> Just when you’ve got it all working, one apt update and your GPU drivers start dumping core. And when you close the lid on your laptop it’s like playing Russian roulette. On the desktop it’s needy, brittle and like wading in sewage.
My spouse needed a new laptop, and I decided to get a laptop with coreboot/FOSS EC Firmware on it (A Purism L14). She also needed windows, and I was told that it should suport Windows through Coreboot. Since Purism wrote properly behaving UEFI and a properly behaving EC Firmware, Windows actually worked out of the box, and worked better on this laptop than I have seen for most vendors that actually support Windows. UEFI on it also behaves wonderfully. I see that and compare it to my current laptop where half the time, I cannot even boot into the UEFI menu (as it doesn't register my keybnoard presses) and have to rely on GRUB to get into the menu.
I say that to say, when you buy a laptop/motherboard whose firmware is slightly better than hot garbage, of course Linux will have issues with it! Most of the time Windows is barely better than Linux with half of these things since their Windows "drivers" are a hotpatched mess.
Ok....but thats not really what you discussed in the parent comment, and if we are going off a sample size of n=1 : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250736933 (I can of course add other threads to that effect here, but you get the idea, at least I hope).
For another example, my music teacher HATEs updating her Mac, because she says she has to spend days unfucking everything that Apple changed, and half of the programs she paid a lot of money for (e.g. Finale) or even simple programs she relies on for work (Zoom, Google Duo) stop working for unknown reasons, and the Mac does other odd things in the OS that break too. She complains about it nearly every week.
That and in the past several years, I have never had issues with desktops/laptops/etc. where an update on Linux dumps a GPU core or plays Russian roulette closing my laptop lid.
To my knowledge, a lot of macbooks behave pretty well with Linux (for reasons I outlined above, they write drivers that are well behaved and conform to known standards).
Same with:
> On the desktop it’s needy, brittle and like wading in sewage.
Since using Linux since 2006, I can't say I have ever had such an experience? And I've never bothered to be careful with buying motherboards.
If anything, that is my experience with Windows on a custom Desktop. I have to wade through so many needy motherboards that need their specific drivers and then want me to install Chrome, Adobe, McAfee, or whatever Spyware type "antivirus" that comes "included" in their drivers. Half the time I have to download it from another computer since their Ethernet controller doesn't work out of the box. Downloading it from Windows update isn't much better, since even Windows bundles their crapware with Windows update (Razer is a particularrly annoying example). And good luck finding reviews that discuss this, you pretty much have to look at their drivers page to find out if the motherboard behaves well in Windows.
My spouse needed a new laptop, and I decided to get a laptop with coreboot/FOSS EC Firmware on it (A Purism L14). She also needed windows, and I was told that it should suport Windows through Coreboot. Since Purism wrote properly behaving UEFI and a properly behaving EC Firmware, Windows actually worked out of the box, and worked better on this laptop than I have seen for most vendors that actually support Windows. UEFI on it also behaves wonderfully. I see that and compare it to my current laptop where half the time, I cannot even boot into the UEFI menu (as it doesn't register my keybnoard presses) and have to rely on GRUB to get into the menu.
I say that to say, when you buy a laptop/motherboard whose firmware is slightly better than hot garbage, of course Linux will have issues with it! Most of the time Windows is barely better than Linux with half of these things since their Windows "drivers" are a hotpatched mess.