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Comment by SmellyGeekBoy | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't believe what I'm reading here. Is it still 1999 where you live!?

I started using Linux around '97ish and agree with the parent too. The problem for me wasn't investing the time in tweaking a new installation, but apt-get dist upgrade (whatever it's called these days) would eventually break my system...in very bad ways.

To be totally fair upgrading macOS or Windows can be a minefield too.

I had exactly one issue with a macOS upgrade - when they introduced APFS. The upgrade process has failed in the middle with an FS-related error, but AFAIR it resolved itself after rebooting and retrying. For comparison, Windows 10 and various popular Linux distributions have caused me a lot more after-update trouble: input devices ceasing to work, graphics drivers breaking and falling back to the built-in generic ones (with a 800x600 resolution, on Windows), graphics drivers breaking and not falling back to anything, but just causing X to fail to start (on Linux). Once (a few years back, I admit) upgrading Debian testing brought in a new version of the kernel that turned out to have some ACPI-related bug on my machine and consistently freeze about 30 - 60 seconds after booting. This all is of course just personal experience, but I think I'm not the only person with similar ones.

I hear this a lot. And mostly from Ubuntu victims. I have not reinstalled my Fedora XPS 13 laptop for over 4 years. I have clean upgraded 3 times.

Fedora is spectacular and has been spectacular for many years now. The driver support is brilliant. It was one of the first distros to have absolutely seamless integration with RAID mode NVME (which was something the XPS set it to).

I will be very surprised if you have to "tweak" your laptop. Everything that you have in OSX is already there - including nightmode, etc... the works.

And here's the cool part - customizing Fedora is a browser extension away! http://extensions.gnome.org/

Breaking upgrades are not distro-specific, but mostly user specific.

It usually breaks for users, who do not respect package manager and what it does, break their installation with misc convenience scripts and tweaks run as root, and then wonder, what went wrong.

I agree with the parent. I’ve been using Linux since before 1999, sometimes as my main desktop, but often not.

This comes up somewhat regularly, and probably always will - it’s the nature of the beast.

I’ve found myself very happy using a Mac as my main desktop. It’s not perfect either, but good enough.

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