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A Linux Evening

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Re: A Linux Evening

#111
In my experience Linux is easy.

Easy to install. Easy to upgrade. Never breaks. Never gets "infected". Fast.

The absence of commercial bullshit is extremely nice too.

(I like Debian)

(Is it just me or is there a lot of FUD in this thread?)

Re: A Linux Evening

#112
post #100

This is prototypical of the standard Linux experience, but I'd like to remark on just how much less common this sort of thing is. Modern Linux and modern Linux distributions have a much larger "just work" factor and it's getting better every year in my experience. Slowly and asymptotically, but it is improvement. This was driven home recently by my experience switching to NixOS. NixOS is brilliant in many ways, but b…

Been hearing “modern Linux is much better” since the 00s

In my experience this is true and Linux has come a long way. But given how far it has yet to go it may continue to be true for the next couple decades as well.

Re: A Linux Evening

#113
post #78

This is prototypical of the standard Linux experience, but I'd like to remark on just how much less common this sort of thing is. Modern Linux and modern Linux distributions have a much larger "just work" factor and it's getting better every year in my experience. Slowly and asymptotically, but it is improvement. This was driven home recently by my experience switching to NixOS. NixOS is brilliant in many ways, but b…

As user I would just return the device back and purchase a reliable USB based device. As a Mac-user would do? I guess a Windows-User would just rate [1/5] stars and don't even research. We should keep in mind: Linux users care a lot and do research. Most other will just say "nope" and leave it a issue for the manufacturer or keep turning it off and on again. What I don't know is if the initial situation is to blame u…

I don't think that really fits together. PCIe (and PCI) hotplug has existed for a while and topology changes aren't new either. ExpressCard for example has done this, as has PCMCIA. Older RDMA buses did this too, as do backplane-based industrial PCs of which there are a really large amount.

I suspect that end-user smoothness based on 'the user is not required to know everything' that makes the likes of Apple implement bus pausing for dynamic topology assignment and BAR adjustment is not available in Linux land because there simply isn't a big enough overlap of people to make this a hot topic.

You need:

  1. A person who understands how this works
  2. A person who understands what they want to use it for
  3. A person who understands what person 1 has to do so person 2 can use it
Usually you get 1 or 2, sometimes both, but almost never 3 except at places like Canonical, RedHat, SuSE etc. because it's too much of an analyst role and not enough of a "I need it for myself and I can build it" role.

Similar but different problems exist in other software areas like when person "3" is split in "business", "end-user" and "licensing" with competing interests. That's where you get the NT kernel which gets split into arbitrary partitions where based on an integer configuration it may or may not want to address your RAM.

Same goes for the old "aperture size" for GPU memory transfers, and later on the BAR resize support. It was never 'hard' to implement, it's just that IBV's didn't bother and mainboard manufacturers didn't care. Yet it was always available and even Tianocore EDK2, Apple's own EFI and (for some reason) BIOS and UEFI from Quanta and Supermicro all did support it just fine. Same goes for KMS and non-blink GPU switchovers where AMD, NVDA and Intel used to constantly sell it as 'impossible' and we all just accepted that. Yet KMS, the MobileFramebuffer (and the old AppleTV Gen 1) and even VesaFB showed that it's totally possible and it's just everyone using the same joke sample implementation from the vendor that's causing it.

Another example would be VESA where DisplayPort topology changes on the control channel side do similar things to PCIe bus pausing. The display controllers and bus drivers should pause on hot plug to let the host decide on the new topology, but implementing that costs time and effort, and you need to have some in-depth knowledge on both the hardware and software side, so lots of companies don't bother. Result: some host+display combinations only work after restarting either end to force it to re-discover the current topology. This even happens in 1:1 topology scenarios where a simple GPU driver update might restart the host bus and the display ignores it and simply stops receiving data until the watchdog timer restarts the embedded processor causing the screen to blink. I'd just dumb low-quality choices and corner-cutting that causes this.

Re: A Linux Evening

#115
post #100

This is prototypical of the standard Linux experience, but I'd like to remark on just how much less common this sort of thing is. Modern Linux and modern Linux distributions have a much larger "just work" factor and it's getting better every year in my experience. Slowly and asymptotically, but it is improvement. This was driven home recently by my experience switching to NixOS. NixOS is brilliant in many ways, but b…

Been hearing “modern Linux is much better” since the 00s

When you're comparing against Linux from 1995, it's not a high bar to hurdle.

Re: A Linux Evening

#116
1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting.

2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs.

3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and the choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.

Re: A Linux Evening

#117

Yes, sometimes you land in these situations in Linux, but many times are self inflicted by unnecesary tinkering. I cannot see why dealing with all the … unwanted things from windows can ever be better. With mac if it is too new it will not be supported and after a few years you need to upgrade your hardware or are left to die. Apart from being an exclusive system for the rich.

Nail in the coffin for me yesterday when I restarted my computer to boot into windows and it had a splash screen begging me to "upgrade" to windows 11. I click no, another splash screen begging me in other terms. I click "no" (actually, no, it was probably more like "some other time" or "remind me again in the future"), ANOTHER SPLASH SCREEN.

Mind you I have my grub set to boot into windows by default so that if there's a power outage, my game streaming and backup setup, which is on my windows partition for now, will relaunch if I'm traveling or something. Yet if it had booted into that stupid splash screen, Steam and etc won't have been able to launch, and I'd have been SOL!

I hate windows!!!!! I can't wait to get EVERYTHING onto linux. I have a todo to see about using proton compatibility for desktop gaming, it works great on steam deck. After that the only remaining thing is ableton, and I'll have been completely freed from windows forever!

Re: A Linux Evening

#118
This post resonates strongly with me. I love the term "a linux evening." This was precisely my experience when I used Linux full time: mostly it worked great, but then occasionally something wouldn't work (some personal examples: touchpad doesn't work after OS update, wifi card stops working etc.) and then I have to spend a few frustrating hours debugging the issue. All I can think in these moments is "you don't get this time back. Is this really how I want to spend three precious hours of my life, when, if I used a different platform, I could avoid this hassle completely?"

I know it's a tradeoff and I sacrifice a lot to live in my current Macintosh rut, but I just don't have the motivation to be my own DIY tech support wiz after a full day on computers for work.

EDIT: as pointed out by others, one headline takeaway from this is that the author was able to fix the problem at all, which s/he may not have been able to do on Mac/Windows (though it's much less likely the issue would occur in the first place).

Re: A Linux Evening

#119

This is kind of the reason I have switched to Mac. I used Ubuntu throughout my CSE degree and a year after. But system bricking at random upgrade, needing a fix was a no go for me at work. I understand some people do not face this issue. But whenever I wanted to try out something new or install anything, some random stuff would go wrong and would need hours of searching and fixing. Happens much less often with MacOs.

Sounds like you had faulty hardware.

Re: A Linux Evening

#120

If OP used Windows exclusively, he'd have Windows evenings. There's tools that people complain about, and tools that people don't use.

Windows just works without a hassle far more often than any linux distro I've installed.
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