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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?

#31

Post by luke2m »

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.

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

#32

Post by gjhh244 »

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…

Weird how different people have different experiences. I've had way more cases of random things breaking on Win 10 than on Linux Mint. Especially corporate Win 10 on my working machine is utterly horrible, just endless problems.

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

#33

Post by jitl »

This experience is based on running whatever the latest LTS Ubuntu OS was in 2018 on a Huawei Matebook Pro, a very nice thin laptop I bought at the Microsoft store in San Francisco. I also tried Fedora. Initially I tried stock Gnome whatever, before heading off for Fluxbox, Sway/i3 etc sparse style window managers after growing frustration.

- battery life worse than a full screen VM running under Windows. Need to fight tooth and nail with drivers and config files for graphics that switch from low power intel to high power nvidia based on workload, for example.

- wifi throughout worse than a full screen VM running under Windows.

- worse UI performance under load than macOS or Windows. The whole UI, eg the compositor or X server can easily grind to a halt with no “beachball” style indicator. Crashes in that process are not uncommon, and effectively lose the whole session.

- somehow I managed to break my sound output with a routine software update in the year 2019

- browsers (eg Firefox) still buggy or blurry under Wayland

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

#34

Post by rubyist5eva »

Because I don’t need or want complete control over my operating system. macOS does exactly what I need: stays out of my way, supports the software I use for work, barely breaks and barely asks me to maintain it manually. Also the UI hasn’t changed drastically since it’s inception, the stability on that front is nice.

Downvoted for answering the question honestly, stay classy HN.

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

#35

Post by auslegung »

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 compared to most other laptops, and it's not difficult to keep one running well for 8+ years. In fact, I have a 2013 MacBook Air and a 2015 MacBook Pro, both of which are running as well as ever.

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

#36

Post by garblegarble »

haileys wrote: post #27
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…

I've been using a Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop for a year now and it's great. Two finger scroll and right click works, but it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS. Inertial scrolling depends on the app, but Firefox implements it well and that takes care of 80% of it for me.

>it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS.

I can highly recommend BetterTouchTool, it has a wide range of features, but one of the easiest to use is map three-finger-tap to middle click

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

#38

Post by hypertele-Xii »

Switching OS incurs costs. The benefits must outweigh the costs. I'm a great fan of the principles and philosophies of Linux, but if I'm to use it as my daily driver, it has to be above all else a practical solution. There's so much weird shit involved with Linux that the costs outweigh the benefits.

Weird shit like, Linux refusing to let me copy files on an external hard drive because "I'm not the owner" of those files. What the hell? I've owned these files for 20 fucking years. Linux telling me I don't have permission to access my own files. GTFO.

Another big issue is lack of software. The alternatives just don't measure up. Graphics and audio editors are garbage. Gimp ain't Photoshop. A similar issue used to be games, but Valve's been fixing that very rapidly.

And then there's the analysis paralysis of too much choice. What distro do I go for? There are over 500 distros actively maintained. You'd need to study this for years to choose well. I ain't got years to switch, I need to work now.

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

#39

Post by bodge5000 »

Using Win10 right now. Tried Manjaro and a few others in the past.

I haven't switched...yet. The problem is its another entry, and a particularly big entry (switching OS's if you've used one for years is quite a big job) on the good old infinite todo list, and other things are prioritised over it. Maybe eventually I'll wittle my way down to it, or it'll get moved up, but yeh, life happens.

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

#40

Post by 0-_-0 »

Last time I tried Linux I couldn't find drivers for my Wi-Fi antenna. Eventually I found something I had to compile manually, but it just failed to compile so I gave up. I sometimes have to work with Linux at work, but it seems to be a constant uphill struggle with drivers and environments (e.g. I couldn't for the life of me get the validation layers in a Vulkan graphics driver working, had to get a Windows laptop with an RTX GPU). In Windows everything I want to do just works.

Ultimately, I want an operating system with minimal friction while using it, and Linux just seems to have a philosophy with a quite different focus.

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