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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I run Ubuntu on three machines and never in a million years would I set it up for my parents. I still struggle with lots of little gotchas and annoying issues like sometimes it just doesn't want to suspend. Or sometimes after resuming, the keyboard doesn't work so gotta unplug it and plug it back in. Sometimes my wifi just conks out for no apparent reason. On and on, just lots of little paper cuts.

I switched my parents over to OSX years ago and have had to do almost no tech support at all. I really like Linux, but I still would argue that the OS that "just works" the most is still OSX.

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It very much depends on what hardware you’re trying to run Linux on. I’ve never had a issue with most of my laptops (which have mostly been Samsung and ASUS machines) but ironically the one laptop that’s been the biggest pain point is my 2018 model MacBook Pro. I get why the Mac doesn’t play nicely with Linux and don’t blame the Mac for that per se but honestly even the stuff that does work correctly (USB-C, keyboard, etc) are still horrible to use so I definitely wouldn’t have been happy even if I’d left OSX in there. In fact I’d probably say getting a Mac was one of my stupidest career decisions of recent years.

But anyhow, back on topic, it really depends on your hardware.

The problem you describe is mostly because of hardware. And you didn't switch to OSX, you switched them to Apple hardware with Apple software, not an OS switch.

On well supported hardware for Linux I have my parents since many years on Fedora. I even just swapped the drive from an old Lenovo netbook to a newer Fujitsu laptop without any issues in between

"The problem you describe is mostly because of hardware."

Which does not change the fact that they are still problems - no matter how unfair it is and how little the Linux-Community is to blame for it.

I used Linux on many different machines - and sadly I can confirm lots of problems with hardware. Standby/Resume, etc.

Try running macos on PC hardware and you'll feel the true pain of incompatibility. Buy hardware supported by your OS of choice. You dont buy an arm computer and expect to run windows. You shouldn't buy a PC for Windows and expect it to function perfectly for Linux.

That's not the point, though. The competitor (Windows) mostly has none of these problems, and that's pretty much what matters EOD.

If you cannot expect a generic PC to run Linux, `$currentYear is the year of the Linux Desktop` will continue to be little more than hyperbole. That's a big problem if we're looking for widespread adoption.

>The competitor (Windows) mostly has none of these problems,

Windows tends to self destruct via forced updates over time. So far I have not had a single windows installation that didn't require a reinstall after a certain amount of time has passed. The type of failure is different but it's significantly worse.

This is coming from someone who uses Arch Linux, a bleeding edge distro that isn't known for it's stability (well it's pretty stable so far).

Absolutely true, if not maintained.

The only reason this isn't the case in Linux/MacOS most likely is simply due to the lack of crapware targeting these platforms though (because the reward profile significantly favors targeting Windows more).

You can see this in action with Android vs iOS too (no flamewar here folks). Android tends to get bogged down quite easily if active maintenance isn't done due to the proliferation of nefarious background workers.

> That's not the point, though. The competitor (Windows) mostly has none of these problems, and that's pretty much what matters EOD.

But the story ends with OS X.

Lol. Try running Windows on non standard or even non x86 hardware. Your point here doesn't make much sense.

Define "standard."

As far as I understand, non-standard or non-x86 aren't really mainstream. Windows for ARM-like devices is nowhere close to being ready for prime time.

The point here is that the solution is simply to get better hardware, which is much less expensive outside the Apple ecosystem.

In my experience the same hardware when ran under Windows does not have these issues.

EDIT: also just want to say I'm not anti-Linux, I'm just being realistic. I understand Linux's history and how it has some disadvantages (and advantages). I'm just saying at the end of the day, my interest is a reliable machine, regardless of how I get there.

Of course, since that hardware is tested under Windows.

OPs point is that if you're comparing Linux to macOS, you need to also compare the hardware accordingly - just as you buy a Mac to run macOS on, you need to buy hardware that's guaranteed to work well with Linux. And such Linux hardware is still going to cost less than a MacBook or a Mac Mini.

I bought an Asus 1215B, sold with Ubuntu, a couple of years ago.

WiFi working has always been ups and downs, specially bad at the beggining when Canonical decided to exchange the closed source driver by an open source one, even thought it wasn't feature complete. I had to spend 3 months using LAN cable until the drive was actually working.

The Radeon on the Brazos APU is a DirectX 11 class GPU, but after AMD dropped fxglr, I lost video hardware acceleration, and the OpenGL feature level has been droped to a lower version.

So much for buying a laptop with Linux support out of the box.

This is usually true until there’s a big Windows version upgrade (7 to 10, for example), and the manufacturer and/or the component OEMs decide to stop supporting their stuff with drivers.

It really depends. Hardware with support in kernel does work really well. I have less issue with my AMD graphic card on Linux than I had in Windows (random blue screen, gpu resets, a random driver version that will just not work). Granted, the quality really improved past years.

My work laptop is also much more stable. On windows 10, the intel driver will always blue screen when i had no more ram left. I never had one crash on Fedora.

It does require to look at hardware support first, but that's the same way than checking hardware quality before buying. I always buy things that meet my requirements, on computer hardware, one is Linux support, I don't see this as an issue.

Try running OSX on the same hardware and see how well it works of if you encounter problems too.

I experienced some standby/resume issues a few times along my years with linux, sometimes the fix was simply to upgrade/downgrade the kernel, sometimes using a different distro did the trick, sometimes it was a matter of configuring things correctly and sadly sometimes the hardware manufacturer was hostile to linux.

Sure, but that hardware advantage is something Apple should be able to take advantage of, they worked hard to get it. And I take advantage of it as well. At the end of the day, I just care about my needing to do support and that a computer generally works.

