Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing that so people who are quite capable feel compelled to hold onto the hand-rails for so long and won't just dive in to Linux. I was guilty of hanging on to the dual boot for a few years but never ended up using the Windows side or any of those programs that I thought were so fundamentally important to my life.

I am not sure why people can't just give Ubuntu a go on a brand new machine rather than maybe run it on Virtualbox. It is like cars and bicycles, people will spend all their money on a car but want or insist on some second hand stolen junk when it comes to buying a bicycle. In so doing they never get into cycling and spend even more money on their car. Then one day they hear about climate change and maybe decide to get the bike out the shed.

I feel this is the same story here, since when has there been any information privacy with these commercial operating systems? DOS 6.22 with a locked floppy drive was probably the last time. So to suddenly wake up to the 'scandal' of Facebook et al. selling your every mouse click is a bit special.

These are just observations, obviously Ubuntu linux is the best operating system there is and I would not change for a paid for OS if you paid me.

>I find it amusing that so people who are quite capable feel compelled to hold onto the hand-rails for so long

Whether I’m capable or not is irrelevant. I consider the extra effort required to configure and maintain a Linux desktop to be a waste of time, because I’m perfectly satisfied with my MacBook, which doesn’t require all that extra effort (for what I consider to be an inferior user experience to boot).

> I find it amusing that so people who are quite capable feel compelled to hold onto the hand-rails for so long and won't just dive in to Linux.

Well it doesn't help that Linux desktop is backed by one of the most condescending cultures that ever stalked the internet.

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the way Linux works just doesn't jive with a lot of people? Like, everything has a middleman involved. Drivers for your hardware? Have to be merged into the kernel. Applications? Should go through (all of) the distro package repo(s) unless you want it to be a pain in the ass.

We get it, you find value in the way these things work, some of us don't.

> Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the way Linux works just doesn't jive with a lot of people? Like, everything has a middleman involved. Drivers for your hardware? Have to be merged into the kernel. Applications? Should go through (all of) the distro package repo(s) unless you want it to be a pain

…? This is a really strange perspective, since I've found Linux to remove middlemen. No more searching a manufacterer's website for some garbage closed-source driver that has a dozen vulnerabilities and no support. No more waiting for Microsoft to roll out fixes; you can apply your own changes yourself.

Getting the driver from the manufacturer directly is somehow involving a middleman in your world, but having that vendor have to submit kernel patches and hope they're blessed by the community, merged, and eventually distributed by the distros isn't?

> No more waiting for Microsoft to roll out fixes; you can apply your own changes yourself.

You don't have to wait, since vendors can roll out new drivers. And what's the equivalent on Linux? Pollute your system with an unnecessary kernel dev environment and compile from source. Personally, I think having to resort to that for such a simple operation when it is almost 2020 is a gigantic failure.

I mean that is essentially how all science is done. It has to go through peer review for it to be worth anything. So that is a strong point. You second point is also an exaggeration. You typically wouldn't compile anything (unless you want to). All supported distros will provide binary updates.

> I mean that is essentially how all science is done.

Installing software shouldn't have to be a formal scientific discipline. It isn't rocket science unless you make it rocket science so you have an excuse to invent package managers.

> All supported distros will provide binary updates.

Eventually. On their own schedule. If you want (or need) the latest driver as soon as the vendor says it is ready, you'll be compiling. Otherwise you have to wait for the kernel maintainers, then the distributors.

> No more waiting for Microsoft to roll out fixes; you can apply your own changes yourself.

And now you have to, forever, since you're no longer using a package manager to get updates to your custom buggy horror show.

> No more searching a manufacterer's website for some garbage closed-source driver

Please point me to the source for the drivers for my rtx2080. That would be super helpful!

>Please point me to the source for the drivers for my rtx2080. That would be super helpful!

There are cases where good hardware has no drivers for latest windows, like I had a Wacoom tablet that the vendfor would not result drivers for newer Windows version but continued to work out of the box on Linux. The fact that NVIDIA are jerks and not providing at least documentation for the community to make drivers is not the fault of the Linux community or the fault of us the NVIDIA customers,

The proprietary driver work well enough for my 970 but my next card will be an AMD one

Huh? Binaries downloaded off the Internet work just as fine on Linux as they do on Windows! Package managers just give you very convenient updating and a chain of trust to greatly reduce the risk of installing malware; and these are things people definitely want - see the App Store, the Play Store, Homebrew, Chocolatey, etc.

> Binaries downloaded off the Internet work just as fine on Linux as they do on Windows!

If that is true, then why do developers keep telling Linux people that distribution to Linux Desktop is a problem? What issue do AppImage and Snap and FlatPak exist to try and solve?

> and these are things people definitely want - see the App Store, the Play Store, Homebrew, Chocolatey, etc.

Chocolatey has a paltry install base, Homebrew is only used by developers, and you don't really get a choice about the mobile stores.

Linux is a headache for two reasons: (1) because it's basically packaging your app for half a dozen different app stores, so you need tools that make that easier for you, and (2) lots of frameworks have no, buggy or unwieldy Linux support, because Linux had such a small userbase. So you're right, it is more of a headache for the developer, but the end user has a much nicer experience (it can't be overstated how nice it is to be able to install almost anything with one command, and update everything with another). Of course, binaries can be downloaded off the Internet just like on Windows, and some apps, like Chrome, will even keep themselves up-to-date without a package manager, again like on Windows, but each app having its own messy, non-standardized updating scheme is something of an antipattern on Linux, even if it's par for the course on Windows.

> it is more of a headache for the developer, but the end user has a much nicer experience (it can't be overstated how nice it is to be able to install almost anything with one command, and update everything with another)

It's a trade off. For that you're giving up control as a user about what can and cannot be installed on your system, you're giving up portable applications, being able to have applications on different media, having different versions of the same applications, etc.

I'm an end user too, and I don't want to make that trade off. I imagine there are many others who agree.

I still don't understand - you can still have a standalone executable if you want, nothing's stopping you! Package managers just streamline the common case of "I just want to install some software on this computer and have it update automatically". Linux has all the freedom of Windows and more.

> I still don't understand - you can still have a standalone executable if you want, nothing's stopping you!

Try it some time. See how much of your Linux Desktop software you can actually acquire that way without a whole lot of work.

>Well it doesn't help that Linux desktop is backed by one of the most condescending cultures that ever stalked the internet.

Oh, Rust community would like a chance to defend their title! ;)

> Well it doesn't help that Linux desktop is backed by one of the most condescending cultures that ever stalked the internet.

Ouch.

I ran Mint for years as my daily driver at work. It was great and took me from being a linux intermediate to something of an expert, and I wouldn't mind doing it again.

But for home use, there are simply too many cool programs on Windows to give it up. The Mint partition on my home dual boot sits largely unused. Emulation does an acceptable job for some things but it's often a sub-par experience. It's also quite tiring to have to constantly futz around with services and configurations just to get programs working, only to have that configuration break because of software updates.

In the end I find a Win10 PC with some of the guts rips out (via something like Blackbird) seems to produce the least amount of headaches and generally stays out of my way. I hate Microsoft's Windows-as-a-Service model but most of the things about it can be ignored or switched off. (And yes, one shouldn't have to but I find it better than the alternatives)

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