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

Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 636 posts

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#351

Post by oehtXRwMkIs »

eikenberry wrote: post #138
im3w1l wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron app: works offline has more permissions can use udp separate alt-tab, tray display is not throttled because it's in the background (on desktop) unaffected by browser settings unaffected by clear cookies unaffected by extensions less confusion over who handles keybinds

Are these supposed to be advantages over using the browser for these "apps"? As someone who uses the browser for most of these things, I was looking for some reason why the electron app would be better and I don't see any (and see some definite negative aspects).

What browser do you use that is unaffected by browser settings? Sounds like a metaphysical anomaly to me.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#352

Post by jamaicahest »

pxeboot wrote: post #253
rubyn00bie wrote: post #214

I just moved to Linux as my primary OS; been fucking great. 11/10 Overall, everything seems to "just work" at least as well as on MacOS and is not quite (for me) as endlessly frustrating as Windows. Gaming has also been effortless and honestly just the most delightful surprise about the whole thing. I can write code AND play games... on the same machine... and it's running Linux?! I would've lost that bet ten years a…

> Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice. This has been my experience recently as well. For laptops at least, as long as you buy a system with known good Linux support, the vast majority of the common complaints I see are not really valid. If you need macOS or Windows to run a specific application exclusive to that platform, great. If your software all runs on Linux, you can gain a lot of freedom…

> as long as you buy a system with known good Linux support

And that is where the problem lies. With Windows I can buy pretty much any laptop and expect it to work with. With Linux I have a limited selection of laptops, if I want it to work fully. I'm a developer and I know my way around Linux pretty well, still I usually run into "missing drivers", "package management is broken", "hardware working mostly but not fully" when I try Ubuntu or Debian.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#353

Post by zvrba »

blockmeifyoucan wrote: post #329
zvrba wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I used Linux for 10+ years, then at one point, copy/paste between browser and terminal stopped working. I got mad at that shit (yes, also constant tinkering, subpar drivers, etc.) and installed windows, never looked back. And yes, font rendering is horrible. I went out of my way to find bitmapped fonts for coding. And yes, trying to get audio mixing to work on Linux was just a waste of time. My Win10 machi…

Can you expand on the driver problems you had? I keep reading this here but people never give actual examples.

First and foremost, sound. I tried to get mixing -- simultaneous playback from different programs -- to work, spent like half an hour on trying to figure out and gave up. On Windows, it works out of the box, so half an hour was more than generous allotment of time.

Next, sleep / resume. Has never worked for me on Linux; at the work place where I used Linux, I just let the machine run overnight. That would be a no-go at home, as I sleep in the same room.

When I got a new machine, I installed Linux only to check that the HW was working and to download Win installation. The kernel had only experimental support for the chipset and integrated graphics (Intel, Skylake just about came out). I had to enable it with boot switches, after which I was able to start GUI (X). However, the GUI randomly and completely froze the machine, a hard reset was required.

I also think that audio mixing didn't work out of the box.

I also tried copy/paste for the fun of it, it did work this time, but only if I managed to guess the "correct" clipboard.

Thanks, but no thanks. $100-ish license that I paid for Windows Professional has paid itself out immensely with things that "just work" out of the box. My time is worth way more than $100.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#354

Post by wayneftw »

simonh wrote: post #342
rubyn00bie wrote: post #214

I just moved to Linux as my primary OS; been fucking great. 11/10 Overall, everything seems to "just work" at least as well as on MacOS and is not quite (for me) as endlessly frustrating as Windows. Gaming has also been effortless and honestly just the most delightful surprise about the whole thing. I can write code AND play games... on the same machine... and it's running Linux?! I would've lost that bet ten years a…

In 2018 I ended up calling both Apple and Microsoft for phone support within a few months of each other and, to my surprise, got excellent support from both of them. The Apple issues turned out to require an NvRAM/SMC reset to fix a weird performance issue. The Apple support person was very polite, helpful and knowledgeable. The Microsoft issue was I’d bought a laptop which came with an Office trial, but wanted to en…

> The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time...

Run a rolling release then like Manjaro or another Arch based system. I’ve been running the latest release of my distro for years, never had to reinstall.

Also, there are plenty of free backup apps for Linux like Deja Dupe or Back-in-time. I don’t really bother with them though because all of my important stuff goes into git, even my dot files.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#355

Post by RMPR »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #262

I hope I can move to linux right now, but I just bought Ableton Live, and have to occasionally use stuff like Affinity Designer, or Adobe. Open source GUI software that runs on Linux generally does not have good UI/UX (for good ones I can only think of Blender), and big commercial softwares generally does not support Linux, being trapped between sucks.. But still, I'm looking for a decent distro that has minimal setu…

You can try pop!_os

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#356

Post by joe_the_user »

pxeboot wrote: post #253
rubyn00bie wrote: post #214

I just moved to Linux as my primary OS; been fucking great. 11/10 Overall, everything seems to "just work" at least as well as on MacOS and is not quite (for me) as endlessly frustrating as Windows. Gaming has also been effortless and honestly just the most delightful surprise about the whole thing. I can write code AND play games... on the same machine... and it's running Linux?! I would've lost that bet ten years a…

> Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice. This has been my experience recently as well. For laptops at least, as long as you buy a system with known good Linux support, the vast majority of the common complaints I see are not really valid. If you need macOS or Windows to run a specific application exclusive to that platform, great. If your software all runs on Linux, you can gain a lot of freedom…

Most recently I got a cheap HP laptop with some online caveats. But it actually works nearly perfectly, better than most versions of Windows I've used. I started using Linux desktop eight years ago and it's only gotten better (and I've always gotten random bargain PCs).

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#357

Post by simooooo »

blockmeifyoucan wrote: post #329
zvrba wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I used Linux for 10+ years, then at one point, copy/paste between browser and terminal stopped working. I got mad at that shit (yes, also constant tinkering, subpar drivers, etc.) and installed windows, never looked back. And yes, font rendering is horrible. I went out of my way to find bitmapped fonts for coding. And yes, trying to get audio mixing to work on Linux was just a waste of time. My Win10 machi…

Can you expand on the driver problems you had? I keep reading this here but people never give actual examples.

Nvidia not supporting multiple refresh rates on multiple monitors without having to screw around with config files

Unable to disable mouse acceleration in some distros without screwing around with config files

choppy YouTube playback which I guess is some video driver compatability issue

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#359

Post by RMPR »

windsurfer wrote: post #154
josephcsible wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying Ubuntu has telemetry like Windows is shaky at best. Ubuntu asks you whether you want it, doesn't mandate it for people who don't buy enterprise licenses, and doesn't sneak in new kinds of telemetry when you already disabled what's there. Saying Ubuntu overrides auto-update settings is just false. If you turn off automatic updates, nothing will automatically update.

This isn't quite true anymore. Snap software will still automatically update even if system updates are off. You have to either edit your hosts file to block the snap domain or disable the snapd.service in a command line to prevent the automatic updates.

Good thing Linux offers choice, and if you are not okay you can just change your distro.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#360

Post by RMPR »

michaelmrose wrote: post #50
fgonzag wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind telling us how to disable auto updating in snaps (or for a specific snap)? You've just solved a huge issue for the ubuntu community

The solution is just not to use snaps. Snap is trash. Consider PPAs if you need the most recent version of a particular piece of software.

In my experience PPAs often break on upgrades
Post reply on HN