Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

>Honestly, every time Apple has done anything with the Mac the past couple of years, they've screwed it up.

Compared to what OS?

The latest Windows 10 update buggers up Storage Spaces and printing, hard on the heels of another Windows 10 Update that deleted the user's files.

View on HN

Is it uncommon for folks to use a Linux desktop as their primary OS? I've been doing so for about 10 years and I've had no complaints. Whenever I need some specific software I boot to Windows or use Virtualbox. I also have a Macbook Pro 2015

I think even in the tech community it's uncommon...especially if you mainly use a laptop. Thankfully, laptop options have expanded quite a bit.

However, a few years ago a Steam update had potential to erase a bunch of data[1].

Is there a Linux option similar to Time Machine or Windows Backup (backing to a local network drive)? I've used things like rsync and restic. They work great for jobby-job like needs, but isn't something I could show a point-and-click user to manage themselves.

How soon did you install Linux on your Macbook Pro 2015? Which distro did you go with? When I get a new Mac I usually test out a few Linux distros and it can take years (if ever) to get decent support. Things like; wifi, palm rejection of trackpad, power management (decent battery optimizations or sleep/wake).

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2871653/scary-steam-for-linu...

Uncommon? Yes. Very few people run Linux as a their primary OS.

Not sure why this is downvoted, it’s objective truth. I’ll go one farther though and say that Linux sucks, and in fact we must admit that if we want it to ever be good. It requires constant investment by the community to remain competitive with the other big players, who are constantly reshaping and making advances we need to keep up with. This is spoken as a desktop Linux user.

Out of curiosity; if Linux sucks, why do you still choose it over other systems?

Open source software is great when it works, much better than proprietary software. I have a strong preference for open source; but I can't use Linux for anything serious because of how so many things are broken (not the kernel per se, so not "technically" Linux itself but the surrounding ecosystem). So, I use it as my hobby machine for whatever I can, because of dogfooding. The only way I will know what to fix, or even want to fix it, is by having to deal with it day after day.

Been using Linux for work and as my daily driver for 10+ years. Never had any problem that would make me consider jumping ships.

Professionally, I work with ultra-low latency systems for high frequency/algo trading and it would be impossible to achieve the level of tuning and performance that Linux offers on other OSes.

I'm interested in the types of issues that made the experience bad for you.

Here's a few...

* Even though there is tons of extra swap space, running too many apps at once causes the entire system to become unresponsive for ~20s at a time. Granted, I am using older hardware, but there should be some minimal amount of responsiveness allocated to indicate the system isn't just totally dead.

* Wifi GUI Gnome utility often ceases working and requires wifi to be turned off and on again. I got so fed up with this I just wrote a command to set Wifi to my credentials, and even then, I have to unplug/replug the wifi dongle frequently to get it to re-register with the system. On Arch Linux, this GUI utility doesn't even work at all. This has happened with multiple different makes of dongles.

* When I was using Ubuntu for work purposes (and Python / node / Docker stack), it would frequently run out of file descriptors. There was no solution other than to restart.

* Last night I started to encounter an issue where Ctrl-X would cut text successfully, but when I go to paste it, it will not be there. Possibly a bug with VSCode, not sure yet, but I haven't encountered it running VSCode on Mac at all.

* Something about programs being interrupted by context switches to other programs that are using large slices of CPU time leads to input being misinterpreted. If I am running a Rust compilation in one window, typing `hello` into an adjacent terminal window might show up as `hellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllo`. This happens in a wide variety of applications. I suspect the problem has to do with input library routines not receiving real time priority, or something like that. Weirdly enough, I saw the same issue on FreeBSD.

>re: WiFi gui

Don’t use gnome and in particular don’t use their network configuration tools. I’ve never seen those reliably work.

>re repeat under load

I’ve had this happen on OSX but I don’t think I’ve ever had it happen on Linux. Then again I almost exclusively type anything long in vim so maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

> Don’t use gnome

This kind of response, though, gets to the core of why desktop Linux isn't a super popular choice. The defaults should _work_. Most popular Linux distributions use GNOME by default. We should fix GNOME rather than say people should know they need to not use it. If using KDE is the obvious solution to the plurality of problems someone might encounter, why isn't KDE the default for most distros? I'm sure there are political reasons too, but those are reasons that matter to the end user just as much as technical ones. They are, in fact, indistinguishable from that perspective.

Even if the solution is KDE (or something else), a person who switched will find that KDE itself has issues as well, and when someone encounters them, they will complain and be told to not use KDE, use GNOME because it doesn't have that issue. We can't continuously flip flop stacks just because we encounter particular bugs.

> maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

I assume that's GTK, and it's possible. I see the bug in Firefox, Chrome, and GNOME's terminal, although strangely not VSCode.

Why would that surprise you, given the comment? The desire is to make it better, using it in spite of its issues is a way to do that. More users = more inertia to make it better, more resources for reporting issues, etc.

