Standby drains the battery surprisingly fast.
Suspend , hibernation and resume
yes laptops may seem like they suspend and hibernate and resume properly on Linux. But they do not work reliably. Back in 2010, you could have laptop running hot inside your backpack just because it failed to suspend on lid close. Fast forwars to 2026, the lid close action works but for me, there are still small chances that it doesnt suspend properly or slow to suspend. I blame Intel and Micro$oft for the new standby mode.
As much as I hate Macs, those fucking money grabbers suspend 200% well. I dont care if you’re alert or drunk or 30,000 ft in the air, if you close on the lids on these laptops, they suspend quickly.
One of the main things I do miss about my MacBook.
I think the main problem lies in the community.
Not everyone, but a few vocal rotten apples are hostile to new users who either:
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Don’t already know the answer to their own question
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Are not using their distro
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Didn’t immediately read the wiki entry for their exact problem
This kind of gatekeeping is why some people are put off of Linux and the community as a whole. Just because someone asks a question you think is obvious, doesn’t mean it’s obvious to them.
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BLUETOOTH
Aha bluetoothctl connect f3:a2:de:e6:b5:a1
Connected
Could not connect
People assume it’s all terminal all the time. I haven’t needed to open the terminal for months. It starts up. With the GUI I open the browser. Maybe steam, too. Do stuff. Shut down.
While this may be true (I really have no idea at this point), terminal is a superpower, pretty much the best option for anything except manually dragging and dropping files one by one.
I never use the terminal. It’s not necessary for me. I’m not an IT user. I’m not missing out on anything. Many things I do don’t even have a terminal command. It’s important new users know this if they are not in to IT.
Software compatibility is probably the biggest issue. If someone relies on a piece of software that is Windows or MacOS exclusive, that can be enough of a deal breaker. Open source alternatives may exist, but they do not always have the same features or behave as expected compared to what they are replacing.
Audio.
And software availability.
Audio is so bad it’s unbelievable. I don’t know if it’s because laptops are built with shitty hardware and then compensated for with proprietary drivers (which Linux doesn’t ship with) but my God are they bad.
Nothing that can’t be fixed by wearing earbuds or plugging in some good speakers, of course.
Freedom is overwhelming.
You can change everything and anything… so that means a LOT of choices.
It deprives Apple and Microsoft of revenue. /s
It needs more pre installed machines on the market.
_
In Linux, you can configure everything. And you’re will be forced to do it.
That really depends on distro. With something like Arch and Debian, that is definitely the case. On the other hand, Bazzite requires almost no configuration and has scripts for common use cases.
Regardless of which distribution you choose, there will come this moment…
distribution
Computer. The OS makes no difference. There will come a time you want to do something, and it will be up to you to do it.
Flatpak and Docker are great, but making them talk to each other can get as complex as solving the problems they came to make easier in the first place.
For me its the nuance of things.
Like quality of life settings. Turn Bluetooth on automatically at boot. Yeah, you can do it, but not by looking at settings and turning that option on. No, you need to recognize that’s a problem then search for an answer, determine which of the 2 or 3 answers you find are right, then do it. Is it a deal breaker? Absolutely not. But I don’t want to “solve problems” for every thing I want to do.
My other gripes would be lack of software support. As great as some apps are, others there are no support for Linux.
I was about to say, I’ve only come across that particular issue since moving to KDE, but I know what you mean about the lack of options, but then I looked in the settings, and found this:
It’s getting there!
Maybe it’s just the distros I’ve picked, but I’ve literally never had to do anything to get Bluetooth to turn on at boot
This stuff unfortunately depends by the desktop environment and because there are hundreds of them, it’s inconsistent.
On gnome it remembers it correctly, although there are a handful of times where the gamepad doesn’t connect automatically and I have to manually do that
the confounding tribalism behind its modularity. options are great, but they also bring out the absolute worst in many of us.
it’s not much of a problem until those options actually manage to fragment the desktop and server ecosystems, but the attitudes at play surely drive prospective newcomers away a bit.
the confounding tribalism behind its modularity. options are great, but they also bring out the absolute worst in many of us.
Exactly. Parts of the Linux community, and FOSS in general, are extremely hostile. And for some new users, that’s the first (and probably only) impression they get when they have an issue trying it out for the first time. It’s a very small minority, but they are loud and aggressive, and are not ostracized by the community nearly enough.
Telling a new user that is going out of their way to figure out how to find and post an issue or feature request to Github, telling them to just fix it themselves isn’t a solution, it’s just being a dick. 99.9% of this planet doesn’t know how to code, just because they’re making a post on GitHub doesn’t mean they know how to code. Especially not at a level to fix an issue like that.
And that some programs are extremely opinionated.
Ignoring requests with thousands of posts, or even pull requests where the changes are already implemented
“No. I won’t add tabs, it’s better UX to have separate windows”
“No, I won’t allow the user to save the password, even if it’s local or not important”
“All the temporary shit will be saved on the hardcoded directory ~/.fuckyou and not /tmp”
get lucky you can patch shit out or in
“All the temporary shit will be saved on the hardcoded directory ~/.fuckyou and not /tmp”
.fuckyou 😂😂
A recent bugbear of mine has been hardcoded icons.
Did you just try to theme my app? We’re opinionated software, and that’s bigotry.
they used to be a much larger part of the community when i first got into linux in the early aughts; i’m glad RTFM is no longer considered a reasonable response.
Go on, say it
You mean systemd, don’t you?
Probably X vs Wayland. Everyone knows what the correct answer is.
GNOME too
It’s Wayland, right? ^oh no^
Init managers for sure! Amongst file managers and DEs, firewalls, package managers, modern packaging systems and their sandbox/security systems, display servers (probably the funniest one), audio servers, filesystems.
Lots of stuff we should appreciate having as FOSS, especially the options we don’t choose.
Fully switching over for the last couple years has made this modularity feel especially apparent compared to commercial systems (when things aren’t always so seamlessly integrated) but I’m glad for it all; it’s really fucking cool to think about how dramatically you can change the experience of a Linux desktop OS.
I mean, it could be so many things. Could just be people fighting over distros in general, or it could be the wayland vs x11 thing.
There’s also a lot of zealous discourse on the subject of atomic/immutable distros.
I wouldn’t say there’s “discourse.” That implies there are two sides engaging. It’s really just NixOS users telling everyone else they’re doing it wrong.
I didn’t really mean it in the sense that the communities of different atomic/immutable engage regarding the trade-offs associated by their respective methods of achieving atomicity/immutability. And, honestly, I’d actually love to see more of that. Even if NixOS users would dunk on the rest, at least until the learning curves are brought up.
Instead, what we often find are unproductive threads like this one 😅. In which, naysayers and proponents act like they’re engaging, but I simply fail to understand what’s happening.
Last time I tried (Mint) the dealbreaker for me was battery management. I tried various utils and settings but I couldn’t get as much juice of of the same charge using Mint and still have good performance. If anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful!
Depends on the hardware.
I have a gaming laptop that I use for Teams for work. I put linux on it so it would shut up and be silent. On windows, even on silent settings, it is always wasting resources and causing the fans to come on loudly.
With linux it is silent. On top of that, battery life is much better because windows is not doing all that crap it does in the background. Still not great, its a gaming laptop after all, but better.
Also, does mint come with good power management tools? I opted for Cachyos due to the gaming (nvidia) driver support. My other laptop is Fedora, and it too does really well with battery life. Both are more up to date than Mint, right?
