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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I might be unlucky but Linux had been a nightmare on the few laptops I've tried it on. It is not that I have not tried. I did. Some of the problems I had: Very slow UI, not recognizing my Wifi Card, Chrome stopping support for CentOS, Problems with the Graphic Card and multiple monitors, problems with most printers I try, problem with my Bluetooth mouse...

Linux and the multiple variants have been horrible. Also, you commented about Python 2-3, I agree I had issues with OS X. But you are ignoring the fact that installing software on Linux is still a mess of resolving all the dependencies and the package manager. Where in OS X, it is just a file move to App.

Nowadays, I run dev code on a Linux docker container. I do pretty much anything else on OS X.

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Your experience running Linux on a laptop is highly dependent on how well it supports the hardware that happens to be in your device. If you're able to research the driver support ahead of time, you may find that Linux runs flawlessly on the laptop you bought. If you install Linux on a random laptop, then getting wifi, audio, etc working can be hit or miss, depending on the drivers.

As far as installing apps, I guess it depends on what you're trying to install. In my experience installing apps is easier on Linux than on any proprietary OS, so long as you're installing open source applications and working within the package manager and keeping your system up to date. If you want to run proprietary software on your open source OS, then yeah it's more difficult since Linux distributions aren't really designed for it.

> Your experience running Linux on a laptop is highly dependent on how well it supports the hardware that happens to be in your device.

My second mainline Linux install was a copy of RedHat on a laptop.

Mind you, this was RedHat 5.1 on an old 486 laptop with 8 meg of RAM, PCMCIA, etc. Sometime in 1995 or 96, I forget.

Several re-compiles later, I had that entire system working - all drivers for all the hardware, including the built-in modem (plus sound and PCMCIA ethernet).

I got lucky there.

This.

I had an Asus laptop that would only pickup wifi if I hibernated it first. I have a Dell touchscreen model that took a full day to get the touchpad to work at all as Ubuntu kept defaulting to the screen. Too afraid to do a fresh install of the current (or any other) distro because I can't remember how I fixed the touchpad issue.

It sounds like you were really unlucky. The last time I struggled with any of the issues mentioned by you is at least 4 or 5 years in the past.

> But you are ignoring the fact that installing software on Linux is still a mess of resolving all the dependencies and the package manager. Where in OS X, it is just a file move to App.

This is also highly dependent on specific experiences. I haven't had any issues with conflicting dependencies on Arch linux in the past few years. And personally I appreciate a system package manager for all software instead of having to download applications and doing drag and drop for installation

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