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Linux On The Laptop Works So Damn Well That It’s Boring

Which is good! Boring = success

Clive Thompson

A few days ago I took my Macbook Pro into the shop. It needed a new battery; the current one is five years old and dies after an hour. We’ll be in touch by next Tuesday, the repair shop said.

So in the meantime, I started working on my backup laptop — which runs Linux. It’s an 11-year-old Thinkpad T420, a big ol’ thick brick of computation that I bought used a few years ago for $200.

Things were going fine, as I cranked away at email and some reading for research. Then a few minutes before 1 pm, I remembered I had to join a video call.

The problem? The video call required Microsoft Teams, which … I didn’t have installed on my Linux machine. “Crap, does Microsoft even have a version of Teams for Linux?” I wondered. I also realized this old laptop has a dreadful old webcam (I don’t normally use this machine for video), and I wasn’t sure my sexy high-res external Logictech camera would work with Linux either. Oh crap crap crap.

And of course, being an unprepared idiot, I’d only noticed these issues one minute before the meeting was beginning.

In an anxious flop sweat, I googled for “Linux version of Microsoft Teams” — and found that, hey now, that Microsoft indeed does have…

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Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson

Written by Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net

Responses (59)

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Nope. The font rendering is crap, and there are plenty of issues on many laptops regarding WiFi.
I don't have time, nor patience to deal with that bullshit anymore.

Im a sysadmin at a midsize company
our employees all use imacs and macbooks, which I have to manage, provision, secure, etc
its an absolute pain in ass. Things alwasy break on them, they are expensive, its hard to automate settings, updates, etc…

I googled for “Linux version of Microsoft Teams” — and found that, hey now, that Microsoft indeed does have one!

This is cool. I think that Teams works in a browser, too.