Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldWideWayne | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion life's too short to use free tools over high-quality tools. I'd rather spend a small amount of time fixing problems with Windows than spend a huge amount of time trying to make Linux a usable desktop.

I am already using Linux on servers and smart phones (but I won't call it GNU/Linux, sorry). If there is ever a decent desktop GUI for Linux, I'll try that out but if I still like Windows better then I'll continue using that.

I'm positive that most people here would agree if my post said "OS X" instead of "Windows".

View on HN

There's no shortage of choice for desktop environments on Linux. If you're looking for a system that's completely user-friendly from the top down, look at Elementary OS. I personally use KDE on Debian, Gnome on Arch, etc. and I haven't had any problems making them usable desktops.

This has to be the most pretentious crap I've read in a long time.

My grandmother could use Ubuntu, and wine makes cross platforming with windows stuff (mostly) seamless. Unless all you use is enterprisey crap or play AAA titles from bad companies then chances are with a week of practice you will be right at home with Linux. No one is asking you install slackware with xmonad on your first go.

Even if you do play AAA titles like battlefield 4, Wine and/or a well emulated windows machine will do you wonders.

Windows is objectively worse than both OSX and Linux in more ways that I care to enumerate here. Unless you have a specific reason to be on it, you're missing out on better security and performance.

P.S. No one calls it GNU/Linux except RMS fanboys. Quit your pretentious holier-than-thou mocking.

I dunno.

I tried using Eclipse on Ubuntu Linux and some how Ubuntu stuck in gimpy scrollbars that almost worked.

I was really impressed with the first betas of KDE, like wow, a good desktop was possible on Linux. However, since then things have just gotten worse. What you expect to have happen on Linux is that the font metrics are all screwed up and there are just zillions of things wrong with the UI that never get fixed or get substituted with other problems.

Confront Linuxers with this, and they sound like Scientologists, they completely deny there is a problem... And that is the problem. If Linux hardcores would admit the GUI sucks, maybe somebody ould try to fix it.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted for sharing your experience.

My experience (as a 10+ year Linux user) is similar. As a workstation/desktop OS, it's unbearable how many things break on a regular basis. My Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS, mind you) installation has constant issues with the update manager crashing. This is on a pretty lightly-tweaked 3-month old setup. In order to get dual monitors to work, I had to plug in one to the motherboard's DVI input, and the other to the dedicated GPU's (AMD) DisplayPort input. And I can't for the life of me get the color profiles to match on both displays, nor to fix issues with screen tearing (also inconsistent on both displays). There are many more issues like this that pile on and on, but these are just two I remember from very recent experience. The fact that this happens on what is supposed to be the best Linux has to offer to the mainstream consumer (I'm judging by Ubuntu's mainstream popularity here) is just terrible.

However, you can't beat Linux as far as the developer environment goes. I live in zsh, Git, Vim/Emacs, Python, Docker, and friends. I'm countless times more productive and trouble-free as a developer in Linux than I would be by using native Windows tools (unless I was a .NET developer I guess). In fact, the times I've tried to replicate my workflow on Windows, it's usually with MSYS2 and installing everything I use in Linux.

Anyways, just my experience. The fact is every OS has its pros and cons. Windows offers by far the better consumer experience, while Linux does the same for developers.

Usually I just let the haters hate, but...

(1) The downvoting is close to the root of the problem here.

A long time ago there were a lot of people in the U.S. that would never buy a foreign car. As a result, American cars did not have to compete on price and quality and the carmakers grew fat. Slowly the customers died off or got sick of the abuse, and even before the 2008 crisis even the rental car companies were starting to buy ricers. Police departments are the one institution that still buys American cars, but our local sheriffs department did trial Hondas for undercover work because after 2008 it seemed possible American cars would disappear from the market.

Today there are lots of people who would never buy an American car so that's how it goes.

By lathering vitriol over anyone who says the emperor's clothes aren't there for the linux desktop, the Linux community continues to fall behind. If you look at Windows and Linux in 1995 vs 2015, you see that Windows has come far ahead and Linux has stayed still or even gone backwards.

