Hacker News Reader

Comment by turbinerneiter | Hacker News Reader

Funny, how for some people Linux catches fire on every single update, and for others it never breaks.

Those "others" for who it "never breaks" belong to two categories as far I am concerned:

(a) People who do very little with their computers. A tiling window manager, an Emacs, and a few terminals will never break, sure.

(b) People who selectively block all the breakage out of their memory ("yeah, I had to update some low level settings, that's not breakage, that's just normal as the driver interface changed in this version, etc").

But not people who use their computers for all kinds of things besides hardcore coding, especially multimedia (hobbyist or professional)...

(a) People who do very little with their computers. A tiling window manager, an Emacs, and a few terminals will never break, sure.

Don't be so optimistic ;). As of recently, Emacs started freezing regularly for 10+ seconds when editing Rust code while rust-analyzer is used as an LSP plugin. First, I thought it was rust-analyzer, but I did some tracing and all time was spent in FreeType functions during the hangs (probably something going rogue, triggering a lot of font rendering). Lo and behold, use terminal Emacs (no X11) and the problem is gone.

But since life was busy, I didn't have the time to debug it further and installed CLion, which works great.

You almost said it

And actually (a) and (c) could be merged.

I had one issue with Arch Linux - partial init, boot to console - check issues [1]. There was an issue with Flash player, solved first by HTML <video> than by bundled Chromium Flash. Pulseaudio - yes, solved by removal, ALSA still works. Can't run windows software - solved for me by web.

I have a ton of programming languages installed. When I experiment with xmonad and it breaks it is not Linux, it is me. If I am going to experiment with CUDA etc I know it would be uncharted territories.

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/news/

I recently ran Linux VM without external monitor (cause lockdown, wfh and all that). Laptop is 1080p at 14". Turns out Xubuntu can't configure HiDPI display properly at all. I searched ten minutes, found some crazy guides advising changing a lot of stuff in the xrandr which I'm completely unfamiliar with. In the end end I simply cranked font size in the terminal, did what I had to do and closed it. Thankfully it was just a VM and not host OS.

In another episodes I saw Linux completely and irrecoverably (at my level of skills) break xwindows after dist-upgrade (on a simple business line HP laptop with a single Intel GPU), stuck in dependency hell trying to run 3rd party software because libc6 had incorrect version and apt couldn't resolve that (again, way above my skill level).

I'll use Linux on servers and clients where it is great, but my work host system will remain Windows for the foreseeable future, thank you very much.

PS: and to address OP article - both my home Win10 and work Win10 never force reboot for updates for some reason, at least in the space of up to 2-3 weeks of continuous uptime. Yes, the sometimes nag me for updates (just like Linux) and I simply install them in some downtime periods (just like Linux).

1. I should have included HiDPI alongside NVIDIA, uncharted territory, use search [1].

2. dist-upgrade breaks a lot, 3rd party software does not play nice with distributions

My rule book — stick to software that plays nice with distributions, use rolling release. I can rebuild my entire system from source with ease. Hence I can patch my system and I do it. It is a great power and it is unimaginable on Windows.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Xfce

had no issue with dell xps developer edition daily updates for a few years.

Now I have some business lenovo with intel gpu and no issues running ubuntu 20 and daily updates.

Anything from bluetooth speakers (Marshall's nice) to external monitors to whatever just works...

Also running Arch on a home server with an amd gpu for games (steam/paradox games).... funny enough that also works great.

When I did have issues it was due to nvidia (crappy drivers).

For hobbyist stuff... depends on hobby i guess... for me most projects involve a pi zero or similar... good luck doing that with windows...

There are probably a lot of factors: do you use more exotic hardware or more mainstream hardware [1], do you use exotic software (NetworkManager VPN plugins with few users) or mainstream hardware. A beginner's breakage is an advanced user's, "oh, I'll just edit this configuration file, done". Then there are probably large differences between distributions.

Regardless, having experience with Linux and macOS -- macOS often has annoying breakage too. I can imagine that it is the same on Windows.

All software is broken. But at least with open source software you have the possibility to fix it if you have the technical chops.

> But at least with open source software you have the possibility to fix it if you have the technical chops.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/linux...

I'm really grateful for this mentality, a lot of people cant be bothered to trace through things, hack it / compile it for themselves and are willing to trade a lot of resources to edit their home made videos/photos/etc for relatively little physical work when you do have the chops. I like it more than when I was installing electrical fixtures than others… don't even have to leave my apt, and I do it from the other side of the world!

Software wouldn't be valued as much if more people were willing to do the work lol

Sure, I fully agree. I realize it's a privileged position to be in, when you know C, C++, gdb, etc. will enough to fix bugs in open source software when you encounter them.

On the other hand, it is also easier to pick up those skills on an open source OS than a very closed system such as iOS.

Exactly. My XPS13 from 2013 was upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to 20.04 with all the intermediary LTS versions. Never had a single hitch. Everything still works (except that the hardware itself is dying after all this time, of course).

I can't take seriously people who affirm that they are both "Linux user since 91" and at the same time pretend that Debian / Ubuntu don't work on any of their machines, ever. Come on.

For what it’s worth, I find the servers reliable but the desktop experience to be unreliable (especially Ubuntu)

I also find the desktop experience unreliable, and I use Ubuntu, Windows 10 and OS X.

I'd like to understand what you call "unreliable". I'm on an officially unsupported Lenovo Ryzen laptop. I've just hot-plugged and unplugged an external display, a gigabit network interface, a mouse. Everything is smooth. Applications run. I can move them to the external display. When I pull the HDMI out, they move back to the laptop display and resize accordingly. I plugged in the USB gigabit interface, my network switched to the wire. I unplugged it, and my youtube video went on playing without a glitch. I turned on my BT headphones, and the video played through them without stopping.

Seriously, I don't get it. What doesn't work for you that would work better on Windows? I have absolutely no experience of windows (the last version I used somewhat regularly was 98SE).

For example, doing a system upgrade and not being able to boot afterwards. Never happened to me on a Mac in over 20 years of having one. Windows will update at terrible times while I'm in the middle of something but will do it successfully at least. Ubuntu let me down with a totally standard configuration.

Issues with things like dual monitors on Linux laptops and other peripherals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com