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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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