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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?

#231

Post by hammyhavoc »

garbagecoder wrote: post #142

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.

By your logic, food being vegan or halal isn't a "feature".

To someone who cares about privacy and freedom, a license is most definitely a feature.

Different strokes for different folks.

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

#232

Post by hammyhavoc »

garbagecoder wrote: post #221
fsflover wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Reliability around on/off/on/off/suspend operations like that of a laptop. This is definitely caused by unsupported hardware. I'm using Linux for many years, suspend works 100% of the time on my Librem 15 and Lenovo.

So?

So, there is an objectively superior experience to be had with more appropriate hardware.

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

#233

Post by hammyhavoc »

astromd wrote: post #212
fsflover wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which limits your options to like five models of computer.

Clearly you have not kept up with what is available.

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

#234

Post by hatchoo »

Power management/Battery life. When I used to just sit in one place with my laptop plugged in it worked well for me (I do everything in the browser and/or VSCode). Unplugged, the battery seems to stretch out more on Windows than on Ubuntu.

(I've always only upgraded to LTS releases)

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

#235

Post by hammyhavoc »

jzellis wrote: post #89

I'm weird because I have a couple of older MacBooks, but my primary OS, even for web dev, is iPadOS. I use Textastic as my primary IDE for Node/JS/HTML and Blink to log into my remote servers and my Raspberry Pi. For me, as someone who does a lot of music and recording, Mac was always the 800 lb gorilla - Windows could never touch Mac in terms of giving OS priority to the audio layer, etc. Linux I don't even bother w…

Bitwig has native Linux support. Reaper trumps both Bitwig and Ableton Live.

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

#236

Post by fhaldridge7 »

Because I'm on a macbook and buying a new laptop is currently not on my plan. Maybe in 1-2 years I'll replace it and run linux.

I've tried running linux on it but the cpu temps are too high. This seems to be an issue with the linux kernel and the cpu's used in macook laptops.

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

#237

Post by muzani »

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…

I really like snapping windows to parts of the screen. Mac doesn't do this well.

Linux, well, I do a search for it, and get this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/26346/how-to-use-window-snap...

The first answer is great. That second answer is typical with every "how do I do anything in Linux" question. It's a chain of things I dread and I end up spending an hour because I forget to type "cd .scripts" and then get lost.

Copying and pasting a bunch of code also makes me wary. There's vague hardcoded stuff like 'Paste this in, and then change your mouse id from 11 to the number from the output of the "xinput list" command.'

Do you Linux users just apply random advice like that off the internets without seeing what every line means? Do you just sudo stuff because someone said so? Instead of a single possible security hole to check for by installing a thing, it's now multiple possible security holes to check on every line of code.

Worst of all, it probably doesn't do what I want it to do. I can't tell until I'm about half an hour into doing it. I just want to sort my windows neatly. This isn't worth it.

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

#238

Post by oefnak »

caeril wrote: post #205
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…

I don't think it's about admin powers, but about having to type commands to fix things. That's not the same as just clicking 'allow' in UAC.

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

#239

Post by noahtallen »

kreetx wrote: post #106
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.

Linux support is pretty iffy on the 2015 - 2019 (chiclet keyboard) ones. I tried once, but driver support was the main problem. Things like keyboard/WiFi/trackpad (I forget exactly which) were broken without any straightforward solutions.

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

#240

Post by seized »

mcv wrote: post #213
Alan_Dillman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah its funny how experiences differ. I was at my parents,and wanted to sketch out something for my dad. So I grabbed my mom's win10 laptop, went to the blender download location, downloaded, double clicked, got a popup about updates. Whatever, not my computer, not my problem. double click again. Again with the popup. Read it carefully this time. WTF? I NEED to update their store to install a third party package? No…

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.

That's exactly what ChromeOS does. Quick reboot (a few seconds) and it's done.
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