Re: "Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?"
On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 04:07:54PM -0700, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> On Apr 06 2017, Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org> wrote:
> > Nikolaus Rath dijo [Wed, Apr 05, 2017 at 03:18:57PM -0700]:
> >> >> I have a very different perception
> >> >
> >> > Me too. I guess it depends very much on whether one can afford to buy
> >> > a good laptop which works well with Linux.
> >>
> >> I think there's a pre-requisite that's much harder for a lot of people:
> >> finding out what laptop works well with Linux. This is the stage where I
> >> have repeatedly failed - the differences in model numbers are just too
> >> tiny and subtle, and typically things that work well are no longer sold
> >> commercially.
> >
> > FWIW it's been a long time since I had any problems in this regard,
> > and I'm surprised it's still an issue among knowledgeable people by
> > 2017!
>
> Maybe I'm just exceedingly unlucky, but I have yet to find a laptop
> where all of the following works:
>
> - Suspend
I found that when I switched my laptop from sysvinit to systemd, this started
to work flawlessly.
I'm not saying you need to switch to systemd if you haven't yet already,
but it might be a bug in whatever you're using to suspend, rather than
in Linux in general.
> - Hibernate
Don't use that anymore, personally, so no idea.
> - Airplane-mode Hotkey (especially hard apparently)
> - Volume Hotkeys
> - Brightness Hotkeys
> - Suspend/hibernate hotkeys
These are all implemented by ACPI on modern hardware. You need to have
something that turns the ACPI events into something useful.
If you have acpid installed, it usually turns the ACPI events into X11
key events, which you can monitor with the "xev" tool. It is then up to
your window manager to do something useful with that (or up to you to
configure your window manager to do so).
Most desktop environments' window managers deal with all that the right
way, but if you're using something more basic, you might have to deal
with it yourself. For instance, at one point I added the following to my
awesomewm's rc.lua:
awful.key({ }, "XF86MonBrightnessDown", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -dec 5") end),
awful.key({ }, "XF86MonBrightnessUp", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -inc 5") end),
awful.key({ modkey }, "XF86MonBrightnessDown", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -set 1") end),
awful.key({ modkey }, "XF86MonBrightnessUp", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -set 100") end),
(this doesn't work currently because the Intel KMS driver doesn't
support xbacklight, but that's a different matter)
> - Hot-plug of external monitor
Haven't gotten that to do anything useful, but then I also don't want it
to (I just run xrander and tell it what I want changed).
> >From memory, some of the models I tried and found lacking: Asus EeePC,
> Lenovo Carbon X1, HP Elitebook from ~3 years ago, HP Elitebook from just
> now.
>
> Suggestions for the next purchase are welcome :-).
>
> (but probably better off-list)
I've not had any serious issues over the past three laptops:
- Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook E734 (current)
- Lenovo X220 (N-1)
- HP something (cheap one, crappy battery life, N-2)
Sometimes you need to fiddle with configuration a bit if you're not
using things like gnome or KDE that set it all up for you, but that's
the choice you make.
--
< ron> I mean, the main *practical* problem with C++, is there's like a dozen
people in the world who think they really understand all of its rules,
and pretty much all of them are just lying to themselves too.
-- #debian-devel, OFTC, 2016-02-12
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