Hacker News Reader

>honestly I want something that's as bug free as possible and allows me to get on with coding instead of tinkering around fixing bullshit

Arch is the very definition of "tinkering around". That's the appeal, that you can (and have to) customize it to what you want. Mint, Ubuntu, and Fedora are all "out of the box" experiences. The old Unix greybeards on the Internet hate them because they're one-size-fits-all, but that sounds like exactly what you're looking for.

Using a "generic" laptop whose origin is not exactly easy to track (it bears the brand of the distributor, not of the maker). I installed ubuntu (LTS) with the proprietary (yuck) Wifi drivers. So far:

  * The trackpad works.  I use a mouse anyway.
  * Networking didn't randomly break so far.
  * Don't care about "unified".  Apart from a suspension bug, it works.
  * The battery lasts for 6-7 hours of programming.
  * Text rendering is pretty.
  * Xmonad + LXDE is pleasing and their interface make sense —to me at least.

It took a little tinkering around fixing bullshit. The lingering suspension bug prevents me to log back in if I close the lid when logged out. On the other hand I can stay the hell away from Apple and their shiny locked down empire.

The fact we're still discussing the trackpad, suspend/wake, fonts, networking, and UI - in 2017 - means the problem still isn't solved on Linux. I gave a decade over to that quest (1996-2006) and then spent the next decade using MBPs. With a macbook pro, I have never once wondered about my trackpad, suspend/wake, fonts, networking, UI, or a host of other things like printers, scanners, USB, bluetooth, or external displays. That level of compatibility is a miracle, from the perspective of a daily Linux user.

I have used my laptop for heavy computation, software dev, academic work, major presentations, video and multimedia, casual browsing, gaming, etc, and it has NEVER given me trouble due to compatibility. Having spent way too much of my life thinking about those problems on Linux, you have no idea how liberating it is to be free of those concerns.

I get OCD about using a specific brand of disposable pen, so you'd better believe I think about the most important tool in my life: my laptop. The MBP is too good to accept any alternative. The 2016 was underwhelming, but it's still the best laptop/OS combination out there. It costs too much for the market and it's not enough-better to justify the upgrade, but dammit there's nothing that even compares.

I've been thinking hard about alternatives to the MBP during the past few months, and my decision is that I can't give all this up and still be a functioning academic and entrepreneur. I'll pay the $1000 premium and if I value my time at $25/hour, I'll recover that additional cost within 2 months compared to Linux maintenance. I wish it weren't so, but the maths don't lie.

> The fact we're still discussing the trackpad, suspend/wake, fonts, networking, and UI - in 2017 - means the problem still isn't solved on Linux.

That criticism doesn't make much sense to me. Linux is just a kernel and virtually none of those things (except sometimes in the case of the very shiniest new hardware) have any kernel issues. Distros, on the other hand, have different priorities and you should pick accordingly. Don't use something like Arch if these are your main priorities. Pick a stable LTS release of a casual user-centric distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and pick hardware that's well supported, and you won't have any of these issues. It's no different from OSX, where using unsupported hardware also requires constant tinkering and research before updates.

I suspect many of these unfortunate user experiences come about because users don't do research and pick something at random. You can't do that with Apple, because you don't get any meaningful choices in the first place, so you can't make the wrong ones.

> The fact we're still discussing the trackpad, suspend/wake, fonts, networking, and UI - in 2017 - means the problem still isn't solved on Linux.

One reason is, it's not Linux's problem to solve. It's the hardware vendor's. Those morons still don't ship with proper drivers, firmware, or even specs —possibly because spending a single cent on Linux isn't economically viable or something.

Last time I checked, suspend and power management does work flawlessly on Linux… when the hardware is a couple year's old. But it will never work properly on new hardware unless the vendors make it so themselves.

On the other hand, Wifi hardware vendors now often ship with proprietary drivers. Proprietary sucks, but it at least works.

> I'll pay the $1000 premium and if I value my time at $25/hour, I'll recover that additional cost within 2 months compared to Linux maintenance. I wish it weren't so, but the maths don't lie.

Let's be generous and assume MacOS requires zero maintenance. 1000/25 means 40 hours (a full work-week), of Linux maintenance.

A full work-week in only 2 months, aren't you being a tiny bit hyperbolic? I spend a few minutes per month in maintenance.

Think of it like this: 8 weeks, 5 days per week, 1 hour per day. That's 40 hours.

I spend more than a few minutes a month administering my MBP, so I have no idea how you get along doing so little for a Linux machine. In fact, I spend more than a few minutes a month administering my Linux servers...

