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Comment by jdblair | Hacker News Reader

And then spend a significant amount of my free time maintaining my phone. This is not a realistic recommendation for a non-technical phone user who just want their device to work.

(I'm not just tossing this out there, I put Cyanogen on a Nexus 5 for a while.)

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This is how so many developers ended up on OS X.

They wanted bash and the command line, but they got tired of dicking around with their machine all day.

Exactly! I made the same calculation 8 years ago, though now the cost Apple hardware has me reconsidering a PC with Linux for my next personal laptop.

This is true as well. I'm on the same boat. Next time that an upgrade is due I'll have to do a more serious due diligence.

Come to the dark side. It’s glorious (with maybe one or two minor issues).

> one or two minor issues

Don't be fooled. By minor he means "Yes, the kernel panics on boot, but the kernel did load."

If you use grub, it's easy to switch to the previous one.

Nothing like that at all.

It boots completely fine to a blank, black screen with no errors at all.

Completely minor. Just need to set a few kernel options to make it work properly.

It's a much different era than 8 years ago. I've been using Linux as my main OS for 4 years now and it's been very stable. Mind you I bought hardware that I knew would work well and did a lot of upfront work with configuration, but now its all automatic.

I've got it to work on hardware I bought previously. No problems on an older Dell laptop, some hassles on a PC with two AMD graphic cards.

Linux comes with strings attached. On the other hand I had to deal with Win7 issues as well (such as the Windows Updater hogging up 50% of the processor) which weren't easy to fix either. In hindsight, it's on par. On Linux, it's easy to switch to a previous kernel, I like that really. And I use timeshift before critical updates.

The only concession I did, was to buy an HP printer recently because of HP's support on Linux.

The only major issue I've experienced is if you need the latest Nvidia drivers and CUDA. The odds are, if you just go and follow the sanest-seeming instructions you can find to install the drivers needed, your OS will no longer boot to desktop. If you do manage to install, the next kernel update will break the drivers and you're left with a black screen and hazy memories of how to fix it.

There are ways to get it to work, of course, but for any distro I've used, before you've dealt with this a few times, it's not obvious which set of instructions will both result in usable drivers and not break upon kernel update. I now have a "how to install Centos 7" document that I'm still not sure is actually 100% correct.

So true. I used to be a gentoo user, then fedora and arch, all in my laptop. It was fun to tinker with it but eventually you have other stuff to do and just need a laptop that works. Now, I won't say every time cuz even OSX has glitches but rarely (for my use cases anyways).

Why not Ubuntu or Mint? These generally work out-of-the-box.

Disabling the Google apps hasn't lead me to need time maintaining my phone. Disabling Play Services and Play Store makes things a hassle, but stuff like Google Drive or Google Play Music doesn't.

Right? I thought endlessly tweaking and optimizing my computing environment was super fun in my 20s and took some sort of craftsman like pride from it in my 30s. Now that I'm nearly 50 I am no longer very impressed with the cost/benefit ratio and just find it an annoyance.

I love that there are opensource alternatives to many commercial products, but I am sad at the relatively low quality of coherence and interoperability of applications.

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