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Comment by jlvdh | Hacker News Reader

I was using Pop!_OS and really loved it. Feature wise it would be an excellent replacement and I love the idea of running Linux.

However, one day when I tried to update the Nvidia driver it failed and when I tried to revert back I got a bunch of errors. My computer is foremost a tool to me and I don't particularly enjoy nor have time for stuff like fixing drivers.

Despite apple's flaws it gives me something that just works everyday.

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Nvidia has always been a PITA on Linux, whether you're using the open source or proprietary drivers. Decent drivers, documentation, and support for their Linux community has always been somewhere between actively hostile against to barely an afterthought.

Go to any Linux distro subreddit right now and browse for people experiencing stability issues, random hanging, or no video on boot. Sometimes they don't mention it upfront but it almost always turns out they have an Nvidia card.

AMD and Intel GPUs have much better native open source support and (usually!) work out of the box without any effort.

Sometimes I wonder how the Linux distro landscape would have looked if there hadn't been a new distro for a new use case or design choice or disagreement among lead devs? Could we have allocated the resources better at battling with Wi-Fi not working, USB creaking on the turns? Or those would have stayed the way they are, because these mostly come or should come from the OEMs/vendors? Would this be better for them if the onus was not to make it work on hundreds (or is it thousands?) of flavours?

That was my hope, between Slackware 2.0 and around 2010, eventually I got Windows 7 and a laptop that supported virtualization, installed VMWare Workstation, and that was it, my zealot years were gone.

Still got an ASUS netbook though, a market killed by tablets and chrombooks.

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