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Comment by lars_francke | Hacker News Reader

I started with Fedora (because basically all my day to day work involves RHEL/CentOS), moved to Manjaro and ended up on Arch for various reasons.

Also: I'm not judging an ecosystem, I'm judging the Laptop support of Linux and I know that some of it is not even the fault of Linux itself.

Things like:

- Windows has 7h battery lifetime, Linux gets 3h on my Laptop (that is with Fedora)

- Which driver do I need to disable the NVidia card? Modesetting, xf86-video-intel, nouveau, etc.. .what do these even mean? (that is with Fedora)

- Why does the modem not work? (That is with Fedora)

- Does my Laptop have a light sensor?

- How to disable the "Hot Corner" in Gnome (Fedora) and many more things.

Almost everything I'm facing has nothing to do with the distro and I switched to Arch because its documentation is by far the best out there.

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Pretty much everything what you're facing is distro specific.

The battery life is solved on Ubuntu by TLP which is installed by default (at least it was on Ubuntu Mate)

Ubuntu is now shipping with free and proprietary Nvidia drivers and you can choose during the installation which ones you want to use.

Gnome hot corners are disabled by default on Ubuntu. Of course if you prefer vanilla Gnome experience you can always use it, it's just a matter of selecting item from dropdown on login screen.

As for the light sensors and modem, I'm not sure but I imagine that it's not a big deal under Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. For me Fedora was always ALMOST there. Most of the times it was working but there was many little tweaks that had to be done in order to make everything working. On Ubuntu even things like fingerprint reader login was dead easy to setup (Thinkpad X230).

I disagree.

I tried Ubuntu us well. I installed TLP on Arch & Fedora. I didn't even test without and the battery life is still abysmal compared to Windows.

Light sensor: I eventually figured that out, thanks.

Modem: There's just no driver for linux, the distro doesn't matter.

My point is: It shouldn't be this hard. I shouldn't have to know what TLP is or what kind of drivers I need etc.

Well, you only have to because your laptop OEM didn't.

Almost any time you find something that doesn't work on your laptop, it's because the manufacturer used chipsets that didn't follow spec and/or only worked with Microsoft to produce drivers.

So it's unfortunate that your laptop didn't work immediately, but it's also impossible for kernel devs to produce perfect drivers if no one shares hardware specs with them. That's just unreasonable.

If you want a laptop made for Linux like the one you own was made for Windows, you can either buy from one of the many vendors that advertise Linux support or you can shop by chipset to make sure they're all supported. Personally, I appreciate the choice, but I know not everyone wants to know how the clock works, just what time it is.

I wonder why there is no major hardware manufacturer producing perfectly tuned Linux laptops in the way Apple sells OS X laptops. That sounds like a really obvious business case to me and it's what I would be doing if I were in that business: not merely having linux pre-installed, but a Linux-based OS that's perfectly tuned to your hardware and provides a pleasant no-fuss Mac-like user experience.

There's much lower hanging fruit to be plucked. A few examples:

Why don't the mainstream distros automatically apply laptop (especially powersaving) specific settings if they detect an internal battery?

Why don't the main distros automatically apply a 'small speakers' equalization to any detected built-in speakers? Running Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro makes it sound like ass but doing a very generic equalization via PulseEffects makes it sound almost the same as on macOS

Why doesn't increasing or lowering brightness fade up or down instead of doing big jumps up or down?

Just doing those three things would make Linux feel tremendously more polished on any laptop it's installed on, no 'blessing' of certain brands or laptop series needed.

Dell XPS developer edition?

Purism?

> battery

You can do a bunch of things around under-volting, governor changes, powertop tuning, profile settings, tlp, etc. to improve battery on arch. Helped me, at least.

> disable the NVidia card

You shouldn't need a driver to disable it. I switched to arch specifically because gpu switching on manjaro was a nightmare; the arch wiki did it for me: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9570#NVIDIA...

It's for a different machine, but it should still provide a decent starting point.

> modem not work

Drivers, probably? Not many laptops have them.

> light sensor

Try this to check: `find /proc /sys | grep -ie brightness -e light -e lux -e lumin`. If that doesn't work, `sudo modprobe -a tsl2550 isl29003 isl29020 apds9802als apds990x bh1770glc bh1780gli` and run the find command again, or try `sensors-detect`/`i2cdetect`. Never configured personally, but these two packages look promising:

* https://github.com/mikhail-m1/illuminanced

* https://cgit.chrisoft.org/lightsd.git/

If you feel like re-implementing, gnome also made one: https://github.com/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy

> How to disable the "Hot Corner" in Gnome

Not what you want to hear, but... don't use gnome. It's not built for tweaking as much as other things are. Something like KDE is orders of magnitude more tweakable, or something simpler like budgie might fit your use case. Personally I like i3-gaps, but that's definitely more advanced.

Any way, if you want to disable it, you actually have to install an extension to do it. More info here: https://michigantechit.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/KB/ArticleDe...

As you said, documentation is awesome. Arch wiki is great.

You shouldn't have to undervolt to get normal battery life, though. The OS should be running only the services you actually need. I always thought Linux was much better at this than Windows. Have the tables turned?

Linux is indeed better about this, I'm more mentioning it as a general power-saving technique. Windows has something equivalent to schedulers with its "power plan" options, and comes on "balanced" by default; some performance cost for better battery. Linux is better at fewer services, but takes more work to optimize for particular hardware (especially as many drivers don't have first-party linux support, and some times don't use all power-saving features). Often it takes some tweaking to get this working at the same level. It has gotten better with the hard work of lots of people (in that it's actually possible with tweaking now where it wasn't at all before), but there's still some room to improve. Of course, more mfgs could also support linux; that would make it much easier. Or better yet, open-source the driver so it can get better.

Thank you for your hints. I didn't actually mean this as a request for support but rather as a list of things I was facing that were/are hard to solve and I've been using Linux for 10 or so years.

(I'm using bspwm, the Gnome Hot Corner thing was just another example, it shouldn't require an addon to disable that)

"- How to disable the "Hot Corner" in Gnome (Fedora) and many more things." — uh, this here. Why that's a default is beyond me. Simple enough to disable, but shouldn't need to.

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