard components for the last twenty years. (But I also tend to buy PCs that are known to be Linux friendly. That might be a reason for my lack of complaints in this area.)
When my laptop was pretty new, I would have to update Linux Mint’s kernel for the trackpad to work. The older kernel it defaulted to didn’t support it but the update manager could get a newer one that worked. The Wi-Fi driver actually worked better in Linux than in Windows.
So, are you trying to say it’s the year of the Linux desktop?
Lemme have a seizure real quick
painfull memories. mouse worked in instaler but not once installed. always something
I had an old laptop where graphics worked in the LiveCD installer but not once installed.
Tldr it took a bunch of bootloader config changes to make it work again
For me it’s the geolocation of all things. Live USB can find my location in map and weather applications no problem but once installed it only gets my country right…
See, this is why I like Linux Mint. I’ve gotten lazy in my old age and just want things to function.
Sheeeeeeeeit. I remember when that wasn’t even the case with Windows. I’m old, though.
That’s still not the case with windows for me. The headphone jack doesn’t work. I did go as far as to reinstall OS from scratch.
It’s not uninstalled drivers because they work for thr first 5 minutes after boot.
Getting sound to work is easier in linux than in windows for my pc. That’s just uncanny to think about.
My wifi does not work out of the box with the windows installer, for some reason, so I have to use my phone as a hotspot. Never happened on the linux distros I tried :>
Try installing Windows on some Dell computers without the storage drivers…
All you have to do is switch the storage to AHCI mode in BIOS. Windows has to have a special driver for it too in RAID mode, at least as of last time I tried to install it on a dell.
You lose some Intel specific optimizations.
This is what I think is holding back Linux adoption for end user devices. Only a handful of hardware suppliers cater for Linux directly, the rest are supported by the Linux community developing drivers where needed which will always be a cat and mouse situation.
I believe as adoption rate begins to intensify, hardware companies will take more notice and Linux adoption will increase exponentially. I think we are already beginning to see this starting.
This isn’t only an issue with Linux, it’s an issue within the whole technology industry. Simple things like Wi-Fi cards and the like, should be all standardized.
Hardware shouldn’t be catered to any particular os.
That would be great, but then you’d also need to standardise driver api’s across all operating systems for it to be seamless.
I am not a techy person. But I started using Linux in around 2007ish (might have been a little earlier). First started because of philosophical issues with open source mentality.
I bled for that philosophy, let me tell you. Nothing worked out of the box, my only friend who used Linux was an online friend, and his tech support could only help me if we happened to be online at the same time. He helped a lot, but dozens and dozens of guides later I managed to get it mostly working. Google.com/Linux used to be a thing, and it was quite helpful. After a few reversions back to Windows in the early days I got a terrible little netbook, and Wubi became a thing. It allowed you to install windows from within windows, without having to have a live CD. It worked great, but it was right back to all the same touchpad, wifi, monitor, et cetera issues. But this time I could go back to Windows and research my issue, print off the guides, and use them to troubleshoot. So much easier than asking my neighbor to use their computer, or trying to read and follow the guides from my blackberry lmao
Now? I haven’t a had a single issue like that when installing a distro in 10+ years. Shit just works now. Granted, I stick to mainstream distros, or forks of mainstream distros. Craziest thing I’ve tried recently was Bazzite, which is basically just silver blue. I liked being on Bazzite and silver blue, but I ended up going back to regular old fedora workstation, because relying solely on flatpaks is limiting, and I (remember, not a techy person) don’t understand rpm ostree lol
Regarding the title,
If you’ve enough distros then you must’ve encountered the scenario where the driver worked in installer but did not in the final installation
Lol yea, I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that, but at least then it was usually a “Why didn’t you just install it‽” rather than a 6 hour marathon of patches and drivers compiled from source or some shit LMAO
I literally ran into this last night trying to install Cachyos on my old surface. I was relieved when the wireless worked in the installer and so incredibly confused when it doesn’t now… I’m still trying to fix it lol.
I have barely had any of those issues in almost 20 years of linux use. The worst I remember dealibg with was cups back in the day. Certainly almost everything I’ve installed linux on in the last 10 years has just worked.
The only exception has been installing linux on old chrome books.
It used to be pretty bad before hardware standardization.
I bought a media center pc around 2000 and installed Ubuntu. The only thing that didn’t work out of the box was sound through HDMI. Figured it out the same day.
Must be a thinkpad lol
Dell surprisingly lmao
As far as I know DELLs are decent, especially latitudes.
My current and previous laptops were/are Dell and I can count on one hand the number of hardware issues I’ve had with Linux (minus the Nvidia GPU but yknow. Nvidia.)
Their corpo stuff is (incl. Latitudes). Their consumer stuff (like XPS) apparently not so much.
My Dell Latitude was that way except the fingerprint reader. Dell’s website even has Linux drivers for my laptop, nearly everything but the fingerprint reader except a Windows only driver.
