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Comment by heax | Hacker News Reader

That is so true. The best supported Linux laptop nowadays is the Win11 laptop of your choice with WSL.

Blatantly untrue.

All my x86 laptops have worked fine. It's only ARM because the hardware is extremely proprietary.

There are some things that simply do not work under Linux because of lack of driver support. An example is fingerprint readers. I agree that most x86 laptops are usable under Linux.

Fingerprint reader works fine on mine. But then I bought Lenovo because they support their hardware including making drivers for their fingerprint readers.

It's a hit and miss unfortunately. On my Lenovo Yoga 920, it doesn't work for example because there is no driver support. Similary on my Acer laptop too.

> On my MacBook M3, Windows doesn't work. Similarly on my Chromebook too.

I mean, if it isn't a supported platform that's hardly the operating systems fault. However there are plenty of systems that do have drivers and are supported.

The original quote was that the best supported is WSL, and that is not true.

Actually since Virtual Box and VMWare got good enough on Windows around 2010, but having one less thing to install, pay license for, is definitely welcoming.

Honestly, I'm inclined to agree with you. When our employer wanted to transition away from Linux desktops (which I'd used for 10 years to that point) to Windows Laptops I pushed back and got a MacBook Pro. I felt like being unix-y made things easier with deep integration of the shell.

However, I recently bought myself a Windows laptop (for games and miscellaneous other things). When I've tried doing a bit of development on it I've been pleasantly surprised. The WSL2 integration works well enough that it actually is probably easier than my development environment on MacOS where I have to worry about lots of subtle differences (and since getting it replaced with an M1 MBP due to the battery expanding - some not so subtle differences).

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