Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.
- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.
- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.
- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.
- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.
- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).
- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.
- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.
- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.
- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.
And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.
I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.
Desktop/Laptop Linux is improving pretty fast, but by using an LTS distro like Debian you miss out on a lot of that.
I had to run Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop for a while and encountered similar monitor switching and bluetooth issues. Eventually I figured out I could get the latest version of most desktop packages from the KDE Neon repos since they were also based on 22.04 at the time.
Running the latest KDE Plasma desktop with the latest mesa and pipewire made a huge difference. Monitor switching now works every time, all the bluetooth features worked, battery life improved, and Firefox stopped crashing when using webgl.
I'm not saying it'll fix all your problems, but most of these problems are being actively worked on and I think its worth trying a distro that actually keeps up with the pace of that work.
I recently installed Debian instead of Ubuntu on my laptop. Although I recognize many of your problems as "you need to know the right way to configure that or it's super annoying" - which sucks but is not impossible to overcome -, I also find that Debian is much more bug filled as a laptop OS than Ubuntu. I was actually extremely surprised by this. I didn't think Ubuntu was doing much of anything.
That said I am running Debian Trixie using wayland / kde / cups / nvidia / etc and do not have any of your problems my graphics work, my printers work, my bluetooth works, sleep works. They all required a lot more configuration than the last several versions of Ubuntu had required (which shouldn't be the case if there is better example just right next door), but none are persistent.
I don’t know why you think that I haven’t tried those configurations in your mind. Are those completely undocumented and cannot be found on the internet or something?
Because having so many unsolvable problems would be an extreme edge case (if you had one, it would be much more likely a bug than a basket full of what you are calling unsolvable problems), and there are a lot of bad setting recommendations out there which make it rather difficult to find the right one for your device. It can take quite a bit of experience and quite a bit of persistence - which is again, as I said, not the way it should be. If you are sure you have exhausted your options, please file bug reports.
If you check a thread about GrapheneOS, almost everybody praises it, and many even state that everything works. If you look into it however, a ton of things simply don’t work, and they just don’t care. Heck, even in this thread there are people like that. They just flat out state, that “it works perfectly”, then a few sentence later “x, y, z don’t work”. So, how should I know that 25+ years of Linux knowledge, custom kernel and Linux building, and tinkering are less, than those people who are fine with their free drivers which don’t utilize half of their hardware’s features?
I have about the same amount of experience with Linux, more on the tinkering and sysadmin/full stack side than custom building (although of course I have to use custom kernel module loading etc), and I still learn a lot more from research on a specific new-to-me problem than from my bank of knowledge. When it's new to me and Vantablack opaque as is the Linux way, I ask rather than waste my time.
What grinds my gears on Linux even more than that is that is is fundamentally unsafe [1], and you can only approach mitigating it. And nobody really cares. I use it because it's the least bad of the major 3 OSes, and I do want a community that can help. But I don't pretend to love it unreservedly. Perhaps I should move to a BSD, but the ecosystem keeps me here.
And I understand if you are certain there are bugs that will be ignored based on your past experiences, I too would be poorly motivated. I am not trying to convince you that you don't know what you know you know. But you can understand that my first take when reading a comment on the internet, even on HN, is that there is always more annoying-and-almost-impossible-to-discover config work to do.
Same here. I recently bought one laptop that I researched to make sure it was supported in Linux, and it had a ton of issues the reviewers didn't mention. So I bought a different laptop with Linux shipped from the factory, and it's better, but still has issues.
I think Bluetooth and printers are broken on pretty much every OS (especially on old devices), I certainly didn't have a better experience on Windows, it's maybe even worse.
Linux truly is far better now than it was even a year ago for gaming stuff. The Linux fanboys stating that everything works flawlessly and better than on Windows aren't doing anyone any favors. Steam Compatibility is a useless flag and ProtonDB is full of "Platinum" games that are barely functional. Despite the additional complexity what got Linux to work well for my son is NixOS. He had attempted to run with multiple "Windows replacement" Linux distros and managed to keep getting them broken to one degree or another. The "Nix" way of managing packages really clicked with him for some reason and being able to reboot to a previous derivation if something goes wrong keeps him with a running system.
Generally I'd avoid Linux on laptops altogether. Even hardware explicitly designed for Linux support has tons of other tradeoffs and most manufacturers don't even try. I'd say Linux on the desktop is night and day from Linux on laptops.
I used Arch Linux on my MacBook Pro 13” (2011) and it was almost perfect (one iGPU), some weird sleep issues, plus battery calibration issues: battery often went down to 7% within like 30 minutes, and then it takes a couple of hours to 0%. But if you happened to close it, it will either power off or hibernate (won’t recall). Then a couple of keys would stop working, and I’d just rsync my entire system to a newer (2014) retina MacBook Pro 13” (instead of fixing the keyboard, there’s no point in that). Perhaps, these laptops are very popular for Linux enthusiasts — I think 15” from 2015 is the best Linux laptop you can get for the money — but this laptop is just perfect! Everything works flawlessly, sleep, hibernation, screen, keyboard backlight… ah, I forgot about the web camera, doesn’t, but I never used it really, it’s crap anyway. The battery life is amazing, I’m getting like 8 hours of real work for the new battery, or even longer for very light work. So, I’d say it depends on the hardware quite a lot. Maybe I’m just very experienced now, but I won’t say I am.
Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.
- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.
- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.
- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.
- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.
- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).
- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.
- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.
- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.
- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.
And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.
I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.