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Comment by paradite | Hacker News Reader

The situation is entirely the other way round here in Singapore (for the younger generation).

I used to run Linux on a laptop, but eventually I gave up and switched to Macbook so that I don't have to deal with drivers and low-level config issues on a daily basis.

In my university, 60%-70% of CS students use a Macbook. They are not working or attending conferences yet, so the change is going to take some time.

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Singapore is the 3rd state for GDP per capita, I bet buying a macbook is not seen as "oh I have to invest on it almost two month of my pay" in that area

Just for comparison, with what I should spend for a macbook here I would pay 3 years of a Bachelor Degree + half a year of a Master Degree (obviously I am referring to just university tuition costs, not rent or other general expenses) in a top 3 university of my country with international recognition.

"deal with drivers and low-level config issues on a daily basis"

What in gods name are you talking about? Are you using a distro from 1995?

I ran Ubuntu 12.04 on a Lenovo laptop for a year or so.

The graphics and wifi drivers broke down every now and then and sometimes it broke the OS completely so I had to reinstall the OS.

Need to fix multiple config issues and compatibility issues when I wanted to install some Linux-alternatives for Windows applications.

Plus I need to do video editing and Android apps so I still have to constantly switch back to Windows with dual-boot.

Mac just seems to be a perfect balance, giving you all the standard terminal stuff plus everything just runs out of the box.

I ran a debian-based distro on a Lenovo thinkpad in graduate school from 2008 to about 2011. I had basically the same experience. Everything worked 95% of the time, but that other 5% felt entirely random and pretty dehabilitating.

Now I use a mix of Win, OS X, and Ubuntu depending on what I am trying to accomplish. I make heavy use of Linux servers, but have no inclination of using one as a primary end-user desktop environment again.

You should try. The changes happened in the last 5 years are extremly big. I mean, all my notebooks (some DELL and a lenovo t430) work better with any linux distro compared to win10, and I even get +30/40% hours of battery on them

same experience here.

When people complain about Linux my first question is if they had given it a serious try in the last 2 years.

Which distro's have you used on those notebooks? I'll likely be switching back to Linux laptop from Mac, and I'm trying to figure out which distro I want to use.

I love linux, and use it as my daily machine for work and home. But whenever I mention to others in the community that we really need to clean up this crap, and make our systems reliable instead of flashy, they treat me like I'm insane. It's amazing to me that we still have sound, wifi, and display issues that need to be solved with shitty hacks in 2017.

Dude, every time I bring up my difficulty installing Ubuntu on a relatively new Macbook Pro (Retina 13-inc early 2015) people respond like this. And yet [1] I was never able to solve this issue with video drivers (or something, I never figured it out) causing incessant crashing. I mean, look at the stack overflow post, I tried so hard to get it working. This is consistent with every ubuntu install I've ever done - there's always some shit that just makes me wonder whether it's worth it.

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/838855/crashing-freezing-hang...

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