I honestly think my 1-hour-per-day estimate is in the ballpark and your experience sounds unlike mine.

Maybe I'm just negligent, but I do have a remote server I spent a full week configuring (web, and mail, just for me, from ssh). I'm no sysadmin, I expect a good one would have needed no more than a couple hours. But I haven't touched it in months. It just works. (Or not. Lack of updates may have lead to vulnerabilities.)

At this point I doubt we mean the same thing by "administration". To me, it means updating the system, fixing what doesn't work, and installing new programs. Spending en entire hour per day just for this sounds insane. Perhaps you had other tasks in mind?

Also bear in mind that I'm currently using a "long term support" release of Ubuntu, on hardware I knew would be well supported (I've read a couple reviews). It's not Arch on a random laptop.

As a counterpoint, I've been a daily Mageia linux user since 2011, and Mandriva since 2009.

I've had that "just works" experience for both of them, on a variety of cheap laptops, pretty much from the start. Whatever they do to detect hardware, it works.

I wouldn't even remember how to hand-edit a config file anymore, seriously. That knowledge is gone.

Good for you. The fact that so many don't have that experience means it's still a problem.

Very well said.

Ah, forgot suspend/wake. I've literally never ever been able to get something remotely dependable with suspend/wake working with Linux. Like, it will work 90% of the time then you open it up and it just...wont.

For some reason, Apple laptops are the only ones usable without a mouse. The trackpad simply sucks on anything else I've tried.

Just like people are used to OSes that crash all the time, they're used to unusable trackpads. Sad.

>Networking doesn't randomly break. This used to happen A LOT. The most stable solution I could find was just using wpa_supplicant and maintaining a load of config files, which was irritating and time consuming.

Did you try using NetworkManager instead of netctl? netctl can be a bit fiddly.

In any case, as an Arch user for a few years, I can definitely say that Arch is not for people who want something that Just Works. If you go back to Linux, you might want to look at Linux Mint, or even Ubuntu, if you aren't put off by Canonical.

I know that I've tried wpa_supplicant directly, network manager, and a plethora of others... on anything that uses wifi (even when teh chip is 100% supported), it's always been hit or miss.

The frustrating thing is that nothing in the system tells you why. Networking suddenly just stops networking over wifi. No logs show that anything happened at all -- but it's not going to work again until you restart services (or in some cases, reboot).

This happens to me 2-3 times a week, usually at the most inconvenient times...

Nearly as much fun is using the nvidia driver. Every time I pull down kernel updates, I hope that my desktop will return... actualy this was a worry under noveau as well, so perhaps it's only made worse by nvidia.

With that said, I still like it better than my few years with Mac OS. It probably costs me ~2 hours a week in "crap I should not need to waste my time on", but I accept that tradeoff in order to have an environment that lets me work the way I prefer to work.

(Not to mention the bump in hardware performance, memory, and ssd size that I was able to get for the same $$)

One thing I found that broke it seemingly without reason and took me months to figure out was that if you run a manager, then wpa_supplicant separately, they'll basically eat each other and kick you offline.

Thanks, I've done enough different things to this machine that it's worth checking to see if there could be a conflict like that.

I know it's just anecdotes, but I've simply never had this problem with Linux networking. In the last several years, I've switched from one low-end laptop to another, and they've all just worked with the wifi and Network Manager.

I have to assume most people don't really see this - if it was as significant enough problem, someone would've gotten frustrated enough and fixed it. Or at least made enough noise about it :)

Without any hints from the system, though, I find I'm not really interested in doing the deep dive needed to figure out the real cause. If it was just a little more frequent - so that it became more impediment than nuisance - I'd likely end up doing so.

In my case, I'm sure some of the problems are self inflicted. I got away from NetworkManager because of the same issue. I tried wicd, and am currently just using direct configuration in /etc/network/interfaces.

Since it still occurs and presents the same way, it seems to suggest either wpa_supplicant or the driver itself is at the root of it.

You'd probably have a lot better luck with Ubuntu or something that isn't rolling. Rolling and bleeding edge distros like Arch have a tendency to break more often when updating.

Then you are probably not the target for the Arch distrib. Others are better suited for your needs.

You were using a distribution made for people who want to take time to tinker, then complain that it requires that you take time to tinker.

Using Arch is sometimes a status symbol, a way to signal that you are a hacker that likes to control every bit of your system. There is no need to try this hard. You can also simply use Ubuntu or any variants, or even Fedora for what's matters. That's what I do.