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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I've come to accept that there is no good OS (maybe iOS, but not really). You're just picking your poison.

Want to be spied on and have your system slowly accumulate cruft and grind to a halt over the course of a few years? Use Windows.

Want to be constantly fiddling with your system just to keep it running on a day to day basis? Use Linux.

Want to be constantly spied on and probably also hacked? Use Android.

Want to pay a bunch of extra money and still deal with a decent number of bugs¹ and atrocious default settings/annoying user-protection features you have to turn off? Use macOS.

¹All of them are riddled with bugs

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Just because some Linux users do that does not mean it is a requirement. If it were, Linux could never have achieved server the server dominance it has. Fiddling is a side effect of Linux being too flexible, so you always have the nagging feeling you could be better with a different distro/window manager/shell/editor/file manager.

I installed Linux Mint on my parents' computer and it's been running rock solid for three years. And they appreciate not being tricked into updates they don't want.

This is fairly spot on though a bit overly generalizing perhaps (e.g. might be me, but 8 years of Win7 on work machine and it's still running completely ok and depending on what exactly you use Linux for there's only moderate amounts of fiddling, though fiddling there is :) I've used and still use all the major OS. There's no silver bullet and there's bugs everywhere, one more annoying than the other. Learning to use them properly (yes that sometimes means finding ways around annoyances) goes a very long way though.

On a long term Win install traditionally you have to pay attention to disk space, backups of patches pile up in the system folder until the disk is almost full. Which leads to more fragmentation, which leads to slowdowns. Which leads to anger and fear, then the dark side.

Has this been finally fixed?

As far as I'm aware Disk Cleanup gets rid of those backups. But this is a long term install and was properly planned to be one, so I started with plenty of disk space.

> Want to be constantly spied on and probably also hacked? Use Android.

Most of the spying is done by phone apps. This affects iOS and Android in the same way in recent versions. The extra bit that gets sent to Google directly seems like a small part of it.

It sounds like they were referring more to the difficulty of getting timely Android updates—or getting them at all—depending on device.

In my experience it’s easier to manage permissions on iOS and it’s easier to see which apps used them. So while app vendors probably try to include the same spying software on both platforms I’m able to restrict their data access in a more straightforward way on iOS.

For 95% of people that want to do what they want to do and not worry about malware or other nonsense? Use macOS/iOS. The little bit of extra money is well worth the time saved.

iOS: You'll still have a really hard time doing anything related to files, by design. Oh and didn't have a dark theme until VERSION 13! Sheesh.

And yet even though a perfectly usable Windows 10 computer which they used for years is available, my parents have not touched it in years after getting iPads and iPhones.

Yes, though I don't fiddle with things much day to day with Linux any more.

But I'll tell you what does happen: CADT and shit just randomly breaking from release to release. Fewer things work than did ten years ago as well.

Right now I have gargantuan indicator icons in my Ubuntu Mate panels. They worked fine for the last ten years previously. But here we go on 19.10. Has something to do with my 4k monitors but as mentioned, worked fine until this release.

> Want to be constantly fiddling with your system just to keep it running? Use Linux.

This may have been true 10+ years ago; the amount of fiddling required is pretty low these days.

I tried ~3 years ago, vanilla Ubuntu. Still enough fiddling that I had trouble focusing on my actual projects. At least there's decent app support now thanks to Electron.

Until you want the latest version of some package like PostgreSQL that isn’t in the yum/apt repos, and then some time after that you have to upgrade the base os to plug new security holes.

Run postgres in a container

Thanks for your input. So I recently looked at Vagrant and Docker and it seemed kind of like a deep dive and I couldn’t find any Clif notes. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks.

I actually remember myself having to fiddle more with Windows than with Linux, in the Windows XP days. Windows would always invent some reason to require some reboot, or get random corrupted system files, or vcredist incompatibilities, or failed attempts at auto updates, or reinstall drivers for the mouse you just unplugged and plugged in a different USB port, or I don't remember what else it was with it all the time.

Linux (at least Archlinux) doesn't require much once you install it, are happy with the set-up and regularly update it.

Unless you're the kind of person who likes tweaking their Linux and trying out many distros, but if you do that means you like fidding with your system :) I personally just like an Archlinux installation that stays stable for 5+ years and actually use it.

The thing about Archlinux is that apparently it requires constant updates or you won't be able to keep up with the current distro at some point. That's not really a recipe for stability, especially if you care about actively using the system and not just testing/playing with the bleeding edge stuff.

I update every few months and that works out fine. More than a year of no updates could make it difficult. All you have to do is pacman -Syu, and it doesn't really interrupt your flow since you can just continue working while it updates. The few times something doesn't work, you look at archlinux.org and the issue plus solution (usually remove some package or update in a specific order) will be described right there on the front page. Seems like a smoother experience than what I remember from Windows with autocountdown timers and what not...

But it's actually also amazing how when you reinstall Linux, and copy over your home directory, everything looks like it was before and you can just continue on as if nothing happened.

> Linux (at least Archlinux) doesn't require much once you install it, are happy with the set-up and regularly update it.

Using Archlinux presumes you already know your system intimately and have taken the time to hand-craft it. That would make solving problems down the road much easier.

On the other hand, if you're like me and you want to just drop standard-issue Linux (i.e. Ubuntu) on a computer and then just use it, you quickly encounter gaps in the defaults/automatic setup and have to dig in and try to figure out where things went wrong. Your graphics driver gets confused when you plug in a second monitor. Your WiFi card isn't detected. There's no sound. Little things that kill your workflow in a death by a thousand cuts.

Windows has just as much intrinsic fragility, if not more, but through sheer economy of scale nearly everyone's real-world problems have been addressed by layer upon layer of defaults and automatic checks. That's how Windows manages to "just work" most of the time.

There is less than there was 10 years ago but you have to be willing to give up a lot in the way of "I'd like something else than exactly how it comes out of the box" in order to avoid a large amount of twiddling.

It depends on your hardware.

If you have everything Intel based then yeah, it almost just works, except the i915 driver occasionally has huge regressions, Mesa sometimes has huge regressions, and the kernel itself oftentimes has huge regressions.

Run Debian Stable or CentOS and you won't have to worry about "regressions" for at least 2 years. If the hardware works when the system is installed or upgraded, it will work for the lifetime of that release (barring exceptional bugs).

Windows has nothing comparable, besides the LTSB/LTSC releases that people can't even figure out how to get legally.

Agreed. Especially since I went to nix for my development tools.

Regular kubuntu install, updated in a single apt-get command once a quarter, and nix for adding/removing software with abandon. Quite stable and easy to work with (after learning nix).

With all the promise of computers being erased over the last few years I've always thought: this is a market opportunity.

But nobody has stepped up to the plate.

MacOS looks like the best poison.

Actually, even with apple's proclamation that "privacy is a right", macos phones home all the time too. ios compounds this by removing any real insight or control over your device or apps.

What do you mean by this? I have just as much control over my device and my applications on OSX as I do on any other OS.

If there were a proper framework for doing web development on iPadOS, I'd switch to using my iPad for a big chunk of my development. It's getting very close but still falls a bit short.

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