Hacker News Reader

Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Linux has always been like this, breaking things with updates. Linux was ahead of commercial companies, but they caught up with it.

View on HN

Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.

Linux is very much "pick your poison"

Run Debian Stable and it basically doesn't happen - only updates are actual security ones.

Run any rolling distro and you basically accept "with newest version comes the newest bugs"

And there is a whole bunch of distros between those extremes ,depending on how new you need your software to be (that being said, Debian Testing hits nice mix between "new enough" and "someone actually tested stuff before publishing").

Not only that, but compared to Windows 10, any Linux distro has objectively more bugs. Things like bluetooth not working, GPU-related failures, update issues, all the classics. While the current status of Linux is amazing, I still cannot recommend it to a non-tech person because I know something will fail at some point and then it's going to be my problem.

Windows has tons of problem, but you don’t see them. That is, you see the problems, but attribute them to bad hardware. It works like this:

Headset does not work on Linux: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from Linux!”

Headset does not work on Windows: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from these headphones!”

(Re-post from 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32541772>)

But invariably, the hardware does work on Windows. I can't remember the last time I had that problem.

I can, just recently Windows update installed a firmware update to my network card (without asking) and made it unusable on both Windows and Linux. I had to run a manufacturer tool to get the network adapter to work again.

Intel dropped support for older WiFi chips in the newer drivers some time ago.

After successfully installing Windows 11 and connecting to a WiFi network, Windows automatically upgraded all drivers, which resulted in WiFi not being able to detect some WiFi networks.

Solution was to manually downgrade to an older Intel driver, but figuring out the root cause took quite a while.

I can.

Last Friday I went to the office and my 5 yo fully intel win11 laptop only detected the full resolution of my external screen if it was connected during boot. Unplug it or even just let it sleep when going to the bathroom, and I’d return to a blurry mess of an image. Sometimes, if there’s a driver update, it can also fix the issue until the next time the screen turns off. This used to work somewhat reliably before.

It also refuses to connect to my Shure and Sony BT headphones. It sees them, says it’s connected, then immediately says it’s disconnected. The BT keyboard works fine. No issue whatsoever under Linux, so the hardware works fine.

YMMV today I literally lost all sound in the middle of an MS teams meeting on my win11 works laptop. When opening the mixer, I could see the little vumeter when sound should have been played. Unplugged the trs cable to my amp, sound would not play from the external speaker, connected my bluetooth headset, nothing (still that vumeter moving when playing random youtube videos to test), tried with cabled headphones, selecting thw default devices manually, different apps, nope, not any better.

In the end I rebooted and sound was working again. Something related to sound (driver, subsystem) had probably crashed randomly.

It was the third time I lost sound in the last 2 months. That is not counting the many windows updates that fail randomly with obscure codes, the randomly undetected monitors, windows Apps that randomly change my selected monitors after I lock and unlock my session and a number of other bugs I encountered in the last 6 months

This never happened in the last 6 years I had been making videocalls with MS Teams on Linux. Only issues I had back then was Teams not always showing new plugged/connected audio devices but this also happens frequently on windows so I fault MS Teams, not the OS in this case.

I won't say Linux never has bugs but statistically it seems to me that on well supported laptops (thinkpads), Linux is much more reliable than windows.

YMMV, I have 2 headsets I've never been able to make working reliably under windows 10 and 11. Cheap stuff, but they are are flawless under linux and with my phone on android. Not to say there are no issue on Linux, but these days it's way better than 15 years ago.

Use better distros. I haven’t had a broken workstation since 2014 or so.

Which is that Linux desktop distro that never has issues?

I've been running Arch (on my desktop and servers) for over a decade, and never had issues. Just read their homepage before upgrading.

The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.

Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.

Debian Stable.

A recent HN submission has 300 comments, many talking about the stability about various distributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095585

I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.

Nothing beats the stale, pragmatic platitude of Slackware.

I miss running Slackware, if for no other reason that the weird look you get. For a decade I was running Slackware and a weird "package manager"(1). It was an incredible cool learning environment, but people though it was pretty strange.

1) https://web.archive.org/web/20040730204123/http://pack.sunsi...

I had a colleague once that was an absolute anthropomorphic distro. This man was Linux personified, and he literally walked around town with a Slackware live CD at all times. This man refused to use any other operating system, or any other programming language outside D or Erlang. He was pretty fun.

You can still use it. In fact it has never been easier because flatpak (available as a slackbuild) allows you to easily install apps you would have had to compile yourself many years ago.

I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.

IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.

I've never had issues with Debian based distros.

My desktop Debian was installed in 2008. I just upgraded it every major release. I am running on Testing so I had some very minor issues (mostly related to proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but even that got better), but at same time my NAS ran on Stable and it was problem-free.

In my case it is Fedora, only problem I had in 10 years was an nvidia driver issue after one uodate on a pro laptop I didn't choose. The only thing I had to do was reboot to the previous kernel and use that n-1 kernel for a few days until the next kernel update.

All my personal computers using intel and amd graphic cards have been faultless using same distro for the last decade.

This is 2000s era FUD.

Yeah, exactly. We all know that Linux removed all bugs and made themselves bug-proof in the 2010s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com