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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Because the Linux desktop sucks. (that's the word of the day)

If I had a Linux laptop, an extraordinary amount of my time would be spent trying to make it work. Wireless breaks, sound breaks, upgrades break everything. I would have to spend a serious amount of time and research finding a laptop that had good Linux support... regardless I would still probably have to spend hours trying to get the sound or the wireless or sleep or some feature or another to work properly.

OS X just gets out of the way. I have never had to put any work into making the graphics card work or making sound work or making the network work or fixing boot... you get the picture.

If I'm using Linux on a laptop to do any sort of work, a sizable portion of the work becomes keeping Linux working on the laptop and I don't want that.

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...meh, just limit yourself to the tops of the lines like Thinkpad, XPSs etc., make sure any networking components are branded Intel, pick Intel CPUs' integrated graphics or not-low-end Nvidia, and everything will just work fine out of the box with an LTS Ubuntu or latest Fedora (basically pick whatever's closest to what you use on your servers).

But yeah, if you buy anything that's not part of the "top of the line developer notebook" category, specifically the Intel not AMD ones, then almost nothing will work out of the box :)

It is worth reminding that lower-end laptops are also a bit of a gamble if you try to use Windows on them

I'm pretty sure that I've spent less time maintaining my laptop than my colleagues who are on OS X. That obviously isn't the case for every laptop, but I don't think that your statements generalize well either.

"Sucks" is subjective; you're allowed to think that.

In years past you may have spent hours getting wireless or sound working. These days, if you buy decent, mainstream hardware it just works. Ubuntu does a great job of getting out of the way.

I'm a Fedora guy, myself, but find myself recommending Xubuntu to more and more people for casual computing because 1) it really does just work, and 2) Xfce is lightweight and lets you use your CPU for doing real work vs. holding up a bloated windows manager.

linux desktop does not suck.

Linux on unsupported laptops (which is most of them) sucks big time, but not linux desktop itself. It works great on standard desktop computers (towers)

you should make that distinction, because otherwise you'll just start a flame war.

I tend to disagree. Yes it works but I find it unpleasent to use. None of the available desktops is pleasant to use, especially fonts and symbols often look much worse than Windows or MacOS. As much as I like Linux on servers, I don't see any reason to use it with a graphic interface.

When was the last time you used Linux on a Desktop?

Almost every time I hear this complaint it was years ago and with one distro. There is so much more than Ubuntu out there people (Ubuntu sucks IMHO).

One thing I've learned is distrohopping is a must if your hardware is an edge case... that said, since moving to Manjaro, I haven't had to use anything else.

~10 months ago. Looking at screenshots on their website I still don't like it. But maybe that's just because I grew up with Windows (although I do like how macOS looks). Think it's very much a taste thing. Most of what I do is browser based (incl. IDE) anyway so the OS doesn't really matter anymore.

I've recently gotten a new laptop, and everything is supported out of the box in Debian. It has a 2160x1440 screen, and the hidpi support with gnome on Wayland is outstanding. I would say that the fonts and symbols look on par with the new MacBook pro (I was using my new computer side by side with a new model MacBook pro).

The Linux desktop has come a long way, even in just the last year or two. I know everyone always says that, so take it with a grain of salt, but I have never been happier with the state of the Linux desktop.

What desktop environment?

Ahh, missed you mentioned Gnome.

Interesting. Personally, I find Windows quite unpleasant to use, even basic window management is a hassle (just an example: you have to target very small hit boxes for simple things like resizing and moving windows around, and default keyboard shortcuts are not configurable). As to fonts, many if not most custom fonts you see more and more on websites look quite odd, and sometimes simply bad with Windows' font hinting (I do agree the built-in fonts work nicely, but so do fonts on certain Linux systems as well, and have done so for at least a decade since Canonical merged certain patches to their Ubuntu's version of freetype).

Might it be that we tend to like what we're used to? When I jumped from WinXP to a Gnome2-desktop, I tried to make it a bit more like WinXP, even though these days I would probably want nothing of how WinXP desktop is laid about.

Windows 10 is the exception by the way, the hotkeys for windows management are wonderfully executed — and, well thought out. Worth giving it a try.

Head on over to /r/unixporn for some inspiration on gui aesthetics. It's not hard to make it look great.

I am using Manjaro with KDE Plasma desktop, and IMO it's the best linux desktop i've ever tried. And the best part is, you can customize it yourself.

