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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

We switched from Windows to Ubuntu for nearly all desktops here earlier this year. The pain wasn't that great even for those that haven't used Linux before as the main development machine. Ubuntu is great (except for installing NVIDIA drivers [1]) and it leads to better and more robust development experiences for the cloud when using lxc rather than VirtualBox for encapsulated environments.

(Of course many of us still dual boot into Windows often for testing and for using special purpose applications.)

[1] https://www.google.ca/search?q=nvidia+ubuntu+black+screen

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I managed a similar transition about 2 years ago. I expected failure like the many times I'd tried before. It went off without a hitch.

The difference wasn't really the linux desktop itself. There never was a "year of the linux desktop". It seems to be everything else. The webification of everything slew the desktop native app and the ubiquity of a gazillion different smartphones primed people to accept new UI experiences.

The business world is finally coming out of the place where everything it does has to be rammed through the Office/Excel/Powerpoint/Exchange funnel no matter how it distorts the outcome.

> The difference wasn't really the linux desktop itself. There never was a "year of the linux desktop". It seems to be everything else. The webification of everything slew the desktop native app and the ubiquity of a gazillion different smartphones primed people to accept new UI experiences.

Yes, I think the situation has changed now. I'm looking forward to good Linux-friendly ARM boxes being available for $100-$150, preinstalled with Ubuntu or Elementary OS. It won't be long until something like that would be satisfactory for most casual users. There are lots of people currently who are using XP or Vista, or old hardware which has worked fine up to now, but which periodically falls off the wagon. They have screens and keyboards, don't need perfect Office compatibility, mostly use the web, and don't particularly want to spend a lot of money for a replacement.

> The business world is finally coming out of the place where everything it does has to be rammed through the Office/Excel/Powerpoint/Exchange funnel no matter how it distorts the outcome.

I am curious about the long term effects of this. We still exist in a world where many people believe the most efficient way to work with numbers is through an excel (no matter the form of the numbers).

One company I worked at 3 or 4 years did payroll for about 35,000 people in an excel spreadsheet. It mail merged and spat out checks in a process that handled about 1,000 an hour. A few times Excel hung and paychecks were late. They simply didn't know or want to accept that any of the plethora of open source databases could be made to do similar but finish payroll in an ten minutes (sans printing) instead of day and half.

And then of course obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1667/

Parts of me think there's a huge market out there for people specialized in extracting business logic from Excel to an actual application, and that I would do well to get into it.

From what I've heard of other Office products, I think the hard part would be keeping my sanity.

I've done transformations of complex pricing spreadsheets to code for providing dynamic quoting on websites. It was amazing how complex the logic gets sometimes with even what seems like a simple spreadsheet.

I like the idea, but Excel is too damn good and flexible at what it is designed for. It can make many complex things simple, and to match what just one Excel professional can do, you'd have do keep an entire development department.

I know this because we tried it, and it was complete pain in the ass to continuously adapt our "Excel replacing" applications to rapidly changing business/analytics/reporting requirements.

Exactly. I've been using Linux almost exclusively on the desktop since 2002. At first, I dual booted for gaming, photoshop and office. I quickly found that I hated booting into Windows. Sure, I could use a real word processor, but I hated not having my files, my music/videos, my browser bookmarks (this was before bookmark syncing) etc... I ended up just accepting the fact that to use Linux, I had to be ok with some inferior desktop software. Since then, things have really improved with apps like Dropbox, Steam, Sublime and Chrome meeting my basic needs, but it's really the web that's solved this problem. Plex, Netflix, Evernote, Google's webapps etc.. mean my Desktop OS doesn't matter, I just need a modern web browser. Would I prefer a native Evernote app on Linux over the webapp? Sure, but it's a compromise I'm willing to make to use Linux.

I actually found Arch a lot easier transition with GNOME than I did Ubuntu. Arch always has extremely good and quick support for virtually all drivers.

If you have one person in your company that can debug / manage a Linux machine then the whole office should be good. Even my wife with no experience can intuitively use everything. Hell, we even game on our home desktop

I love Arch, personally. Have been using it for quite a few years now and love the rolling release paradigm.

