Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

You practically described how I feel every time I run into an issue on windows and have to resort to editing undocumented registry keys.

View on HN

And that happens how often? Once a year? On Linux, that’s more like one a day. Once a week if you’re lucky.

I have no idea what you are talking about, I've used fedora for over a year now and aside from some tweaking, which I explicitly did myself, I've never had to go into some weird configs to change anything.

It just works

Can you elaborate on what exactly you're doing with Linux that's causing that? I use Arch daily (programming, gaming, web browsing, etc), and the last time I had to do anything more complicated than `sudo pacman -Syu` to configure my system was over a year ago.

Can you be specific? I like to tinker with my config so am not the comparison point, but my partner, two young daughters and my mother are all on Linux and neither do I help them, nor do they use the terminal.

My mother switched to Linux several years ago and the amount of questions I receive are less than when she used Windows, mainly because if she encounters issues it's much easier for her to find a solution herself.

Linux is great for grandmas and linux junkies.

If all you do is check email and watch youtube, it works excellent. Its when you are someone in the middle that it becomes a huge PITA.

Exactly. I’m someone who can fix his broken Linux install because the driver update broke something again or because the display scaling is fucked again or because the game won’t launch on Steam or because wayland crashed again or because the application is missing some weird dependency, but I really, really don’t want to. I want to use my computer to do my work. I don’t want to work on my computer.

I'd agree with that, my sense is there would be a lot of benefit from adding GUIs that bridge the gap and show what they're doing. So instead of firing up a text editor to reach into the depths of /etc or googling the huge breadth of guides that essentially have "copy this into the terminal and pipe into grep" to get information sometimes without providing context. Another aspect to this is setting up guardrails on what is being done, and feedback on limits, which could increase confidence in using the system instead of treating it as something that will shatter at the slightest wrong touch or an appliance.

I think honestly PEBCAK.

I use an AMD GPU. When I installed windows, windows kept insisting to downgrade my drivers. I looked it up and the official solution on Microsoft was a regedit to disable auto updates for GPU drivers.

This actually happens pretty often when I’m using windows as a power user.

On Linux, I’ve setup endeavourOS once (and by setup I mean installed it, and then installed Flatpak for the rest of my applications). I run yay every once in a while and everything works.

Meh if you’re not picky about the way your desktop looks/acts then you can install it and run __aslongas__ linux has the software you need. If you use office/play games all day long linux probably isn’t for you because it simply doesn’t have the the software you want to run which is the most important thing for people. That isn’t the fault of linux it’s just a market fact. Linux has everything I need and 80-90% of the games I play install easily via steam. I mean I know I’m giving up a little, but it’s just games. I prefer to have a stable system that isn’t spying on me 24/7 and trying to insert ads between myself and my very prodigious computer time.

Or worse, the knobs don't exist because Daddy knows what's best for you, and you can't have the source to implement those knobs yourself either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com