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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

>they like editing Word documents

LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.

>using Bluetooth

Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.

>playing AAA games

This is your only legitimate point, but it grows less legitimate every day.

>printing and scanning

Works fine OOTB for nearly all printers and scanners using only GUIs to configure and use the devices.

>connecting to external monitors

This has worked perfectly fine for at least 10 years...

>watching DVDs

Also works just fine.

>transferring files from their phones

I do this all the time. Works OOTB on popular distros.

The real problem is that people are change averse and that people like you spread uninformed FUD. Cut it out.

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> >they like editing Word documents

> LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.

I run LibreOffice on my Mac and documents ALWAYS render differently than on Word. I always have to proofread on an office computer before I send files out to my colleagues.

> Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.

I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.

>I run LibreOffice on my Mac and documents ALWAYS render differently than on Word. I always have to proofread on an office computer before I send files out to my colleagues.

If you're authoring the documents, you don't need to use docx. Use a more open format that's supported better by both. As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? So long as you can read it that's enough.

>I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.

I was only referring to using your computer for bluetooth, not your phone, since that's the only subject that's relevant to the discussion. Audio is a fair point, though, but I'll point out that I have a pair of bluetooth headphones that works fine with Linux.

A more open format? You mean ODF? A niche format that literally only cough free software enthusiasts cough care about?

You know what happens when you give someone .ODF in the real world? "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"

As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently?

People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.

Both plain doc and rtf are way better than docx in portability, docx is a disaster.

> A niche format that literally only cough free software enthusiasts cough care about?

And ISO and Microsoft. Microsoft cared enough about ODF, that they implemented importers and exporters for the MSO.

> "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"

Do you realize that you can open and export ODF formats in the MSO?

> As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? > People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.

They are already used to this - each version or language version of the MSO displays the documents slightly differently. Some layout calculations even depend on the printer driver installed!

Do you realize that just being able to save a file in a format does not necessarily mean being able to properly render files in that format that were created by other programs?

ODF is basically XKCD 927. It solves no problems in the real world. It has no new features. The effort spent by OpenOffice in implementing it could have been better spent on making the Word filters not suck - to this day I still have Word2003 format documents with tables that OO won't render properly.

If I had a dollar for every document made in Word version X that didn't display correctly in Word version Y... As an Office for Mac user, I could tell you long stories of inconsistencies (e.g. they finally fixed dropdown controls embedded in documents in the july 2016 update).

In LibreOffice defense, it is kind of difficult to implement specification, that says things "works like Word95".

In the end, these inconsistencies are not a big deal. Neither between different Office versions, nor between LO a MSO. If you want pixel-perfect layouts, use tools intended to do that (i.e. InDesign or other DTP).

> who cares if it renders differently? So long as you can read it that's enough.

The idea behind word processing is that how you've authored your work should be rendered accurately and consistently without unintended side-effects.

Even docx hardly ever guarantees that. Use PDF if you really want that. Most Word documents are written to be read, not to be rendered the same way everywhere.

> This is your only legitimate point, but it grows less legitimate every day.

As a gamer I've not seen much more progress (outside of WINE workarounds, some GoG ports and Valve-specific games). Most AAA games still exclusively windows due to things like DRM (Denuvo is windows-only IIRC)

There are others, like BioShock Infinite, Mad Max, Hitman, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, DiRT etc. which are not really Valve or GOG-ports.

I don't even game very much and I still have a lot of big titles on Steam+Linux - Rocket League, Alien: Isolation, Bioshock Infinite, Civ 5, a ton of Valve games, Torchlight II, PAYDAY 2, Saints Row, SOMA, FTL, Kerbal Space Program, Metro: Last Light, Borderlands 2, Tomb Raider, Towerfall Ascension... I could play nothing but positively rated games on Steam on Linux all day every day for a year without running out of things to do. Looking at popular releases I don't own, I see DOOM, ARK, XCOM 2, CS:GO, Borderlands pre-sequel, Cities: Skylines... gaming on Linux is great, man. Xbox controllers, PS4 controllers, steam controllers all work great, the steam link lets my play games at my couch, I can play everything with the gfx settings maxed out...

Linux is not great for gaming. Tombraider took 4 years to come on Linux. And Rise of the Tombraider hasn't yet. No Witcher 3. No Dishonored. No for honor. None of the top rated new games. You generally have to wait for years before something appears and there is no guarantee of it.

The Witcher 3 is making great progress on Wine, along with a lot of DX11 titles in general. You won't get every game, but you will get more than enough to keep you occupied with great games. It's no different than all the games you're missing out on Xbox when you buy a PS4. Linux is great for gaming.

The game library on the Super Nintendo means that I could play nothing but positively rated games every day for a decade without scratching the surface of what's out there. Problem: Good games aren't fungible, timing matters, and people want what they can't have. There's social value in being able to take part in talking about the games that my friends like.

Let's see: 183 games listed on my Steam account, 54 of those are available for SteamOS+Linux. A lot of those 54 are great games, but so are a lot of the 129 others. In my game catalog here, I've got about a 30% chance that the game I want to play right now will actually run in my current OS without rebooting. I don't like those odds much.

Wine? It's got the same issues that complex compatibility layers usually do. I consider it an option of last resort.

What you call "uninformed FUD" are unfortunately real problems I have had in the past 12 months on Lenovo Thinkpad W530 with Ubuntu 14.04.

Perhaps I am missing the ever elusive combination of distro and machine.

Looks like there are a couple of minor issues that can be resolved with a trivial amount of research: http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_w530

If you hit other problems, did you do any research? Did you ask for support anywhere?

