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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Free non-commercial and non-free commercial software are both wildly different products in practice.

I installed some package recently that fucked with my X config, or my kernel modules, I don't know. But my hybrid graphics is now fucked and I have crazy artifacts all over my screen. The default install of this distro does not result in a working config, and I had to spend three days to figure out the insane set of software and configuration I needed to make it work last time. (Also, I added extra RAM, and now hibernating doesn't work)

There is no commercial support for this laptop running this distro. My free software has no "revert to a last known good working system state" button, like some non-free software. Doing all the work to fix the graphics again may literally be more expensive than buying a new Windows laptop.

Thanks, Free Software.

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Windows support is provided by the manufacturer of the laptop. Linux support is provided by a finite supply of free labor.

Instead of whining that not enough volunteers provided free labor to make whatever laptop you already invested in work better perhaps buy machines that are well supported or even better ones which come with Linux.

This approach has worked well for me for 14 years.

Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works, with basic features and quality testing baked in. But that's not the point.

The point is that free software devs asking for a thank-you is like a dog owner asking for a thank-you when you don't step in their dog poop on the sidewalk. They weren't walking the dog for my benefit, and I'm not going to thank them for getting to walk around their crap.

> Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works

lol

What is wrong with your skewed perspective

Doesn't solve your support problem, but...

Re "revert to a last known good working system state": some distributions provides this capability. For example, in NixOS, your system is similar to a git repository in the sense that every package is identified by a unique hash. You can choose to boot any version of your system configuration until you decide to have it garbage collected.

If you're not interested in the "declarative, reliable, DevOps-friendly"[1] approach of Nix, you may 'emulate' this behavior a bit with the bulkier approach of snapshotting.

If you're into LISPs and FOSS-only systems, you may prefer Guix instead of Nix.

[1]: https://nixos.org

Hybrid graphics likely depends on a proprietary driver to work so that's probably where the problem lies. As for the RAM, you might just need to expand your swap partition so its the same size in order for hibernation to work.

And really, this has nothing to do with free software; there are even more horror stories like this about Windows and macOS and those are both proprietary systems.

The problem lies in commercial companies not making free software. But since they don't, what you're left with is non-commercial free software, which in practice is worse than the alternative. Free software is broken, and you can fix it. Commercial software works, but you can't fix it.

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