(2) So far as a dev environment goes I used to run Linux under Virtualbox all the time, but these days I use Vagrant and for various reasons I am more likely to fire up a Linux box in AWS. If you are working in Java the experience on Windows is not too different from what it is to use Visual Studio and you have the ability to deploy on Linux, which is what I do.

P.S. No one calls it GNU/Linux except RMS fanboys. Quit your pretentious holier-than-thou mocking.

The distinction actually makes sense when talking about, e.g. Android versus GNU/Linux. Android uses the Linux kernel, but it doesn't use GNU tooling. Contrast to what are typically referred to as "Linux distributions", which do use GNU and are thus usefully distinguished as GNU/Linux. The GNU part actually makes a practical difference if you're a hacker.

I don't think the word pretentious means what you think it means. And I wasn't mocking anyone. I simply said that I won't call it that.

But you couldn't be more wrong about Windows being somehow objectively worse than OS X or Linux.

>>Windows is objectively worse than both OSX and Linux in more ways that I care to enumerate here

Well, you can't put "objectively" in front of your opinion and call it a day. That's not how this works. I make my living writing software in C++ and there's nothing,absolutely nothing that gets close to performance ,comfort and tools of Visual Studio. I would also subscribe to the idea that Windows "just works" and any linux installation I had so far also just works, if you disable automatic updates - my only bad experience was always with updates breaking stuff, sometimes leaving me with a terminal input because the gpu driver wouldn't start anymore. But hey, YMMV and I wouldn't want to call one or the other "better".

> Unless all you use is enterprisey crap or play AAA titles from bad companies

Is Photoshop a AAA title or enterprisey crap? How about all other common software that many, normal people use daily that doesn't run under Wine?

That software needs to be replaced with ethical versions.

At the end of the day, the User Experience is always terminal.

Dont know about your grandmother- could be grace hopper, so the granny scale doesent say much.

The reasons why users are there is they sub-conciously disagree with the core philosophy of linux. Not everyone wants to become a comp sience major and learn.

Microsoft is making simple to use software for a society of specialists that accepts that not everyone has to learn everything and still should have the ability to delete his systes-core files. Windows is not here to stay because M$ is good , but because open source never challenged them.

I mean, this site is called "Hacker News". Are you suggesting that a Windows desktop makes for a better development environment than a Linux one? Unless you're targeting specifically Microsoft technologies, and using Microsoft tools to do it, that's not really the case. And I don't know what year you think it is, but in 2015 there are several Linux distros that make for very useable desktop OSes. Also, don't be sorry for not calling Android "GNU/Linux". No one calls it that, because it's not GNU/Linux.

At any rate, even if I have to spend extra time making a Linux box useable when compared to protecting myself on Windows from the prying eyes of Microsoft and god knows who else - and even then just hoping I didn't miss something - I consider it time better spent.

For anything but web development, yes Windows is a vastly superior development platform to Linux.

Can you elaborate? Honestly curious why you think that.

Visual Studio

Because Visual Studio is an order of magnitude better than all else.

Here are a few:

    - Visual Studio.
    - Faster than OS X on same exact hardware.
    - Less bugs than any Linux desktop.
    - Not tied into one brand of overpriced hardware.
    - Runs the majority of popular web browsers.
    - More extendable GUI than OS X.
    - Better window management than OS X.
    - Better keyboard acceleration than OS X.
    - More high-quality dev tools that are free than OS X such as Paint.NET.

> Are you suggesting that a Windows desktop makes for a better development environment than a Linux one?

I've used Windows and Linux since 2006.

I've yet to understand what makes Linux a better development environment. When I have a choice (or barring other factors, like the portably-sized Linux VM I'm using for a personal project, which would probably be much bigger if a WIndows VM), I use Windows for development.

Can you elaborate on what makes Linux a better development environment? Most Linux tools run fine on Windows (though I believe Git is perpetually behind on Windows; I personally prefer Mercurial, for other reasons, which doesn't have that problem), and I think Ruby is also usually behind as well, but I can't really think of anything else. On the other hand, Windows has Visual Studio exclusively. If it's about the command line, Powershell has so far sufficed for development purposes(and sometimes pleased), though I'm much better in bash.

You definitely need to try Gnome 3. Ignore the ramblings against it on the web. Just try it a few weeks. It's awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com