Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

fosspost.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–99 of 99 posts

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#91

Post by hnbear »

opyate wrote: post #59

A mate cycled 15km to my house back in 1995 with a stack of floppies a foot high, saying "dude, you need to install this right now. And when it asks for mount point, just put a /, that's the only tricky part". It was Slackware. I've used all sorts since: redhat, Gentoo, yellow dog, Debian, arch. Never looked back. A job I had once required windows, and I tried WSL, but it felt ... so limited.

I had a similar start, probably similar era, maybe a '98ish. My mom grabbed me one day and said I had to meet the new neighbors.

So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware.

We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, some BeOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. Had to purchase the SuSE CDs early on because on 56k couldn't download the ISO and didn't own a CD burner anyway.

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#92

Post by opyate »

hnbear wrote: post #91
opyate wrote: post #59

A mate cycled 15km to my house back in 1995 with a stack of floppies a foot high, saying "dude, you need to install this right now. And when it asks for mount point, just put a /, that's the only tricky part". It was Slackware. I've used all sorts since: redhat, Gentoo, yellow dog, Debian, arch. Never looked back. A job I had once required windows, and I tried WSL, but it felt ... so limited.

I had a similar start, probably similar era, maybe a '98ish. My mom grabbed me one day and said I had to meet the new neighbors. So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware. We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, s…

Yeah, I remember a time when it was easier/cheaper to drive somewhere to pick up a burned CD/DVD than to download it :)

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#93

Post by adhamsalama »

joshspankit wrote: post #67
adhamsalama wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your phone is not really connected to your PC Not exactly sure what you mean, but KDE Connect is amazing for connecting my phone (and any device that has the app, including other PCs) to my PC.

Jumping in as I’ve enjoyed what we’ve had as well as wished for more. Does your setup: 1. Back phone things up to the PC wirelessly? Not just photos but app data, documents, drawings, etc. Note: must all be in original quality/format 2. Allow your PC to update an app itself (in a way that can be scripted)? 3. Allow copy/paste between the desktop and the phone? (Though with LocalSend being decent this is less and less…

1. You can mount devices on each other so you can copy/backup as you wish.

2. Not sure, but you can setup scripts and run them. I only tried running scripts on my PC via my phone.

3. You can send the clipboard to another device.

4. Not sure what this means.

5. Not sure.

6. Yes.

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#94

Post by sickofparadox »

AlienRobot wrote: post #85
gmuslera wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft won't fix intended, by design, behaviour, it is not broken from their point of view. And even if you disable Recall by whatever name they put to hide it, it could be silently reenabled by "security" updates. At least if some Linux distro includes something that users consider bad for their privacy, you can choose among several alternatives, including direct forks. That is an actual strength of that approach…

It took 10 years[1] for GTK to add the ability to rename files and folders to its file picker. I think Microsoft will change their minds faster than Linux will fix its other problems. 1. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325150

The difference between Linux and Windows is that if you wanted that functionality almost any time in the past 10 years you could have switched to another file navigator that allowed you to do that, such as dolphin. No such options exist in Windows.

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#95

Post by aaomidi »

gazby wrote: post #73
acidburnNSA wrote: post #29

Big Linux user here. It's been my daily driver on my personal desktop and laptop for coming up on 20 years (damn). I haven't had any of the dreaded graphics-driver-breaking-during-update or other hardware issues since like 2008. It works great with Zoom, Teams, WebEx, whatever you throw at it. It's fast and stable. My laptop uptime regularly hits 30+ days before I go down for an upgrade. When my 70+ mom needed a new…

You didn't mention your distro, which I think is very relevant when discussing upgrade failures and GPU issues.

Honestly what’s more relevant is, is it an nvidia gpu. If not then you’re basically golden no matter what you use.

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#96

Post by artiontily »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #36

Perhaps Linux distros should now ship with local AIs as well to match what Windows can offer. Purely local, transparent and intuitively configured with high level of detail, on opt-in basis. Essentially do the same thing but better.

Does not sound like a Linux distro problem. Can you name any free software pieces that fit the description? If they exist, they're likely to be in a lot of distros' package repos already. I think I've tried some TUI chatbot with a small llama LLM recently, just out of curiosity. It was available in Arch repo by default. Can't remember the name though.

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#97

Post by felurx »

beart wrote: post #53
enceladus06 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi monitor support is working on Ubuntu 24.04 with a 34" 4k monitor and 24" 1080p monitor. 4k is set to 1,5x scaling (scaled 1440p), and everything is being driven by the default intel drivers. Works perfectly.

Based on the comments, I guess I should clarify. Yes, I can plug my monitors in and log into my system. However, it is a crap shoot that an application will 1. choose the correct monitor / remember the chosen monitor after reboot 2. render text in the correct resolution for the monitor 3. correctly render in the new resolution when dragged across monitors 4. correctly respect the "primary" monitor setting instead of…

It's kind of funny to me to read your comment, because multiple monitors are working perfectly fine for me (Manjaro, KDE, Wayland, if anyone cares), but I do have some problems with that on my work laptop that runs Windows.

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#98

Post by felurx »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
tony-allan wrote: post #37

I have used MacOS forever and it has worked well for me. I would love to use Linux + Framework Laptop (awesome hardware). What I need is some suggestions for a distribution that just works. My workload is development plus lots of web browsing (100+ tabs).

That hardly exists, there is always something on laptops that isn't supported, or needs a couple of late nights to properly configure. The best Linux experience remains classical desktops.

My experience with a Framework Laptop has been that the one or two things that are relevant were quite well-documented, I'd guess because Framework actually cares about Linux and there's a lot of overlap between "folks who want what Framework offers" and "folks who want what Linux offers"

Re: There Has Never Been a Better Time to Switch to Linux

#99

Post by qwerty456127 »

artiontily wrote: post #96
qwerty456127 wrote: post #36

Perhaps Linux distros should now ship with local AIs as well to match what Windows can offer. Purely local, transparent and intuitively configured with high level of detail, on opt-in basis. Essentially do the same thing but better.

Does not sound like a Linux distro problem. Can you name any free software pieces that fit the description? If they exist, they're likely to be in a lot of distros' package repos already. I think I've tried some TUI chatbot with a small llama LLM recently, just out of curiosity. It was available in Arch repo by default. Can't remember the name though.

Every desktop Linux DE/distro comes with a calculator, a simple text editor, a file manager etc. Perhaps it's time to ship a sensibly-preconfigured AI tool alongside these to win more non-techie desktop/laptop users. I personally don't need anything pre-installed, I can pick Arch or even LFS, install and configure everything I need, also write my own AI tool for my needs. But non-techies (whom we need if we are sad about how little desktop Linux market share is) often can't even apt install anything. Everyone is using AI, Windows PCs are coming with AI, Macs are coming with AI and Linux is not. Many consumers are probably going to view this like an OS without built-in network support soon. At the same time shipping better AI tools with transparent, sensible and privacy-friendly defaults OoTB can attract those who are not happy with Microsft/Apple approach.

This is a conceptual idea however - no, I can't name any specific free software. Perhaps it is yet to be written.

Post reply on HN