Ask HN: Why don’t you use Linux as your daily driver OS?

For what it's worth:

KDE Plasma supports "non-integer scaling" perfectly, and for my money is vastly superior to any other GUI available, open or commercial.

Thinkpads with nVidia GPUs also have Intel GPUs. You don't have to use the nVidia, it costs nothing to have.

There are other distros than Ubuntu and Debian. I use Void, which I find to be a perfectly stable rolling release distro with great package coverage.

1. I hate the application distribution model. Repos are basically the same as walled gardens, only maintained largely by unpaid volunteers who occasionally introduce their own bugs. You can't have two versions of the same application unless the packages have been specifically set up to allow it (Python 2 vs 3), you can't install applications to alternate disks, and there's no such thing as a portable application. There's also of course a dozen different package formats and hundreds of different repos. If what you want isn't in your distro's repo you can hope for an AppImage, but they're not "the way it is done" in Linux land so it's pretty unlikely. There might be a Snap or Flatpak but they have basically all the same limitations as the other package manager/repo models as well as a few extra ones for good measure. So then you're stuck compiling from source, which requires setting up a build environment which is probably finicky and sometimes requires installing yet more packages that are not in the repo. It is more or less impossible to have some software on a stable release while having other software on the bleeding edge.

2. The community is condescending, arrogant, and extremely pushy. If you have a problem and it is not in the set of problems they're used to, they will be mad at you for not conforming to how they do things. They will often unhelpfully tell you to use a different distro, which of course has its own problems. When none of their unhelpful solutions are good enough, they will blame you for not changing your use case. They will hate on people using alternative OSs, but when told why people chose those OSs instead they become extremely defensive.

3. Everything else. There's a lot of little things that add up. A modern Linux desktop has a lot of moving interconnected parts that are mostly developed by completely different groups with completely different goals, almost none of whom write good documentation. Every application has a completely different configuration file format. Pretty much everything in GUI land is at least a little jank, as though it is just a poorly coupled frontend to running commands on the terminal... which it probably is. There's a lot of hardware that technically works, but is flaky as hell with the existing driver and there's no indication that'll be the case until you run into a bunch of problems. The system's default response to running out of memory is to start randomly killing programs to free some up, and for some reason the community doesn't think this is completely insane.

I will say that Linux is usually pretty good for building appliances, and it makes a decent server because server is a subset of appliance. But as a desktop it is a complete garbage fire as far as I'm concerned.

I used to use Linux as my full-time desktop from 1994 to 2013.

I've developed all sorts of things. I've built 3d games engines and EDA software that ran on Linux desktops. Even when developing for Windows or (in the earlier days) DOS, I cross-compiled them on Linux. So I have plenty of experience with it.

I 2013 I bought a MacBook Pro, having held out a long time, vaguely in line with the GNU boycott of all things Apple. A big life event led to me deciding to try something new outside my traditional comfort zone, and I went to a database conference where it seemed the entire audience had an MBP. I'd read that the hardware was great. So I bought one.

I've been pretty happy with it ever since.

However the first thing I did was install VMware Fusion, so I could still have a Linux desktop. In fact I copied my previous machine's entire installation over, to run in the VM. It worked very well and still does.

The MBP four-finger swipe between desktops works really well for this: I could switch between Mac and Linux desktops as if they were equal status peers on the machine. It's about as good an experience as running Linux natively. I know, having used Linux desktops for 19 years prior to that.

Performance of filesystem access won't be as good, but I tend to use Linux servers for intensive work including compilations.

Naturally, I tried booting Linux directly on the MBP. It's the cool thing to do, and I've done it with every previous laptop I owned.

Then I did some battery measuerments, and found (to my surprise at first) that Linux drained the battery noticably faster than MacOS running Linux in VMware. So I stuck with VMware, and got used to MacOS desktop gestures on the Mac side, and the lovely four-finger swipe between desktops. I had wanted to try something new anyway, so that cemented my exposure to MacOS.

Around the same time, Ubuntu's desktop experience went downhill. The out of the box Ubuntu desktop is nothing like the rich desktop I was using from GNOME in previous years and through numerous XFree86 configurations before that. I couldn't be bothered installing an "alternative" desktop any more. Most of my deep development work was run on servers anyway, or in terminal windows.

The weird scroll control that appeared in Ubuntu desktop was especially offputting. I'd found it difficult to use even on my previous laptop.

Even now, where I still have Ubuntu installed in a VM, the Ubuntu desktop experience still seems rather odd. I have to click some dots and type "terminal" to get a terminal window up, while I'm presented with a bunch of apps I'm not interested in, does not encourage me to spend more time with it when I have alternatives. There's a "frequently used apps" tab, but Terminal doesn't appear in it despite it being by far the most frequently used app. The collection of interesting desktop controls I remember from older desktops seems to be absent: The default is quite minimal. Obviously I know I can pin the terminal, reconfigure everything if I put in the time, switch to an alternative desktop, or code things myself if I'm really keen. What I'm saying is the out of the box experience isn't a great start, and since I have MacOS available as a peer which is very featureful from the start, it's just easier to swipe and use that.

There are some things I'll definitely use with the Linux desktop: Inkscape in particular, and for OpenGL tests. But mostly I use my Linux VM via SSH from iTerm now. Same way I access my servers.

For a few years, this resulted in my preferring to access Emacs running in Linux over SSH from a Mac terminal, compared with using the GUI to access the same Emacs on the Linux desktop. The Mac side terminal was just a better experience than the Linux GUI, especially as by then I was using Firefox etc on the Mac side. GUI Emacs is much better, though, for scrolling and copying. So eventually I got a good version of that running on the Mac side as well, and when I use Emacs on the Linux side, that's now emacsclient calling the Mac side Emacs to edit Linux files.

I'll always be a Linux enthusiast, but this is one of the key things that keeps me on macOS at least some of the time. To be honest I don't think there's a reason to nail your colours to the mast with any OS, there's no reason not to use two for different tasks. I juggle macOS, Linux, and to a lesser extent FreeBSD just fine, although the context switch is much more expensive adding Windows to the mix in my experience although I expect a lot of that is down to personal taste (I'm very set in my *nix ways).

Ah, I remember when a Linux laptop was my daily driver. Suspend/Hibernate was magically on OSX.

I recall running custom kernels and the like to get it to work. And it did! But on OSX, it was smooth as butter.

IIRC it's still not so magical on Linux.