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Comment by cannam | Hacker News Reader

Although not wrong, and full of interesting details, this is a really puzzling article. It feels a little like writing about how you couldn't get your toaster to boil noodles. (Though not as unsafe.)

I use Linux as my main desktop and have always found it very pleasant, but if my main thing was video editing, I wouldn't try to do it with Linux on ARM64 and then grumble when it turned out not to work very well.

(Of course what makes the article worth reading is the fact that its author has tried just that, and reported on it. It's an interesting report! It's simply odd that the article seems so disappointed, since surely few readers would have expected any other result.)

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I had the same feeling. Most of the article was about challenges the author has with Linux in a single day of trying. My SO could have written the exact same article about the time her work gave her an iPhone when she's been an Android users since 2011.

It's like me deciding to learn Polish and giving up at the end of the day because I'm not fluent. (I actually tried for three months before deciding the pierogi was the only word I needed).

> If your use of the computer is more oriented towards the browser, a code editor, and the command line (e.g. backend web development, infrastructure development, writing/blogging, and the like), the Pi is perfectly adequate, and with 8GB of RAM, Chromium runs just fine, even if you have a bunch of tabs open.

The author does a good job of going into the separate use-cases.

A colleague has effectively abandoned local dev. His "local" is Digital Ocean. If the project is critial he locks it down by only letting his IP in. Gives new meaning to "virtual desktop."

I'm sold on the idea but I will likely go with VS Code instead. He uses Vim. God bless him :)

In this context the Pi feels intriguing. I'm going to run this past him.

For me, a used USFF x86 box fits the bill better. It's not hard to find a $~125 Lenovo m93p "tiny". With an i5 x86-64, 8GB, and a small, but real SSD.

At first, $125 seems like a lot more than the 8GB Rpi will cost you, but things like a power supply, enclosure, and an SSD add up.

That's a good point. What about an older Win * laptop that support a popular distro? Where can I find a list of such machines? My work provides a MBP but for myself I want to go further.

Note: I've traditionally been a Windows person. Mind you Win 10 has distro support, I might as well keep going :)

There are some plugins (I haven't used them) for using VS Code with remote instances. You can also use sshfs to mount the remote system and use VS Code as if the files were on your local system.

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...

Right. I'm familiar but have not used. Once I realized this was possible it opened my mind and vision to other possibilities. I hope :)

My understanding is that that plugin is proprietary and only works on official MS builds of VS Code. There don’t appear to be official builds for Linux on arm64, so I suspect you may not be able to run this on a Pi.

But yeah sshfs would work, of course, as would e.g. Emacs’s TRAMP mode.

I run VS Code in a container on an SBC with no complaints.

I've been migrating to this for the past few months. Using VSCode server, and VIM. Trying to wean off VSCode and use VIM alone but still getting used to it.

Working more and more off my iPad since almost nothing is local anymore.

Funny enough, the colleague I mentioned wrote a blog post on using an ipad in that way.

Incidentally, an (analog) toaster should have no problem boiling water if turned on and dropped into a bucket. The heating element lifespan would probably be short and it would be tremendously unsafe, but it's just a resistive heater.

You may need to cut the ground wire to the toaster if the circuit has a ground fault circuit interrupter, though.

You sound like a Linux user :)

<snort>

Wouldn't the exposed wiring cause electrolysis if the water is conductive enough (possibly due to contamination)?

Seems like a useful way to get hydrogen and oxygen, then, provided you can capture/separate the gases and someone else is paying the power bill.

I should try this for Hindenburg 2: Electric Boogaloo.

I wish the lessons of OP's reality check were better established in our industry's collective consciousness.

Pis are great, but I can't count how many times I've seen a raspberry pi stuck in an application where its strengths have no value and its limitations have severe consequences. The "$100/hr developer waiting for a $5 computer to finish being slow" is a classic. Bonus points for "laggy $5 kiosk in a $1MM expo outing." The most damage probably comes from semi-permanent customer-facing installs where the pi gets to inflict misery on every person passing through.

Articles like this help "responsibly consume" the raspberry pi, and that's something we can all benefit from.

There was a bloke (I think it was the Explaining Computers guy) who tried editing one of his YT vids on the 4 GiB Pi 4 (with USB-attached SSD for the video data), and found it serviceable. Obviously not ideal, but it was up to the job.

