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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

>inux is only free if your time has no value. I use it as a server OS plenty, but don’t really need it on my desktop.

To me this means "I don't know how to get Ubuntu working". Even Arch Linux requires less maintenance for me than my 2013 Macbook Pro did. As soon as you get the setup over with correctly you never have an issue, unless you can't get set it up correctly.

Windows is nice when everything works, and if you don't do anything too advanced for your setup and never have an issue it's good. But fixing issues is much easier in Linux than Windows as long as you know what you are doing.

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Your argument doesn't really prove anything, you can just flip it around:

Linux is nice when everything works, and if you don't do anything too advanced for your setup and never have an issue it's good. But fixing issues is much easier in Windows than Linux as long as you know what you are doing.

Anything will be easier to do "as long as you know what you are doing."

But it's not. Windows is not an open operating system, many of the issues simply cannot be fixed and the only solution is to basically reinstall Windows. The error codes are often opaque and there is a ton of the time no documentation as to what's happening behind the scenes. Whereas on Linux I've never ran across an issue whose official solution was a reinstall.

Have you ever read Windows Internals? Or MSDN? It has more documentation than any Linux system, ever. Even Microsoft's documentation of Apple's SDKs is better than Apple's. Windows Internals books are extremely extremely detailed.

I've ran Windows since 3.11 and have never ever had to reinstall Windows to fix things. Perhaps you should take a look at Event Viewer in more detail to see why things are broken.

I worked as a Windows sysadmin. I'm familiar with Windows Internals and Sysinternals. But when the bootloader decides it's going to go into automatic repair or now or when the indexer decides that it needs to use 100% of your HDD for the next year, there's nothing you can do about it but reinstall. When some Windows services will fail exclusively if your locale is set to French, there's also no explanation, and the log gives you no clue about what's going wrong. I could go on and on. Every update the already incomplete Internals documentation gets slowly more obsolete. And that's not even taking into account the clusterfuck it becomes when you need to modify anything.

There's a reason why when you need something to be stable you don't use Windows.

Perhaps I have not had these problems because my locale is UK English.

I've used Windows for decades and it has been very stable for me for the past 7+ years.

> the setup over with correctly you never have an issue, unless you can't get set it up correctly.

Eh... I don't know about that. I still have problems with GPU drivers when updating Ubuntu (and I don't think that's significantly different for other distros)

I personally don't have such issues due to rolling distros, but FWIW I had the same problems when upgrading Windows as far as graphics drivers. Though yes, on every OS a major system upgrade might require you to repeat part of your set-up. The only OS where I haven't had such issues are Linux rolling distros.

> To me this means "I don't know how to get Ubuntu working".

Yes, I'm sure Jamie Zawinski didn't understand Unix systems well enough to get them running.

He said that over twenty years ago. Things changed. A lot.

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