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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, my android phone works reliably for ... I don't know weeks? Months? I only restart for major update. My Ubuntu laptop after a straight install didn't turn off properly, my Ubuntu desktop regularly has chrome crash and fails to wake up the screen. I've had so many issues with basic Linux setups that I absolutely do not want that on my phone. I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable". I don't want zoom that goes absolutely nuts or a webcam that loves to decide some ports aren't OK.

My phone works. I open it and it works. I've never been in a position where trying to fix the underlying OS was required nor could I picture it being something worth time I'd have to trade away from my family.

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I actually don't share your experience. My Linux machines are all more reliable than the best smartphones I've had. Flagship Android phones have been the worst in my experience, most can't make it a week without crashing, not to mention the awful battery life. Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware and don't run things like Chrome.

>I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable".

I have to wonder what exactly you do want then, maybe a parade?

I get it though. You don't want the responsibility of configuring your device. That's fine, most people don't. This next thing you said really gets me though:

> I've never been in a position where trying to fix the underlying OS was required nor could I picture it being something worth time I'd have to trade away from my family.

You've been conditioned to feel helpless here. You've been told you can't fix things so you accept that they're broken and don't think about it. That's one reaction and in this situation it's probably healthier. For me it's like living in a house with crooked picture frames and the police showing up if you try to straiten them. It's a little upsetting for people to act like that's reasonable or ok.

I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weekend searching for solutions is just "idk, give up and reset your entire OS" or "Yea, that bit of hardware just doesn't work with the Linux kernel and never will because some BDFL hates someone who worked at that company".

I'm currently living with SO MANY "crooked picture frames" on all my devices that I've just given up on fixing after spending tens of hours on them and burning my free time on it. I still prefer Linux in general for a lot of the reasons you like it, but just doing basic "I want to install a program to take screenshots" has send me down hours of reading about how window compositing systems work, and why Snap is the devil even though everyone seems to be using it now. If I wasn't single and had better hobbies other than tinkering with config files, I'd have given up months ago.

The trick to not having crooked picture frames on Linux is to throw out components that refuse to be straightened (and you'll run into many of these, especially if you're on a distro pushing snap on you.)

If you pull out everything complex and thoroughly understand what's left you won't run into the "idk just reset the whole OS" situation.

Something Windows/OSX users coming to Linux might not realize is that almost nothing in the userspace is actually necessary because the kernel does almost everything. Especially if you don't want graphics but even if you consider those components necisary then all you need are: The kernel (one file plus some modules), a device manager (the thing that creates nodes in /dev when you plug stuff in, if you use kdrive you don't even need this), a display manager (Xorg, kdrive or Wayland) and some kind of shell and VTE (bash and Xterm for example.)

Literally everything else can be thrown out if you don't want to deal with it. Don't like configuring systemd? I've used just script in the past at /linuxrc. Don't like what Gnome is doing or maybe it's crashing on you? Get rid of it, for the most part it's just aesthetic and the functionality can be replaced by eg fluxbox and PCFMan (and maybe wpa_gui if you like using a GUI to configure your wireless card.) Did the package manager get confused? You can actually get away with removing the database and starting over (although this will replace all the binaries it previously installed and potentially overwrite configs.) Don't be afraid to nuke things.

Oh trust me, I'm aware of that, but if I kicked out every component giving me trouble, I'd have no graphics drivers, or a windowing system, or a bootloader, or a package manager, and at that point I don't have a computer any more.

You don't need a bootloader. If your distro builds Linux with the EFI stub and you don't need an initramfs the EFI firmware can load it directly.

you don't even need a bootloader for an initramfs. you can easily set your initramfs in the cmdline stored in efivars.

And you've both now used a lot of words that I'm not familiar with or particularly interested in learning deeply. I just want my computer to boot up, and maybe dual boot, and every time I try to do anything with GRUB or EFI I almost always nearly brick my computer again.

> Especially if you don't want graphics

Who in 2022 doesn’t “want graphics”?

People who don't want to redo their Xorg config.

