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Comment by dschuler | Hacker News Reader

I know you're saying this in jest, but the (US) government wrote code to fly to the moon and back, control robots on Mars, and model the earth (e.g. DoD's WGS 84, all the work by NIST, etc.). Sure, healthcare.gov was not a smooth rollout, but they do deserve some credit overall.

Now Windows on the other hand.... I just set up Windows on a new laptop I bought recently.. just plain Windows as it shipped with my new laptop. Didn't do anything "outside the box" here. I've let it update after this fiasco was supposedly over, restarted - and, of course - can't boot, everything's corrupted, had to reinstall Windows from scratch. Never had this happen with macOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.

It's hard to believe, but it really is _that_ bad. I wish it wasn't!

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Never happened to me with Windows. It's not the best, but works.

Linux on the over hand it's a continuous installation of drivers and fixing functionality that works out of the box on my windows: graphics problems, audio, screen, usb, WiFi.

Of course and then you try to install some module and says you have incompatible modules. Then you need to figure out what modules you need to change to match the version of the module to install. This was a few years ago, but I don't have the time to do this.

Plus window management is broken on Linux, too many bugs. Last time I couldn't even alt tab like windows.

I don't know, what exactly you are doing with your Linux installation, but you are doing it wrong.

Try installing something released in last 20 years or so.

Just let version of Ubuntu and follow all the steps there. Just standard

Working out of the box is nice, but what's magically fixed can be magically broken just as easily. Traditional Linux was more work to get working, but once I got it working I could rely on it to stay working rather than getting broken in the next update. (Linux is no different from windows these days, so I've moved to FreeBSD).

I don't know, windows just works most of time just fine. Linux is way more problematic, that's why I just use Windows.

I find windows more problematic, because of the unpredictability. FreeBSD experience: spend a day or two setting it up, but after that you can rely on it always working. Windows experience: it works the first time, but every few months it will have an update that breaks things for a bit.

I tried switching to Linux again for desktop usage since Proton became a thing and I was tired of the weird new licensing model. Installed the new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and after fiddling around for a week I still couldn't get my sound cards to work properly. The sound quality is just bad and the sound often cuts.

Honestly if I had a little willpower I think I might have been able to get a satisfying result at some point but the effort just wasn't worth it for me. I use my home computer like 3-4hrs a week in the weekend for games and maybe hobby projects if I don't feel like dying. I'd rather just have something that plainly works in a predictable manner, but even that seems to be asking too much nowadays...

You don't appreciate the difference between knowing what's happening to your system well enough to fix it and hoping that an "update" doesn't cause too much unrecoverable damage when it installs itself behind your back.

I just need to do some work, not fixing the os

>but the (US) government wrote code to fly to the moon and back, control robots on Mars, and model the earth

I don't believe either of this where 100% bug free.

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