Take the price of a Macbook, buy that many Raspbery Pis, connect them in a beowulf cluster and try rendering videos again. Might be completely different story.

Ok, maybe you can't boil noodles in a toaster, but you can cook a steak on an electric clothes iron:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kbx3dv/how-to-cook-like-a...

And salmon in a dishwasher!

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/dishwasher-salmon-with-a...

The beginning seemed a little like getting your [amazon toaster link] to boil [amazon noodles link]

Video editing was at the bottom of the article after many other problems he encountered.

I do not use Linux as my desktop anymore, but I have, and every time I try I run in to all kinds of issues like this.

I recently started doing video editing with blender and it has been a pleasant experience. I have a beefy computer though, not a toaster.

I own an RPi4, and it stutters doing something basic like 1080p video playback on VLC, so not ideal for multimedia.

> it stutters doing something basic like 1080p video playback on VLC

That is interesting. What bitrate are the files?

Encoding is probably more important. Without acceleration from a hardware codec, decoding modern videos is CPU intensive.

In my experience, linux is (unfortunately) only good for running server apps. Ubuntu is good but it's still like 20ys in the past when compared to macos (and that's including how macos gets worse with every new release). There are so many things wrong or half-finished, inconsistent (3 ways to copy/paste, no native GUI fw/toolkit, vsync/video/browser tearing), I'm afraid to install updates because sometimes it won't boot up and I'll need to figure out what went wrong this time (instead of doing what I wanted). Linux ppl like to say it's because of HW but no, it's because they don't care or they have different goals but then I don't understand why the same people often don't understand why linux is not more widespread.

If you want to get job done, get a mac, it's still the best choice (unfortunately, I don't like it but it's the least evil - W7 was good too but W10 spy/adware is ew)

I use desktop Linux for last ~20 years. I don't use Gnome; my choice is simpler things like Xfce, and Window Maker before that.

I find the fact that I can configure it my way utterly important, and performance-increasing, for me. This is exactly what I dislike about MacOS: it is very opnionated and rather inflexible. (I also see zero vsync tearing, and I'm fine with GTK2, GTK3, and Qt all look reasonably consistent under the theme I can and did customize myself.)

You are correct, MacOS and desktop Linux have different target audiences, with distinctly different preferences, neither of which is "more correct". This is not Linux "20 years behind" MacOS; it's often away in a completely different direction. (Though yes, Gnome folks try to imitate MacOS, and they are forever behind by construction, because they are chasing, not blazing new trails.)

This. I couldn’t figure out how to do multiple workspaces and switching between two full screened apps took ~500ms. Virtually all Linux DEs did that seamlessly.

That is, except that trash fire that was the Ubuntu default up until ~19.x

use mission control to create "spaces" (workspace)

see

   System Preferences -> Mission Control

to make sure you have a key or mouse button mapped to invoke mission control.

invoke mission control and press the (+) sign in the upper right hand corner to get the number of spaces you'd like

You can switch between spaces using keys defined in

  System Preferences -> Keyboard -> [Shortcuts]

choose mission control on the left and map they keys you like. I use option-1 .. option-8 (aka alt-1 .. alt-8) to switch to specific spaces.

(I'm not using catalina, for all I know apple has removed spaces because it's not something an appliance should have)

I think the issue with this is that there’s still the delay due to the animation. Even with the reduce motion setting (which turns it from a slide animation to a fade), there is still a noticeable delay.

AFAIK there is no way to disable the animation in Catalina without disabling SIP.

This is totally fair and I don't think we are in disagreement.

I should word it differently: Don't expect regular people with previous mac/windows experience (which I myself find very intuitive) to be happy with linux. I've yet not found a single distro which would be on par or better. Every distro I've tried (many of them over the years), I was always dissapointed, just like the guy in the original article.

And it's partly so because people like to say that "you can replace your mac/winpc with raspi4" which you can't (without being seriously limited)

16 years ago, I switched from Windows XP to SUSE Linux as my desktop OS. The desktop manager was KDE. (I think I had a choice between Gnome and KDE at that time, and KDE was the more-supported option).

It worked great. I managed to keep it as my primary OS for a couple years until I got an iMac.