A quarter of a century ago, the Xorg config was indeed the major problem of any Linux installation.

Nevertheless, now that is extremely ancient history.

During the last 20 years, I have been using Linux on all my desktops and laptops, without needing any Xorg config.

The only exception is that now I have a couple of lines of Xorg config, which describe how my 3 monitors must be positioned.

Without an Xorg config all would be OK, except that I would have to rearrange the monitors after each power-on.

Of course, there was no need to write those lines of Xorg config, I have just given the command to save the current monitor configuration.

So I cannot imagine what problems still exist nowadays that may require "to redo their Xorg config".

All the problems that I have seen in recent years with Xorg had been caused by either a kernel compiled without some modules needed by the hardware, or by an Xorg server that was installed without some X device drivers needed by the hardware.

With a complete kernel and X server, things should just work.

I want to add that even if I have not seen for many years any problems with Xorg, on a wide variety of hardware, that does not mean that there are no problems with Linux.

In my opinion, the worst hardware problems in Linux are usually with Bluetooth or with audio.

I have not encountered yet hardware problems that could not be solved in Linux (unlike for Windows Enterprise, where I have met unsolvable problems).

Nevertheless, in the case of Bluetooth and of audio, I have encountered frequent cases when the default configurations would not work and when finding how to make the right configuration was highly convoluted and unintuitive, so many hours could be lost with that.

Even so, the difficulties of installing Linux versus Windows, Android or Mac OS are just a myth.

Most users see that Windows and the other commercial operating systems just work, because they have been preinstalled by professionals on their computers.

When you are the professional who must install Windows on a new computer and when that computer happens to be slightly non-standard, which is the case for most embedded computers, installing Windows is usually much more difficult than installing Linux.

I have encountered cases when I had to work a week to succeed in making Windows have an acceptable performance on a computer on which Linux just worked from a live USB stick, without any problems.

I don't WANT to redo my Xorg config, but I don't have much choice if I want Linux to behave like an OS from this century.

Wayland is here without any need to tinker for modern features.

Modern features like screenshots? Wayland is a nightmare of second system syndrome for most users.

Wayland can do screenshots since like forever. Do try it out before you believe every false claim on the internet.

The implication was that screenshots require tinkering although I can see why that wasn't clear.

They really don't.

> but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weekend searching for solutions is just "idk, give up and reset your entire OS"

... On Linux? That's the traditional Windows solution.

I mean, it can be both. The issue is sometime you do an "apt get" and it just doesn't work and the only solution you can find is "idk your apt cache is broken. Clean-slate your entire OS because at some point Apt crashed in a way that was unrecoverable."

I don't get it. Since 2006 I have never had to clean-slate my GNU/Linux installation, on both PCs or phones. I only ever did it out of choice, usually with new hardware being a pretext to try a different distro or installation method - which happened total a handful of times during those 15 years. Debian (and apt) in particular has never made me even worry that I'll have to reinstall my OS, and I'm sort of a power user who isn't afraid to break things, so I should be more likely to actually break it. How can my experience of using GNU/Linux as my only OS for so many years be so drastically different than what you describe?

Honestly, you're probably just better at using it than I am. I'm sure most of my "I guess I'll just clean-slate" moments could be fixed if I put in the time and knew the system better, but I don't, and in the moment where my computer is half-broken and the windowing system has stopped displaying any text on anything, or just not rending half of the icons, I have the choice of either making it a learning opportunity, or deciding I want to use my computer today for sure.

Most folks who use Linux daily are just flat out better at Linux than me at this point. It makes sense - it's a self-selecting group. But that also means half of the instructions you'll find on a blog or forum or SO assume a lot more familiarity with the system than I have. I've been wanting to try a different visual theme on my computer - it seems easy to install a new one, and the repo I found just has a helper script that should install it, but all the docs also just say "and you can just uninstall it if you want", but there's no uninstall script, and I don't understand the install script well enough to know how I'd undo it if something broke. So I just haven't done it.

