Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 306 posts

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

#101

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

watermelon0 wrote: post #87
tluyben2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like others here I have the opposite experience: to such extend that I am actually installing Ubuntu instead of Windows10 on computers of friends who are not technical and they love that it works so well.

What magical software and hardware combination are you using, where there are less issues on Linux than on Windows?

A lot of times when people say they've had no issues whatsoever what's really happened is that they've become so used to all the issues that crop up and have so much practice dealing with them that they aren't even conscious of them anymore. Same thing happens to Windows and Mac users.

It's a bit like how people who browse without an adblocker aren't even consciously aware of them anymore, but you use their computer for a second and want to rip your eyes out.

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

#102

Post by zbrozek »

fsflover wrote: post #59
zbrozek wrote: post #15

Generally unpolished quirkiness that requires time and attention to resolve. For example, in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling despite hours of fussing with X11 and compositor settings or graphics drivers. Or how my default file associations change unbidden all the time, frequently to poor choices like GIMP to open a JPEG. And more recently Internet Explorer through W…

> in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling Sounds like a hardware/driver problem. How is this a fault of Linux? I guess your hardware came with Windows and the vendor never cared about Linux support.

I've had a lot of hardware over ten years, including workstations issued by my employer that were engineered for first-class Linux support. The problem is never ubiquitous - sometimes it's just one browser and not another. Further, this is just one example of dozens of rough edges that may-or-may-not be present on any given setup. Lots of people aren't visually sensitive enough to even notice. I've had to point to specific regions of the screen and describe the shape of the tear to get observers to be able to recognize them.

But your comment sort of makes the point for me. Hardware support and drivers (especially in-kernel ones) are absolutely a reason to judge an OS for suitability for desktop use. I run Arch on all my servers and it's great. But I struggle to get an acceptable user experience on the desktop.

There are, of course, tons of other rough edges. Inconsistent input grabbing behavior across desktop environments (KDE not working properly with Remmina, for example), volume controls being difficult to use or having strange response curves, compositors hanging on monitor reconnect, infinite audio and video decoding issues, etc etc etc. Sure, each of these is individually surmountable at the cost of some hours of searching the intertubes and fussing at the command line. But then you end up with a magic snowflake installation that is brittle and you're down a bunch of time. Not worth it.

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

#103

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

runjake wrote: post #95
haunter wrote: post #57

Too confusing for me. Too many different distros. Too many different DEs. Too many different package systems. Just look at this https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Comparison_of_desktop_envir... And this one distro doesn't even cover the package systems that differs between distros and other distros based on those (see how Ubuntu is based on Debian but there are distros based on Ubuntu, it's like the Inception). Of cour…

You can just pick a distro and stick with it. You don’t need to learn about all the package managers and all the desktop environments. I don’t really know anything about Arch’s package manager or Fedora’s dnf.

Until you ask for help and the very first response is something like "Ubuntu is a very bad example of a linux distro."[0], or "I've never had these problems with Arch", or any other variation of "try a different distro", which is incredibly common advice in the Linux Desktop community.

Not to mention that if you're googling for help on a problem, there's a good chance you'll run into posts about dozens of other distros so, if you want to use their advice, you have to understand the differences enough to know how to translate it to fit yours.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28367789

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

#104

Post by fakecrusade »

apple dedicate its existence to building beautiful things and user experience, it makes painful work much more bearable, at the end of the day I'm just another consumer that wants to enjoy things without thinking about how to build this from source or fix that dependency, plus it's beautiful to look at

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

#105

Post by navjack27 »

DirectX12. I do tons of personal work in UE4 and UE5. I haven't tried Linux in a bit and I haven't looked up how easy or compatible proton and other things are with those types of workloads. So I'm in Windows world. But each of my computers are for a purpose. The OS used fills that purpose. My 4k TV computer is an M1 Mac mini. That computer can also handle image optimization and video transcoding quite well without a fan ever turning on. I also watch twitch and YouTube on that along with local media. So my windows 11 desktop is for work in graphics. My Mac is for consumption. I'm not really sure where a Linux would fit in. My Android phone is for communication and authentication... I guess if I could have Linux run Windows 11 bare metal and it be the host to other os's that might be cool. But that would also just be complicating things.