I personally use Linux all the time, but not on the desktop because it's just bad enough that I can't stand it (It's really not Linux, it's X and all its associated crap). I won't criticize those who do because they want a better OS though, that's a good thing.

> Why would that surprise you, given the comment?

Because people choose the least shitty solution for themselves whenever they can. So it doesn't make sense to torment yourself with an OS you don't like or cannot utilise to the extent that you'd like.

It's more about generativity. I have the capability to make this thing better, and I see vendor-imposed problems all the time with the proprietary solutions. Put two and two together and there's really only one responsible choice.

I've been using Debian GNU/Linux with KDE as my main Desktop from 1999 (21 years now): in home and work. As a "family administrator" my father use Linux in the Desktop too from about the same time. My 2 sisters and my brother also use it all the time. If they have any problems, they call me and I'll take care of it. I got married in 2004, and since then my wife and in-laws have also used Linux on the desktop as their only operating system.

My oldest daughter is 16 years old and has always used Linux at home, and she had no problem when Windows was found in some classes in the High School. I think it is possible, as long as you have someone to turn to if there are problems (I am that someone in my family).

Yes, I gave up on Linux for anything desktop related about 15 years ago.

Still have an ASUS Netbook with Ubuntu LTS, which allows me to validate the "progress" of Desktop Linux on laptops.

Naturally I occasionally get to deal with it via VMs and server deployments, however for my choice of languages the OS hardly matters anyway.

Same. I’ve been on Pop OS on a System76 Darter for over a year. Very happy with the combination, and the price.

Unified keyboard shortcuts and I'd be all there. I've come kinda close-ish in Elementary, but it's still clunky enough that I can't commit full-time.

I used to use Linux as a daily driver until switching to macOS because I wanted to get stuff done instead of faffing around and learning edge cases for every app. I used to use KDE 3.5 which was near perfect and didn’t require learning new methods of using a computer for each app, but then KDE4 and GNOME3 got released which was like stepping backwards 20 years.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head that unified interactions (and with the keyboard, not some dumb new hamburger menu for mouse users like the new gedit) are what’s required and missing for speedy daily use. I couldn’t articulate it until reading your comment, thanks.

>Is it uncommon for folks to use a Linux desktop as their primary OS?

Serious question? Otherwise I have to respond with LOL. Only people inside the tech bubble would think a Linux desktop was normal, and even inside the tech bubble you truly have to have a reason.

The largest install of Linux as a desktop for a company I've seen has been at a post house where all of the software ran on Linux. The users only used it to launch the specific app they needed. They had TDs (technical directors) to do all of the Linuxy type of stuff.

Welcome to this website. It's name is "Hacker News". The name, in case you didn't guess, comes from the main demographic that it targets/is driven by.

can't speak about the very recent updates, but windows have been consistent and adamant on keeping the backward compatibility. they still use reserved file names for io devices so that 30+ year old printers can still work, and you can still open a 2000s doc file in office 365. (I'm looking at you Apple, who made many of the 32 bit apps I loved useless)

relevant video: https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI (Tom Scott: Why you can't use CON as filename in windows)

Actually you can use CON as a filename in Windows, you just have to use the right API. The command:

    type CON > "\\?\C:\CON"

will create a file named CON. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming... has some details about this.

Even the, now official, merge of UWP with Win32 is planned to take years as they don't want to introduced hard breaks for those that decided to bet on WinRT.

Why does it need to be compared to any OS? One of the reasons I switched to Mac was the OS X was far more stable than Windows. I still want a stable OS.

I have biweekly kernel panics on macOS... somewhere in the io sub system. Luckily vscode etc store their state

This hasn't been my experience at all. I'm running a hackintosh of all things on vanilla x86 hardware and I haven't had a kernel panic for months (and even then the only thing I can think of was when I was screwing with something that's supposed be behind the curtain). Importantly, I'm more and more resolute against installing Catalina.

Then you probably have a hardware defect somewhere

I had maybe one or two kernel panics since OS 10.1 more than 15 years ago, even with hackintoshes or water damaged MacBooks, so that would be a real shame if that’s due to Catalina and it’s not a hardware problem.

I never reboot my laptop

You have a hardware problem.

> OS X was far more stable than Windows.

I'm not sure that was ever true but certainly hasn't been true for over a decade. Neither OS is fully stable (how ever you might define that) and neither OS is a terrible unstable mess either.

I'm not sure that was ever true

I am. Absolutely sure. Stability was the reason I switched to Macintosh two decades ago. I've had to run Windows boxes for work at the same time, and with the exception of the most recent few years, Macs have been 100% more stable than Windows.

That is what I have been saying about the Mac.

It isn't the Mac is so good, it is the alternative is downright awful. From Design, UX, to even technical.

Compared to the previous (-ly used) macOS release, obviously. That's the only OS that matters in this context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com