That said, I'm looking at setting up a desktop machine for my Dad, and seriously considering using Kubuntu 16.04.1 LTS[1]. He just wants to "use the damn thing" and I think that provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines that are less "pets" and more "tools".

[1] Yes, I much prefer KDE to GNOME. Can we all just get along?

Amen, ubuntu was horrible experience, I mean I loved it as I love linux over windows, but it kept crashing on me, and having issues, and too much bloat. I tend to run thin w/ i3 instead of a more graphical desktop environment anyhow. So Antergos (arch) was a much better choice and it's also very beautiful and runs a lot smoother.

Any downvoters care to explain why lettergram's Arch recommendations are both greyed out? His/her comments appear substantive & germane, what gives?

I didn't downvote, but there's a negative perception around Arch users kinda like vegans/vim-users/emacs-users, a la "how can tell if someone uses Arch? They'll tell you, over and over again."

The comment in question here is not at all guilty of this sort of "air of superiority" that bugs people, but it may be an oversensitivity caused by that perception.

I think they were the result of the weird groupthink that Ubuntu (or Mint for the really non-technical) is the only Linux that is usable for non-power users. If you recommend anything else, they think you're insane.

It's likely more than that. Arch generally is viewed as an "extreme" distro, since you have to manually setup everything.

Nothing wrong with that, but generally that's not a linux newbie distro.

Yeah, I don't care much about the up / down vote on a comment.

I did want to address setting up the distro so people have a general idea when reading the comments. It is pretty hard the first time around. Having set up Arch 5 or 6 times over the last few years, it takes me 20 minutes. My friend has his up in 5 - 10; it's really easy to deploy once you know how a computer system works. I don't think it's extreme for developers, and honestly it has one of the better documention and like I said, having tried many distros Arch is usually one of the most up-to-date and stable. I run it on my home computer with GNOME and my wife doesn't even know the distro, and she zips around, watches movies, plays music, uses Google Drive or Libre, etc.

No, I completely agree with you, and happen to have a fond spot for Arch myself.

Just wanted to point out that Arch does indeed intimidate most linux newbies. Most "regular" folks expect to install an OS and have everything "just work". They get this from Ubuntu, Fedora, etc... but with Arch, they get a terminal screen and a mounds of documentation.

Once setup with a windowing environment, most folks will settle in just fine. It's getting to that point that's the challenge.

Thanks all for the explanations.

Where I work (a tech-oriented company in the "services" business, not in the US) we have a large developer staff and while some use Windows, most use Linux. Usually but not exclusively Ubuntu.

This makes sense, because our software stack is now mostly open source software running on Linux servers (Ubuntu or CentOS). The developers who choose to say on Windows end up using tools like gitbash or SSH'ing to Linux machines anyway. Some use Linux VMs. But like I said, most simply install Linux.

The company used to be Windows-only (.NET), but migrated to Java+Linux some years before I joined. I suppose the main reason was cost, but I also heard from senior tech stuff that Windows was simply too opaque, that they couldn't "see" what was going on in production in the same way they can with open source. And of course, you cannot make your own modifications to closed source. This was before .NET was opened up, by the way.

> simply install Linux...

What kind of hardware are you "simply install[ing] Linux" on? Was it really that simple?

The reason I ask is because every single time I try to install Linux on actual hardware, it's a nightmare.

Meanwhile, everywhere that I install Windows - it just works.

Lenovo Thinkpad T-Series here, all hardware functional out of the box. Additionally, any Dell I've tried it on works just fine (XPS 13 has explicit support for it, too).

In fact, in most cases it "just works" these days, but the range of hardware I attempt it on isn't great. I've had trouble with a low-end Toshiba of a friend's in the past, and even on the Thinkpad I'll sometimes have issues with rarer configurations - namely a complicated multi-display setup using the Lenovo dock/port replicator.

It certainly isn't the Apple "don't make me think" experience I would love to present people with, but it's been far from a nightmare for years in my experience.

> Lenovo Thinkpad T-Series here, all hardware functional out of the box

Indeed! Lenovo Thinkpads in my company as well, and everything mostly "just works".

