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Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

Windows is easily the best desktop os right now. Linux requires a vast amount of intricate knowledge, constant troubleshooting, just to keep your system running. There is a way to not do this, but it needs you to never update the system at all. And macos is not even available for people to install on their pc, so that's not an option.

My windows PC stays updated without issues, never faced any strange issues with audio, graphics, nothing. My games run the best they can on my hardware, I don't have to worry about tinkering with stuff. What's not to like?

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I feel like I live in a parallel universe. I have never, after two years managed to get Bluetooth audio working on my windows computer. Shit randomly breaks and I have to follow 2-hours of steps to reinstall some inane driver that should have come with the OS every couple of months. Joining a WiFi is a small adventure. This is a branded, prebuilt, premium PC by the way. Every windows machine I’ve had has easily been the most unstable piece of shit, I have no idea if it requires special knowledge to use correctly, but I don’t deviate from defaults, don’t do anything weird and it still never works properly.

The amount of technical knowledge and upkeep required to keep a windows PC working is insane.

Hi there. So nice of you to join us from 20 years ago. Linux these days runs quite well and has no driver issues.

Meanwhile my Windows machine randomly hangs every 30 minutes or so while it spins the hard drive for no reason at all.

I too like Windows and use it as my daily OS everywhere, but I am firmly against ever upgrading to Windows 11 and, with each update, Windows 10 gets more unpleasantly like 11.

Recently I tried to open an image, and the Windows Store asked me to pay 99 cents for the codec. Actually, for a video codec pack - it showed me as already having the codec pack for exactly these images installed. But they wouldn't open, only the Windows Store appeared asking me to pay 99 cents. Adding insult to injury, it seems that anyone who did this earlier than a couple of years ago got the pack for free - I was only asked to pay for it because I hadn't secured my rights at the time, apparently. Even though the Windows store verly clearly indicates that I already had the image codec installed.

[even more fun, the Windows store had additional prominent listings for what appeared to be these codecs, for free, but were very transparently third party spyware and not really the codecs at all.]

Windows 11 vs 10 feels in many ways analogous to me to Windows ME vs Windows 2000, at least in terms of user-hostility.

I have 3 Linux PCs, including a Steam Deck, and 2 out of 3 basically require zero specialized knowledge and just work. One of them has been that way for like a decade and circa every 3 years I just install a new OS to update things and it takes all of like 10 minutes. Steam Deck takes care of itself so far. Leaving the one PITA early model Ryzen, which doesn't really take intricate technical knowledge, but has an annoying bug or issue with boot where sometimes you have to boot it a couple times for the graphics output to initialize cleanly. I also have a laptop with Linux, and it has a swollen battery, which is probably my biggest gripe, but I'm not sure of the degree I can or can't blame Linux for that - it seems like it started when the laptop fell about 3 feet to a hard floor.

But yeah, no special technical knowledge required.

I had my barely computer-literate mother using Linux (Xubuntu or Mint) for about 10 years. When I initially installed it, I expected a call to 'put everything back the way it was', but it never happened. She managed to keep it updated, and nothing ever broke, unlike with Windows.

> Linux requires a vast amount of intricate knowledge, constant troubleshooting, just to keep your system running.

This is tangibly false.

I installed Ubuntu Mate on a really old laptop and gave it to my mom that needed a computer for email/YouTube/browsing.

It worked like a charm for years until the machine finally stopped working beyond repair that was economically viable.

> My games run the best they can on my hardware, I don't have to worry about tinkering with stuff.

Funny you say that - for some older games, I find it easier to run on Linux nowadays that it was to run on Windows and I needed to do some trial-and-error with compatibility modes.

I think that is maybe the case where you use more technical applications that require elaborate environment setups… but I have a classroom of 20 Linux laptops running on Ubuntu LTS and have had years of automatic updates with zero issues, and more than a decade on some of my backend systems which have been cloned through several hardware iterations.

YMMV?

Have you used linux in the last 10-12 years? Install linux mint. It's literally point and click. The only difference between it an windows is that it asks you to confirm the updates it installs, and lets you know if the updates have changed the information the software collects from you or has access to.

You are wildly out of date.

> My windows PC stays updated without issues, never faced any strange issues with audio, graphics, nothing.

On the other hand, after an automatic Windows update to my PC, my Bose wireless headphones were permanently unable to connect to it. They continued to work flawlessly with various smartphones.

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