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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I would say it used to be about games. But now many people use laptops and Linux has pretty terrible support for most of them. It often "works", but you'll usually have some issue with bluetooth or wifi or the trackpad, and good luck getting anywhere near as good battery life as Windows or Mac.

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Yeah but I found we all have the same problems with Windows these days.

I watched a friend struggle to get slack to use the correct camera work on his windows 10 laptop. Another occasion, on a desktop machine problems with microphones.

A few months ago I woke up and my Windows 10 desktop just decided to lock up about 10 seconds after showing the desktop. There was nothing I could do to fix it and had to reinstall windows.

I'm a power user and have been using linux since the early days. Support has actually never been this good. Mostly due to standards in buses and hardware. Even GPU support is relatively good despite the closed-natured mindset.

I'd still never recommend it to anyone who wants something that "just works" though. It will never be on the same level as that needs a ginormous organisation to provide testing, support, documentation. Especially if you follow the Windows model with all the hardware support vs the Mac model.

My 12 years experience with HP laptops is no issues with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, touchpad but, according to kernel releases, brightness control keys not working (workaround: hotkeys to run xbacklight, not every week) or shutdown is actually a reboot (workaround: hold down the power button when it starts rebooting, maybe 2 or 3 times per year.) Not ideal but I still trade those inconveniences with working on Windows, which I do on a few Windows servers of customers that are running some Windows only programs.

My wife had an HP laptop going on a decade ago that was terrible with Linux. But we've also since then had three Dell Inspirons and a Thinkpad that all work perfectly fine.

I think Linux has been perfectly adequate for "browses the internet" level users for quite a while.

Everything on my Dell just works, including docking station and 4k panels.

Nothing comes close to a MBP's trackpad on a Mac.

Linux laptop user checking in. No problems.

You're lucky!

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