There are also some Samsung Ultrabooks (I heard they have some trouble with the boot partition) and some poor quality local brand clones which break down if you stare at them too hard (but that's independent of the installed OS).

The Thinkpads give no trouble. No idea why they're phasing them out. Cost savings maybe? :(

As long as we're doing anecdotes, let me mention what a trouble it is every time I have to install Windows. On a model I have to use at work, which originally came with Windows 10, a fresh install of Windows simply fails to find any Wi-Fi network, can't handle touchpad scrolling, and the power hungry Nvidia graphics driver never shuts off, even when I tell the system to use the Intel driver.

As I learned years ago with my experience putting OSes on shitty hardware: if you want your OS to run well, buy good hardware. Stayed away from Broadcom, Realtek, Lenovo Ideapads, Dell Inspirons etc. Bought a ThinkPad. Never had a problem with Linux on it.

Yes, thanks - I was responding to an anecdote which was a response to an anecdote as well. It's anecdotes all the way up!

Not sure what else we'll be able to find on HN...

Across five different desktop builds and two laptops, everywhere I've installed Linux has just worked (barring nicer power management features on the first laptop almost a decade ago).

Sorry if my question came off as sarcastic - it wasn't. I love Linux, but I always have trouble getting it to run directly on hardware (mostly laptops).

Did your laptops have dual graphics/Optimus (Nvidia+Intel)? Every spare laptop I've had includes Optimus and that's one issue I couldn't overcome and tried with various popular distros.

I have one old IBM desktop workstation that I can install most Linux distros on without problems. It's usually laptops that I have a problem with and I asked because that's what I hear most working devs are using these days.

Indeed, GPUs (and Optimus and similar tech) are sometimes a pain point with Linux. Of course, this isn't a problem at the office, so my lowly Thinkpad works great and I don't have to worry about videogames :)

At home, I've been using Linux exclusively for more than a decade now and I also use it for gaming. I had an HP Envy laptop with a Radeon GPU and it mostly worked, though there were glitches in some games. Recently it broke down so I bought a Lenovo Ideapad with an Nvidia GPU -- I know Nvidia is problematic on Linux, so I'll let you know how it goes ;)

It's occurred to me that businesses are likely to have better experiences with fleets of Linux desktops than individuals do with their own machines.

Configuration management is ubiquitous on Linux servers now, and it seems most of the problems with personal Linux desktops are related to manual tweaking around configs and drivers.

If only a small contingent of experts needs to deal with that manual tweaking, and then they encapsulate it in Puppet modules and automated provisioning processes, end-users could have an OSX-like smooth experience.

May I ask what GUI you use? I really like using linux via terminal and prefer it over Windows in many cases. I try making it my main OS every 1-2 years, but always switch back to Windows. The GUIs that I tried just don't feel right. Last time I gave it 3 weeks of 8 hours/day, and I still couldn't use it as productively as Windows or MacOS (even though I'm not experienced in using the latter). The fonts and symbols alone make it harder for me to work with it.

Didn't you experience any problems with that? Now I'm back again running Windows and terminal sessions to linux machines (for testing/deployment). I wonder if it's just me who can't work with it, but I have the feeling that developing a functional and yet simple GUI is perhaps as hard as the kernel itself. And most linux machines are servers, so there's little incentive, while Microsoft and Apple have spent billions on developing this over the years.

> May I ask what GUI you use?

Stock Ubuntu for the most part. Sublime or atom as text editor. Kraken or Git Gui for source control GUI. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox for web browser. Very little else is really needed. Although I use Gimp, Blender, and Skype (which works poorly on Ubuntu unfortunately.)

It probably depends on the kind of work you do. For most web development you need a browser, a development environment and a bunch of terminals. There's little difference between OSes there.

What kind of thing do you have trouble with under Linux?

Personally I find Windows very hard to use because there's no central way to update installed software on it.

Things like switching windows, working with multiple screens, having an overview what's open.

