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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be making the point that using an iPad is a 'badge of pride' because it's 'challenging'; trying to make the point that Linux is also difficult to use. Except, it's not the same type of challenge at all.

Linux usability can actually be pretty good, but it's dependent on familiarity, the desktop environment, the distro, the choice of installed applications; everything is customizable, and making most of that customization requires a willingness to research, understand, tinker.

An iPad is locked down to the point of hurting usability, the 'share' system is vastly inferior to Android's 'intents', split-screen mode just recently arrived, mouse support is intentionally missing. Trying to use it as a desktop replacement is borderline masochism. Frankly, it's nothing like desktop Linux, even if you're in an unfamiliar desktop environment.

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I started using Linux on the desktop in 2001 and have only used other OSes casually since then.

Linux is incredibly productive for me and I'm pretty worthless on other operating systems. And I'm old enough that I'm no longer willing to put in the time to learn a new one.

Ubuntu does what I want; I don't have to configure things and It Just Works 99% of the time. Plus it's free, so there's no financial incentive to use something else.

Can I ask you a honest question? How much time do you spend on ISM that the OS actually matters to you that much? I've heard a lot of people saying I'm more productive on X, but in every case I never had real examples of OS specific reasons why they were more productive as in every case it boiled down to the Application ecosystem they end up using.

Say you are a Java (it's easy, common, and cross platform) developer this means you need your Eclipse/Netbeans IDE, a JVM and or some Java based web server. So you have your IDE+JVM on the OS, and development/deployment & test environment on a virtual machine, does it really matter to you if you are running Linux, Windows or OSX in this case? All you use and see is Eclipse, a text editor, Virtual Box and a web browser.

Yes, when spending most of the day in front of a cross-platform IDE the OS has very little effect. But the OS has an effect on configuration side of things. Due to working in parallel with different projects and systems I need to have multiple versions of JDK available, a set of multiple build tools in different versions and multiple application servers. I have used Windows, OSX and Linux for development and Linux has been the easiest environment to set up and maintain and Linux VMs also solve the multiple app servers-problem. I don't have that much experience with OSX (only got my MacBook Pro a couple of months ago) and so far it feels quite alien. While there's the familiar power of Unix lurking in the back the GUI side feels very cumbersome and something I feel I have very little control on. Is that the Apple usability magic that people usually talk about?

Yes, it's rather silly. Desktop Linux is like having a machine shop. It's a steep learning curve, but you can do amazing things. Advanced tasks on the iPad is like a dancing bear: it's impressive that it can even be done, but the actual dancing sucks.

I love the dancing bear analogy, but I'd argue that Linux on the desktop isn't a difficult learning curve. Not in 2016, anyway.

The Linux desktop is different than Windows 10 or the MacOS, but it isn't harder, IMO.

Yeah, in 2016 you don't need to configure X or edit CHAP scripts. I think some people still hang on the allure of days gone by.

For the average user (who uses w10 or osx) linux is miles more difficult. Turn on your mac, login to apple, and 1 click download anything and it works. Linux has dependencies, and not-so-straightforward app store, and plenty of little differences that aren't obvious like osx. Thats what makes it so powerful though.

This is going to change with projects like snap and flatpak. Soon every app will be come bundled with its own dependencies like Windows exe's

As someone who remembers apt-get update taking only a couple seconds back in the debian etch days, That sounds horrible.

> Desktop Linux is like having a machine shop. It's a steep learning curve, but you can do amazing things.

IME, the learning curve for Linux (post-installation, at least) is waaaay less steep than Windows. When I went off to college and got tired of my Dad calling me every few days with another question or concern about his Windows computer, I switched him to Linux Mint and haven't been bugged since. It's too much to expect of the average user to use a Windows computer: constant fears of malware, a system tray polluted with two dozen startup programs that they didn't consent to, frankly idiotic design decisions like "Let's install updates and refuse to turn off for ten minutes, regardless of whether this laptop needs to be shoved into a backpack right now".

The main difficulty in desktop Linux is hardware compatibility stuff, but IME that mostly boils down to a couple careful decisions right at the beginning. I've had something like four Thinkpads over the last ~10 years and I've yet to have hardware problems of any significance. People occasionally comment that it's ridiculous to have to constrain one's hardware choices based on the OS they want to use, but that's pretty much exactly what many people do for Macs, so I don't think it's all that weird (and certainly worth it).

Except that to those of us who cut our teeth on DOS & Windows, and grew to the point that going away from the GUI was either the mark of doing something the hard way or because of a specific failure, *nix presents a vastly different working paradigm.

Not to mention compatibility issues and other general issues.

I grew up on DOS and Windows, and never felt that way. The console was always for when I ran into limitations imposed by whatever GUI I was in.

When you say that "going away from the GUI was either the mark of doing something the hard way or because of a specific failure", it's true about windows because the windows command line was basically unsupported territory.

The Windows command line ecosystem was a stagnant ghetto for a long time.

You had to use an uncomfortable and ugly program to access it and the environment itself barely moved from DOS.

PowerShell was the first real progress in a long time and now they've arrived at 'lets just run bash on windows'.

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