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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

> As a side issue, both are crap on the desktop so I'm sitting here on Windows 8.1...

Which just goes to show how we all are different. Windows 8.1 was what pushed me to move my main laptop (also used by wife, etc) to Ubuntu.

It has worked great, and just yesterday I discovered Linux automatically handles (SANE) scanners network-transparently via saned. I had no idea. Connect scanner to server and start scanning applications (including scripts) on the laptop. It just works. With zero configuration. Try that on Windows!

I'm literally finding Linux on the desktop the greatest thing ever these days.

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Linux on the desktop isn't terrible until you hit an edge case to be honest. Typically for me, it's printers and power management.

I have a wireless scanner and printer combo (HP 2450). To set this up on windows, I turned it on, pressed the WiFi button and the WPS button on my router and File -> Print and/or open up Fax and Scan and that's it. Just works. No setup for scanning or printing. On linux, 30 minutes arguing with hplip and the output looks like ass whatever switch you flip and SANE doesn't even see it.

Then there's PM. On my 9-cell Lenovo X201, 8.5 hours on windows 8.1. I managed to nab max 5 hours out of every Linux distro I tried (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS) with powertop tuning. The cruel irony is that CentOS gets better battery life in a VM in Windows than it does on the bare metal.

YMMV as they say but I really can't be arsed with anything that gets in the way of doing stuff these days. Tuning a Linux distro was fun about 10 years ago for me. Not any more.

Funny thing, I've had the opposite experience with Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu.

Printing to my 6 year old Ricoh color laser proved a difficult task, tangling with driver hell. It seemed unnecessary given the printer is equipped with PCL and Postscript emulations, but Windows didn't care about those standards. The only way it would work is with the crappy Ricoh driver forcing the sacrifice of some basic functions.

OTOH under Linux, gutenprint drivers worked even without altering the default settings. Maybe it was easier because I was more familiar with the CUPS setup, nonetheless the difference was noticeable.

I'd concede that newer printers might be easier to configure for Windows vs. Linux or other OS, but it's troublesome that perfectly good equipment becomes "obsolete" when a few years old. In that respect Windows can be a disadvantage.

You are right. Windows is better with newer hardware, Linux is better with older hardware.

I've had nothing but trouble when trying to install Ubuntu on brand-new laptops, but the exact same laptops run Ubuntu perfectly well a couple of years later.

Consumer devices are just targeted for Windows. That is the explanation. I had similar nightmares getting a mainstream brand consumer printer/scanner (Epson I think, but not sure) working wirelessly with Mac OS X. Never succeeded. It's a result of decisions by the manufacturer, not any lack of capability in Linux.

In MANY other ways I find Windows to be a constant, not just edge-case, constraint on my productivity. So I don't use it. To each his own of course.

Disagree. The HP 2540 works fine with the wife's MBP on 10.10. It just appears and you print to it. Same with windows. Same with iOS/AirPrint as well - it just works.

They're $70 in the US / £30 here for an all-in-one scanner, printer, copier combo so this is rock bottom cheap ass hardware and it works flawlessly.

>power management

Are you running TLP? It's easily the best power management tool out there and it's a big reason I'm not switching to a BSD.

I've generally only run with thinkpads, but I find OpenBSDs ACPI to be measurably better than everything else on power management.

I run Gentoo on my Dell Inspiron 5520 and it took only a minimal amount of configuring (holy moly!). The most difficult part was audio and touchpad drivers, which took my google-fu to another level. Otherwise, wow is Gentoo fast if you configure it correctly!

Last year I bought a asus n-550jv with win 8.1 and after a few months started having problems with wifi, the keyboard, bluetooth and a general slowdown. Now eveything I tried only yielded minor results... So at one point I decided to try linux for the first time, I installed Ubuntu 14 and voila! Half my problems were gone, and over the next few months I was able to fix most of the other problems as well. On the other hand, I still havent been able to do anything meaningfull with windows.

I don't see how many people have so many problems with windows. I use a clean install on just about anything and it pretty much always just works and does so for months.

Stay away from anything Broadcom, AMD, Radeon and pick a decent SSD (Samsung 840 pro here) it's bomb proof.

The only playing around you have to do is on hardware that is way newer than the windows version and the network interfaces aren't supported.

So what you're saying is... Windows works fine if you shop hardware from known good vendors and nothing too bleeding edge? That sure sounds like what people said about Linux a decade ago. ;)

Actually it works on anything out of the box but you might have to source some drivers for network cards so you can get to windows update for everything else.

The best bit is on my older X201, it installs all the Lenovo official drivers as part of windows update. You install windows, wait about 15 minutes, then reboot when it tells you to and bam, sorted.

That doesn't sound like Linux a decade ago ;)

It does actually, package managers in linux update all of your drivers along with you programs for more than a decade now...

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