alex_smart

As a buyer, how am I supposed to know which manufacturer did their homework and on which laptops?

> it's been like this for a decade

Again, depends on the definition of "flawlessly". Afaik, support for hardware accelerated videoplayback on browsers was broken across the board only three years ago.

Issues reported:

Link 1: screen only updating every 2 seconds, visual glitches. Link 2: brightness reset to full on screen unlock, fans turning on when charging. Link 3: bluetooth troubles, speakers cant be muted if headphone jack is on mute. Link 4: audio quality and low volume, wifi not coming back after sleeping. Link 5: fans being too loud, poor sound quality.

Either your Stockholm syndrome is affecting your reading comprehension or you just take bugs like these as part of the normal "working perfectly" linux experience.

> You are going to find issues for any computer for any OS by looking things up like this

I wasn't cherry-picking things. I literally searched for laptops available in my budget in my country and looked up what was the linux support like for those laptops as reported by people on reddit.

> Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled

I suppose you are talking about System76, Tuxedo etc. These manufacturers don't ship to my country. Even if I am able to get it shipped, how am I supposed to get warranty?

Afaict, all the reporters used the newest available Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch.

I thought you said everything should work seamlessly on any modern distro.

And what is supported hardware here? What even is "support"?

That was certainly not the case ~2 years ago, the last time I installed linux on a laptop.

It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1hfqptw/linu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1esntt3/leno...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1j3983j/hp_o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1k1nsm8/audi...

The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1c81rw4/thinkpad_...

That was certainly not the case ~2 years ago, the last time I installed linux on a laptop.

It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1hfqptw/linu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1esntt3/leno...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1j3983j/hp_o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1k1nsm8/audi...

The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1c81rw4/thinkpad_...

I don't need new reasons to hate Linux. Like I said, I have moved to macbooks as my personal computing device because of the better hardware.

> solved a while ago

Can not be the case because I was facing these issues less than a couple of years ago.

I was responding to the "Stockholm syndrome" comment specifically because there are a number of hardware and software problems (e.g. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...) with using linux as a desktop operating system that linux users have to find their way around, so I found the comment rather full of irony.

PS: I already know that the file-picker issue has been fixed. That does not take away from the fact that it was in fact broken for decades. It is only meant as an example.

I preferred WSL to running linux directly even though I had no need for any windows only software. Not having to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on was reason enough.

I don't think Microsoft losing the mind share has anything to do with software. Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.

> symptomatic of some sort of Stockholm syndrome

I have since moved to macbooks for the hardware, but until not too long ago WSL was my linux "distro" of choice because I didn't want to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on.

They are so completely different that it would be simpler if you explained what similarities you see between the two.

I don’t get it. How could you be fsyncing the WAL in 600ns? What are the transactional guarantees that you are offering?

>"it doesn't matter" != "code is correct"

Fair. Despite the lengthy argument, I don't think our stances are all that drastically different. I am not saying that you shouldn't write tests. Just that the mental model comes first and that the tests are informed by it (in an ideal world the test are an automatically executable specification of your mental model).

Still I don't understand why you insist that "there exists an automated test for it" has to be the definition of whether something matters.

> But if you write webapps or games or ...

In which case it might just be fine to YOLO it without tests.

People have been delivering valuable software without automated tests for decades. Checkout the code of the linux kernel from circa 2005 and see how many tests there are.

>You are the only one putting forward such an idea

This was the very first comment you made that started this thread:

>> If none of your tests fail then does it really matter?

> But as they get larger you often can't keep track of every last piece simultaneously

Sure, but then you divide the larger system into smaller components where each team is responsible for one or few of these individual pieces and the chief architect is responsible for making sure of how the pieces are put together.

> At least in theory the tests are supposed to cover the observable behavior that matters. So I figure if the tests pass all is well. If I still find something broken then I need to add a test case for it.

But you sure as hell hope that the engineer working on implementing your database has a decent mental model for the thread safety of his code and not introduces subtle concurrency bugs because his tests are still green. You also hope that he understands that he needs to call fsync to actually flush to data to disk instead of going yolo (systems never crash and disks never fail ). How are you supposed to cover the user observable behavior in this case? You cut off the power supply to your system/plug off your disk while writing to the database and assert that all the statements that got committed actually persisted? And how many times you repeat that test to really convince you that you are not leaving behind a bug that will only happen in production systems say once every three years?

I am only giving database and multithreading as examples because they are the most obvious, but I think the principle applies more generally. Take the simplest piece of code everyone learns to write first thing in uni, quicksort. If you don't have a sufficient mental model for how that algorithm works, what amount of tests will you write to convince yourself that your implementation is correct?

>Tests not failing when your code does implies that you are missing test cases. In other words things are underspecified.

I am really confused. Have you guys never written any multithreaded code? You can write the most disgusting thread-unsafe code without a single lock and be perfectly green on all your tests. And who in the world can write tests to simulate all possible timing scenarios to test for race conditions?

I give multithreading as just the most egregiously obvious example that this "tests can prove correctness" idea is fundamentally broken, but I think it applies more generally.

>Haskell is the extreme example of this. If it successfully compiles then it most likely does exactly what you intended but it might be difficult to get it to compile in the first place.

Absolutely 100% of the safety of haskell comes from the mental model (functional programming, immutable data structures etc) and none from the test cases (although their community appears to even do testing slightly better than others).

No, they are not. They are a cheap way of verifying that something hasn't gone wrong, not a proof of correctness.

Tests failing implies the code is incorrect. Tests not failing does not imply that the code is correct.

I obviously meant the code that you own and are responsible for.

> If none of your tests fail then does it really matter?

Yes. Absolutely.

You don't believe your software is correct because your tests don't fail. You believe your software is correct because you have a mental model of your code. If your tests are not failing but your software is not behaving correctly, that your mental model of your code is broken.

> Squashing any error, strangeness and warning can be very expensive in some projects

Strongly disagreed. Strange, unexpected behaviour of code is a warning sign that you have fallen short in defensive programming and you no longer have a mental model of your code that corresponds with reality. That is a very dangerous to be in. Very quickly possible to be stuck in quicksand not too far afterwards.

I have something almost identical, except for the `—-graph` part. That way I have the flexibility to get either the linear view or the graph view by adding that single flag.

I can most confidently say that it is in fact actually option 2 that is the case. Absolutely a vast number of people are using ChatGPT exactly like what they were using Google for.

Yes, the “chat” part of ChatGPT enables a kind of deep and long contextual exploration, but even at the very first response it is already better then what my experience with Google typically is, so I definitely keep creating new chats for whatever I was going to create a new tab to search Google for. I have even mostly stopped talking with the LLM in full sentences - just the keywords just like you would with a search engine.

Please help me understand why you think that is a bad thing.

> China has long banned US social media for likely the same reason.

Sure, but most other countries haven't. Perhaps they should learn from these developments and start considering their options.

All that is to say that the Malthusians are not just wrong, they are not even wrong.

Is it even working for the developer though? Last I checked the server-side rendering performance for react based frameworks was somewhere like 200 pages per second? Is that something to be proud of as a developer?

Whatever service you are using to host your website is not doing a very good job. Tiny <1kb assets are taking upto minutes to load.

India being a notable exception. Modi got re-elected for a third term, although with a smaller majority.