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

#106

Post by kreetx »

auslegung wrote: post #35

It's primarily because I want things to consistently work as expected. Sure, macOS doesn't always work as expected, but compared to my experiences with various Linux distros, it does. Others have mentioned the trackpad experience, and that's a thing, but not a deal breaker for me since I use the keyboard a lot. Hardware quality is another issue, more important than the trackpad for me. MacBooks are built like tanks c…

Other than the recent M1s don't the previous ones run linux? The mbp's made until 2015 sure do.

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

#108

Post by maxxk »

I moved around a bit. I started using Gentoo around 2008, then migrated to macOS on hackintosh in 2010, macOS on MacBook in 2015, NixOS on MacBook in 2017, NixOS on ThinkPad in 2019 and, most recently, back to macOS on M1 MacBook (just this week, actually).

Last month I did rage quit GNU/Linux because of iwlwifi bug [1]. It was moderately bad until the middle of July (fortunately it didn't occur under the load, like in videoconferences), but after another kernel update I got the same behavior as in comment 269 there: connection dropping every minute. Then I found out about new hackintosh intel wifi drivers, tried installing it on my Thinkpad and was surprised how smoothly everything worked.

[1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709

Of course, there are another annoying points besides the WiFi bug. macOS sets pretty high bar for GUI convenience:

- consistent cmd-shortcuts - I tried reproducing it with some luck using custom xkeyboard-config file

- MathUnicode.keylayout - tried reproducing with XCompose, with recent sway it was rather close experience

- consistent clipboard support - with Wayland it became much worse, e.g. between Firefox and LibreOffice

- not having to hold a dozen of terminal windows open because I don't remember from which window did I open this program so it won't be killed with terminal - I know about "disown", but I tend to forget to use it

- Preview, Spotlight

- as others already said, Apple devices have the best touchpad including OS support, and great hardware in general

- WiFi connection speed after wakeup

- for me - less ability to tinker around and more focus on actual work :)

I sincerely tried to use only a free software, to spread a word in my close community, to find alternatives, to scratch my own itches a bit (probably not so much as I should), but I believe now my watch is ended. I'm back to macOS as long as the current hardware will be enough for me.

All that said, NixOS is a fantastic distribution which I still use on my servers and still would recommend to any advanced Linux user, and Nix is an excellent package manager. A lot of my project environments didn't require any changes from Linux to macOS at M1. Also, I'd like to mention great software projects which I used a lot: sway display manager; astroid email client with notmuch indexer, lieer for gmail sync and mbsync for other providers; howl - minimalist GUI text editor; alacritty terminal.

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

#109

Post by Leftium »

I have a laptop that dual-boots into Linux Mint. I haven't logged into the Linux side for ages.

I like the Linux command line, but I get what I need via Git Bash for Windows. Also there's Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Windows generally has better compatibility with hardware with less fuss. Especially on laptops. My friend tried to use Linux-only for a while, but he said trying to video conference just sucked. Sure, there might be some programs that work, but often the client dictates the video conference platform, and he simply couldn't do anything but tell clients he couldn't video conference. So he switched to Mac, which is like Linux with better multimedia support.

Finally, I'm just more used to Windows. And I personally don't have a big incentive to switch.

There are two Linux things I wish I could have on Windows:

- Proper X-Mouse

- Tiling windows manager

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

#110

Post by ericbarrett »

Accessibility. I started becoming farsighted when I closed in on 40. I need bigger fonts and more aggressive UI scaling on a 4K monitor to be able to operate without squinting or headaches. Linux distros have come a long way in the last 5 years, but there are still many apps and window managers that ignore these settings.
Post reply on HN