Mia

Right, that’s exactly my point. There’s no argument to be made about Linux “not being ready” in terms of hardware support because in the worst case scenario it’s not any worse than Windows, and those worst case scenarios are few and far between.

Now, in terms of software parity, sure. There’s quite a bit of stuff that won’t run on Wine yet and doesn’t have alternatives, but this discussion was purely about hardware support and that’s solid nowadays.

Oh what do you know? It’s almost as if representation in government has a purpose! Not so easy to target people when they’re not just a faceless boogeyman now is it?

Love to see it, we need more of this everywhere.

I’ve found it to be just the opposite. I’ve had so many more issues on Ubuntu and Debian derivatives than any other distro out there. Both in terms of hardware support and stability, ironically.

Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, otherwise Windows would be good.

• apt is atrocious and will nuke your system every once in a while if you’re not careful when installing even the most trivial packages.
• Snaps are objectively worse than any other packaging format.
• The software is never up to date and you have to go scavenge for drivers and updated kernels otherwise stuff is just broken.

There are much greener pastures out there, even if a little more niche.
Arch if for tinkerers, no doubt, but Fedora is just as simple to use as Ubuntu. The support is great since it’s backed by Red Hat and has a sizeable following. I never had issues finding what I was looking for. The only caveat is that it’s for newer hardware; not cutting edge mind you, but it may not be the best choice for a 2009 laptop. Anything that’s at most 10 years old though I’d expect to just work honestly, maybe with minimal tinkering.

The kind of people who would install Linux on their PC are the same people who’ll reinstall Windows to remove all the bloat manufacturers put on their laptops by default.

Whether or not the basics work well enough to go scavenge for drivers is irrelevant. The fact that I have to do it means it’s no better than modern Linux in that regard. It’ll boot and in 90% of cases it’ll just work, when it doesn’t you’ll need to install some drivers.

Cry.

Have you tried anything not Debian based?

Historically, yeah. Nowadays (as in the last 2-3 years) I don’t really see many issues. It’s fairly solid in my experience.

And let’s be honest, Windows is a nightmare as well on many laptops. If you wipe them and start from scratch, there is a non zero chance that you’ll have to source like half the drivers manually.

Nah just stuff I built myself or random laptops.

• Some old Lenovo laptop with an Intel iGPU and an AMD GPU I can’t remember, worked out of the box but was a bit finicky for some things. I don’t remember what it was, it broke years ago.

• ASUS TUF FX504GM (1060 maxq), zero issues on X11

• Lenovo Legion 5 (3070 + AMD iGPU), zero issues, daily driver

• Custom Desktop (1070 + Intel iGPU though I didn’t really use it), some issues but i was testing Wayland years ago. Good on X11.

• Custom Desktop (7900xtx + 3080), zero issues, daily driver. It used to just have a 3080, which is fairly solid on Wayland as well but not perfect.

• A few other random laptops and desktop some friends owned over the years, fairly smooth on pretty much all of them.

I’ve found in general that anything that doesn’t have an Nvidia card as the display output works fine. Wayland is getting quite usable on Nvidia as well, but there are still growing pains. Still, no black screens anywhere.

Sure I’ve tinkered a bit during the years, but I almost never had a black screen, much less stuff not booting, on install. I did brick my display drivers a few times (just Nvidia being a pain, mostly) but it was mostly my fault.

It may be that you’ve just been really unlucky. There are definitely hardware combinations out there that cause problems, but I haven’t really found any particularly problematic ones up until now.

I just don’t see it. I run it on all my PCs with nvidia, amd, hybrid graphics, pretty much any combination (I have too many 😅). It works. Even various friends of mine have tried it on their older setups, no problems there either.

Unless you’re using something like Debian or whatever with crazy old packages, everything works for the most part. Nvidia is still not great on Wayland but it at least works now.

I’m not saying your experience isn’t valid, I’m not trying to gaslight you, but I’m not sure it’s representative of the average experience nowadays.

Laptops have historically been a little iffy yeah. Personally I haven’t had many issues except for Nvidia optimus, but since most of them are non standard and proprietary it used to be kind of a pain. Now though it’s much better, at least on newer hardware, even my newest laptop with hybrid graphics just worked out of the box.

I almost never had Linux not boot after a fresh install, even with nVidia hardware. It happened a few times like 10 years ago and never again. What hardware are you running?

No they made them fluffy :3 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/04/genetically-modified-woolly-mice-mammoth

Every time I see someone write “sorry for my bad english” their writing is several times better than many of the native speakers I interact with on a daily basis.