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Comment by jxi | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think Unity is slightly better, but another problem with most Linux distros is that when things break, it's way harder to fix that on Windows, and in my experience they seem to break all that time after even just a month of use.

Yea, I did make the point above that Windows is not easy to use either (heck imo it's worse that Linux now), but people are just used to it, so it's perceived to be easier to use. For your example on Mac though, you simply just drag and drop which is by far the simplest.

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>Yes, I think Unity is slightly better, but another problem with most Linux distros is that when things break, it's way harder to fix that on Windows, and in my experience they seem to break all that time after even just a month of use.

More hand-waving. Don't know what to tell you, I've been using Ubuntu for years and I've never had anything break, certainly not magically on it's own as you seem to be implying. This stinks of FUD.

>For your example on Mac though, you simplyt just drag and drop which is by far the simplest.

Oh come on. The newest version of OS X requires that you ignore a huge security prompt, manually disable GateKeeper!!!, download a DMG, double click the DMG, know that you need to drag that App.app to your /Applications/ folder and then run it... clicking through yet another a security prompt telling you that you downloaded it from the Internet.

The "app store" model that Ubuntu deployed years ago via USC is so popular that it's the model that iOS, Android, WP7, Windows 8, and now even OS X push as their primary app distribution and installation route...

I can't count the number of times I've had to boot to graphics failsafe mode to fix graphics drivers after a kernel update. I've never managed to get my motherboard to output sound correctly in Ubuntu, no how many different variations of installing, purging, and reinstalling packages I do.

Windows in failsafe is a lot more user friendly (safe mode, startup repair, etc.) than Linux's "dump you into a terminal" approach.

You open your comment with acknowledging that X will fallback to VESA and then end it with the FUD that linux "dumps you into a terminal".

DKMS should prevent kernel updates from borking anything, and so far I've handled all kernel updates from 10.04->now with no issues and that includes several custom built and installed kernels too.

Also, I'll even grant that getting the initial setup is hard, (but then again, so is the nightmare of downloading drivers for a laptop that has no ethernet port in Windows).

> the initial setup is hard

Do you see what you're saying here? It means that the proven setup you describe here needs to be attained by the user. This is not something an average user will be able to do and even the tech crowd has many difficulties with it as shown in the other postz here.

And I disagree that it's the same as a clean windows install. See, for a clean install in windows I have a relatively well working to do list: the device manager. Yes I have to download the drivers manually, but IMO the package approach has one fatal flaw when it comes to built-in devices: which one will work for my hardware? If I just try, will removal still work afterwards? Usually it comes down to finding a community tutorial (which are often quite good, I admit). Of course, this difference comes from the fact, that most hardware vendors don't fully support linux. Ubuntu has made lots of progress here in that it tries to install the correct packages itself, but for bleeding edge hardware you're often out of luck.

Here's an idea: How about a webfrontend for that hardware auto configuration, Ubuntu uses? It would map some kind of hardware signature to package name, has some community mode built in as well as the vendor approved configurations (e.g. if distro+vendor mode fails, activate community. which configuration is pulled is being determined by 'votes' (does your sound work now? yes/no).

That already exists.

For Ubuntu?

The problem with Windows's safe mode is that when something is really broken it tends to not boot. So while Linux safe mode is less user friendly it at least works when you really need it.

This is based on my anecdotal experience so can be specific to my software/hardware setups.

You've never had anything in the same Linux distro break after years of use? Seriously? Somehow I find that hard to believe. Even the most skilled Linux users have had things break on them. Just to name a few, PulseAudio used to (maybe still does) have tons of issues such as sound simply not working anymore after a reboot (I had to just uninstall it, so it just used Alsa all the time), package managers get messed up after version upgrades (apt-get vs aptitude) and give you unresolvable dependencies (happens often when libc is upgraded), X window servers get busted all the time too (even just using tmux will mess up your DISPLAY variable sometimes). Google any of these issues, and you'll see tons of people having the same problems. Maybe you're a genius and can fix these problems right away, but not everybody is like you.

You also talked about OSX's new security features. You don't need to do any of that if the App is signed, it's just double click install (though most are drag and drop). For Apps that are less popular, yes you'd have to disable gatekeeper, but that's not much worse than having to add custom PPA's on Linux (those cause a lot of issues too oftentimes).

I'm all for Ubuntu becoming an awesome viable desktop replacement, and it's come a long way, but (for me) there's far too many annoyances for now so I'm sticking to OSX for my main machine. I do think it's probably better than Windows now though.

"Even the most skilled Linux users have had things break on them"

I had Windows giving me more breaking problems than Linux, by far. All my windows machines broke after months of intense work and had to re install them, even win7. The most stable has been my macs through.

"Maybe you're a genius and can fix these problems right away, but not everybody is like you."

Well, I'm not a genius but I have a secret. When I buy a machine I look for good compatibility with Linux inside. It works great. You save lots of work in the future with such simple things. Now it is even simpler to choose hardware that works great with Linux.

I've had these problems with PulseAudio. When I ran Ubuntu 7.04. It was a known bug, that I believe was fixed before 8.04, but perhaps I'm wrong.

Either way, Linux installations don't rot in the same way that Windows installations do - mostly because the Gnome people did not manage to infect the Linux crowd with the "registry" mentality. And partly because NTFS is so much worse than ext3.

The first time I used Ubuntu I loved it, except to fix my desktop resolution I had to google around and edit xorg.conf with a text editor.

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