Ubuntu 26.04 has a bug in their pc-kernel snap causing it not to ship firmware for some devices (like my iwlwifi chipset), and because it mounts read-only directories into /var/lib/firmware/ you can't install the updated firmwares from apt either. Unless you're willing to do something like unpack the .deb file manually and extract the relevant firmwares from it, your wifi card won't work.

This isn't an issue with the hardware being too new or anything; it all works and the firmwares are all available, but Ubuntu's kernel snaps don't ship them and they make it much harder to get them yourself either.

I bought the Lenovo's proprietary Ethernet adapter from Lenovo directly for my Thinkpad X1 Extreme because I wanted to keep a USB-C port free. It didn't work at all under Fedora. A third-party USB-C to Ethernet adapter I bought works flawlessly.

If Lenovo's own adapter doesn't work on one of the most well supported product lines on Linux, that is not a good look.

To be very clear, I am a long time Linux user and most of the third-party stuff usually just works.

On the desktop that's true, but when I last used linux laptops (Debian, probably in 2021 or so), there were significant driver issues for the touchpad, touchscreen, buttons for brightness, and audio on every laptop I tried.

I eventually gave up and bought a Macbook and installed Homebrew and Rectangle on it. I haven't thought about drivers or firmware updates for that device since I bought it.

If I did own a desktop, I would use linux on it, and I solely use linux when I'm using VMs or cloud providers.

Recently started working at a company that uses windows and .net and it's so bad.

Not OP, but I have an Asus StudioBook 17.

Of what is builtin, the fingerprint reader and the numberpad functionality of the touchpad don't work.

Everything else works fine though.

3 Words: Dell Docking Stations

> Unless your hardware is exotic (or actively anti-consumer)

Bruh.

2 weeks ago I was getting full kernel crashes on Ubuntu Server due to an Intel iGPU on a Dell Laptop with a 7th gen i7. Fortunately Claude Code fixed it after a couple of attempts, but still.

Audio was completely corrupt on a Bazzite HTPC I tried to set up 6 months ago, until I changed some setting on my TV related to 10-bit colour. Then, when that was sorted Kodi would only run in 30Hz despite the fact that other apps supported 60.

My previous laptop with Arch (circa 2020) sometimes wouldn't wake from sleep.

When I ran an OpenSUSE Desktop (circa 2019) I picked Noveau instead of the proprietary drivers, and the picture was all corrupt. Then when I installed the proper Nvidia drivers, I did the wrong thing and my whole screen turned black, Linus-style.

I then switched the same desktop to Ubuntu, which was better out of the box, but would stop reading my USB SD card reader after unplugging it a few times. WiFi would also randomly drop out until I rebooted the whole system every few hours, and when talking to my Brother Laser Printer it would only print in like 30dpi or somthing ridiculous. I was emailing the files to myself, rebooting back into Windows and then printing from there because it was so bad.

The 5 year gap between the current Linux attempts and the last one had less to do with Linux improvements and more to do with agentic LLMs being able to paper over all the cracks. To be fair, though, I expect regular people having access to Opus 4.5-tier or higher models will result in all kinds of minor issues that would normally be overlooked actually getting fixed on Linux. (Thinking about it a bit more, regular users will have access to subsidised tokens too, so a million open source devs running $20 Claude Pro subscriptions might between them be able to do way more with that $20 million than Microsoft could with Enterprise API access).