Linux is good now • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux is good now

#21

Post by advael » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

savolai wrote: post #5

Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems. Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any o…

We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.

My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5

Re: Linux is good now

#22

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

lorenzohess wrote: post #4

2026 YOTLD?

[deleted]

Re: Linux is good now

#23

Post by weslleyskah » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

And still, look at all the comments on the article bashing Linux because of compatibility, driver and hardware issues.

Re: Linux is good now

#24

Post by ofalkaed » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

lorenzohess wrote: post #4

2026 YOTLD?

The personal desktop has fallen in relevance enough for that to be possible. The goalposts moved, now linux needs to have phone, tablet, and laptop with smooth effortless integration between them all.

I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.

Re: Linux is good now

#25

Post by necessary » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #2

I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywh…

This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.

Re: Linux is good now

#26

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

savolai wrote: post #5

Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems. Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any o…

[deleted]

Re: Linux is good now

#27

Post by zamalek » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

MostlyStable wrote: post #9

It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior. However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which…

FUSE will provide Dropbox in a more integrated way than Windows (eg. terminal) and a cursory Google revealed some projects for Dropbox that do the JIT download you are after - they are old, but I wager still work just fine (an inactive project can just mean that it's complete).

Re: Linux is good now

#28

Post by jbstack » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

Zealotux wrote: post #17

It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.

You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.

Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.

And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.

Re: Linux is good now

#29

Post by advael » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

Zealotux wrote: post #17

It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.

I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.

Re: Linux is good now

#30

Post by pygar » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

Every year at around this time there is a lot of linux related content in tech media.

It's a slow moving evergreen topic perfect for a scheduled release while the author is on holiday. This is just filler content that could have been written at any point in the last 10 years with minor changes.