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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Yes, spend your time maintaining a Linux distro on the desktop instead. Everytime it breaks, you won't have time to surf any toxic forums.

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There's a lot of things to pick at desktop Linux for, but maintenance is not one of them, especially not on a mainstream fixed-release distro like Ubuntu. Once you're set up, you're good to go, and you have full control over what you want to change.

Until what you seek is not in the package manager or there is an old version that is not solving your specific issue. I use Arch btw.

I also use Arch btw, pretty much exclusively for over a decade. Rolling release has that maintenance cost, though. It's way lower than people make it out to be, but it's still there.

That's not exactly the whole truth though. There are tons of issues with desktop Linux lurking in the background, waiting to bite you. Even something as simple as changing one your monitors might land you in deep trouble, or a printer that somehow doesn't work.

Of course, but that's true of everything you can use. Linux has the same excellent printer stack as macOS. Never had any issues with monitors.

I think the biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, the availability and simplicity of documentation is way worse than Windows/Mac for the most part. The upside is that sometimes the level of access you have to bits and pieces lets you fix stuff that wouldn't be possible on other platforms. For the average user that's pretty irrelevant, though.

I don't really buy the general concept that Linux is boobytrapped any more than other OSes.

Hahahahaha. Every time it breaks, you go searching for help and end up reading either holy war about this or that technical detail or a dick-measuring contest.

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