Phoronix Announces '2017 Linux Laptop Survey' (google.com)

Phoronix is hosting a 2017 Linux Laptop Survey. From their site: While Linux laptop compatibility is much better than where it was years ago, it's still not too uncommon to run into display/hybrid issues, shorter battery life under Linux than Windows or macOS, touchpad problems, and other occasional compatibility/performance shortcomings. So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties...
The survey will be online until July 6th, after which the results will be publicly available, and will determine the most popular brands, distros, screen sizes, and GPUs, as well as common pain points and popular price points. And one particularly interestng question asks respondents what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux laptop."

Comments

what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux laptop."

[Hognoxious]

The complete absence of anything by Lennart Poettering.

no laptop

[tomxor]

We all like to bitch about crappy hardware and software, but If you kept adding all the things that anyone ever hated about linux or hardware to your "no" list you will end up with a transistor... even some people will hate a particular type of transistor. so you will end up with nothing.

Point being, if you knew all the details of what went into making your computer you would find a lot of it pretty fucking awful... Once you take the red pill you have to be more accepting of the prevalence of poor design and buggy hardware and software or get out of computing. Just focus on the good stuff, the bad stuff is inevitable for so many reasons. On a semi-related note, another way of looking at things is like Minix3: failure is inevitable, so make it fail right.

Re:no laptop

[iggymanz]

Minix is extremely useful for education though.

To anyone interested, minix3 runs on two architectures: i586 or later processors, or beagle arm7v boards. It uses NETBSD's packages

Re:no laptop

[ortholattice]

even some people will hate a particular type of transistor. so you will end up with nothing.

Back in the day, I used to hate PNP transistors. Everything was backwards and counter-intuitive, even the power supply was negative. A classic example of user-unfriendly design.

Re: what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux lapt

[buchanmilne]

These days, audio on linux just works (including things like auto-switching an audio stream to a bluetooth headset whrn connected).

I haven't had to fix buggy init scripts in years (only to have them overwritten on upgrade), and unit files provide all customisation options I need (e.g. increasing file limits).

If you have real problems, post links to the bug reports so there can be more eyeballs looking at the problem.

With the old keyboards!

[Kludge]

Would someone please tell these laptop companies that the Apple-type keyboards are SHIT!?!! Please bring back the old Thinkpad keyboards.

Too bad I can't take the survey

[Kludge]

None of the radio buttons in the survey does anything when I click on it.
This is probably because I am running a script blocker. Why can they just not use the regular old html radio buttons that just work? Why does everything have to be overloaded with javascript bullshit today?

Re:Too bad I can't take the survey

[drinkypoo]

Why does everything have to be overloaded with javascript bullshit today?

Because everyone thinks their wheel is better than everyone else's wheel. If you choose your modules correctly, a Drupal site will continue to work even if javascript and cookies are completely disabled. It will pass the PHP session ID in the URL, which is insecure (in that it potentially allows hijacking) but which will still permit the site to function.

Re:what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux lapto

[KGIII]

Fine... I'll do it.

I have been using a distro with systemd for years, now. It hasn't failed me - ever. I learned a few new commands, and have grown to accept it. I'm not willing to say I like it - but it is easier for me to deal with.

To be clear, I have a small network and nothing of great importance on it. I am also meticulous about backups. It has never stopped me from booting, it has never prevented me from finding problems, it hasn't even gotten in the way.

Are there improvements that would help? Probably. It should probably spit out more accurate information when shit fails to start. That'd help.

Meh... I really don't mind it. At the same time, I understand why other people aren't that fond of it - and it can be a bitch to work with. I have read the stories.

Re:what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux lapto

[taiwanjohn]

When was the last time you actually tried LibreOffice or KDEnlive or similar "equivalents" in OSS? Unless you\'re a "power user" in the commercial version and/or you're starting from scratch, you probably won't notice much difference.

I've been doing some at-home editing and proofreading for a local magazine for the last couple of years, and we've never had a problem interfacing between my Linux system and their Windows gear. I just save as .docx and everything seems to work fine.

I recently uploaded a series of videos on YouTube, and used KDEnlive to edit some of them. I was fairly new to NLE, but I found KDEnlive to be a very robust and well supported platform. The learning curve was no steeper than if I'd been using Maya or FinalCutPro.

It will take a while for this to sink in, world-wide, but the trend toward open source is inexorable.

Re:what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux lapto

[Hognoxious]

I find Writer sometimes buggers up the formatting (especially bullet points & indents) but then again I've had the same problem from different versions of MS Office.

Calc isn't too bad. It doesn't seem to have conditional formatting though. Formulas & charts are no clunkier than with Excel.

I used the Poohypoint equivalent once, it was dross.

(Note: I'm on CentOS which is pretty conservative so I probably don't have the latest versions)