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by AshamedCaptain5 hours ago |
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upvoteby delta_p_delta_x3 hours ago|
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> now has hardware support that is miles ahead of Windows

[X] doubt.

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upvoteby jasonjayr3 hours ago|
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Windows is cleaning up a lot of legacy drivers. A bunch of printers (+ scanners) that predate updates to the printer driver framework in recent versions of windows just don't have functioning drivers anymore, despite being perfectly functional.

All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.

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upvoteby bluebarbet3 hours ago|
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Most devices that you can buy for under $400 now run on ARM chips (frequently Mediatek). We're talking tablets (with keyboards), convertibles, even outright laptops (i.e. "netbooks"). These things qualify as computers. They are replacing traditional laptops, just as those replaced desktops.

And they do not run Linux out of the box.

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upvoteby yjftsjthsd-h2 hours ago|
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If we're looking at sub-$400 computers, especially on ARM, it seems like we have to include the large segment of ChromeOS devices that only run Linux out of the box (or at all, generally).
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upvoteby bluebarbet2 hours ago|
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Referring to Intel Chromebooks (i.e. laptops), that segment is now dwindling in size much as its predecessor (Intel Windows netbooks) did a few years ago. Most low-end ChromeOS devices now run on ARM. And Android is nipping at their heels.
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upvoteby yjftsjthsd-h2 hours ago|
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Sure. And all of those devices run Linux. Some of them even run other Linux OSs decently; one of my daily drivers is an ARM Chromebook running postmarketos.
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upvoteby bluebarbet1 hours ago|
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It is not trivial to get FOSS Linux onto a write-protected Intel Chromebook, compared to a Windows netbook of yore. It is harder still to get it onto an ARM Chromebook or Android tablet. PostmarketOS is a bit simpler (or at least better documented) but it is not a full Linux distro.

Installing a fully-fledged FOSS OS on low-end general-purpose computing hardware is getting harder. Certainly for the non-techies who have to be part of FOSS if it is to survive.

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upvoteby ux2664782 hours ago|
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Most devices in that class I see run some vendor flavor of Android or ChromeOS and not Windows, so definitionally speaking they do run Linux out of the box.
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upvoteby bluebarbet2 hours ago|
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Yes but it's a bit academic. The problem is that getting a FOSS distro of Linux onto low-end general-purpose computing hardware is harder now than it was a decade ago. I speak from bitter recent experience.
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upvoteby ux2664782 hours ago|
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Oh, I know perfectly well what you mean. The move to the SoC paradigm has serious implications for the future of computing freedom. I can't imagine how we might be able to fight this crap, realistically.
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upvoteby AshamedCaptain2 hours ago|
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There is only one area where windows excels: recent PC-based hardware. For everything else, primarily including anything that is not PC, and anything that is from more than a decade and a half or so ago, Linux is miles ahead, and there's no discussion possible.

Whether this is any helpful to us is another story.

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upvoteby craftkiller5 hours ago|
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FreeBSD uses a compatibility layer to run the Linux graphics drivers, though it lags behind Linux. So if FreeBSD currently does not support the graphics cards, it will soon. It looks like they are currently porting over 6.11: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/41
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upvoteby AshamedCaptain5 hours ago|
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It is the _only_ OSS operating system that supports AMD cards from this decade, and it does so by having to emulate the Linux kernel API, and yet _still_ it lags years behind Linux itself. I've chosen this example for a reason -- this is exactly what I'm sad about.
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upvoteby 0x4574 hours ago|
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That and WiFi being stuck at 802.11g is what made me switch. It was a very sad day for me when I uninstalled FreeBSD from all of non-server machines.
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upvoteby craftkiller3 hours ago|
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That certainly _used_ to be the case, but it looks like 802.11ac is supported in iwlwifi since FreeBSD 14.3: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwlwifi&sektion=4&...

And it looks like they're adding 802.11ac support to some realtek drivers too: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-10-2025-12/#_linu...

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upvoteby 0x4572 hours ago|
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Not to sound like goal post mover, but once you tried 802.11be @ 6GHz, you never go back (assuming what your AP connected to can handle it).

That's my problem with FreeBSD on non-servers - eventually it's supported, usually via Linux shim, but it's too late. By the time FreeBSD started to support (on CURRENT) GPU that forced me to switch, I already upgraded twice.

Glad it's getting better.

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upvoteby craftkiller2 hours ago|
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eh I've got 802.11be @ 6ghz at home (u7 pro AP and QCNCM865 client) and it is truly impressive, but I only notice the difference once every 1-2 years when I'm transferring a full-disk image over the network for backup. We've long passed the point where the speed improvements matter for daily usage (browsing the web, streaming video, remote desktop, installing updates). For those use cases, you wouldn't notice a slowdown on 802.11ac and I'd argue even 802.11n would be fine.

The one exception I can think of would be video content creators since they end up with large amounts of raw video that would benefit from transferring at much-faster-than-streaming speeds.

And I guess steam downloads if you don't plan ahead at all, but if I'm planning to play a game later, I'll tell steam to install it hours or days in advance.

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upvoteby 0x4571 hours ago|
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I often have to transfer large files in LAN. 802.11ac and 802.11n definitely enough for most of the time. I often have to transfer large files between machines in LAN, with 802.11ac makes you remember that it's wireless, while 802.11be makes you forget.

I have the same setup for a framework main board next to the AP, and it's reliably faster than using their usb-c ethernet extension card.

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upvoteby skydhash2 hours ago|
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I wouldn’t mind faster wifi speed, but reverse engineering stuff has always been slow (i.e Asahi Linux, and they only have a few device to investigate)
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upvoteby rjsw1 hours ago|
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Ethernet works fine for me at home, only use WiFi when travelling.
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upvoteby ux2664783 hours ago|
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Why do you think so?
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upvoteby cevn2 hours ago|
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It's sad because it removes choice from users over what OS to run. People that only use windows are going and throwing their old computers away.
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upvoteby ux2664781 hours ago|
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I think of it more in the reverse, the choice being removed is the hardware you can use. It has been the case from the dawn of computing that you start from a usecase (which correlates to software, which maps to an operating system) and then look at your options for hardware. The more specific your usecase, the more specific your software, which correlates to a specific choice of hardware. There is no, and can be no, "have it all". It's a fundamental principle of mathematics, the postulates you choose radically change the set of proofs you have access to, and the set of proofs you choose entail the axioms and structures you can take.

Now it can be better or worse, and right now it's never been better. There was a time when your language, your shell and your operating system were specific to the exact model of computer (not just a patched kernel, everything was fully bespoke) and you have a very limited set of peripherals. That we suffer from more esoteric operating systems lagging behind the bleeding edge of extremely complicated peripherals is a very good place to be in. That there's always room for improvement shouldn't be cause for sadness.

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upvoteby AshamedCaptain1 hours ago|
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> Now it can be better or worse, and right now it's never been better. There was a time when your language, your shell and your operating system were specific to the exact model of comput

No, it is not. There was a small period of time between the 90s and the 2010s where you could grab almost every 386 OS and have your hardware mostly decently run for it, and if not, drivers would be easily written from manufacturer specifications. That time was definitely better then than what we have today, or what we had before then. I am writing this as someone who was written serial port controller drivers for the BeOS.

> That we suffer from more esoteric operating systems lagging behind the bleeding edge of extremely complicated peripherals is a very good place to be in.

This is the wrong logic, because operating systems become esoteric since they can't support the hardware, and hardware becomes complicated and under-specified because there's basically only one operating system to take care of. You may _think_ you have no reason to be sad if you're a user of Windows or Linux, but you have plenty anyway.

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