I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went. If you google it, you’ll get a lot of “lol good luck installing linux on that” type posts - so I was ready for a battle.
Turned off secure boot and tpm. Booted off a usb stick. Live environment, check. Start installer and wipe drive. Few minutes later I’m in. Ok let’s find out what’s not working…
WiFi check. Bluetooth check. Sound check (although a little quiet). Keyboard check. Screen resolution check. Hibernates correctly? Check. WTF I can’t believe this all works out the box. The touchscreen? Check. The stylus pen check. Flipping the screen over to a tablet check. Jesus H.
Ok, everything just works. Huh. Who’d have thunk?
Install programs, log into accounts, jeez this laptop is snappier than on windows. Make things pretty for my wife and install some fun games and stuff.
Finished. Ez. Why did I wait so long? Google was wrong - it was cake.
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Yes, if you don’t have a computer that literally came out this year, don’t have 2 separate graphics cards and don’t need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.
Hopefully HDR can get crossed off that list soon
Hdr in games is the last frontier from me totally dumping windows.
It looks like it works in KDE 6, albeit a bit janky. Might be worth seeing if it works now, and if not come back in a year or so. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
Yeah I’m using 6, it works well for desktop but not in most games yet
You should be able to get most games to work with some extra tinkering.
Got Armored Core running in HDR with this.
Also, I found it was enough to run the just the game in gamescope, no need to run the entirety of steam in a gamescope window. Just set the launch options for the game you want to enable HDR on.
Yeah I can get HDR to enable w game scope but it looks way off in stuff I’ve tested like elden ring or Tekken 8. Gets kinda blown out looking.
There’s plenty of laptops with 2 separate graphics cards (mine included) and I’d say it’s the ideal experience if you need an NVIDIA card. Everything related to your system is done in the integrated Intel/AMD GPU (which works perfectly) and games and GPU intensive work (like CUDA) gets done in the NVIDIA one.
My issue is family control. I haven’t found a way to get Microsoft family type control yet on Linux, since my sibling uses my computer. The syncing time allowed across devices is the hard part.
Create separate user?
But I can’t remotely set their allowable usage time and access list. Maybe dual booting would work though.
“Generally” is the key word. I’m a linux user since slackware on diskettes. My daily driver is Mint, because lazy. I have 2 VMs with kali and kinoite.
A couple of days ago a kernel update borked my install. A problem with the Ryzen graphics driver.
For me it was trivial. Boot into the previous kernel, timeshift roll back, and back in business, but I can see how a newbie woul go into panic.
A satisfied “customer” will recommend you to a friend. A pissed off one will tell 10.
What is the issue with laptops this year? I was planning to upgrade.
If you follow general newbie advice and install Mint, the kernel is older than your laptop and may not support everything.
Fedora, EndeavorOS or Manjaro would be a better choice then.I use endeavour os so fine I guess.
You can always install a newer kernel, or move to something Fedora or Arch based. My son has ZorinOS on 6.8
I know. But I wouldn’t consider that “just works”.
It would mean installing the most popular beginner distro, finding out it doesn’t work, and then first having to google what is even a kernel…True. PopOS has pretty current kernels, and is very beginner friendly. What I mean is that there are options, regardless of hardware (unless your on an m3 Crapple chip).
I just did that with hdr on alderlake n95. Easy as hell with NixOS.
I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.
The moment that shocked me was when printers, network cards, and even motherboard integrated Ethernet didn’t work on Windows without driver downloads but Linux was plug and play. Full reversal of the situation.
We may need a new forum: when Google is RIGHT about a search.
You’ve given me some interest in Endeavor. My current installation won’t hibernate & restore.
HA! True. Remember when Google was always right and always exactly what you were looking for?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I 'member
Long ago. Check this one out if you want something that actually works and I think it’s open source
Endeavour is great, I daily it and as a Linux noob it’s been very forgiving. My only annoyance is that I’ve been having some issues with the display where sometimes I’ll wake it up and will only get a black screen and no means of doing anything to fix it. My laptop also really doesn’t like me using any other DEs besides Budgie.
No surprise it feels a lot snappier. You only run the shit you have purposefully installed, and not endless layers of telemetry, candy crush silent installs, game bars that somehow make the performance worse, and mandatory online service accounts
you shouldn’t need to disable tpm
I’ve used Linux since the mid 00’s and, well, I’ve seen some shit. But nowadays? It’s the best desktop OS I’ve used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE’s like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you’d likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.
TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!
Yes it literally has come a long way, all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
I know that’s not quite what you meant, it was just a thought I came to think of reading the headline.But apart from that, it’s also become quite good, but IMO it has been for more than a decade now.
It kind of was what I meant. My first Linux experience was in 93 - I wanted to run X on my 486 so I could use maple and other Unix programs from the mainframe in college. Thank god for my comp sci roommate-I don’t think I could have figured it out on my own back then.
Flash forward through the decades and here I am running all the games I want through steam and bottles. Win10 updates are crapping on themselves requiring a reload - I try linux on it expecting it to mostly work, but having a few annoying issues that will be a bear to solve. Nope, it just worked.
It’s impressive to me. A bunch of nerds on the internet mostly volunteered their way into a better OS than the big boys have made.
Yes it is absolutely cool. 😎
I tried Linux earlier, but didn’t find it really useful until 2005 when I switched to Linux as my main OS, but games were a huge problem, so I had to dual boot for a couple of years, before I dropped Windows completely.
1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
Also the various BSD-based OSs. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. are still around, and MacOS is based on BSD too. And since BSD (1978) is a Unix, you can trace these all the way back to 1969.
That’s kind of true, but MacOS and Mac OSX are 2 different things. What is based on BSD is the MAC OSX that came out in 2001 AFAIK.
And BSD was interrupted for 2 years because of copyright disputes with AT&T. If that hadn’t happened, BSD would be the longest continuous OS today, and probably way more significant than it is.
I don’t consider MAC OSX as part of BSD, just like Android isn’t part of Linux Desktop, but only uses the Linux kernel. OSX took parts of BSD and shielded it behind a proprietary wall, because the BSD license offer no protection from that. So they become separate projects the moment they enter the Apple domain.
Problem here is when people mix up the use of the word Linux as an OS with Linux the kernel. I am 100% sure OP meant Linux as a Desktop OS like GNU/Linux or something like Free desktop according to freedesktop.org. Using his experience with EndeavorOS as an example.
But you are right, it can be said Unix/BSD has an even longer running time, but it has been somewhat problematic and interrupted because of AT&T and SCO and Novell.
I don’t consider MAC OSX as part of BSD, just like Android isn’t part of Linux Desktop, but only uses the Linux kernel. OSX took parts of BSD and shielded it behind a proprietary wall, because the BSD license offer no protection from that. So they become separate projects the moment they enter the Apple domain.
Check : What happened to the open source Apple Darwin OS then ?
tl;dr : Darwin OS is kind of obsoleted.
Up to Darwin 8.0.1, released in April 2005, Apple released a binary installer (as an ISO image) after each major Mac OS X release that allowed one to install Darwin on PowerPC and Intel x86 systems as a standalone operating system.[12] Minor updates were released as packages that were installed separately. Darwin is now only available as source code. As of January 2023, Apple no longer mentions Darwin by name on its Open Source website and only publishes an incomplete collection of open-source projects relating to macOS and iOS.
That’s kind of true, but MacOS and Mac OSX are 2 different things
Then Windows 3.0 and Windows 11 are two different things, so by that metric you can’t include Windows either.
Good catch, I guess that’s mostly true, but Windows NT was an evolution of Windows that mainly got rid of the DOS legacy. Which after Windows NT ran on a compatibility layer, where Windows 3 ran on DOS directly.
It’s a bit of a grey area. But I’d say windows NT was a continuation of Windows that shared almost the entire API from Windows 3.0.
The old “System n” OS was also called MAC OS. And the switch to OSX was a completely new OS where the old MAC OS software ran on a compatibility layer.I guess it can be seen either way.
all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows
It’s easy to forget about MacOS when it only has 15% desktop market share.
