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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I love Linux, but oh my God it is so unstable for me. Updates crash things all the time. The whole Nvidia driver takes me days to sort out each time. Depending on segment, commercial software tends to be less available. You also need to know just so much low level stuff just to keep going. Wayland vs X, display managers, grub config... Too much for me.

Linux has many redeeming features but it can be a full time job just to keep it running. By contrast, Mac comes in one size and configurability is limited, but out of the box it just works.

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Weird, I've been using Linux since 1993 in one way or another, first together with OS/2, from 1996 exclusively and have not had any stability problems in the last decade or 2. I use somewhat older hardware - Thinkpad P50 and T42p, "late 2009" 27" iMac, DL380G7 under the stairs, a bunch of Core2Duo HP laptops plus a ragtag assembly of Raspberry Pi's - which may help but still... on the P50 I can switch between nVidia and the built-in Intel GPU without problems, on the iMac the Radeon driver works just fine, it works on the T42p as well but that thing is just too slow to make it worth the effort but it just has such a good screen and keyboard that I prefer to use it over more modern machines.

Linux-related maintenance time on all these machines is measured in minutes: sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade, wait a few seconds (gigabit fibre helps here), look through the list of updates, check that it doesn't want to remove something important on those machines which run Sid ("Debian unstable" - this problem does not occur on stable distributions) and let it rip. That's it.

Maybe try a different distribution? I'm using mostly Debian, there are a few machines running Mint, the Raspberries run whatever I happen to experiment with. On the server I'm running Proxmox with a flock of containers running Debian and a few VMs for things-not-Linux. Here, too, I have none of the problems you describe.

Try Debian?

I have only ever installed Ubuntu myself, on the (misguided?) hope that it's the easiest one to manage. Maybe that's where I'm going wrong.

The solution to that is using hardware that does not depend on proprietary drivers. If the kernel just supports your hardware out of the box, things get a lot easier.

I've been using Manjaro with a cheap Samsung laptop with an integrated Intel iris GPU for the last two years. Performance is not amazing but very usable. I hear AMD drivers are pretty OK and that's probably what I'd get if I needed more performance on Linux. The whole deal with Nivia sounds like it's just not a great experience. Manjaro is an Arch linux derivative so you need to be pretty hands on to fix things once in a while. That goes without saying.

Though I must say, I don't seem to have a need to fix a lot of things lately and I think the Arch approach of not trying to bend a lot of packages their way and just compiling them as is while keeping on top of upstream improvements, optimizations, etc. is doing a lot of good. Keeps things simple. If things break, they usually get fixed pretty rapidly too. The package manager actually takes btrfs snapshots when it runs. So, that makes trying out new stuff pretty safe.

Mostly stuff just works on Manjaro. Stability has been fine for me. Manjaro defaulted to Wayland when I installed it and I did not have to fix anything to get that working. Just worked out of the box. I had some issues with the Intel sound driver that seem to have resolved itself with kernel updates. Bluetooth is a bit of a mess on Linux sadly. Just very flaky. So, I tend to rely less on that.

I use snap (mostly) and flatpak for running all the usual suspects in terms of electron apps for various video call tools. Steam works great on Manjaro (the steam deck of course uses Arch Linux as well), and I use that for some light gaming on the laptop. And Darktable, which I use for photo editing. The latter two are of course what I'd like a faster GPU for.

I also have a mac for work and it's nice and fast. And while the M1 has a great GPU, a lot of the older Intel macbooks had even slower intel GPUs than my Samsung. And of course while the M1 GPU is fast, you can forget about running most Steam games on it. Darktable works on it but without hardware acceleration. So, there's that.

Yeah exactly! Especially the whole Wayland and Snap experience. It seems like it is not quite there - I understand the benefits but just not right there.

could you describe a bit what you do that takes days to sort out nvidia driver?

I recently set up two boxes with Ubuntu 20.04 . Both were on the Ubuntu list of supported hardware. Power on - it works. Install updates and restart - black screen. Ok not to panic, just do the usual: google random commands on the Internet and type them in. Ok, boot Linux in nosplash mode - fine, that works. Reinstall Nvidia drivers - whole box goes to shit and the only thing that does anything is reinstalling the distro from scratch.

Tried this again for good measure just in case, but unsurprisingly with the same effect.

Many gray hairs later, it turns out the system update installs a new kernel which has a bug to do with Nvidia drivers causing the whole thing to crash and burn. So if I downgrade the kernel (is that even a good idea?) and install Nvidia drivers there, it's ok. Some more random-commands-from-internet and this is done. Nvidia drivers installed, computer works.

Now I'll "just" install MATE instead of the default desktop env which I dislike. Some warnings about display manager..? Hmm let's see what happens in a mo. Install complete, reboot, machine is fucked again.

I'm getting desperate now, for a week I did nothing but type various cryptic commands, prepending sudo if they didn't work. I mean, I'm a decent Linux user, but I don't know what the lshw command I just typed in does. But never mind. On an Estonian Linux forum I find someone who has the same issue, and has a fix: boot in safe mode, get a terminal, disable some obscure MATE option via cli, then reboot. Yes! That worked - but why..? I breathe a sigh of relief and think fondly of my Mac at home.

There are or course the Nouveau drivers, but they get my PC hot if I wiggle.the mouse too much so that's not an option.

If it happened once, maybe I was unlucky, but happened on two different boxes in the span of months from each other.

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