Now if a fresh macOS install on a common 5-year-old laptop could be set up out of the box with a working swap (8gb ram is not enough) and working power management (staying on until battery dies is not an option) as well as working suspend and hibernate, perhaps we could some day declare the year of the Mac desktop.

Now if a fresh Windows 11 install on a common 5-year-old laptop could be set up out of the box with perpetual updates (Skylake CPUs aren't new enough) and working power management (microsoft deleted my acpi tables =C) as well as working suspend and hibernate, perhaps we could some day declare the year of the Windows desktop.

> microsoft deleted my acpi tables =C

My first Linux experience was on a garbage-picked laptop I got for free because it had broken power management on Windows

I think in its case, the hardware was somehow damaged and Linux just fell back to APM instead of ACPI, so the technical details are different

but there's something nostalgic and funny to me about the prospect that this kind of thing could become a pattern :)

The Windows Desktop had many years. It may be in decline now, we'll see.

Haha. It's funny because it really actually does "just work". (Sure you can't run the latest MacOS, but that would be moving the goalposts).

I'm afraid you've already moved the goalposts, yourself! Let me help you put them back:

> a common 5-year-old laptop

doesn't mean 'a 5-year-old Mac laptop'.

The point isn't about macOS, but the proposed standard. It's this: if working on whatever random piece of hardware you happen to have lying around is a requirement for being a viable desktop operating system, macOS is not a viable desktop operating system... but of course, macOS is not only viable as a desktop OS but quite successful in its niche. So this tells us that the proposed standard is no standard at all— running without any tweaks or compromises on random hardware which was not designed, marketed, or sold as compatible is not necessary for a desktop OS to viable or a reasonable choice or whatever.

(And as a sibling poster to you points out, in the case of older hardware, it's a test that Windows may sometimes fail as well, if for entirely different reasons.)

I use a ten year old laptop and it does all of the above(with Mint as well).

Lenovo might disagree.

Yeah, ThinkPads exist, thanks, but I'm replying to the guy who's saying that Linux on laptops generally sucks, and it does. Of course you can chase down specific hardware that works; that was true when the problem was "wifi on Linux generally sucks", too.

My understanding of the situation is that manufacturers tend to work really hard with Microsoft on graceful power management code, and until that effort is replicated on Linux (lol), one has to chase down specific hardware, because otherwise it generally sucks.

No experience yet on power management, but even as a noob on Linux, and someone who didn't install an OS since Windows XP, I got Ubuntu running within 2 hours on my X1E Gen2 today. Pretty straight forward, and all functions work. I didn't try fingerprint scanner and dual GPUs. The first already was a nuisance under Windows and the latter deactivated from day one of ownership to get multiple displays properly running. Even Steam and most of my games are running just fine.

That being said, he nVidia GPU managed to suck the battery in 2-3 hours depending on the game being payed under Windows as well, everything around 4 hours on normal working is fine.

Installing software under Linux / Ubuntu is, well, strange. But solvable. And I really do like the old-school, non-cloud feeling of Linux way better than Windows 10 and One Drive.