On the system side I love linux. Updating all software with one command is great, but isn't connected to the GUI. In fact, I find the Ubuntu software center so hard to use that I always revert back to the terminal to install/update software. And that's what I meant with my original post. I love the functionality that Linux offers, but for many day-to-day tasks having a GUI can make life easier. And that's where Linux always disappoints me.

I was using Fedora for a few years as my full-time operating system, and being a heavy Mac user and occasional Windows user, I came to really love GNOME 3. (I'm back on OS X after switching jobs.)

GNOME has a javascript extension library at http://extensions.gnome.org/ to easily tweak it to your preference. It's also easily themable using CSS, I was using the ARC theme (https://github.com/horst3180/arc-theme)

You could give elementary OS (https://elementary.io/) a try. Got a nice looking GUI but i'm not too sure how mature it is.

Sadly they focussed on the beautiful GUI above upgradability of the debs. It lags behind actual Ubuntu by at least one Long Term Release (possibly 2 by now if they still haven't upgraded from 2012) and I've found it a pain to work with beyond the initial "wow this is pretty for Linux".

(I actually ended up using XFCE and then AwesomeWM, so maybe I'm not the market for Elementary!)

EDIT: just checked and their newest release, Loki, is based on Ubuntu's 2016 LTS. I'll be taking another look at it this evening!

eOS is something I would probably recommend to my mother or my girlfriend if I wanted to give them an easy "introduction" to Linux. But the designers made several decisions that seem hostile to power users (you can't even add your own PPAs in Loki by default), and for that reason I'm not sure I'd recommend it to developers. Which I can understand, I guess--I've mentioned my problems with it to the designers directly and have been more or less told by Daniel Fore that I am not their "target audience". So, okay, you can't please everyone.

The Pantheon desktop is beautiful, and it deserves all the praise it gets. I maintain hope that the eOS team will work on disentangling Pantheon from the rest of eOS once they finish stabilizing the core OS so that it can be ported to other distros. Ideally I'd eventually have Fedora running on my laptop with Pantheon strictly as the DE.

It's true, Windows and OSX are usually miles ahead of Linux in terms of the desktop GUI. But I absolutely love the simple beautiful UI in elementaryOS, it's a delight to work in. It is my primary OS on my laptop. I also has Windows 10 installed, but everything feels more instant in Linux. God knows what Windows does under the hood to make it that slow and unresponsive.

I installed the latest version (Loki) for a couple of months ago and except from 1 issue with "wobbling" mouse cursor (resolved by installing some xorg components) it works great.

I had some troubles with the previous version (Freia, I believe), more specifically the desktop manager would frequently hang. Luckily that haven't happened once in Loki.

All of the tools I use on my Windows box are availble for Linux as well: Netbeans, Jetbrains Pycharm, GitKraken, Chrome, Slack, Dropbox etc.

The only thing holding me back from switching primary OS on my desktop computer is gaming.

I use elementary OS Loki daily and am pretty satisfied with it. It has a few things that I'm not totally happy with, but it's my favourite OS right now.

Was there a reason you went with NVidia hardware and closed source drivers? Did you really need graphic horsepower?

In my experience the easiest solution is AMD hardware with open source drivers. They just always work. It is just that if you need more graphic horsepower you might be better off with NVidia hardware and closed source drivers, and then accept the hassle.

We had no choice. We are a 3D software company and we need to do CUDA, WebGL, WebVR, etc. We also have dual 4K monitors for every developer and you need good GPUs to drive them properly -- integrated Intel just doesn't cut it.

They might have already had Nvidia hardware they bought not planning on switching to linux at the time. That's the position I found myself in a few weeks ago (tho that 1070 for VR... HHNNNGGGG)

I'd recommend Arch - IMO it keeps the graphics drivers up to date. You might just need to learn about the different package managers. It had 1080 support day 1 in their beta drivers.

Sadly these days you need a GPU just to drive the DE.

I used Windows pretty much my entire career until recently, since I started focusing more on client side scripting and Azure (and being able to use VS Code for more .NET projects). I now see Linux as my go to environment. But I still have to use my company laptop for some .NET projects of course.

check out https://github.com/rcarmo/azure-toolbox ;)

No way, that's awesome. Thanks for the heads up.

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