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Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who very much uses and likes FOSS, I'm not sure I'd actually recommend people use Linux in end-user, day to day work. I can definitely see BSD or Linux in core infrastructure, but end users don't really care too much about which OS to use, they care about driver compatibility, UX usability, and app availability, among other things like security and what-not. Windows has apps, it has vendor-built drivers, it has auto-update and nice GUIs and all that. Linux doesn't.

I use Ubuntu 19.10 eoan for my daily driver replacing Windows 10 Professional for Workstations, and I can tell you that the drivers are _definitely_ worse, updates are manual, apps are updated last of the major OSes, and if I wasn't a SWE but I needed to use a computer for my job it wouldn't be as pleasant as Windows.

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A lot of your specific claims are dubious at best but more importantly this isn't someone installing Linux on their own random laptop. Doing Linux deployments across a set of machines whose hardware and installed applications you control is a completely different situation.

> Windows has apps, it has vendor-built drivers, it has auto-update and nice GUIs and all that. Linux doesn't.

Linux has tons of auto update solutions. E.g. on Debian you can configure the unattended-upgrades package to do it for you. There are plenty of nice GUIs for most tasks if you use the right distro. Ultimately, it's up to the admins of the deployments to take care of updates, not up to the end users.

As for the vendor maintained drivers that Windows has, it's often the same in Linux actually. Often, the maintainers of the mainline drivers are employees of the vendors. As it should be.

> Linux has tons of auto update solutions. E.g. on Debian you can configure the unattended-upgrades package to do it for you. There are plenty of nice GUIs for most tasks if you use the right distro.

These suggestions are still problems for many Linux distros these days and for general users there should be one sane default solution for 'auto-updating', just like Windows and macOS. No user should have to configure packagename-1.0 to do automatic upgrades for the user, it should be in the default install and configurable via the settings GUI with a simple checkbox. Finally, to further confuse the end-user to switch to a Linux distro is when they have to choose 'the right distro'. Windows and macOS come in one recognisable desktop form, Linux still suffers from an identity crisis on the desktop for end-users.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible for me to recommend a Linux distro to an end-user only for them to end up being frustrated with the switching process and eventually going back to Windows or macOS. Ubuntu and ChromeOS may suffice for some users but the other distros will confuse them further.

> Windows and macOS come in one recognisable desktop form

Like Win10 home, pro, server, or enterprise?

The difference for the end user is zero.

Interestingly enough, my tech illiterate Dad has been running OpenSuse for years now and has the opposite experience of what you describe. It has drivers for his hardware that Windows no longer can use, he likes KDE's GUI significantly better than Windows, apps for just about anything that are a few trivial clicks away from being installed, updates come quick and automatic, and it runs much better than the Windows install he hasn't booted in months.

To your updates point: as I understand Microsoft's strategy they are doing rolling release now, which is how a desktop OS should do in the age when hardware is expected to still be fast enough for everything in 15 years. Ubuntu doesn't do it, their LTS is just 5 years, neither does MacOS by the way. This is of course very annoying to deal with and disrupts and breaks user experience pretty significantly. But also is not a problem for government making their own distro, updates is like half of the reason to even make a distro.

You could use Manjaro instead- it has rolling releases, is based on Arch, and looks and feels nice to use.

Agreed, I'm also an SWE, pro FOSS and all but the Linux Desktop is just not there.

also these days my first suggestion for most users would be chromeOS or similar.

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