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

I Miss BSD/Linux

brainbaking.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 251 posts

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#41

Post by bachmeier »

TheRoque wrote: post #22
hnlmorg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

Sorry, but this is still true IMO. For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. Not even talking about software availability and functionalities. I have had other issues, but anyways I don't want to list them all. I also find it misleading to claim that Arch Linux is "rock solid", just look at the news to see the amount of "manual intervention needed" listed. I lov…

Well, some folks had trouble with the GTX 1080 on Windows, so by your logic Windows is also no good:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/nvidia...

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/gtx-1080-no-display-...

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics...

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#42

Post by hnlmorg »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #25
hnlmorg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell. Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I u…

2004 was round about the last time I had a major driver issue. I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer, the name which escapes me. Weirdly FreeBSD worked just fine with any WiFi radio I threw at it.

Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality.

I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges.

These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease.

So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues.

edit:

just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#43

Post by [deleted] »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #25
hnlmorg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell. Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I u…

[deleted]

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#44

Post by herbst »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #25
hnlmorg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell. Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I u…

Imo the maintenance thing is not always true. When I install Linux on a relatives computer I usually never hear from them again because they finally have a OS to run their browser on that doesn't constantly nag them.

For my use, sure I break it. But I broke Macs too and never had a stable environment there either.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#45

Post by guenthert »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #25
hnlmorg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell. Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I u…

Some of us where using Linux desktop/laptops more than 20 years ago (I had a Toshiba Tecra upgraded to 48MiB RAM running happily Debian Linux in '97). And it wasn't a big deal. And I've seen this discussion every so often in the last thirty years. It's always the same: don't buy bleeding edge hardware.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#46

Post by grumpyprole »

bachmeier wrote: post #31
hnlmorg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

I agree. I have a Windows 11 laptop for work. It's had a few issues, including wifi connection problems for a while, but the one that has been most horrible is that it may or may not detect an external display. It's infuriating to plug it in and nothing happens. A reboot always fixes it, but that's no fun.

My work laptop, a Lenovo X1 running Windows 10, was completely busted out of the box. Sleep doesn't work, massive throttling issues running zoom (only improved a bit with firmware updates), WSL 100% CPU bugs, display port MST bugs, the list goes on and on. IT say all my issues are normal and known. About five years ago, I had a Linux Laptop for work, that was rock solid and I miss it very much.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#47

Post by fragmede »

juliangmp wrote: post #24

He does make a good point: the arm laptops from apple are hard to ignore I'm eagerly awaiting the day I can buy a high performance arm or riscv laptop and run Linux on it...

How supported does that Linux have to be? Does Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon ARM count?

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#48

Post by herbst »

bozey07 wrote: post #5

> Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? I really don't get this either. Every laptop I've looked at has some wart somewhere - battery life, webcam, structural integrity, display, CPU, temperatures, speakers, IO, repairability (not that Macbooks are good here either). Some of these things aren't even hard to get right. It's like laptop manufacturers just don't care.

I am not sure what people do with their laptops but I am perfectly happy with a refurbished 5th gen X1, replacement for my t480s, that replaced my t440, after t420s.

I never paid more than $500 for a refurbished model. I can choose which kind of screen I am going for never had any heating issues or driver issues with Linux.

I've had a MacBook at work, I could afford a framework or whatever when I wanted. But except gaming (don't care and better devices available) and AI/rendering (cloud cheaper in most cases) I don't see why the majority of people seems to think they need $2000 machines.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#49

Post by Philpax »

hnarn wrote: post #40

The title for this blog post should be "I Miss BSD/Linux for Apple devices". Unsurprisingly, if you buy hardware from one of the most FLOSS hostile hardware manufacturers in existence, your BSD/Linux experience will not be great. > Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? I really don't understand this question. Is the author seriously suggesting that MacBooks are objectively the best laptops for any use case a…

The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used.

The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect the former is more likely than the latter...

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#50

Post by cies »

I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed as my daily driver:

* /home on it's own partition (having it as a subvolume of btrfs did not work out well with reinstalls) -- saves me a lot of time with reinstalls

* docker works better (no need for an internal Linux VM, that is needed on macOS/windows)

* installing tools that i used sparingly is so much easier: Inkscape/ GIMP/ LibreOffice/ Audacity/ cloc/ ripgrep/ tig/ iotop/ htop/ DbBeaver

* i dont truly trust any big corp's binaries

* Firefox and Chromium/Thorium are solid browser options

* easy to install dev tool chains: package management and opensource secured supply chains are not an afterthought

* I feel since PipeWire and Wayland we come to a point were A/V "just works" for all my usecases

* being on a rolling distro now for some years, and it does sometimes mess up, but rarely (resinstalls are quick) -- i prefer it over OS version upgrades on macOS/windows

* i dont need an Apple ID, or hotmail account for ANYTHING and that keeps my blood from cooking

Post reply on HN