I used to have a little Asus EEE PC, for which I downloaded a community-generated EEE-specific Linux. EEE Ubuntu, I think it was. All your EEE-specific drivers pre-loaded, no extraneous junk, no funny business! So I had high hopes for this one, on account of the very limited number (3!) of different hardware configurations the distribution had to support. Surely nothing could go wrong!
Once I'd installed it, I found trackpad touch-to-tap didn't work. At all. Well, OK, the trackpad has buttons, so I suppose I'll have to live with that.
It wouldn't detect my wi-fi network, and in fact as far as I could tell wi-fi simply didn't work in the slightest. Fortunately, I have a long network cable, and I mainly used it fairly near the router anyway.
When I tried to suspend to disk, it claimed it was out of swap space, and proceeded to just shut down normally. Hmm, never mind, I can just close the lid and leave it plugged in, it's no big deal.
> Linux just doesn't seem to do laptops very well.
Linux doesn't do 'random, low-priced consumer laptops' very well. It does regular business laptops very well. I've been installing Linux on Thinkpads from the T20 days all the way to the current T430 and I've been incredibly impressed with how well everything runs.
Even cheap laptops run pretty well these days, at most you'll wrestle with the wifi drivers. The problem is the low-end market for laptops is so varied you don't get a lot of developers who get hands-on time to get the drivers working well.
Popular laptops will usually have great support unless they've got some hardware where the vendor doesn't want to play ball. But any cheap machine that's sold a lot of units will have a forum where users explain everything they've figured out.
In the old days you could buy two network cards, keep one and send one to a developer as a gift, and you'd end up getting a working driver out of the deal. Some people did that with entire laptops.
Have been running Arch and Ubuntu on Thinkpads for over 4 years now, which are known for being Linux friendly. And, to be fair, it works, but it doesn't just work. Power management issues abound: out of the box, Ubuntu on my Carbon X1 was regularly using over 10W, and it was only with substantial tweaking that I could get it to 5.5W-6W consistently. Anytime I need to restart, I need to go through the Powertop suggestions again. Certainly could write a script for that, but it doesn't just work. Suspend doesn't work all the time: I've had days where I've charged the computer overnight, thrown it in my bag, and by the end of the day it was entirely dead, complete with some minor but obnoxious filesystem corruption. Using the hardware mute button fucks up PulseAudio.
I'll point out that the Carbon X1 is hardly some "random, low-priced consumer laptop." Probably a bit less Linux friendly than more traditional ThinkPad offerings, but if you go any more higher end with Sony or whatever, I would be very pessimistic about it working, just or otherwise.
Now, for my purposes, other alternatives just don't work. I don't know an easy way to have a Windows or OSX system to throw up a private virtual cloud over LXC on your notebook so you can work from a networkless Koh Rong beach. Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) makes this trivial. Everyone else has shitty window managers, while dwm is heaven.
In that respect, Linux works. And nothing else mainstream does. But universal mediocrity isn't an excuse for mediocrity.
>> Now, for my purposes, other alternatives just don't work. I don't know an easy way to have a Windows or OSX system to throw up a private virtual cloud over LXC on your notebook so you can work from a networkless Koh Rong beach.
I've been thinking about doing that, actually, so not knowing of any easy way was a bit of a fib. Very tempting, to say the least, but free software and all.
I installed a bunch of different distributions and most of them worked well.
To say that "Linux doesn't work on laptops very well" because you had a terrible experience with a single distribution is odd. Especially when many of those distros have pretty good user communities and wikis that tell you what does or doesn't work, and how to fix stuff that's not working.
But the wider point - there are a gazzillion different distributions and sometimes there's no way of knowing if they'll work on your hardware apart from just installing it. Which does suck.
I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't gelled with just about every experience of installing Linux on a laptop that I have ever read! Broken wifi, broken suspend and broken trackpad seem just par for the course. (I am sure that the 3D acceleration wouldn't have worked either, had I bothered to try to get that far.)
I just thought it was a particularly amusing example of the phenomenon.
I used to have a little Asus EEE PC, for which I downloaded a community-generated EEE-specific Linux. EEE Ubuntu, I think it was. All your EEE-specific drivers pre-loaded, no extraneous junk, no funny business! So I had high hopes for this one, on account of the very limited number (3!) of different hardware configurations the distribution had to support. Surely nothing could go wrong!
Once I'd installed it, I found trackpad touch-to-tap didn't work. At all. Well, OK, the trackpad has buttons, so I suppose I'll have to live with that.
It wouldn't detect my wi-fi network, and in fact as far as I could tell wi-fi simply didn't work in the slightest. Fortunately, I have a long network cable, and I mainly used it fairly near the router anyway.
When I tried to suspend to disk, it claimed it was out of swap space, and proceeded to just shut down normally. Hmm, never mind, I can just close the lid and leave it plugged in, it's no big deal.
When I closed the lid, it crashed.