I run Ubuntu on a 2015 and 2017 Lenovo ThinkPad (T450 and T470s) and a desktop I built myself. Interestingly it runs the best on my custom desktop.

I use Ubuntu due to i3. The advantages a solid tiling window manager give me outweigh the drawbacks. But if OSX had a tiling window manager on par with i3 I'd drop Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

EDIT: and just to add, when I run Windows on these machines I don't have any of these problems: suspend works, USB and wifi work, etc. In my experience Windows's main problem is that it still crashes pretty regularly.

your problem here is not linux, your problem is probably ubuntu and lenovo.

ubuntu is notoriously buggy and lenovo thinkpads are more and more hostile to linux since 5-6 years.

Try something like manjaro instead of ubuntu and see if you still experience the same issues.

Thinkpads are not really problem. Yes, Lenovo occasionally does something with ACPI in their brand new models, that breaks Linux, but overall they are fine. Of course, it is possible to configure them in such a way, that will be problematic; for example, if you put Nvidia GPU in your config.

It's Ideapads that have often the problems.

That's totally fair. It's on my todo list to try some other distros. I will probably try Debian first. I chose Ubuntu due to it being so popular and also because my company's IT supports it. But if other distros are more reliable then that's fantastic.

Mint on my Lenovo P51 has been brilliant. There were basically zero issues to get everything working like sound, sleep/resume and network (common sticky spots). Being a ThinkPad, there were also some utilities to do more specific things like power management to only charge to 80%; mine's usually plugged in, this is supposed to help battery life.

I can still dual-boot to the Win10 it came with, but it's been a month or two between typically.

Which brand is more Linux-friendly than Lenovo these days?

> The problem you describe is mostly because of hardware.

No, that would be a software problem; as in driver-related. And as others noted, it's still a problem either way.

I think the point is that if you buy Apple hardware, of course macOS is going to run well, because you bought hardware specific to that, so do the same for Linux, buy Linux specific/well tested hardware instead of just any old crap, because you weouldn't do the same with macOS.

It's a fair point. Especially now that you can get purpose built Linux laptops, even from Dell.

A fair comparison would probably be Mac/OSX vs System76/Pop_OS.

My mom's NUC has never caused any trouble running the latest Ubuntu. Network printer, scanner, wireless mouse, webcam, bluetooth headphones, USB hard drives, sleep/hibernation... not a single problem.

Which NUC model is it? I looked into NUCs a couple years ago but at the time they had a reputation of not being great with Linux.

https://ark.intel.com/products/76978/Intel-NUC-Kit-D34010WYK

Actually the Gigabyte Brix variant because I didn't want to buy the WiFi/bluetooth card separately. But it's the exact same mainboard.

I have a NUC5CPYH (it was very cheap). It was too slow for my liking, but everything worked, including Ubuntu, OpenBSD, Haiku, etc.

ChromiumOS is perfect for it. It's distributed by Neverware as CloudReady OS.

I run Linux on the Skull Canyon NUC and it works great.

This is great to hear. At one point I was considering that very NUC. I'm glad to hear Linux is working well on them.

But do you have the skull lid/cover or the boring black one?

Of course the skull cover :-)

I have a couple of NUC7i7DNKE and they are great with Linux. They even support AMT, if you ever needed that.

I just installed Debian testing on an ACEPC GX1. Zero problems.

Exactly why I switched from Xubuntu to Mac 5 years ago. I just want to do my work, not fix my system after every minor upgrade.

The reccurring issue people seem to have with linux is that they use ubuntu. Just use a decent distro instead and see if that fixes your issues.

Even Ubuntu is fine (this is coming from Fedora fan). If you are going for the long haul, do the following:

- use LTS. You don't need every 6-mo release.

- don't install packages from random ppas, if you don't know what they are doing to your system. Of course, do not install anything not managed by repositories, that would break your system (If I had a dime for every person that installed hplip/nvidia driver/etc from HP/Nvidia/etc site and just overwritten their apt-managed system files. It worked... until upgrade).

My parents also use Ubuntu; they are using it since 6.06, on the current hardware since 12.04. Upgrading them between LTS releases is non-event, aside the UI changes.

I always found Ubuntu to be easiest to use. No fighting to get GPU drivers to work, or other weird issues. Easy to install things when I was first learning too.

Edit: I meant to ask what people are using that's more stable. Fedora you need to reinstall every few months, Debian has some 'rules to not break Debian' that seem to make it special purpose, centos hates my GPU, trisquel gets very rare updates. I know that all of this is solvable, but Ubuntu seems simpler to set and forget.

Gnome is buggy though. I love it but I sure wish it ran better

Well Ubuntu is a broken by design bleeding edge attempt to be microsoft with linux so it is not something I would use myself (ditched it 15 years ago) and even less install for people who are not computer literate with time on their hands.

I have two main issues with OSX: it only works on overpriced hardware with no repairability and some things are hidden or very difficult to find when possible (sort of the civilized version of GNOME's way of removing settings and features and thinking the user is dumb).

If "just works" is the relevant metric, it's hard to beat Debian stable - or CentOS, or perhaps OpenSUSE Leap. Sure, the things you might be able to easily achieve with them are quite limited. But the flip side is that they will chug along nicely and reliably for years upon years, with nary a hiccup aside from the occasional security update. That's the sort of "just works" that we - and our non-technical acquaintances - are most in need of!

Yep. My parents can usually also find some kind of support system with a Mac, either on Google or if they must, at an Apple Store.

I would never in a million years subject my parents to Linux on the desktop unless there is some kind of support system that is not entirely dependent on me.

Same. I would ===never=== burden my parents with Linux. Until recently, it would be Macs. But am starting to think ChromeOS might be superior.

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