Re: Atypical migration to Trixie
On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 07:00:05PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> I find this to be highly optimistic.
Maybe slighly.
> Common problematic areas for Linux on laptops continue to be things like
> wifi/bluetooth support
This is true, sometimes WiFi does not work, even today, but: Often you
can swap out the built in M.2 card, or use a tiny USB dongle that can
be kept in the USB port all the time.
> and ability to successfully suspend and/or
> hibernate.
Yes, if suspend does not work, this is a problem. In my experience this
is much much rarer than WiFi problems (these happen occasionally, I
agree with you).
> Problems I've seen:
>
> - wifi just doesn't work
>
> - wifi works but continually drops out
>
> - laptop can't suspend while that wifi driver module is in the kernel
>
> - laptop suspends but is never able to wake up
>
> - laptop suspends but wakes up without wifi/bluetooth and nothing gets
> it back
>
> - laptop suspends but wakes up without wifi/bluetooth and only
> removal/re-add of wifi module gets it back
>
> …and so on.
Most of these are WiFi/BT related, for myself a USB dongle is good
enough if the builtin WiFi does not work. I had a laptop like this,
with some sort of Realtek WiFi, it was not a huge problem. It had more
than one USB port and the dongle was cheap and tiny. And worked well.
> While I can list off plenty of laptops that work fine in all respects,
> IMHO it is still a bit of a lottery to buy blindly unless the vendor
> advertises Linux support explicitly on that model (e.g. some will offer
> pre-installed Ubuntu or Fedora, which indicates that most other Linux
> can be made to work too.) And this is not a thing related to "old" or
> "new" or "cheap" or "expensive". Problems crop up across all dimensions.
In my experience brand new makes more problems, because drivers are not
yet upstreamed. YMMV.
/ralph
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