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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

Linux Airlines

When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do WHAT with the seat?"

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Do you truly and honestly sense software quality as a hallmark of Linux? To me, Linux feels like a bucket of papercuts glued together with ... I don't know - something glueish.. I have tried loving Linux for the past 17 years, but I just can't muster the idealism anymore. I have gone back to Windows 7, which is rock stable.

I have to use Linux because I am an embedded developer, and all my clients want to use something free. Ok. But I develop in Windows because I can get stuff done. I limp along in the Linux environment, mounting sdcards and sticking thumbdrives into USB ports to copy files, which don't mount right unless you do it very carefully and wait for things to time out and take it out and try again ...

Love the simile. I am a human Linux-papercut entity with scars covering every inch of me, from months of struggling to do every single development task from symbolic debugging to editing to mounting storage to finding drivers for old well-supported devices that somehow never got Linux support. But its a living! I make good money papering over Linux's shortcomings for industrial clients. So its got that going for it.

You are comfortable with Windows as a dev environment, and that's fine. But consider that for many of us, it's like the mirror image of what you just said: I find the Windows environment painful to develop with, at least out of the box. Everything about Windows irks me. Linux (Ubuntu in my case, but there are many great distros) works as a dev environment almost out of the box for me. I never have problems mounting USB drives; most tools I use assume Linux by default, and it's usually their Windows version that's more buggy and/or hard to install. I know how to tune everything to my satisfaction, which I wouldn't know how to do with Windows.

Instead, every time I use Windows I get a papercut.

(To get this back on topic: I love and use GIMP, and I particularly love that a Free alternative to Photoshop exists, but I agree it's very complex and its interface is a mess).

Same experience here: in Linux everything I want works by default or I can configure it easily. In Windows I have to jump through a bunch of hoops with third party tools to get there.

I'm a developer though, for most people it doesn't really make a difference. It's just a matter of being used to something. My girlfriend liked Ubuntu a lot for the graphics (she asked me to install it after seeing me use Linux Mint and Debian for a year or so), but eventually switched back to Windows because a single website wouldn't work (some flash player thing, which Adobe stopped supporting) and she's just more used to working with Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Live Mail (or whatever they call it these days), and the general Windows 8.1 workflow.

Same for me with LibreOffice: I'm used to it now and in Microsoft Office (which is admittedly prettier) I have to search for every feature all over again.

I fully agree comfort is often a function of being used to something. I understand your girlfriend and think that, for her, it makes more sense to keep using Windows... for now! Also, MS Office is a killer feature of Windows, for users familiar with it or who must use it for work.

I've taken great pride at every person I've converted since 2010 that don't know Word's Ribbon interface, but can zoom through libreoffice. They use Word and complain. it's like WordPerfect all over again.

I also find Windows to be a painful environment to work in. All of my preferred tools are second-class citizens on Windows: vim, TeX, emacs, GCC, and pretty much anything that uses GTK or X11, really. The lack of a decent tiling WM slows me down considerably. If it weren't for Cygwin, I don't think I could get anything done in Windows.

I'm trying to think of a single thing that Windows has going for it, but I'm at a loss. I haven't had any driver issues on Linux in over 5 years at this point, and I don't play games, so I have literally no reason to use Windows except for the fact that it's what's supported on my employer's laptops.

I think JoeAltmaier’s dev experience is different because he’s an embedded developer. The embedded ecosystem is a disaster area. Proprietary forks of Eclipse, fragile build systems with closed-source modules, strange interfaces that don’t necessarily follow the USB specification properly, and drivers and documentation only for Windows.

I guess he’s also actively hostile to Linux for some reason. Mounting SD cards and USB drives is one thing that Linux is so much better at than Windows, where every USB drive needs its own permanent entries in the Registry. Except when the drive is hosting a modern Microsoft filesystem with its armada of active patents, but then you get a different bad experience than JoeAltmaier was describing.

Thanks for the insight - you are largely right.

I'm critical of Linux because I have wide experience on a variety of OS development environment over a number of releases. I've ported Linux kernel code and Windows network stack components; written desktop, embedded and mobile Windows, Linux and other more exotic OS drivers. I've seen what is available, what level of support for OS/kernel development exists. And I've formed strong opinions.

My current distaste derives from the fragile Ubuntu 14.04 auto-mount system that can get out of sync between the kernel mounts and the desktop representation. Put USB drives in and out too fast, and the desktop can show drives that are gone; can miss drives that are mounted; can even on occasion leave files in device folders that mask the mounted device so you copy Gbs of deployment data and it all goes into a file instead of on the media.

So I've earned every paper cut. They're not imaginary; I'm not so much 'actively hostile' as battle-weary.

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to discredit anything you said. I'm sure your papercuts aren't imaginary! And of course, I know nothing of embedded development, so I trust you're right in that space.

I was just pointing out that my experience (in a different problem space, admittedly!) is the exact opposite: I find Linux way better and more comfortable to work with than Windows.

OK, that’s fair. I don’t trust the Ubuntu automount system (in general, I don’t trust GUIs that can go out of sync with the underlying system, and I always have a terminal open), and I don’t plug and unplug drives quickly.

I've been using Linux (Well only Ubuntu and Fedora to be fair) without any kind of dual boot to Windows set up for like 5 years now. Before that, I always used to have a Windows installation along with the Linux OS. But as I started getting comfortable with Linux, I just didn't feel like booting up Windows. The only thing I miss is the availability and the performance of games on Linux machines. Also used to have driver issues when I started but almost everything works out of the box now. Currently on Ubuntu 16.04.

> Do you truly and honestly sense software quality as a hallmark of Linux?

Yes, but that reflects my experience. I use emacs, st, zsh, SBCL, Python, Go, Debian: the flakiest software I run is Firefox.

Others have a different experience. They use gedit, gnome-terminal, bash, Ubuntu: the most stable software they run is Firefox.

Windows, OTOH, is so bad that it tries to download OS updates as monolithic, multi-GB blobs instead of small package updates. This can be bad when one has insufficient hard drive space for the monolithic blob but plenty of space to install a few packages and update them.

Windows advertises to one. Debian doesn't. Windows tracks one's input. Debian doesn't. Windows is slow on old hardware. Debian isn't. Windows has a fairly crappy interface. Debian doesn't (whether default, or using one of the available replacement DEs/WMs).

> Windows has a fairly crappy interface. Debian doesn't (whether default, or using one of the available replacement DEs/WMs).

You clearly haven't tried using AfterStep ;)

Or FVWM2. or IceWM. or MacOS 9, or Windows XP PlayskoolOS.

But let's keep the comparisons to desktop environments made this decade. Enlightenment 0.17 GNOME3, KDE Plasma 5, etc. if you're using Mint's Debian Edition (and new converts should if they're too scared to try Calculate Linux), you're likely to boot into something relatively pretty the first time.

I didn't take "crappy interface" to mean "aesthetically unpleasing" (not to say that such isn't a valid interpretation or belief).

FVWM and IceWM, for example, might be ugly (though only by default -- I've seen pretty configurations of both), but I've always found them quite usable. AfterStep, though... * shiver *.

Don't forget to mention it's all free and, if you have the skills to do so, you can build your seat any way you like ;)

Linux Airlines.

Although there is a choice of 74 different types of fork for the in-flight meal, the pilot has an alarming tendency to crash into the side of mountains. When you point this out to fans of the airline you are told either;

1: The pilot is a volunteer. What do you expect?

2: At least with Linux Airlines you get to choose which type of fork you're holding, when you crash into a mountain!

3: If you don't like the way the pilot keeps crashing into mountains, why don't you fly the plane yourself?

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