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Comment by kardos | Hacker News Reader

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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