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Comment by ezst | Hacker News Reader

> those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates

Unless you insist on running a server distro that's consistently obsolete by design (and if the notion of GPU comes into picture, that definitely shouldn't be the case), it shouldn't matter in practice. Every reputable desktop distro has a kernel/mesa stack that's up to date.

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It still takes a few years for other people to find and patch the bugs.

~3 year old hardware seems to be optimal for linux in my experience. Ideally a thinkpad or something lots of linux devs have.

Buy newer and you'll be constantly finding bugs and having to apply workarounds, custom kernel builds, custom config lines, etc. just to make basic features work like the ability to adjust screen brightness.

Don't buy anything ARM or requiring a custom bootloader - thats a constant battle with custom builds needed of nearly everything.

Yes, but the debugging process is the most fun part for me.

As they say, there are people whose hobby is 'cars' and there are ones whose is 'driving cars'

I thought this too when I was 18. Now I'm 41 and too tired for that.

There's still a real amount of time between someone creating a patch and it going in to a final release of the kernel and then coming out even to rolling release distros. It's not years like debian but it's much longer than when consumers first get their hands on the hardware.

I would also add don't use an LTS variant (or anything based on an LTS variant) of those desktop distros

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