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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Consider Linux on the desktop vs OS X or even Windows. Sure, I use and sorta like it, but I don’t think I could keep a straight face if I tried to tell you it was higher quality.

I'd honestly want someone to elaborate on this.

Personally, after spending lots of time with GNU/Linux and BSD, I find it physically painful to use Windows. Even with the existence of alternative DEs, third-party package managers and whatnot, your entire perception of what an OS should be simply changes after being exposed to the Unix way and you never really go back.

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For context, my normal desktop environment is wmii running on Linux. I also find Windows physically painful. The problem is that the reason this works for me is that I'm able and willing to put up with an awful lot of bullshit and have a reasonably good ability to debug things when they're not working properly.

I pretty much agree with your description of what it's like to run Linux. However, I don't see how that makes Windows or OS X better than Linux.

With Windows, you have to put up with at least as much BS, if not more, and whether or not you can debug things is irrelevant because the system is opaque. At least in Linux there are plain text configuration files if the worst comes to the worst.

With OS X, things work fine as long as you don't try to do anything with it that Apple didn't explicitly design for. As soon as you try to color outside those lines, it's at least as much BS as Linux, and while the configuration files are technically text files, they're not plain text, they're XML (PList files), which means that you end up having to use customized tools to hack on them instead of a plain text editor. So debugging things is not as easy as on Linux, although it's still a lot easier than on Windows.

I also find Windows physically painful. With Nuget, third-party devs have started addressing the worst part of using Windows, which is package management, but it's still nothing like using apt or aptitude.

Furthermore, I rarely have to put up with debugging strange Linux problems. I use Linux Mint with Mate and it just works 99.9% of the time. The technology behind Mate is the old Gnome 2 environment, so it's very battle-worn.

I have to wonder what distro all the people complaining of strange Linux desktop bugs are using. Yeah, they happen, but are increasingly uncommon when using non-beta software (like Debian Wheezy or an Ubuntu or Ubuntu LTS release).

I can elaborate a little. (This feels like pointless stirring, because even "Linux desktop software" is a vague topic where people can point to things linux does better which are unrelated to my activities, as a windows home user (not yet a tech professional like most of HN) occasionally checking over the years to see if I can recreate windows life on a $0 OS) Four or five years back, I was trying linux torrent clients and got round to deluge. I thought "Wow.. the UI layout and column choices, equal to utorrent.. the options... almost as comprehensive as utorrent, equally coherent... okay this big torrent is slow to load and there's the occasional crash, but apart from that this is as good as windows software". So torrenting was covered. Unfortunely, music playing, media playing, etc weren't. And built-in distro wares (eg abiword, ristretto) only serve as reminders that you're in windows minus. (In fairness, they might technically do everything wordpad and windows photo viewer do, while feeling less slick because the OS is behind in ergonomics). But thats me, waiting for a lucky free windows clone whether thats fair or not.

I find OSX to at least be a tolerable platform once I found out about the existence of homebrew, but as a development platform for anything other then platform-specific software, linux is peerless and I recommend it as a superior experience.

If your goal, on the other hand, is to browse web pages, edit documents via wysiwyg interfaces, and maybe play some games, there really is nothing wrong from a UX perspective about Windows or OSX, and at least some minor problems with linux.

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