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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?

#131

Post by qorrect »

rcarmo wrote: post #128

For me, it’s the lack of polish and full corporate productivity suite. There are _zero_ effective replacements for a multitude of things I need, although I would be perfectly happy with a fully standard implementation of Remote Desktop (and no, Remmina still lacks the authentication and virtual desktop workspace support I need). Edge and Teams betas are coming close to providing around half of what I need, but not al…

> make Linux a no-go unless they just want to browse Facebook and read webmail.

This a joke my man ? Are you seriously saying Linux is only good for browsing the internet ?

>(I work at Microsoft)

There it is.

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

#133

Post by rcarmo »

luke2m wrote: post #31
dschuessler wrote: post #8

The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable. Another comment here on HN described it as the trackpad completely disappearing from your mind. You don't have to fight it at all. You don't even think about it anymore. The cursor just becomes a natural extension of your hand. Also, as a person working with PDF documents on a regular basis, I don't know of any application that can beat the feature set and UX of Prev…

My Lenovo Flex 5 with Fedora 34 (GNOME) has an incredibly smooth trackpad experience. Also, GNOME sushi is a useful preview.app alternative, maybe not on the same level, but you should try it. I used Xfce before getting my new laptop, but on newish hardware, GNOME is great.

I have one of those (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400) but Elementary doesn’t let me do triple-finger drag. Can you do that with GNOME Shell?

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

#134

Post by fsn4dN69ey »

I have, for years now. Coming from a former all Windows (and a couple years on an MBP) user, it's perfectly fine. I have a dual boot, so whenever I need windows, I can use it, but it's becoming less and less frequent. Nowadays it's usually only for games.

Reading through this thread though, I'm baffled by some of these issues. I have been using the latest Ubuntu release for the past several years, on a variety of machines (T440s, 2 self-built desktops, a Lenovo Legion) and haven't experienced any problems to the degree others have mentioned. Out of the box support across Intel, AMD cpus, no graphics issues, nothing with scaling or extra monitors, never, on any machine. I did notice one problem when I updated to Ubuntu 20 about six months ago that my left Gsync monitor was acting weird, but I just disabled gsync and it runs perfectly fine. That's it in the past 5 years of using Linux as daily driver.

I work as a software engineer full time so maybe I just don't notice "issues"? As the old saying goes, it works fine on my machine(s).

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

#135

Post by rcarmo »

taylodl wrote: post #100

A DAW (digital audio workstation) I can work with. There are DAWs available for Linux, and one, Reaper, is quite popular and even used in professional studios. Which is great, but it doesn't fit my work flow. If I were a Pro Tools, Ableton, or Cubase user (extremely popular DAWs) I would still be stuck: they only run on Windows or Mac OS. So I'm pretty much stuck on Mac OS (I use Logic Pro). The additional problem I…

Check out Bitwig Studio: https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2021/08/24/1800

I got hold of an 8-track license giveaway and have been having quite some fun with it, as it feels like a better thought out Ableton (I’m a Logic guy, but appreciate trying out new things).

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

#136

Post by rcarmo »

4ad wrote: post #44

Where do I even begin. 1. Lack of good mobile hardware. ThinkPads used to be good, but sadly more than a decade ago they switched to 16:9 screens. Macbooks were 16:10. This was and still is an absolute dealbreaker for me. Fortunately, ThinkPads started bringing 16:10 back (but see below). There were a few non-16:9 PC laptops on the market, like the Microsoft Surface or some Dell XPS models. Absolute junk. 2. Even tho…

I feel your pain. My Lenovo Flex 5 (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400) is a Ryzen 5700u, but has a pretty unremarkable screen that could have been perfect.

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

#137

Post by CarelessExpert »

Leftium wrote: post #121
CarelessExpert wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My friend tried to use Linux-only for a while, but he said trying to video conference just sucked. As an FYI, for folks reading this, I spend at least half of every day in video conferences and this is largely a non-issue these days. The vast majority of platforms have web-based clients that work great, and many have native clients that are quite good as well. The biggest issue is probably screensharing on Wayland,…

Yes, this was a couple years ago; good to know Linux has better video conference support, now. I use ThinkPads, so I probably could use Linux if I wanted to. But other people might not want to prioritize their OS choice over their hardware choice. And this is probably really niche, but I forgot to mention anything in Korea like online banking/shopping required Active-X for secure transactions. I think this is getting…

> I use ThinkPads, so I probably could use Linux if I wanted to. But other people might not want to prioritize their OS choice over their hardware choice.

