Comment by adambatkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adambatkin | Hacker News Reader

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You missed the rest of the paragraph though: "If you’ve used them, you know that they’re not as nice as the applications available in macOS and Windows."

I used Thunderbird for about 10 years on my Mac laptop and every time I tried to switch to Apple Mail (or anything else) I quickly switched back. But the truth is, I have used Linux on my primary desktop PC for about 15 years now and can honestly say that it is a very pleasant experience.

I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are long gone.

As a software developer and general techie, I believe that Free Software is important for my profession and for the public at large. For me, even if Linux was less convenient (which it is not - today anyway...it was more challenging, say, a decade ago) I would use it because I have serious concerns some of how Apple and Microsoft treat developers and the Free Software movement.

> I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are long gone.

Downloaded a .docx template from Hubspot recently, LibreOffice could not even begin to open it correctly, the layout was screwed up all over the place.

Using this template probably saved us 20 hours of work. So the only reasonable solution here was to set up a Windows VM, sign up for Office, and use Word to edit the template.

It's very frustrating when people say things like "those days are long gone" and dismiss issues like this as mere "inconveniences" when they are not and we, while being devoted Linux users, are still facing these challenges.

Yep. LibreOffice works... except when it doesn't. Similarly, getting Ubuntu 16's AMD drivers to work well is a clusterfuck and a half.

Linux fits 99% of my use cases, and the other 1% is unbelievably frustrating.

Bought a new laptoo with AMD APU and Radeon Graphics.Installed Ubuntu 16.04. Even though I'm using the default open source driver, there doesn't seem to be any issues for general use. Had to struggle to get the wifi driver working properly though.

So yeah, I agree with you on the 99%-1% part.

What's really infuriating is that I seem to be the only one with this issue. Dual-monitor setup, computer will completely freeze and refuse to boot if I disconnect a monitor. It will hang half the time that I start up. Opening any graphically intensive app (VLC, games, Youtube videos, opening up the Dash, etc) will cause massive tearing. And there is nothing on the Internet about it.

I'm staying on 15.10 until they come out with something better.

Drivers are hard on windows too. As a non-dotnet developer windows is frustrating with 99% of use cases too.

Haven't Mozilla gave up on Thunderbird though?

Not yet. They're still in the process of moving it to a community run project.

There's always Icedove, which gets updates from Debian.

Debian isn't doing any independent development on icedove, are they? I think if thunderbird development stops so will icedove's.

https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove

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