linuxmemes

Seriously, you guys need to stop trying to troubleshoot Linux's shortcomings at people. I know. Everybody knows. If you don't, that's the first thing any tutorial will tell you. I'm not looking for technical help, just sharing an anecdote.

If you're curious, no, I couldn't do Pop because I needed some specific libraries and kernel modules to support this particular device's power management and I/O quirks and those were only officially supported in a handful of distros, so I picked one of the ones with better documentation, and even that wasn't meant for my specific hardware.

Not that it matters, because it's a laptop with a iGPU and a dGPU, and the Intel iGPU was just fine out of the box, so getting the Nvidia dGPU to work well was way down my priority list for this exercise, since the device was meant mostly for web browsing and media consumption. Instead, I had issues with sleep mode, since that was related to those specific modifications, and I coudn't figure out a way to make it wake from boot without locking up, which is a pretty big dealbreaker for a device on a battery. Plus the embedded audio controls had some issues, the touchpad was flaky and eventually trying to go through the process of getting that dGPU running exposed other compatibility troubles.

I was ready to roll back to Windows once I noticed the touchpad acceleration was messy out of the gate, honestly, that's my bar for troubleshooting tolerance. So no, I didn't fail to do a cursory Google search in 2020 and find out that Nvidia support is messy. I knew that my slightly nonstandard device was going to be a bit of a challenge, but was hoping to get lucky. Didn't get lucky and went back to what works on it. It's not a call for help, it's just a thing that happened last time I tried to switch a device to Linux.

Like I told the guy accusing me of trolling, I'm not even trying to "trigger" anyone, it's just that people will walk you through the same three basic troubleshooting options whenever you point out you bumped into a compatibility issue and it gets annoying after a while.

Agreed on the other thing, though. I actively want Linux on desktop/laptop to be better. I actively like many things about it already, which is why I was trying to set it up on this thing in the first place. I use it on other devices that have specific support for it, from SBCs to the Steam Deck. And I definitely also have issues, concerns and pet peeves with Windows, Android variants, MacOS, iOS, iPadOS and every other alternative out there.

I just don't particularly care to stick to a single thing and will use whatever the path of least resistance is for each application. Anything else seems nuts. An OS is a utility, not a sports team. It's like rooting for an AC manufacturer.

But I do like Linux. That's a really silly thing to say. That's why I was trying to get it in there even though I knew the support wasn't all sorted. Screw that "if you don't like it, leave" attitude.

And no, I won't contribute to fixing the issues because I lack the technical skills to do so and the skills I can contribute they don't need. That's also silly, you can't be arguing for mainstream adoption of a thing and simultaneously saying users should be out there fixing it themselves if they encounter an unaddressed hardware incompatibility.

And yes, it's absolutely down to the manufacturer not making a Linux version of their drivers and dumb dedicated software. Absolutely. What am I supposed to do about that? It's not a niche manufacturer, either, it's a pretty popular one. As far as I know, none of the big corporate laptop manufacturers offer official Linux support (at least not Lenovo, Asus, MSI or Dell, that I know of). In fact, the indie manufacturers tend to offer better support, what with using less custom hardware and software and sometimes offering a built-in Linux install as an option to serve as a workaround for OEM fees.

Look, if you don't want to hear about the issues people encounter with your OS of choice... fine, I guess. I don't know why you're emotionally invested in utilitarian pieces of software, but you do you. But if you hope that you're going to be online having a fanclub about an operating system, of all things, and nobody is ever gonna show up saying "hey, I tried it and it kinda didn't do it for me"... eh... maybe make it a private Discord channel instead, because that's probably not gonna happen otherwise. That's probably a reason why you don't get Windows or MacOS fanclubs out there, because let me be clear, I would have just as many objections to dump into those, albeit for different reasons.