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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

The control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you’re facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).

It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.

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This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other distros. I haven't had to "go under the hood" on my daily driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7 years.

I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.

Those and other big distros are better in that regard, but they're still not perfect. Depending on one's machine and needs, there can still be pain.

One recent example I experienced is jumping through hoops to get virtualization enabled in Fedora… it takes several steps that are not obvious at all. I understand not having it enabled by default since many won't need it, but there's no reason that can't just be a single CLI command that does it all.

Things like that can be unbelievably annoying and confusing on Windows or Macs, too. Even worse, they can just turn out to be impossible: the company can actively be preventing you from doing the thing that you want to do, refuses to give you enough access to your own system to do the thing you want to do, and/or sells permission to do what you want to do as an upgrade that you have to renew yearly.

These are things that don't happen in Linux. Doing what you want to do might be difficult (depending on how unusual it is), but there's no one actively trying to stop you from doing it for their own purposes (except systemd.)

Also, as an aside, a reason that Windows and Macs might have easy virtualization (I have no idea if they do) is because of how often they're running Linux VMs.

One needs to go a fair ways off the beaten path before they'll start running into trouble like that under macOS and Windows.

For macOS in particular, most trouble that more tinker-y users might encounter disappears if guardrails (immutable system image, etc) are disabled. Virtualization generally "just works" by way of the stock Virtualization.framework and Hypervisor.framework, which virtualization apps like QEMU can then use, but bespoke virtualization like that QEMU also ships with or that built into VirtualBox and VMWare works fine too. No toggles or terminal commands necessary. Linux does get virtualized a lot, but people frequently virtualize Windows and macOS as well.

What exactly did you need to do? All I've ever had to do to get QEMU working properly has been to make sure KVM is enabled in the BIOS (which you have to do on all OSs).

Just run a KVM based Windows VM (via GNOME Boxes, virt-manager, etc. On my Fedora install I had to install the @virtualization meta-package and enable dameons among other things, and the only reason I knew to do that is because I looked it up. Without that Boxes, etc just throws an unhelpful error that doesn’t suggest that more packages or config changes are needed.

I had to enable virtualization features in BIOS too, but that’s entirely separate and not the fault of any Linux distro.

Ah, I guess I might be a little unusual in that I use the QEMU CLI directly. I tried some QEMU GUIs in the past but they were annoying to get working so I just learned the CLI.

There's several distros that are fully usable without ever touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the internet.

> It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired.

'Similar to Windows' System Restore and macOS's Time Machine', the Linux 'Timeshift' tool can be used to do make periodic saves of your OS files & settings. (They can be saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.

Mint program 'Backup Tool' allows users to save and restore files within their home directory (incl. config folder and separately installed apps).

You do have to know what you're doing. A complete OS has a bunch of components that work together. But an out of the box distro hides all that do you end up fiddling with incomplete knowledge.

Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).

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