Yup, absolutely true, and I'm no evangelist or Linux maximalist. People should use what works for them. It's not like Linux needs the desktop to succeed. The reality is, it's already taken over the world. In the grand scheme of embedded devices, phones, servers, infrastructure, etc, the desktop is just another niche...

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

#138

Post by rcarmo »

qorrect wrote: post #131
rcarmo wrote: post #128

For me, it’s the lack of polish and full corporate productivity suite. There are _zero_ effective replacements for a multitude of things I need, although I would be perfectly happy with a fully standard implementation of Remote Desktop (and no, Remmina still lacks the authentication and virtual desktop workspace support I need). Edge and Teams betas are coming close to providing around half of what I need, but not al…

> make Linux a no-go unless they just want to browse Facebook and read webmail. This a joke my man ? Are you seriously saying Linux is only good for browsing the internet ? >(I work at Microsoft) There it is.

I am also an old VAXer, been through the Slackware dozens-of-floppies ritual, and have been primarily on a Mac for nearly twenty years.

Your characterization of who I am and why I use what I use is woefully incomplete :)

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

#139

Post by lostmsu »

wayneftw wrote: post #97
lostmsu wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of those problems of "unchangeable 800x600 resolution" magnitude? Could you name a few?

Windows is slow af compared to Linux on the same hardware when I’m doing anything with Docker or Node.js/npm/yarn. The cli is incompatible with bash. I also can’t disable telemetry and other things I don’t want. It’s also missing features UI features that I get with XFCE. That’s why I switched to Manjaro 3 years ago for work and never looked back. I still have Windows systems for games where it mostly works fine exce…

Performance for specific use cases is debatable (as in not everyone has your use case, and even your use case might not be as important as you think in comparison to cumulative effect of other performance differences). However, the comment was specifically talking about breaking issues:

> random things breaking on Win 10

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

#140

Post by ppetty »

I really want to try Linux more & like it more. In early 2020, I wiped a 2012 Mac mini that had a nice quad core processor with 16 GB of RAM & an SSD; and then installed Linux Mint. It was great & worked well with the display (a Dell 27”) and Apple’s Magic Trackpad & bluetooth keyboard. But there was some work needed to get the trackpad behaving exactly as it did on Mac & as close as it got, I still saw frustrating results in some app’s scrolling.

I’ve previously tried different versions of Ubuntu on the same machine, and eventually wiped everything again favor of Cinnamon. Cinnamon was great. I’ve also tried Elementary — very macOS like; along with a few other I can’t remember.

But as you can probably tell, not very scientifically researched. And I’ve never felt compelled to learn a whole lot about exactly what separates the variations of Linux I’ve tried. For example, I know some are KDE based, and some are Gnome based. My criteria was simple, install OS, configure, install apps, configure, install more apps, configure … and so on.

Honestly, I’d still be using Cinnamon, but when the M1 MacBook Air came out, Apple offered $180 for an almost 9 year old Mac mini. It was like they new somehow, that they might be losing me. I’m not that locked in on App Store purchases, and always recommend trying to avoid apps that aren’t widely available on both macOS & some Linux distributions. (I still love Joplin for notes, for example.)

Where Apple has me locked in is my phone, with handoff and all the other tight integrations. So if I were building a Linux distribution, that would be a high priority: build an ecosystem. Maybe that’s an SDK that allows for data syncing from Desktop to Phone (for everything, consistently: email, password manager, bookmarks, etc). But when you do that, integrate with macOS (and Windows) too. Build a Safari Extension so I can get to my bookmarks on my Linux machine, my Mac & my iPhone (mobile Safari does Extensions), for example.

Tools to analyze hardware & software to then help determine what distribution would work best would be awesome, too. Imagine a Migration Assistant for Linux that you install on a Mac that tells you what Linux distributions are a good fit for your peripherals & installed apps … along with suggestions to resolve some known issues.

There are a lot of barriers, and I’m sure most of them have been dealt with over & over again. Why do I have to re-solve some of the issues? That friction, if reduced, would probably make more people try. I started on my Mac mini because the latest release available was old & some newer software that did run was very slow. Linux Mint & Cinnamon are really straight forward, have big communities and plenty of resources for help; and either of those made that old Mac mini feel very fast again.

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