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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, I run Ubuntu on my htpc, and have for several years now... there have been a couple times where the updates broke audio, and the fix took on average 2 days, though I can imagine some people having worse experiences...

Getting an MCE remote (arguably the most common PC remote type) working with Kodi (formerly xbmc and very popular full screen media player) took some cumbersome steps.

On average one app breaks every 6 months or so after updating.

By comparison, omitting the privacy issues, MS has a much better track record with updates.

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I've been running Linux on all of my home machines for many years, including an HTPC, and I've yet to have an update break anything.

Should we trust your anecdote, because it has more words, or mine, because it mentions more than one computer?

Really? Anything?

It's not that I don't believe Linux is that reliable. I use it daily.

I don't believe any software is that reliable.

Maybe you're not using it?

My point was that anecdotes are pretty useless. Some installations run brilliantly, others are a huge pain. After all, we're not talking about a single distro on identical hardware.

To answer your questions- Linux is my primary OS, at work and at home. I don't recall every single issue, especially way-back, but traditionally, I create problems by doing something stupid.

Maybe I'm just lucky with updates, but I stick to popular distros, and I specifically seek out Linux-friendly hardware. Others surely have a different experience. It just felt like OP was painting with too broad a stroke; their statement was valid in 2003, but not so much these days.

Both are subpar (and osx or whatever Apple call their offering is no better).

I've been stuck in an update hell with windows where security updates simply would not install the only solution I could find was a full re-install. I've been in a similar situation with Ubuntu and was able to fix it - but only because I understood it - otherwise I would have had to do a re-install.

The key with Ubuntu updates is to stick to LTS versions and to do a clean re-install (keeping /home as a separate partition makes this painless).

Both have rubbish audio systems. Windows breaks on my laptop every few suspend resumes (fixed by restart). Ubuntu every few months (fixed by restart).

At this point I'm disappointed by every system I use.

That reminds me of another one... (Ubuntu htpc) I can "shut-down" and the remote startup works, but if it actually goes into suspend, I have to hit the actual power button in the cabinet. And more often than not the audio is broken on resume from suspend and I have to completely shut down to fix it (reboot doesn't work)... this is with a core i3-5010u, which is a relatively common intel audio chipset.

I agree there are aspects of every OS that I don't like... I just wouldn't single out Windows (again other than privacy) as particularly bad on updates... updating my mbp to el capitan took a wipe as the upgrade broke half way through.

TIP: Never update when you're tethered to your phone on vacation, always update a week before leaving for vacation by the way. lol

Remote startup and wakeup is actually handled by firmware of your mainboard. (or Intel ME) Ubuntu cannot fix hardware problems most of the time.

Drivers still breaking in S3 is often a result of lack of Windows driver workarounds for this case. And Ubuntu using slightly outdated kernel versions.

Considering it's Intel hardware (nuc), I'm not sure what the point is, since Intel tends to have some of the best Linux support. In any case, shouldn't linux receive a signal that it's recovered from sleep and that should allow it to re-initialize problem hardware/drivers?

I keep running it, my point was that it's not exactly rosey with Linux all of the time either.

I work with hardware devs who work with Intel NUCs professionally (I do software). The NUCs have some really crazy firmware/hardware bugs. In fact, just yesterday I had to suggest to them to get the OS (Linux) to power cycle a hung hardware, and they said "Yeah ... the PMIC doesn't shut off power to that bus, the only way is to shut down the entire system. We asked Intel, that's what they said."

Interesting that you claim that OS X is not better when you are not even sure about the name…

It could be that fdgdasfadsf's point was a sarcastic observation about the upcoming switch of the name from 'Mac OS' [0] to 'macOS'.

[0] Or 'OS X', which, technically, is just the tenth version of Mac OS rather than an OS name in its own right (despite what I think is the fact that most people think of it as the latter).

OS X 10.11 broke USB support on Macs.

USB used to just work. Now it stops working after you connect ten or so devices - which is not a common thing, but not unusual in music studios. And external USB hubs only work if they have a specific generic name in the firmware ID.

Apparently if you hack your own kexts you can get it working again, kind of.

>At this point I'm disappointed by every system I use.

This. The Win 10 situation is beyond horrific. I would never have imagined that MS would set itself up for a class action suit like this. I know people who have had their PCs trashed by this forced upgrade, and they're really not happy about it.

But the alternatives are not great. Linux and OS X are both in similar "kind of works, mostly, except when not" states.

Consumer OS reliability and design has become an embarrassment for the entire industry.

At least, as of a few years ago, Apple figured out that incremental updates are not such a bad thing. There is only so much “damage” they can do with an update; and although they do screw up stuff, you can at least figure out what happened.

Where do you start though when W10 changes the entire damned UI, replaces a bunch of apps, moves stuff around, creates two versions of some control panels, etc.? That is just a special level of “don’t give a crap” that is embarrassing for any company making billions of dollars.

As someone who's had the misfortune of encountering and then tracking down PulseAudio bugs, it probably doesn't help that it's a code quality disaster. Few comments, close coupling between different parts, no stable bugfix-only releases, and even the developers have trouble understanding what size buffers functions should expect.

I was running Ubuntu 14.04 on a small PC with XBMC and proprietary Nvidia drivers. The standard `apt-get update` would never rebuild the nvidia drivers so inevitably on reboot, X couldn't start and I had to figure out why, then rebuild the nvidia drivers manually, and try again.

I'm much more scared of Ubuntu aptitude updates than I am of Microsoft updates.

Fixing a broken apt update is easier than fixing a broken Windows update, though.

Win10 broke safe mode, it can be re-enabled, but still... Reboot into safe more, or via recovery disk... restore the to restore point set before updates, reboot.

Most updates in Ubuntu can be recovered from. That doesn't make it better/easier than recovery in Windows... as it depends on what got updated, how it got updated, and what all came with it.

I've had the exact same problem every time with Nvidia drivers when updating ubuntu.

Despite this, it's not too hard to fix, and I'm much more scared of forced Microsoft OS updates though.

Win7 will be my last Microsoft OS. The way they've been trying to trick people into updating is disgusting.

Even Win7 has gotten a lot of privacy killing updates silently.

I have had the same experience, especially with broken mythtv updates (specifically the mythtv web interface), and also sound.

Plus for some reason every time I update I have to manually edit the grub file to boot the correct kernel and run the nvidia installer. I think it's because I'm still on an older version of grub or something.

I'm still much happier running ubuntu on my server/htpc than Windows. I'd be ecstatic to use ubuntu exclusively if I didn't need to run Ableton Live on Windows, which I can't run in a Windows VM.

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