Every minute I spend "resolving minor issues" is a minute I have to repeat if I ever reinstall, a minute where I could be getting work done but am instead dinking with the tools rather than using them, a minute where I am not using my computer for the thing I want to be using my computer for.

Manual screwing around in .conf files, having to care about what GPU is in use and fussing around with configurators before using certain ports, features dropping out between driver upgrades.. and all this just from your link on one model of one computer that supposedly "supports Linux".

Look, I'm sorry, this is 2017, not 1997. This is not even a sorta okay standard of usability anymore. Not for home, not for enterprise, nor should it be accepted or defended as such.

I completely agree. I stopped using Linux on my desktop a few years back (coincidentally, when Windows 7 came out).

On the other hand - I would rather fiddle with Linux drivers than fiddle with Windows ad/telemetry settings. So I suspect I'll be switching back once Microsofts decides to force me off of Win7.

This kind of response to reported problems is why Linux has been hovering at 1% desktop user share for over a decade now. It was exactly the same back when I was first installing Mandrake in 2002, and it seems like nothing has changed in that regard, even though the DEs etc look very different nowadays.

> can be resolved with a trivial amount of research

If someone has to do a hundred trivial fixes then you might start to believe that there is something fundamentally broken with whatever software confronts me with a hundred trivial problems.

I'd absolutely love to get away from windows but I tried it multiple times in the past and linux just isn't close to being an alternative in the desktop market. There are so many problems and almost everytime the solution involves doing some arcane stuff in the terminal. This isn't going to win your average user over to linux.

Linux runs on all my servers, where it does an excellent job, but I can't see it replacing windows on my desktop systems, not until they fix some fundamental usability and driver issues.

A hundred trivial fixes? More like 3 trivial fixes max! Jesus christ, Linux isn't that complicated. You're likely to run into a similar number of problems setting up your scanner on Windows! I've run Linux on desktops and laptops for years with next to no problems.

Interestingly, there's always someone like you making such claims in every online debate about Linux on laptop. And yet I have never succeeded in making Linux run as well as Windows or macOS on any of my laptops over decades.

I never seem to have one of those unicorn hardware/driver combinations that perform well, don't drain battery, don't run hot and don't break on dist-upgrade. I have researched my issues every single time because I would prefer to use Linux for many reasons, but the fixes I find are often partial, temporary and fragile. Eventually I give up and go back to macOS or Windows.

dist-upgrade almost always breaks things for me, especially all those hard fought for fixes. And it's not just minor things that break. Last time (Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10) networking stopped working completely because some maintainer had decided that network manager should no longer manage wired connections on my particular variant of Ubuntu.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322

That's a 156 page thread. The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine.

And that machine isn't particularly unusual in its class.

I will concede that ASUS laptops tend to take a year or two to sort out. But they do get sorted out - as far as I can tell most of the issues mentioned in that thread are also solved in that thread. Did you read any of it?

I've read all of it.

It's a considerable amount of work for an average user to get a working Ubuntu, and even after all that work there are still things (headphone audio ffs) that don't work.

This thread is about how people today should move off Windows, and how it is trivially easy to do so.

I agree people should move off windows. I disagree that it's trivially easy to do so, especially for these class of netbook style machine. I think that your advice (basically "wait until the kernel is updated") is proof that there are problems with these machines.

ASUS is the exception, not the norm, and dealbreaker bugs are generally only found in recent models. My point is that for nearly everyone, switching to Linux is easy, and people who generalize the whole platform as broken are spreading FUD.

So I tried yesterday installing (as a dual boot) Ubuntu on my desktop. 3 year old system, Intel 4770 CPU, Gigabyte motherboard, nothing fancy.

Ubuntu 16.10 wouldn't boot from a USB stick, with some PM error and the CPU watchdog errors.

Fine, go to all the trouble of plugging in a DVD drive, go out, buy a blank DVD. Same thing. The Ubuntu installation media just hangs with an error. Googling that didn't help.

> Did you read any of it?

How weaselly. His conclusion is plain to see:

"The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine"

How do you figure that as weasely? You could easily argue that posting a link to a 150+ page forum thread with a dozen serious issues in the OP is misleading when today only one minor issue is outstanding.

You didn't dispute his conclusion (the topic being whether linux requires 3 trivial fixes max) , settling for undermining his post in general.

You're just picking nits here.

One minor issue?

You seem to misunderstand that thread.

If you do a stock install of Ubuntu you'll have very many, showstopping, errors.

If you use a custom script that forces a custom bootloader, custom kernel, and a bunch of other fixes, you end up with a machine that still doesn't have headphone audio and some problems with bluetooth.

The relevant kernel changes are shipping in 4.11, though. Bluetooth seems to be working according to the latest messages. What's this about a custom bootloader? The other fixes so far as I can tell are pretty easily applied in <20 minutes work. It seems very do-able to get this laptop working correctly, especially when 4.11 ships.

A self-defeatist attitude won't make this more comfortable. If you don't like that Windows 10 is full of ads and spyware, the time investment to get this laptop working seems pretty small in exchange for a better OS. Throw in a little extra time to get these fixes applied in the form of patches to the relevant projects. If everyone gave up because they can't put a few minutes into troubleshooting and tweaking their setups, Linux will never grow to the threshold necessary to get vendors to support it OOTB.

>I do this all the time. Works OOTB on popular distros.

Debian doesn't connect with android phones OOTB. What's the opposite of FUD?

Debian isn't really a hands-off distro. It works OOTB on i.e. Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, etc. It's trivial to get working on Debian, though: https://wiki.debian.org/mtp

Bluetooth is massively popular among millennials who enjoy listening to music streaming from their phone on wireless speakers, in cars, etc.

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