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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

This particular article seems to be an ad for consulting/support services, but their underlying point is one that I agree with:

Desktop usage (terminals, browsers, editors, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, media listening/viewing and light creation) should not be surprising. It should not change out from underneath the user.

I've run Debian Stable for more than 15 years as my primary desktop system, almost always with XFCE. I add the Google Chrome repository and download the latest Firefox and Firefox Nightly. That's it. The whole thing runs really nicely on an i5-2500 with 16GB RAM and 2 SSDs in a ZFS mirror. I'll need new hardware when I switch from 2 1920x1200 monitors to a big 4K screen; I won't need to change my OS.

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Problem is, most softwares that are NOT in the official repository are made for Ubuntu TLS, not debian stable.

So if you want to install VSCode, Telegram, Skype, Stremio, Sublime Text, Python 3.6, clipgrab, steam, dukto, tilix, etc. You know that half of them won't work out of the box on debian stable. Each year it will be different ones, to make it spicier, for different reasons that can take a huge amount of time and energy to figure it, if you ever do.

Then if you need to do anything exotic, and it's worse. E.G: I'm currently compiling a lot of crypto currency wallets (I run a master node automation service). Most of them will compile only on Ubuntu. And if you don't want precisely Ubuntu 12.04 (I compile for 16.04), you'll need a little tweak.

Don't mistake that for hatred. I donate to the debian project financially, I adore them.

But for the desktop, it's really not making my life easy.

Leave it to Ubuntu to invent their own Transport Layer Security standard

> The whole thing runs really nicely on an i5-2500 with 16GB RAM and 2 SSDs in a ZFS mirror.

To be fair, I'd expect any OS to run nicely on that spec.

Not windows 10.

W10 runs fine on my laptop, a Thinkpad T440 with an i5-4300U, 8GB RAM and SSD.

W10 does a fair few things wrong, but performance is not really one of them, unless you're on a Pentium 4 or something.

I converted a similar laptop from win10 to Ubuntu and now it is all cool and quiet.

Windows seem to require many many CPU cycles just to update itself and index files (yet cortana never seems to find anything, but that's another discussion).

A significant fraction of the time, win10 is indexing files, running antivirus scans, running win update (multiple times a day), etc. This will often pin 1-2 cores. On my dual core i7 laptop from 2016. That’s not good performance. Since I also use ubuntu on a daily basis, I can see the benefits pretty clearly.

Just wondering what made you think it's "an ad for consulting/support services"

Edit: I found the "offending phrase", I think. I dare you to click the link, it leads to a (free) online book. :D

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