Just to be clear, if a Macbook works better for you or if you just prefer macOS, by all means, go ahead. Macbooks, from what I hear, must be superb machines, and while I prefer Linux with a Mate or XFCE desktop, I have used a Mac for a while and there are things I do miss. And a lot of software is available for Windows and Mac only; given the choice between Windows and macOS, I wouldn't have to think long.

I hear that argument frequently. On macOS (or even Windows) things just work(tm), while on Linux (or some BSD), there is always something that does not work correctly.

I guess I must be quite lucky. A long time ago, I positively enjoyed spending an entire weekend getting a sound card to work or something. To be honest, these days I consider myself too old for that stuff. I, too, like it when things just work. But really, Linux as a desktop system has come a long way, and for the past couple of years, things have pretty much just worked(tm) for me.

Picking hardware that is supported by Linux takes a little care, so does picking a distro[1], especially with laptops. But I prefer to do a little research before buying a laptop anyway, because I am usually on a budget.

[1] In my experience, the more recent the hardware, the more unlikely Debian is to work. OpenSuse has worked well for me, though.

I put Ubuntu (Mate) on an old Macbook of mine because it was absolutely crawling with MacOs on it. The only driver it needed was a Wifi driver. Everything else worked fine out of the box.

Also, I run an Intel Nuc (laptop hardware, essentially) with Ubuntu as a main development machine. 0 problems. 0% in the way.

OSX is great, don't get me wrong. But, it's been years since I've ran into driver problems with desktop Linux.

> If I had a Linux laptop, an extraordinary amount of my time would be spent trying to make it work. Wireless breaks, sound breaks, upgrades break everything.

At our office, the macOS laptops tend to have the most problems with sound & graphics; the Linux desktops, OTOH, Just Work™. I find that pretty funny, actually, because I would have expected it to be the other way around.

The most problems I ever had with Wifi was a mac machine (rMBP13). In the office, usually during RDP sessions, it often lost the connection and couldn't reconnect until reboot.

I've never had anything similar happen with a PC (we use Thinkpads), whether running Linux or Windows.

My Mac problem was solved using ethernet adapter.

Linux Mint worked perfectly on my T420, and I expect it to work perfectly on the T440 I'm picking up today to replace it.

Sure, not the very newest hardware, but it's not like laptops have gotten significantly more powerful for anything that actually matters, for the last couple of years.

Oh, they did more powerful, just in departments you don't pay attention to.

The biggie is the GPU. T420 has no oomph to run an external 4K display (at more than 24 Hz, i.e. in usable mode). Broadwell and newer do have the capability to run 2 of them.

The CPUs got less power-hungry. You can do the same work with less juice, so your battery lasts longer.

The SSDs with the new interfaces got much faster. There is simply no comparison between M.2 nvme drive and SATA3 SSD.

Sadly, wifi took a step back, with almost universal unavailability of anything better than 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac. In the past, MIMO 3x3 used to be available (Broadcom, but the option was there).

So yes, modern laptop is significantly different experience than few years old one, despite the CPU having the same GHz.

That's not my point.

My point is that they're not noticeably faster for the things most people use their computers for. They still run browsers, Spotify, email, word processors and all of that just fine and last "long enough" on a charge.

The improvements have been incredibly marginal for most people.

The difference is noticable, the modern laptops are subjectively perceived by users as faster, even if they have slower CPUs.

Also, they do not have a problem with Electron apps. for most people, they are just apps like anythig else, and do not perceive any performance problems with them.

That is mostly due to SSDs, which can also be fitted perfectly well to older laptops, SATA has been standard for a long time now.

And where did Electron apps come into the discussion?

The difference between NVME SSD and SATA SSD is like between classic HDD and SATA SSD. It has to; NVME can push 4GBps, SATA3 only 600MBps.

Even the Apple 2015 M.2 drives, which are "only" AHCI, but with much deeper queue (i.e. nonstandard), can do 1.something GBps and the difference compared to standard SATA SSD is noticable by normal users.

Electron apps are something normal people use and some of them compain about the speed/lag/memory usage. Usually those with older computers, who think nothing changed in the last years ;).

But for most people, that speed difference is purely academic, and doesn't actually benefit them. Sure, if you're compiling stuff or otherwise moving around a lot of data, it matters. But for most people, it's just some numbers on a spec sheet.

If you do not perceive a difference between HDD and SATA SDD, then you won't perceive the difference between SATA and NVME SSD either, that true.

If you do the first, you will do also the second. It makes a difference even when launching Excel or Firefox.

There is a definite difference between old-fashioned spinning rust and SSD.

Between SATA SSD and PCIe? Sure, for extremely IO-heavy tasks there's a difference to be felt, but not really in everyday use.

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