Comment by batou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by batou | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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