I'm always befuddled by comments like this. I have been daily driving Linux (arch,btw) for quite a while, and I have never once had a driver issue, even with NVIDIA graphics cards. The only times I run into issues is when I am trying to run games with anti-cheat, but even that is being worked on by Valve. Linux mostly just works in my experience, I don't see where the idea comes from that its a huge blocker, minus the lack of specialized software.
Friend of mine got a new laptop which i recommended without looking closely on the specs, as it was listed as supported on ubuntu a lenovo yoga x 11 gen I think.
Found out afterwards that the version with windows preinstalled(that the friend bought, because of the cheap windows licence that maybe needed) comes with a special mipi camera from intel with ipu6 out-of-tree driver that only supports specific kernels and specific distros and while there are packages for ubuntu I couldn't get it to work.
Linux works if you don't buy the wrong hardware, windows works on any bought hardware.
I'm not against linux and I use it and most of the time it works out of the box, but this "most of the time" will bite you when you stop looking at specific reviews and driver support and just buy a laptop.
> but this "most of the time" will bite you when you stop looking at specific reviews and driver support and just buy a laptop.
I've never once looked at reviews. The only time I've been bitten in the last 20 years was when given a MBP for work (the intel model with butterfly keys).
There's definitely edge cases out there. But these days they're exactly that: edge cases.
I said that linux mostly works out of the box, but your "edge cases" where in this case:
All lenovo yoga x1 models from the 8. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 2 years
All lenovo carbon x1 models from the 10. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 3 years
I'm pretty sure it also affects all newer hp and dell models since at least ~2023
It's great that your choice of laptops are never the ones that are broken, but then again, I never said linux never works.
Even if you set aside the webcam problem, the lenovo laptops who where always called out for their good linux support had problems:
The 2016 yoga x1 model couldn't get to sleep (s3i problem which many laptops had) and if it good back from sleep it need a special command to reconnect trackpad and trackpoint.
There where some special patches to make it work and after about a year it worked, still not a possibility for non technical people
The 2016 thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 model sometimes needs a special command to reconnect the trackpad and trackpoint, think that got fixed after ~3 years.
Neither of theses devices have a working fingerprint sensor, I can't even think of one that works with linux
Neither of these devices had a supported mobile (lte) modem, as the built in modem wasn't supported and you can't change it because the bios has only whitelisted the preinstalled model.
The new s3i sleep modus also made it impossible for linux laptops to sleep for about a year until it was fixed.
Did all of this get better over time?
Yes
Will every big new hardware thing still mean that some linux things are broken for some time?
Yes
Again, linux works for most of the hardware most of the time, but this will bite you when you expect certain things or devices to work.
But you’re comparing manually installing Linux with a preinstalled Windows. Of course Windows is going to win there - it’s not a fair comparison.
Let’s take an extreme example of that same argument: If someone’s only experience of macOS was manually installing on hackintoshes then they’d say macOS was hard to use too.
And by that same token, I can tell you from experience that manually installing Windows on new hardware isn’t a piece of cake either. You have the same bullshit experience trying to locate drivers.
The common theme here is that nontechnical people wouldn’t be building their own OEM systems or wiping laptop drives and performing fresh installs. Regardless of whether that’s Linux or Windows.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, and most of my machines always had some driver issues.
The laptop I'm writing from needs my mobile phone as wifi bridge, because the Linux driver is poorly written, and it causes extremely poor signal quality. I also can't workaround tearing that plagues the whole desktop environment.
My other laptop has issues with the speakers that will never be fixed. And another one or two issues that I can't remember.
I wanted to buy a certain Lenovo laptop that is officially Ubuntu certified. Lenovo doesn't offer the OEM Ubuntu that they used for the certification though, and the vanilla version doesn't work (I've stopped checking after an year or so).
My desktop has a wake from suspend problem.
To be fair though, I have no doubt that if one chooses a certain machine (laptop) based on Linux compatibility, they will be happy - but it implies a certain sacrifice upfront.
I have used Linux desktop for around two decades on my laptops and never had any issues with drivers or anything else. Various distributions have worked very well out of box with different models of laptops and PCs.
"It works perfectly" statements are invariably false.
For starters, Bluetooth has been broken on Linux until recent times (a couple of years, probably, maybe less), because of the piece of crap that Bluez is. In some Ubuntu distros, Bluetooth may still have some broken functionality (I remember examining the configfiles).
Ubuntu's hibernation was broken last time I've checked, because the setup was setting a 2 GiB swapfile, which is not enough for the RAM of modern machines. My last installation, last week, still set the same size.