Operating systems that started before 1991 that are still in active development (had a release in the last 12 months):
- Multics (1969-)
- MVS (1974-) via OS/390 (1995-) -> z/OS (2001-)
- VMS (1977) via OpenVMS (1992-)
- BSD (1978-) via 386BSD -> FreeBSD, NetBSD -> OpenBSD
- HP-UX (1982-)
- SunOS (1982-1994) via Solaris (1992-)
- MacOS (1984-)
- AIX (1986-)
- RISC OS (1987-)
Almost made it:
- Minix (1987-2017)
- Genera (1982-2021)
- AmigaOS (1985-2021)
- NeXTSTEP (1987-1997) via GNUStep (1993-2021)
- IBM i (1988-2022)
- SpartaDOS (1988-2022)
That’s an impressive list, 👍
I admit I forgot AIX, but the others there are reasons I didn’t consider, I have explained in other posts why on BSD and MAC OS. Same arguments are true for most of your list.
But it’s still an impressive and interesting list. And yes AIX absolutely qualifies.
Windows only has more support because it is 10 years older but of course the shareholders will destroy its market dominance.
Windows became popular with Windows 3.0 that came out 1990, And the Linux kernel came in 1991, but the first distro which is a better comparison came in 1993.
So Windows had a 3 year advantage.
But that wasn’t the more crucial thing, the real advantage was DOS compatibility, which everything legacy ran on. So with Windows people and companies could still run their old DOS programs, they could even run them better than in an old fashioned DOS system, because Windows was brilliant for multitasking DOS programs.
When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they’re supposed to do?
HP laptops–at least business-grade ones–are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.
They do! I checked all of them. I couldn’t believe it!
This has been my experience since 2009 :) I’ve been using Linux for 15 years now, across four laptops and two desktop PCs, and I’ve only had a few rare hardware issues. (Sleep not working properly, BIOS update overwriting GRUB, and Wacom tablet mapping needing to be fixed. That’s it.)
The hardest part is almost always the installation, and that’s almost always attributable to Microsoft Bullshit.
I’m happy you’re having a good time :)
Linux is boring. In a good way. It is so boring that each of my computers use different distros. I have Debian, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Endeavour OS installed across 4 or 5 computers right now. Some of them still dual-booting Windows 10/11. Now each time I boot into Windows is fun. In a bad way.
EndeavourOS has been a wonderful experience for me, can’t recommend it enough.
for me it was very unreliable, I have an i7 7th gen hp envy from I think 2018 and I dual booted Windows and linux for more than a year now jumping distros every now and again just to get to know them better.
I first started with zorin OS and it was good, snappy, long battery life, stable I then tried popOS! and it was even better, I loved it until a few months in I started getting sudden crashes for some reason so I installed endeavourOS as it seems to be very popular and everyone was recommending it, but I immediately after installation started getting crashes every 30 or so minutes which was weird as no other OS linux or windows did that so it didn’t seem hardware related I’m now using linux mint and it’s wonderful so far
TLDR I daily drove half a dozen OSs and the only one that gave me trouble from the beginning was endeavourOS, which is weird because it feels like I’m the only one…
You’re not alone.
I had the opposite experience. I have been using EndeavourOS on my desktop since November, zero issues. This weekend I’ve been distro hopping on my old MacBook pro and almost every distro had a problem. Some didn’t boot, other had wifi issues, trackpad issues, keyboard volume keys not working, high CPU usage… EndeavourOS was the only one I tried that just worked out of the box with no issues
that’s what I hear everyone say, which makes my experience with it all the more weird… I’ll just blame HP
Installing Linux is really easy these days.
Secure boot is still problematic, but it has also become much easier thanks to
sbctl; in the best case you only have to delete the keys in the bios and run 3 or 4 generic commands.And there are distros where it works out of the box with no extra steps needed: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE IIRC
Since the day secure boot became the standard on motherboards, about once every quarter a new research paper popped up, describing a new way to hack or bypass it …
Interesting. Do you know if it works with an existing LUKS-encrypted installation?
It does, I used to set it up during the time I used Arch, it takes a bit of reading to understand how it works, but works flawlessly once you set it up.
It really has come a long way since the old times.
Yeah, 2 hour kernel recompiles to get a sound card to half work were not fun.
They kinda were for me. But then, I was young with plenty of time to spend.
I agree, installing old linux was a great way of learning unix commands and how computers works, plus you got really good at administering linux computers. But of course, that only works out if you have a vested interest in computers already and quite a bit of free time, so I’m also glad all “normal” folks nowadays can get an awesome linux experience without having to put much effort at all.
Yeah I guess it was kinda fun. Especially for nerds like us. Getting x-forwarding to work over a 14.4 modem was pretty awesome, albeit painfully slow, at the time.
