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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

With good support for Intel graphics, and more laptops leaving out 3rd party GPUs even on Core i7 models, it's easy to buy a laptop with high confidence that Linux will work on it.

But the article glosses over the trickiness of keeping a Windows partition on UEFI machines. Not an issue for me, but it does make me want a Windows license refund more than before.

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Well it is until you want reliable WiFi and hibernate/suspend that actually works...

I've not had problems with wireless under Linux since ~2000.

Suspend/Resume is also catching up.

Suspend works fine now in my experience, it's mainly hibernate where the remaining issues are.

Interestingly muy suspend/resume worked always for 3 different computers, but failed on one desktop.

I reinstalled Ubuntu on an Asus that shipped with Ubuntu, and wireless randomly doesn't work on boot. Claims that it's disabled by hardware switch (there is no hardware switch.)

    sudo rfkill unblock all

Why? I don't know, but I have to run this command a few times a year. It's in my history so it's easy to find.

The biggest complaint I have by far is power management. It seems to be better with recent kernels but still almost 50% of what I would get with Windows.

Agreed with this. It's why I still run Windows as a host and Linux in VirtualBox instance.

If you run it the other way round, the battery life is half.

(that is with powertop optimisations and a fair chunk of other optimisations as well)

Why is this still such a pain point?

I can't speak for hibernate/suspend, as this has worked well for me on every linux laptop I've owned (first one in the mid-2000s).

For WiFi, many (most) vendors simply refuse to provide open source drivers, which hinders inclusion in the kernel. The blame here is almost entirely on the hardware vendors.

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