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

For me it’s because I do creative work and need Final Cut, Logic Pro, the Adobe suite of apps, etc. and those tools just don’t run on Linux.

I would really like to have an OS that quietly keeps itself up to date without bugging me about it. My work Macbook and Windows laptops also bug me a lot and keep demanding reboots at inconvenient times, with popup notifications blocking things I need.

Just quietly download your updates, install them in the background, and quickly switch to the new version at some point when I'm not using it.

Linux has been my daily driver for the past month, let me tell you why it shouldn't be.

20 mins ago I was getting Steam set up. I want to try Protons experimental features on Battlefield 4 to test for any glaring issues before the new game releases. Proton switches over, I go to install, and I'm told I don't have execute permissions on the disk I want to use.

Okay, I did have some issues with that disk initially, I probably messed with a setting that needs changed. Let me check folder permissions. Those looks good, let's check the partition itself. Yup, still a colored rectangle. Everything looks like it always does. I get to Googling and see someone on the AskUbuntu forums mention that my config should look like theirs with, "Show in user interface" checked off for that partition. I'm not using Ubuntu but it seems like a general fix and I didn't see an AskManjaro in the Google results, so I do that and reboot. No joy.

Keep digging at Google, find a Steam forum post about this. user notes that for security the disk would not be able to execute programs by default. Okay, sure, that makes a kind of sense. I follow his instructions and tag the drive as "users, exec, {something I've forgotten and will likely bite me in the ass in a weeks time}". and I go to reboot to make sure everything is on the same page. That's when the problems started.

FATAL ERROR. My first, yippie. After slamming my forehead against the keyboard in the correct pattern I was able to enter my root password and get to work. reading through the one-thousand-and-thirty-five lines of the journal file, I found the error around line 900. To paraphrase: disk don't mount no more. Out of pure luck I remembered that someone in the forums mentioned /etc/fstab, which is the text version of the config I'd been screwing with. I erased everything but "user" in the field I changed before and rebooted and managed to get myself in. The keen eyed among you will have seen that I had spaces in the field the first time I put it in. I think that fucked me.

On boot I licked my finger and stuck it back in the light socket, changing the field again to "user,exec" and mounting. Well praise be to Jesus, Allah, and whatever the hell Tom Cruise got roped into, because not only did the drive actually mount, Steam stopped whining at me and started a download.

I have no idea if the game will work, the download has another hour to go as I write this. Earlier today I saw this post and wanted to talk about how I've enjoyed Linux so far, and I still do! But Linux isn't built for users, it's built for technicians. You don't run Linux, you maintain it. I like this, but that's because I want to learn more about Linux and these miniature trial by fires force me to. If you're the kind of person who just wants something to either work or not, and can't be bothered to deal with an hour of 'maybe', stick with 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.

Or they forget how much time they spent tweaking their system to get it just right. My Linux systems are now good as gold. I can say I have no issues whatsoever. They work reliably for me day after day. But hell if I didn't spend hours/days setting up all sorts of crazy things you'd expect to just work out of the box like Sleep/Suspend, WiFi, and High-DPI displays.

You're not wrong, but here's what I do because I think it's worth doing:

1. I keep a separate Windows machine for games. I never liked playing games and doing personal stuff on my workstations anyway.

2. For my workstations, I buy older refurbished towers, upgrade the RAM and SSD and everything just works. I've actually had more hardware issues on my Macs, with incompatible mice and keyboards, never on Linux. Example of one of my workstations - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FBSW5G6

Luckily for web/mobile dev, I don't need a dedicated GPU but my old Acer E5-575 laptop has a dedicated nVidia card and Manjaro has no problem running on that. There was one small flag that I had to enable to stop screen tearing.

3. I hardly had to learn anything new since I'm a minimalist and most of my software carried over. Thunderbird is there. VS Code is there. Instead of Paint.net I use a fork called Pinta, (but it is slightly lower quality than Paint.net but luckily again as a full stack guy, I don't have to do much with it). Plenty of options to edit doc/docx like Libre office, Google docs or Office 365... but this is not something I really ever have to do. The only thing I've never done on Linux really is video editing, but that was never great on Windows either - the best video editing experience I've had was on my iPad.

4. I've been using Linux since around RedHat 3 or 4 and I didn't switch to a Linux desktop until about 3 years ago, because I've always had problems keeping a Linux desktop running... until I switched to a rolling release. With Manjaro, I have had zero issues getting all the most recent software versions that I want. In the past, with Ubuntu, I'd have to add so many third party repos that eventually an update from one of them would make my machine unbootable. Never happened once with Manjaro. One time an update broke some fonts, but I downgraded the package and locked it from receiving updates until the problem was fixed.

Honestly, I have to do non-trivial setup for any desktop OS that I run because I'm a picky minimalist.

Anyway, the best part of switching to a Linux desktop for me was the speed and ease of using things like Docker and all the other CLI stuff that I normally do on my servers. Doing things with Node.js/npm/yarn is super fast compared to Windows. There is no split-brain between my development environment and the server because it's the same OS.