Linux & hardware conundrum

Updated: January 17, 2025

"Why did you get a Slimbook? If you had bought a more upmarket brand, it wouldn't have happened." I'm paraphrasing roughly a dozen emails I received after I published my seventh Slimbook Executive report, in which I complained a lot about buggy firmware and botched system updates that temporarily rendered my beautiful and elegant laptop into a nerdy sandbox.

As a result, I wanted to write an article that summarizes roughly 15 years of laptop usage, with this or that Linux distro, with this or that result. In this manner, I will try to answer the question written above. Sadly, the conclusion is, it doth not matter which hardware you choose, or which distro you choose, until there's a professional "wedding" of components, software and silicon, there will always be issues. After all, even Windows systems often have driver-related problems, despite the full, heavy OEM support in making the bits and pieces behave. Therefore, don't blame Slimbook. To wit, let's get into details.

Display, truncated

Hardware me, hardware you, there was nothing we could do

OK, so let's compress roughly fifteen years of testing and reviews into one list, full of lovely links and references. These are the various laptops I owned (and some still own), and what sort of issues they exhibited vis-a-vis Linux hardware support (well, drivers in essence, plus some firmware here and there, but yeah).

No Bluetooth

What do we have here?

If we look at the list, statistically, of the laptops I tried to use seriously, only Lenovo T42, Lenovo T60/61, and the Slimbook Pro2 never quite exhibited any real hardware-related problems. That means 10 out 13 did. If I'm being generous, and I toss into the lot the odd Meego netbook and alike, it's perhaps 10 out of 15, which means, a good 66% misbehaved on the hardware side.

What unifies these distros or machines? Nothing. Some had Intel, some had AMD processors and graphics. Some had Nvidia. The network cards came from Intel, Broadcom, Realtek, Atheros. For that matter, we're talking both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture, plus 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. I didn't go into details regarding disks or display, but practically, it does not matter. I used Arch-based, Debian-based, Red Hat-based, and SUSE-based distros over more than a decade. I tested Plasma, Gnome, Unity, Xfce, and other desktop environments.

Based on these results, we shouldn't blame Slimbook (Executive), nor Kubuntu.

Oh, I also had problems on my desktops, including graphics and network.

Oh, and in most cases, Windows does better power management and battery life. Not all, but most.

Conclusion

The fact you can install and run Linux distros on such a wide, mindbogglingly complex array of systems and their hardware permutation is nothing short of a miracle. That's wonderful. But that is not an excuse for why people ought to suffer. Indeed, the issue isn't that there are hardware problems. The issue is, why do they happen and what happens AFTER they are discovered.

There isn't enough quality assurance and testing done to make sure updates and patches don't mess up things. It's not possible to do this for so many hardware permutations, but again, that cannot be an excuse for why virtually no real testing is done. And once the bugs get reported, usually, there are three scenarios. One, big distro players try to fix what they can, to some extent, but they are also dependent on the upstream hardware makers, who don't always care about the niche 1% Linux desktop/laptop market share. The small distros are totally at the mercy of whatever happens with the big guys. This is an okay scenario.

Two, because most distro developers are overworked, overstretched (partially due to their own fault), not really paid to do this (non-gratifying) work, they don't really have an incentive to constantly keep fixing things, because that's boring, dejecting, and keeps them from having fun (making new cool things). The older and more arcane the code base is, the less likely you're to get any fixes. With no commercial incentive, and no real motivation to dig in the old, boring stuff, these bug reports often get ignored or deflected. The non-resolution comes in four flavors: a) properly ignore b) ignore for a long time and then tell the user to try again c) ignore for a long time and then tell the user the "problem statement" as defined is no longer supported, e.g.: the distro has gone out of support or something like that d) the user gets told that "it works for me" and they should reconsider their usage model so the problem becomes not a problem. This is an annoying scenario.

Three, because the Linux desktop depends heavily on big corporate decisions, because the developers doing their fun hobby stuff aren't really in it for the money (some personal glory and nerd points), and because in many cases, it is IMPOSSIBLE to actually test and verify the bugs, as in many cases, maybe one or two people out there have the specific hardware model actually running Linux on it, there's real, proper resentment toward acknowledging these issues. Software and hardware problems transform into human-focused hostility, whether toward companies that produce hardware, teams or entities that write code, the users that "use it wrong", and pesky bloggers like me, who raise their voice and threaten to shatter the bubble of open-source bliss. And thus, instead of solving the usability problems, energy is wasted on turning the messenger into a problem. Because if the messenger is "evil", there's no reason why the problem should be fixed, now is there. This is the worst scenario. It's the self-defeating Linux echo chamber loop mechanism.

Saying "Linux is great, you're the bitter Windows noob shill" ain't gonna fix the problems. One should always step back and look at things more philosophically. Factually, the Linux desktop share is tiny, and hasn't really grown much. Over the past two decades, the change has been negligible. It cannot be just the evil corpo world's fault, now can it? The message of how Linux is easy, accessible, works on all hardware, works on old hardware, and works better than Windows does not help anymore. It's partially a sweet delusion, and until acknowledged, we will never have a better baseline Linux experience on the desktop.

Most importantly, the Slimbook Executive is a lovely machine. The software needs to treat it nicely, that's all.

Cheers.