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0 pointspjmlp8mo ago0 comments

Dell XPS and Asus netbooks supposedly were designed with Linux in mind, and I had my share of wlan adventures.

On Asus netbook, only the original proprietary driver from Asus worked properly, the open source replacement, always kept dying when under load, regardless of how many improvements were made to it.

Something like updating Rust, instead of seconds, took minutes with all the network reconnection happening, or I had to pull the lan cable instead.

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microtonal8mo ago

I guess my point is that brands like Lenovo use bog-standard Realtek and Intel NICs and they just work well out of the box. Somewhat similar with WiFi chipsets - my ThinkPad uses a standard Qualcomm chipset and it works without any issues.

It seems like these small Linux laptop vendors do not have enough clout to ask ODMs for devices with better-supported hardware. On the other hand, there must be ODMs that use more standard hardware, no?

At any rate, it creates the weird situation that it is better to purchase something like a ThinkPad if you want good Linux support. But if the Linux laptop vendors do not become large enough, they will not have enough sway over ODMs.

pjmlpOP8mo ago

Ironically that driver I was talking about was the Qualcomm driver, Ubuntu the distribution Asus was using on the netbook I had, decided to replace the proprietary blob with the open source on, back then in its early days.

Not only did we had to endure it getting feature complete, or rollback kernel updates as means to be able to use the proprietary one, it was never as stable during the last decade.

Point being if not even Dell and Asus, with their might care enough for a flawless Linux experience, how can we expect better from small shops doing Linux installations on random asian models?

Last year I got burned with 300 euros, buying something that was supposed to work with Linux, but only did so when using external storage via USB, booting never worked from the internal SSD drive, pity that forgot to mention that anywhere.

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