That makes sense. I do however have an impression that GNU/Linux gives its user much larger surface to actually grasp what's going on, provided that they're actually willing to spend time on it. I have used Windows for quite some time before switching, and I'm also not unfamiliar with macOS, but when I had to troubleshoot some issues on these platforms I often felt like I have reached a dead end despite of me willing to spend time on it. I guess someone who's an expert with those systems wouldn't have such a hard time, but in my experience finding relevant resources to learn what's going on has always been infinitely easier on GNU/Linux, which in turn makes me much happier as a user. Problems always happen regardless of which OS you use, and my computer is a tool that I need to take care of in order to be able to do my work, so an OS that allows troubleshooting to be "a learning opportunity" rather than "a trigger for reinstallation" gains a lot of bonus points in my book.

To be honest, I kinda felt similar with Android (I think it was LineageOS) at one point, which I have used for a few years on a secondary phone. The system shell went into some broken state where it didn't want to display any quick settings at all, and my search for how to debug such issues (or even just some information on where does it store its state) has been completely fruitless. Turns out nobody does that; I'd have to build my own image from scratch and dig into the source code to debug it, and I have decided that it's a bit too much and that I have better things to do. Rebuilding a single .deb package is fine, rebuilding a whole OS - not so much. Now I'm using GNU/Linux on my phone as well, and debugging things like that is much easier and more approachable, with tons of resources around the Web and people who are willing to help.

> I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weekend searching for solutions is just "idk, give up and reset your entire OS"

So a long time ago, I installed Gentoo running GNOME 2.

There was a menu in the topbar labeled with some kind of icon in addition to the text. Probably the GNOME foot.

Anyway, since Gentoo was all about letting you make the customizations you wanted, I thought it would be nice to replace that icon. I had found an icon of the Gentoo fish wearing a wizard hat and I thought that would be appropriate.

So I looked through the documentation for the menu. I found the file where the icon associated with the menu was defined. And I replaced that with a definition pointing to my preferred icon. This did not work. The icon displayed in the name of the menu didn't change.

It's not that there was no effect. If I viewed the menu properties (you know - right click, "properties"...), my fish-wizard icon showed up (in the properties view) as the icon for the menu where I'd tried to put it. It just wasn't displaying in the topbar the way I'd hoped.

I was unable to figure out how to change the icon the menu actually displayed, and had to give up. The documentation was no help. :(

I don’t understand where these problems are coming from. I also needed a program to take screenshots, so I did `apt install flameshot` and it worked great.

Until you try to do that on Fedora. Where Flameshot just doesn't work for reasons. You can install it, but can't actually open it. For reasons I don't know enough about the windowing systems in whatever my flavor of Fedora is using to understand.

I wouldn’t try to use apt on Fedora. But a more serious reply would be to ask what you mean by “windowing systems” (I don’t know much about Fedora). I’ve found that Linux works best if you keep things simple. I use Debian with no “desktop”; just X11 and dwm as a window manager. This gets me a fast and responsive system on modest hardware, with almost all my RAM available to actually use. But aren’t there at least a half-dozen screenshot programs to choose from?

I don't know much about Fedora either, but it's the only distro that seemed to have out of the box support for the laptop components in the laptop I needed to install linux on. My basic understanding of the Flameshot issue is that it assumes you're in Gnome and tries to put the Flameshot button in the top bar, but whatever Fedora uses doesn't have that bar, so it just silently crashes.

The issue is "keeping things simple" requires you to have some pretty serious knowledge of Linux, to the point where it's far from simple to know what the "simple" set of things you need to install in order for your system to work, or to know what components you can't buy if you want to use Linux. As-is, my trackpad on my laptop just sometimes doesn't register clicks, even on the best supported drivers (which I had to install by hand because no distro upstreams them). Also the audio system just doesn't work half of the time either, but I'm used to that on Linux, and literally the official explanation I've seen is "idk it's like that. Just reboot if it can't find any audio devices." No other OS makes me have to check the manufacturer of specific sub-components of my motherboard to know whether they'll work at all.

