Technology

I got a cheap mini pc. It had W11 on it which I promptly broke (I think it was when it insisted on me putting in a PIN but I closed the window). It also ran at 100% for no reason trying to do updates, but then refused to do any updates.

So I put the latest Ubuntu Linux on it. Seems OK, but I can't get anything to recognise the video codex stuff in the N150 CPU. It seems to know it's there, but Firefox and MPV won't use it...

I mean, if whole EU countries can do it, so can you.

What?! I'm still working on my spreadsheet comparing 7 and 8!

I've been a full time dev since 2012 and needed a Mac, I had barely used windows over that time but beforehand ran a PC service business.

Anyway, Ive been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 6 months for reasons.

... The other day I got a new cheap laptop I needed to setup for run a single application.

Holy fuck what a shitshow.

It took me 2 hours just to get to the desktop. Shit didn't work, bullshit login screens, ads everywhere.

It was a massive pile of dog shit.

After battling to get the system setup for the rest of the day I gave up, chucked Fedora Kinoite On it... Took 30 minutes from creating boot media to getting a desktop going, chucked the app I needed to run in a Flatpack, chucked it on a USB, and it was up and running.

No bullshit.

Just works.

Truly the year of the Linux desktop.

It's not all quite as rosy.

Yes, Linux is much more capable now than it was 10 years ago and it's much more capable of being used as a main system. I myself have been using Linux as my main system for a few years now.

But it's also a fact that a lot of stuff might not work (even if it works for someone else) and that some things are still more difficult than they should be.

For example, on my laptop cannot wake from sleep since kernel 6.11. I have manually sourced a 6.10 from an older version of my distro and keep holding it back, so that I can use my laptop as a laptop. For someone without technical skill, this would mean that their laptop just can't sleep any more. Hibernate also doesn't work.

Another example is that LibreOffice still makes a lot of formatting mistakes when it has to open word documents. And sure, everyone could just switch to odf, but it's not quite as easy to make everyone else switch to odf. It makes it really hard to use LibreOffice in any kind of professional environment. Wouldn't want to make a powerpoint presentation that then looks like shit when it's played on a different PC.

Lastly, Nvidia sucks, but it's also close to the only option for laptops with dGPUs. When I look for laptops with dGPUs available in my area on a price comparison platform, I find 760 laptops with Nvidia GPUs and only 3 with AMD, all of which are priced at least €500 more than comparable Nvidia devices. So if you want to go for a gaming laptop, Nvidia is pretty much the only option, and under Linux it really sucks. Steam games generally work ok for me, but trying to use Heroic Launcher to play anything from my gigantic library of free Epic/Amazon/GoG games, about 10% of the games I tried actually work. And even with those that work, my laptop sometimes just decides that a slide show with 3 FPS is good enough. That stays even after reboots and resets, and after a few days it returns to normal. Only to go back to slideshow mode a few days later.

If you just use your laptop to run a browser, I can recommend Linux 100%.

If you want to do anything else and don't have any technical skills and/or don't want to spend hours fixing things that should just work, I can't fully recommend it.