I've seen many threads suggesting products but they often don't mention FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software. With FOSS you are already boycotting capitalism, on either side. Free and Open Source ignores borders and shouldn't be categorized in nationalist terms, no matter where some of the maintainers happen to live.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

investment in stabilizing Linux enough to make it a feasible alternative

Do you care to elaborate? If I had to write a list of reasons why Linux might not be ready for your average cubicle... Stability wouldn't be one of them.

[–] Lauchs@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Stabilizing might not be quite the right word I'm looking for. But for example, trying to connect a new wifi card etc. Or when one program updates but this causes instability and you have to undo the update. Even from the handful of linux wizards I know, their battle stories with updates or new configurations are enough to terrify someone.

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 hours ago

OK, now I get it. Yes, my experiences with Linux have been ridiculously good for a long time, but that is indeed also due to being careful with what I buy.

Nowadays it's generally gotten pretty easy compared to a few years back, but there are still rough edges there.

I also expect this is more of an issue with cheaper solutions? Because nothing I touched in the last 10+ gave me any real problem. With maybe the exception of getting NVidia Optimus to work?

For a company it wouldn't be so unreasonable to say "we'll transition to Linux over this period of time" and replace incompatible hardware as you progress. The hardware replacement will be a small fraction of your switching costs.

The company I work at has decided to be Linux centric a long time ago, and basically all laptops are years old refurbished Thinkpads that run just fine with no intervention and no hacking.

But the university where I worked at before had a framework deal with Dell, and while I was one of the few people using Linux, I never had trouble with hardware compatibility on those Optiplex and Latitude. To the point that when I was getting a new machine, I would clone the old partition and just boot into a perfectly working system.

I use Arch, BTW.

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Not the other commenter, but they likely meant stability with respect to device drivers. The kernel is great at not degrading with a high uptime, but there's consumer stuff that's just perpetually unimplemented, buggy, or minimally-functional:

Sensor monitoring on Ryzen platforms
Realtek NIC chipsets
Nvidia cards and proprietary drivers for anything and everything other than compute workloads
Nvidia cards older than the RTX 2000 series and FOSS drivers
Peripherals targeted towards "gamers"

None of this is the kernel maintainers fault, of course. The underlying issue is the usual one of shitty corporations refusing to publish documentation and/or strategically abusing the legal system to stifle reverse engineering for interoperability.

[–] spex@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I'm going to add Broadcom to your list, but otherwise it is a great, concise explanation of the root issues behind why some users will struggle with older hardware while others will have no issues.

[–] droplet6585@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago

stifle reverse engineering for interoperability.

Nothing will get better until the rent seekers are cast out of the temple.