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

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

#141

Post by qorrect »

rcarmo wrote: post #138
qorrect wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make Linux a no-go unless they just want to browse Facebook and read webmail. This a joke my man ? Are you seriously saying Linux is only good for browsing the internet ? >(I work at Microsoft) There it is.

I am also an old VAXer, been through the Slackware dozens-of-floppies ritual, and have been primarily on a Mac for nearly twenty years. Your characterization of who I am and why I use what I use is woefully incomplete :)

> been through the Slackware dozens-of-floppies ritual

I see you know the old ways :).

To each their own, I still find myself most productive as a developer on a linux machine.

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

#142

Post by garbagecoder »

Because the desktop experience is bad and I can get everything I need from the CLI in WSL on Windows or from the terminal in MacOS. And I try not to be a martyr for politics in my choice of tools. If all else was roughly equal, I would prefer FOSS, but it's not and the sooner the FOSS community realizes a license isn't a feature the sooner we will have that world.

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

#143

Post by sigg3 »

rcarmo wrote: post #128

For me, it’s the lack of polish and full corporate productivity suite. There are _zero_ effective replacements for a multitude of things I need, although I would be perfectly happy with a fully standard implementation of Remote Desktop (and no, Remmina still lacks the authentication and virtual desktop workspace support I need). Edge and Teams betas are coming close to providing around half of what I need, but not al…

Just a tip: Dwservice is a great tool for remote control, and it can run as a service or as a one-off!

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

#144

Post by garbagecoder »

qorrect wrote: post #131
rcarmo wrote: post #128

For me, it’s the lack of polish and full corporate productivity suite. There are _zero_ effective replacements for a multitude of things I need, although I would be perfectly happy with a fully standard implementation of Remote Desktop (and no, Remmina still lacks the authentication and virtual desktop workspace support I need). Edge and Teams betas are coming close to providing around half of what I need, but not al…

> make Linux a no-go unless they just want to browse Facebook and read webmail. This a joke my man ? Are you seriously saying Linux is only good for browsing the internet ? >(I work at Microsoft) There it is.

Nice ad hominem. In reality there is all kinds of productive work that you simply cannot do on Linux or at least not outside of some joke programs like Gimp. Developing on Linux is nice

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

#145

Post by hajile »

dschuessler wrote: post #8

The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable. Another comment here on HN described it as the trackpad completely disappearing from your mind. You don't have to fight it at all. You don't even think about it anymore. The cursor just becomes a natural extension of your hand. Also, as a person working with PDF documents on a regular basis, I don't know of any application that can beat the feature set and UX of Prev…

That's not mac-specific.

My Pixelbook has a better trackpad experience than my M1 Macbook and it runs on Linux (ChromeOS).

The big problem is a lack of investment by either Linux or Windows. It's such a huge quality of life improvement that I really don't understand why there's not more focus.

The real downer on Linux for me (chromebook aside) is that it's hard to get good laptop battery life and even with all the tweaks, it generally still isn't as good as my macbook.

I'd give KDE and Okular a look. There are some rough edges, but I find myself missing it when I'm on my mac.

All my desktops run Linux though as it's a beast there.

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

#146

Post by kadoban »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #103
runjake wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distr…

If people give that advice, ignore it. No matter what, you're going to get some unhelpful advice. Comes with the territory.

Similarly, just include your distro in any searches.

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

#147

Post by CarelessExpert »

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?

Eh, after getting exhausted with forced Windows updates, I've run Ubuntu and Debian on a Lenovo X1C5 for years with basically no issues. The only thing that didn't work was the oddball fingerprint reader on the unit, which was disappointing but far from a dealbreaker.

Frankly, I was a little shocked it worked as well as it did. Hell, even my USB dock was plug-and-play, which really blew me away. I was used to Linux on laptops being a giant PITA, and yet...

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

#149

Post by kitsunesoba »

captainmisery wrote: post #10

I'm using Windows 10. In the past year I've tried: Manjaro, Fedora, Linux Mint and some others. Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix. After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution. "Well, you know, you…

A lot of these sorts of issues tend to spring up around specific hardware.

Point in case, proprietary drivers for Broadcom wifi/bluetooth and Nvidia GPUs. I had a problem where every N rounds of updates, Fedora would just eat the Broadcom drivers and I'd get stuck tethering from my phone over USB to fix it. Similar things happened albeit much less frequently with the Nvidia drivers on various distros.

Of course the best "solution" for this is to use hardware supported well by the FOSS drivers; Intel wifi/Bluetooth, Intel/AMD graphics, etc. For desktops and a shrinking number of laptops that's an option, but people using machines with soldered components are just stuck with a crappy experience and are probably better off running Windows/macOS.

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

#150

Post by kazinator »

captainmisery wrote: post #10

I'm using Windows 10. In the past year I've tried: Manjaro, Fedora, Linux Mint and some others. Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix. After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution. "Well, you know, you…

> Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix.

You mean every time you log into Windows 10, there is something to update, so you don't have time to switch?

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