Just this year I installed Ubuntu on an Intel NUC, and was flabbergasted at how spartan the new Gnome is. KDE a long time ago was more polished and exposed more settings to me than this abomination almost 2 decades later.

Maybe it's nostalgia or something, but I just can't shake the feeling that to "solve" problems, desktop environment providers just rip features out. UIs keep sacrificing functionality on the alter of simplicity, to the point where I'm not sure what the point of a desktop environment is anymore. Might as well go bare-bones window manager and control my system exclusively through the terminal.

KDE still has most of the features it had 20 years ago, and has added many more. I've been using it since 2003, and currently on a NUC.

Why not use KDE? Kubuntu is an "apt install kubuntu-desktop" away. (Double check that.)

I'm using the NUC to host a VM instance of Home Assistant, and run a PostgreSQL instance outside the VM for logging (What HA calls "recorder").

I don't work within it on a daily basis. I probably VNC into it once a month or less, just to apply updates or troubleshoot any issues. It's stable so I'm not keen on mucking about with any non-default packages. I seem to get myself tangled up a lot more lately whenever I decide to make any changes to a running system.[0]

But who am I kidding? I'm sure I'll have some free time one of these days and decide to give KDE a shot.

[0] https://xkcd.com/349/

You're not wrong, KDE3 was something of a high point for personal computing.

I've been using desktop Linux for over a decade (Red Hat, Suse in the early days, before settling on Ubuntu) and Linux works just fine for me. Granted, I like my computer to conform to my needs (and not the other way around), so I set up my configurations years ago & these have survived through multiple upgrades.

I had to pick up OS X in the past few years and it has been disappointing - I have to brew install all manner of utilities before I can be productive (or at capriciously random times brew cask install. WTF). In all, I find the BSD commandline utils bundled with OS X to be more onerous/less humane than the GNU equivalents (ls *.zip -lh)

I never had to second-guess an Ubuntu upgrade - nothing ever broke, but I don't think I'll ever upgrade to Catalina: it's just too risky for very little upside.

I've lost three boxes in ubu upgrades, although in retrospect two of them were blob video drivers.

Take Linux Mint Cinnamon for a spin. I think it'll change your perspective for Linux on the desktop. Browsers like Vivaldi make a consistent experience across all three OS platforms.

Mint w/ Cinnamon was the first distro I tried (as my main; I dabbled with Damn Small Linux for a bit on a couple non-daily-drivers) after switching off Ubuntu in the wake of Canonical refusing to budge on the Amazon Lens. Absolutely hated it then; yeah, it looked a bit more traditional, but it felt just as inflexible as GNOME 3 or Unity, and certainly no less buggy, either. Ended up switching to MATE and thoroughly enjoyed it (stuck with that before eventually moving to Debian, then a brief Fedora stint, then flip-flopping between openSUSE and Slackware before settling on the latter).

Haven't tried Cinnamon since; maybe it's improved in the last decade or however long it's been.

I use Mint; have done for ... eight? years after I got fed up with incessantly gardening Arch. (Too high maintenance to be my friend, I decided after 6 years.)

Recently I had to start using windows 10. On Microsoft's own hardware. Oy vey.

I doubt that someone who likes Mac OS will like Mint, but it's definitely a better Windows than Windows. Comfortable rather than stylish, but without jarring jumps to 30 year old UI styles at random times, or six different ways to not quite do what you want. Or the surveillance.

If you don't like Mint, then try MX Linux or Manjaro.

Mint was one of the best distros, I've tried.

I did. It's still the same thing over and over again - try this, ok cool, looks good until you need something which is not covered or is buggy or needs an hour of extra configuration. So I sometimes make mistake and say it loud that it sucks and somebody says yeah, try some other distro, XXX is really great.

Not anymore, thank you - I have linux on my living room PC and few raspis and I occasionally try different distros just to check if it didn't improve but I'd never ever install linux on my work machine and I'm not going to recommend that to anybody until it will work for me. BTW: It took ubuntu 2 years(!!!) to actually make onscreen keyboard work with screen zoom.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised with Proton from Valve, that's likely the best thing which happened in the linux ecosystem for years so it's not like I hate linux or anything like that, I'm just used to better experience.

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