Helplessness.

>out of the box support for the laptop components

Drivers are going to be part of the kernel. The only thing I would expect to vary by distro is probably the way firmware blobs are packaged (which is just a matter of installing the appropriate firmware blob package or worst case grabbing the blobs from kernel.org.) In general your hardware shouldn't constrain your distro choice outside of very weird hardware or very weird distros (or maybe Nvidia graphics cards but you just shouldn't use those.)

If you're talking about your WiFi, Bluetooth, or possibly your GPU not working OOTB this is almost certainly what you ran into. Not that Fedora is a bad distro although personally I don't like it.

Also switching out the UI is just a package away if you don't like the default. If you want to run, say, FVWM instead literally just `yum install fvwm` and then log out. It should show up in you display manager (and then since it's an X11 WM instead of a Wayland compositor you can just use scrot etc for screenshots.)

>Just reboot to fix audio

Sometimes Pulesaudio can get funky. Do you atleast run `pulseaudio -k` first?

>Trackpad

Yeah the trackpad situation is not great. I don't buy laptops without trackpoint mice partly for that reason and also because the only machine I've ever used where I didn't hate the trackpad was a mac.

>Shopping for motherboards etc.

An easy shortcut for this is to just check the Arch/Gentoo/Debian wiki for the composite hardware you're looking at and see if people have issues with it. Windows and OSX have similar issues if you want to buy hardware separate from the OS.

This was trying to get a Framework laptop running, and there were literally 3 Fedora team devs working on compatibility for it as a priority and stuff still didn't work. I only went to Fedora after I couldn't even get through the setup tools for Manjaro, Ubuntu, Debian, or Pop.

I'd look into swapping out my UI if I had any confidence I knew what was going on and how to revert it. I mostly bricked an Ubuntu install earlier last year trying to get Wayland working on it.

I'm pretty sure it's not pulseaudio, it's Pipewire by default, but I think neither of them works. It's something about the device just not registering correctly on boot for some reason.

I knew what I was in for on trackpads, but it's still not a good system/sign either way.

I'm really unsure I agree with you on Windows having "similar issues" with hardware. As someone who's been building and upgrading the same desktop computer for 20 years with a combination of Windows and various Linux distros running on it, I have literally never had a compatibility issue on Windows that took more than going to the company's website and running an EXE for drivers, and I never once went to check if Windows was compatible with any part I purchased. Meanwhile, I found out that the specific sub-SKU of my Intel CPU just doesn't work with the Linux kernel for some features, so I guess I'm either out hundreds of dollars on a new CPU or I just don't use Linux again on that computer.

I'm to the point where I mostly like Linux for day to day stuff, and I really do understand a lot of the reasons why all of this isn't trivial, but it really gets my ire when people try to contend that Windows has worse usability for most normal use cases. I don't know nearly as much about Linux as you or many others, but I appreciate that I can fix things in ways I couldn't before. That said, the complete "there are no guard rails, the only instructions are a forum post you just have to copy-paste from, and sometimes the answer is just NO" of Linux is really its own universe of pain for anyone who doesn't want to have their computer eating up 1-10 hours a week just to keep it running acceptably.

Don't run frankenDebian and your life will be much easier.

My friend that bought a Framework as well had no trouble putting Debian 11 on it, you just need to add the non-free repo to /etc/apt/sources.list, install the non-free firmware with apt and reboot: https://community.frame.work/t/debian-11-on-the-framework-la...

Wayland also works out of the box on Debian, I have been using it for a few years on a Ryzen laptop without issue.

Fiddling with the OS is a rarity for me. Back when I was a teen I do recall the trouble that was upgrading Ubuntu or getting openSuse running after accidentally filling the disk fully.

Switching to Debian simplified life, I don't invest effort into my OS (eg: opening up a terminal) with any kind of regularity and it simply works, letting me focus on actual work (and video games :D).

I’m not in Gnome, as I mentioned, and Flameshot works perfectly here. I don’t have a top bar.

