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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's one of the worst sales pitches I've ever read. "Linux - Embrace the Pain".

I do run Linux on the desktop. I also have a Windows 7 desktop machine for stuff that won't run on Linux, but it's usually off. I have some Linux subnotebooks. And I still think Linux on the desktop kind of sucks.

Linux always has GUI bugs that never gets fixed. The Ubuntu dashboard randomly stops finding applications. The cursor disappears after suspend/resume. Both of those have had open bug reports for years. This is considered part of the Linux experience. Microsoft and Apple usually fix that stuff, so they don't get criticized in the press.

With enough code bloat, all bugs are deep.

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That cursor bug has bothered me on Xubuntu 16.04. I didn't realize how old it was. Is there a workaround besides "awkwardly save your work and restart using the keyboard and an invisible cursor"? (Please nobody say "stop using a mouse"; just try editing graphics without one.)

Yes.

CTL-ALT-F1

CTL-ALT-F7

This takes you from the graphics environment to a full screen text console and back, which re-initializes the graphics environment. It doesn't affect your running applications.

First reported in 2012.[1] Search for "cursor disappears ubuntu" for the long and broad history of this bug. I see there's been progress on the bug report.[2] Unfortunately, fixing it seems to have broken some other things. But after years of complaints and confusion, effort is being put in on it.

Visualize having to explain this to a CFO whom you're trying to convince to use Linux.

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/118001/how-to-restart-only-mi... [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...

Just today I had Win10 lock up on a brand new surface. None of the inputs did anything, though the screen remained on and the time changed, etc.

Only holding the power button unreasonably long did anything, and that wasn't anything good.

I've found this approach -- to console and back -- useful for clearing other things, e.g. a custom pointer image in Firefox "sticking" upon some combinations viewing/activity.

A while ago I moved to Arch Linux and started using the i3, a tiling window manager. This is an unusual setup, and not one everybody likes.

I was surprised at how many GUI bugs there were in the stacks of the mainstream OS's when I had to work on some in the last few weeks.

If you are competent I recommend moving away from xubuntu, or at least its defaults. Take note of the programs you like and install them on the new system, or note the ones you don't and replace them. Swapping wm's is pretty common.

A tiling wm is not for everyone, and my job doesn't involve much mouse work, however when I have had to use GIMP and Inkscape they have worked pretty much perfectly in their fullscreen beauty.

But yeah. Not for everybody.

> (Please nobody say "stop using a mouse"; just try editing graphics without one.)

Actually I had lots of success editing graphics from command line with ImageMagick. Granted there are lots of things that you need a mouse to do but I was surprised how far I could go with just the command line.

A coworker mentioned the cursor bug yesterday; I have never encountered it, but he uses Ubuntu and I use Debian. If you have no need for Ubuntu-specific software, I would suggest to just install Debian Testing, as it is more up-to-date than Ubuntu and does not have this bug.

I wish that Ubuntu wasn't the default desktop Linux - they have a development process that means that they don't necessarily ship stable software, they use their own graphical interface stack that nobody else works on, and they don't have the resources to deliver on any of their ambitions.

Ubuntu Server is quite good, since it's mostly a polished-up Debian, but Ubuntu Desktop is probably always going to be almost good, and no better.

I stopped using Ubuntu when it went off in that weird direction with the UI.

My HP Stream 11 runs Mint XFCE and we put Mint Cinnamon on the laptop my wife uses. Both these just kind of get out of the way and are mostly unnoticeable, which is mostly what I want from an OS as a user.

Isn't Mint still basically Ubuntu, but with their own release cycle that's even further abstracted from the Debian one?

True. I could just use XFCE or Cinnamon on top of Ubuntu. But I have to admit 'Linux Mint Cinnamon' sounds cool. Probably a dumb reason but at least I'm honest!

I stopped using Ubuntu years ago because of their development process making upgrades more complicated than necessary. When I do recommend an operating system to someone nowadays, I usually go for Debian Testing or Debian Stable.

I absolutely agree, but just to provide a counterpoint - Windows(literally all editions, from 2000 all the way to 10) has a bug, where sometimes when you right click on something and click one of the options (say "paste") that button will stay on screen, no matter what you do. The only fix is to either change your resolution temporarily or restart. MS knew about this for years, probably more than a decade now, but says the bug is somewhere in the kernel and can't fix it.

http://superuser.com/questions/57016/menu-select-item-stuck-...

> Linux always has GUI bugs that never gets fixed. The Ubuntu dashboard randomly stops finding applications. The cursor disappears after suspend/resume. Both of those have had open bug reports for years. This is considered part of the Linux experience.

Maybe some would consider stuff like this a part of the Ubuntu experience, but I have encountered neither bug on Debian using XFCE, GNOME or i3. You should know that Ubuntu has a different desktop from most other Linux distributions and that Ubuntu is not representative of the whole – in a similar way that any GUI bug in Android is irrelevant for most other Linux distributions.

I used Windows exclusively from DOS until XP. Then for over 10 years I was using OSX and Linux exclusively. With a recent job change I'm now managing Windows 7-10 and I'm amazed how many clunky things are still there.

I built a new PC in January and installed Win10 from a USB stick--no driver for onboard ethernet. I had to find another computer, find the driver, put it in a USB (no CDROM), and manually install it so I could connect to the Internet to install the other drivers and updates. Yes, it was a new motherboard and likely the fault of the manufacturer, but it was just 10/100 ethernet.

This week I was prepping a brand new system with an in-house developed game for a trade show. Fresh install of Windows 10, installed all updates, video card driver, copy the UE4-based binary. I get some DLL errors on launch. After googling and ignoring many offers to download that specific DLL I find out it's a DirectX DLL and I should just re-install DirectX. DirectX is no longer separate in Windows 10, so everything should be included. After more digging I find there was an optional DirectX update in 2010 and installing that fixes things. It had a suspiciously different install method; launching it asks to uncompress files to a folder, then you have to dig into the folder and run the setup.exe in there. I also see/hear Steam manages different DirectX (and .net runtimes?) when installing games. Windows + DirectX is a huge focus for Microsoft.

Windows still freezes the whole window when the application is busy. You can't resize or minimize it. I don't remember this being an issue in Linux or OSX in the past few years.

I was amazed had how many updates you need to install on a fresh install--and how many times you need to reboot. I heard they started doing rolling service packs to address this--but they're only now starting to do something?

There are so many little grievances still in Windows after not using it for 10 years I wanted to compile a list for a blog post--I was just so amazed how much housekeeping hadn't been done.

This is why some people go for more manual and minimal distros and desktops ... fewer bugs.

I use mostly Arch Linux, with the core components of the Mate desktop environment. But I've used Ubuntu a lot in the past (and even a bit currently). Even though it often rolled out newer major versions of packages sooner, Arch always seemed to be less buggy than Ubuntu, because it didn't try to make everything "just work" by auto-configuring stuff or applying integration patches etc. You might not want to do the rather manual Arch install/setup/configuration thing, but if you do go through it, you're rewarded with a less bloated and less buggy system, and a better understanding of what all the parts are.

For anyone reading this and curious about the cursor bug: The fixed was already released and it is no longer an issue[1], which basically illustrates the power of a active community

1. http://xubuntu.org/news/sru-16-04-intel-cursor-bug-fix-relea...

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