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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?

#171

Post by [deleted] »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #120
Engineering-MD wrote: post #114

I would like to, but just always put off by various small things. I like the UIs available in linux and the free and open software. But often there is a difficulty, a nag, an issue to solve. And things don’t fit together, it’s lack synergy between its components. Hardware support is another difficulty- track pads like others said. Tbh, I am looking to upgrade my laptop, and was thinking of going pure linux, but all t…

I learned that you gotta pick a boring Linux distro as your main OS. For me it's Kubuntu LTS. Sure, I've had small glitches like bluetooth headphone issues or flaky double screen support, but once you solve them, you're set for 5 years. At my age, I'll upgrade my main OS maybe 10-15 times at most. I used to eagerly try the six-month releases, but I can't devote time to beta test anymore. Give me a boring, non-bleedin…

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by phendrenad2 »

hajile wrote: post #145
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 tw…

Does the trackpad usability steeply decline when you switch from ChromeOS to, say, Ubuntu?

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

#173

Post by KingMachiavelli »

oarsinsync wrote: post #96
reportgunner wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is a very bad example of a linux distro.

What is a good example of a linux distro?

Fedora, PopOS, Manjaro/Archlinux, NixOS, etc.

Manjaro/Archlinux as really good about not having anything 'extra' which helps reduce the cognitive load even if they require more command line skills. i.e I'd rather have to know 10 complicated things than 10,000 easy things.

Ubuntu is just constantly doing their own thing and is really bloated. Like Snap does the same thing as Flatpak but is Ubuntu specific (at least by usage) which pretty much defeats the point of having portable packages.

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

#174

Post by phendrenad2 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #125
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…

> The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable Only if you use it as your main OS. If you use a combination of Windows, Linux and MacOS, the latter's trackpad tends to do the opposite of what you expect. the first thing I do is change the vertical scroll direction so it behaves like the others.

The direction of scroll is one small part of it. The Mac trackpad is perfectly balanced in various important areas: knowing when to reject extraneous fingers, high DPI/resolution, just the right size and shape, the same height as the rest of the laptop, feels smooth rather than some weird studded plastic nonsense, etc.

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

#175

Post by phendrenad2 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #164
kadoban wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If people give that advice, ignore it. No matter what, you're going to get some unhelpful advice. Comes with the territory. Answers like that are very common , meaning that you commonly get unhelpful advice. But worse, those people get angry when you don't accept their advice. The Linux Desktop community has a serious problem with letting these kinds of people continue to represent them. > Similarly, just include y…

In fact, answers like that are not just common, they're entirely valid and usually the only answers. Switching from X to Y is unreasonably effective in the open-source world. Nobody knows how to fix anything, because things are usually poorly documented, change radically each version, and everyone you'll meet has a wildly different Linux setup than you. So people recommend it. It's like the Monty Hall problem, except the thing you want (the goat) keeps changing. Problem A? Switch from X to Y. Y causes problem B? Switch from Y to Z. Continue until you tire of switching enough to settle on something that mostly works for you.

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

#176

Post by probably_wrong »

lostmsu wrote: post #91
gjhh244 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird how different people have different experiences. I've had way more cases of random things breaking on Win 10 than on Linux Mint. Especially corporate Win 10 on my working machine is utterly horrible, just endless problems.

Are any of those problems of "unchangeable 800x600 resolution" magnitude? Could you name a few?

I can name two.

I had Windows 7, which was then upgraded to Win10. Problem is, my computer doesn't support UEFI, so I cannot reinstall Win 10 from USB on an SSD even though it's gotten really, really slow (as in, 15sec for right click). I also cannot generate a recovery DVD because the generated image is too big and doesn't fit. As a result, the computer spends it's first 15+ minutes updating stuff I don't need. The only solution at this point is to throw away a perfectly good computer.

Plugging a PS3 USB controller the reboots Windows. This doesn't happen under Linux. I also need to reinstall the controller driver every time because Windows removes it.

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

#177

Post by acmdas »

Debian's been my workstation OS for many years. I mainly use Emacs, the shell and a browser so familiar and stable is all I ask of the OS. I'm on 10 now, will probably update to 11 shortly.

I have a Win10 installation on a drive on a second workstation should I ever need to run a commercial, Win-only app, but it mainly just gets started every few months to catch-up on updates. I'm fond of my 2011 MacBook Pro (the hardware) and have become less and less impressed with the OS and apps as time as gone by (and as I made the mistake of installing updates). It's the only machine that I allow the camera on, so it's the go-to for Zoom.

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

#178

Post by tpoacher »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #127

1. Video games. Easily the biggest one. I don't want to have to potentially jump through hoops or be completely unable to play a game by chance every time I download a new game. 2. The subtle issues from various audio devices, mice, printers, GPU driver support, etc. Or just driver/hardware support in general. 3. Learning the equivalent (or worse) software for the various little things that need to get done like pict…

I know this will probably come across as trolling to most in your place, but I'm effectively in the same position as you, largely for the same list (yes including games), except in the reverse direction in terms of OS.

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

#179

Post by wayneftw »

lostmsu wrote: post #139
wayneftw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is slow af compared to Linux on the same hardware when I’m doing anything with Docker or Node.js/npm/yarn. The cli is incompatible with bash. I also can’t disable telemetry and other things I don’t want. It’s also missing features UI features that I get with XFCE. That’s why I switched to Manjaro 3 years ago for work and never looked back. I still have Windows systems for games where it mostly works fine exce…

Performance for specific use cases is debatable (as in not everyone has your use case, and even your use case might not be as important as you think in comparison to cumulative effect of other performance differences). However, the comment was specifically talking about breaking issues: > random things breaking on Win 10

Windows users just randomly lost free access to Docker desktop too.

Enjoy that!

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

#180

Post by teitoklien »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #127

1. Video games. Easily the biggest one. I don't want to have to potentially jump through hoops or be completely unable to play a game by chance every time I download a new game. 2. The subtle issues from various audio devices, mice, printers, GPU driver support, etc. Or just driver/hardware support in general. 3. Learning the equivalent (or worse) software for the various little things that need to get done like pict…

3> equivalent or worse software

1. Krita is very good for picture editing And id say more user friendly than photoshop 2. For video editing, Davinci Resolve is often more reputable and popular in studios than Adobe premiere 3. Editing docs tho , ye kinda sucks but you can use wine to run office suite , libreoffice exists but i get your point on that one

The rest are either equivalent or superior for almost every usecase scenario tho.

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