“No other OS makes me have to check the manufacturer”

Other OSes are sold on hardware that’s designed to work with them. If you want to buy a laptop to run Linux on, first research whether Linux works well on it. There are plenty of machines of all types that Linux works great on.

I bought a Framework, which was specifically intended to work with Linux, and has devs from multiple distros working to stabilize, and I'm still having plenty of issues.

As I said elsewhere, I've been building desktops for most of 20 years with just entirely random parts and had Windows always work completely fine on it, and only get better at it over the years. Linux has gotten better as well, but I still have to be paranoid about every single part and sub-component in the system. My current motherboard's USB-C controller just doesn't work with Linux, it seems, but I'm not about to replace the entire motherboard just for that, and I'm not even sure where I'd go to research such a thing.

I'm in the same boat with a framework and my linux experience.

I don't think you will be able convince a who-needs-graphical-displays and occasionally-run-this-command-a-terminal crowd that this is an issue.

There's technical knowledge, and there's ecosystem knowledge.

To know which applications/libraries are available and suitable for a certain task, and what their individual strengths and weaknesses are, is a very different set of knowledge, and often a vastly underestimated part of experience.

I've been using Linux and other Unix/BSD operating systems since the nineties, and I'm completely lost when it comes to helping out others about App store or Windows store options. I can imagine that it's especially hard in Linux to be missing that sort of ecosystem information, as the installation process often assumes some level of technical proficiency and up-front knowledge already.

For experienced Linux users, the experience of freedom is a lot greater than using Windows, Android or Apple operating systems; but if you're just starting out and all unknowns turn up more unknowns, it might be a pretty frustrating experience. I think you have to choose if you want to learn, or if you're willing to settle with whatever you're given in the Windows, Android and Apple world.

Something to laugh about crooked frames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhj1xhv3rZI

I've been using Linux Mint Cinnamon for years, doing mostly programming, and honestly I've encountered way less issues than with Windows. Maybe it's because I'm using old hardware. I'm very satisfied with the experience as it is by default, not much need for customization or tinkering in my case.

> Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware

I have had home built pcs, custom built ones and have just bought that laptop from a common Linux only supplier. My Dell was much worse.

If it takes more effort than I have spent finding either support, components or experts then it's a bad sign.

Maybe you should just be ever so slightly picker about your Android phones?

> I have to wonder what exactly you do want then, maybe a parade?

Well this just unnecessarily rude, and frankly silly. What I want is a browser that works "well" not that just meets the bare minimum of "yeah it's possible to use".

> You've been conditioned to feel helpless here. You've been told you can't fix things so you accept that they're broken and don't think about it

No. I have told you exactly why.

1. I haven't come across this on my phone

2. I have on other devices and I would much rather spend time with my family now

I have gone through years of tinkering and adjusting xorg config files, wrangling with mythtv, all that kind of thing. It's no longer a trade-off I want to make.

> It's a little upsetting for people to act like that's reasonable or ok.

I think you have invented a false image of me in your head then are feeling upset about that character.

I would agree with you (Pixel 6).

I've found that any problem I have can be solved with something on f-droid / google play and by googling it. This isn't dissimilar to the experience in linux for my headless NAS or VPS to figure out how to run a new service or learning to use borg backup.

Backup photos via SMB share every night if on local wifi/VPN'd home? Sync calendar, contacts with nextcloud via dav? Schedule a copy of my sandboxed work outlook calendar from Nine into a dav calendar so I can share it (read only) with family? Spit tunnel wireguard traffic? All these work without having to root and I'm not spending my evening trying to fix driver issues. I didn't spend an entire evening on these away from family.

I'm not happy giving away the sum total of my experience on this planet to Google but this device just works and it works well. Some conveniences like Android Auto keep me from going to CalyxOS.

I must be one of the lucky few. I've used Linux Mint as my main desktop for about 10 years now with zero problems. I've used LineageOS as my main phone OS for about 5 years now with zero problems.

I run Windows for work and gaming, and run into issues regularly. Default Android/iPhone makes me a bit queasy.

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