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

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

#201

Post by webmobdev » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

qorrect wrote: post #141

rcarmo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A relative used to take me to his office sometimes (after hours) so I could learn / play on the computers. One day, he gave me a task - he was installing Windows 95 and my job was to insert each floppy when the installer demanded it. That was fun the first few times ... :)

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

#202

Post by dpl » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

_Anima_ wrote: post #168

dpl wrote: post #166

Several reasons really. No matter how stupid it sounds, but one of them - there's no normal e-mail client.

Care to define what you mean by "normal client"?

The one that can properly work w/ SSO and integrate email/calendar with several email service providers (Google/Microsoft 365/Exchange)

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

#203

Post by pengo » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

But I do. I use only Linux on all my computers except a dedicated Mac Mini used for music production.

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

#204

Post by xboxnolifes » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

tpoacher wrote: post #178

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.

I can understand being in the opposite position for everything (I have plenty of complaints about Windows issues), except for the games. What games do you play that are inconvenient or impossible to play on Windows but not Linux? If I had to guess, it would be emulated games, but that's the best guess I can give.

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

#205

Post by caeril » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

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…

> Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that.

This is an exceptionally good point. I've NEVER, in my life, tried to either install something, update something or, even literally open a random localhost port from a development test suite in VS Code without having to click through a UAC authorization dialog sequence on Windows.

/s

(I know that HN encourages the assumption of good faith, but when a poster just straight up lies through their teeth about the on-the-ground reality of user authorization, it's really hard not to push the (obviously correct, hanlon's razor be damned) corporate shill angle. (sorry, dang))

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

#206

Post by MikusR » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

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.

Which one?

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

#207

Post by runjake » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

I think this is the problem with the tech community at large. I encounter this whether I'm browsing for info for Linux, macOS, or Windows or networking or programming or anything else.

I don't think its up to the "Linux Desktop community" to police this more than any other community needs policing.

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

#208

Post by m4xm4n » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

I've used Linux for a long time. Though primarily on servers these days, I've occasionally used it as my main desktop OS, and always end up going back to macOS because of three things:

1. battery life on laptops. Linux tends not to Power Management well on most laptops. Whether this is a hardware/ACPI thing, a device driver thing, or an overall ecosystem thing, I'm not sure. But it's noticeably worse than when running Windows or macOS.

2. as others have no doubt mentioned, trackpad. Apple's trackpad hardware and macOS's trackpad gesture support is so good, it's really hard to not have it. I can emulate some of it on my XPS 13 running Ubuntu w/ some additional agent thing that runs in the background, but it's only 85% there and not as smooth an experience.

3. desktop environment stability & consistency. this is _much_ less a problem than it was say 10 or 15 years ago as GNOME has gotten quite good and Flatpak/Snap/etc. are decent at containing various GUIs and their disparate dependencies, but there's still a lack of good integration with DEs across ecosystem tools generally. But also Electron has also sort of leveled the playing field a bit, so many desktop apps behave the same across platforms (for better or worse)

I would've said slow package/kernel updates, but there are enough solutions to this now, that it's not as much of a problem (Ubuntu HWE, Nix, Linuxbrew, or using ArchLinux)

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

#209

Post by simooooo » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #62

watermelon0 wrote: post #23

Mostly buggy desktop environments and broken drivers (especially on laptops). It's 2021, and it's still a miracle if we can achieve different scaling on different monitors, no tearing on multiple screens, and plug'n'play of an external monitor. Things that work on Windows/macOS out-of-the-box for the last N years.

> Mostly buggy desktop environments and broken drivers (especially on laptops). Using Linux for years without any such issues. Consider trying a laptop designed for Linux. If you are using a Windows-certified laptop with Linux, it's your fault that it doesn't work well.

But a Linux-certified laptop runs windows fine… Linux is the issue

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

#210

Post by theshrike79 » Tue, Aug 31, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

Hackbraten wrote: post #169

theshrike79 wrote: post #43

Death by a thousand cuts. There aren't any major showstopper faults any more. But everything is a little bit off and I'm not willing to spend the hours required to customise everything to my liking. Also if I find a nice piece of software, it might just die because it doesn't have a business model, just 1-2 enthusiastic developers who may or may not suddenly burn out. The old adage still holds true: - Linux for serve…

> if I find a nice piece of software, it might just die because it doesn't have a business model, just 1-2 enthusiastic developers who may or may not suddenly burn out. One could argue that the same risk applies for almost every piece of software, be it proprietary or free. Vendors are killing their applications all the time.

Yes, but if the developer is motivated by money they are more likely to keep their product updated.

Many (not all) small/medium open source projects just fizzle out when the main dev moves on and doesn't dogfood their own product any more.