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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

I love my Linux Mint. It's a breeze to install, runs on older hardware (old laptops my kids are using), and can do basically everything any other OS can do.

WTF are people still doing with this Windows thing? Especially here on HN, I expect everyone ditched that shit OS with shit browser a long time ago already.

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We set up now 14 years old laptop for my parents who hardly used anything like that, total tech newbie level.... With Ubuntu 14, it was running with minimal maintenance since then, recently upgraded it to 21 because repos were too outdated to install chrome that worked with JS on weather forecast site they visited regularly. Nearly 0 problems with the upgrades except it took half a day to download and install.

Put SSD in it, it's flying, parents can tell the difference. I set up one way SSH via tailscale to it so I can install updates and fix things when I'm not at their place lol. Going to keep this laptop running as long as it refuses to die.

> WTF are people still doing with this Windows thing?

Many are forced by their bosses ignorance, possibly fueled by corporate partnerships with Microsoft which implies the use of Windows and related technologies. Others were sucked in because they saw WSL and VSC as a good thing while those are actually the weapons created with the intent of taking away users and developers from the real Linux. Other non power users mainly because of non technical media and press not giving a damn about products not advertised by corporations, and objectively because if something goes wrong on their Linux PC, not everyone has a Linux kid around to solve the problem.

Installing and maintaining linux (when it breaks with a silly update snafu) is too costly for many capable people. Particularly if you have a hybrid card.

Some others (the majority) are not capable of installing or maintaining it.

If you can't install Linux nowadays, you can't install Windows either. And if you can't maintain Linux, you can't maintain Windows either.

I personally don't understand what "maintaining linux" is. I have a dock icon that says "update available", and then I click "update", and it runs the updates. Never had any problems with that (Linux Mint).

On Windows, each application has their own update schemes, and it can all go wrong there. And the updates of Windows, what a pain! All the "don't shut down your system now" kind of things... horrible.

This is not the olden days of Linux anymore you know, it's just all super user friendly. I would say more user friendly than Windows.

Try to do a major Windows upgrade, and compare that to a major version update of Linux.

I would have agreed till recently. I ran Manjaro without a hitch for a long stretch of time, maybe 7 years. Then one day the hybrid laptop would not recognize the external monitor. I spent quite a bit of time debugging it, and finally concluded I was done with Manjaro. I entered a distro jump journey I hadn't done since... forever. And after about 2 days of fulltime work (more or less) sacrificed to testing distros, I realized nothing would prevent problems like this one from appearing again. I cannot waste days without my main machine being operational.

I bought a desktop, and forgot about that laptop.

But my trust in linux got dented there. I'm happy you have had a good run, I did too. The risk is too high for me to jump into 'debugging linux problems' mode at a random time. I cannot afford the disruption and downtime.

Outside the HN bubble, Windows is still used everywhere. Your kids probably use it at school.

> Especially here on HN, I expect everyone ditched that shit OS with shit browser a long time ago already.

It is not the employee who usually decides the OS in a corporate environment.

It really depends if your corporate environment is toxic or not.

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