Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrsj | Hacker News Reader

I've never worked somewhere that uses Linux dev machines. Almost always Mac these days, but otherwise it's been Windows. At least a good option exists for *nix tools on Windows now.

And WSL2 is good enough for personal development that I use it on my desktop as well -- I don't want to waste time fucking around with drivers or dual booting for something I do infrequently anyways.

View on HN

I've never understood what drivers you people are "fucking around with". On Windows I have to go to netgears website and download a driver or use the included CD to get my WiFi dongle working. On Linux it works out of the box.

I've always found Windows to be the huge pain in the rear end, not Linux.

Lucky you? Usually it's my bluetooth adapter, or my AMD graphics card, or my thunderbolt, or my 4 button mouse... or.. or... the list goes on and on. For a normal experience yeah it generally could work out of the box if I just want chrome and facebook like normal people. But none of us here are normal are we?

If you want chrome and facebook you go to an american shopping building and get a chromebook or a rebranded mass-produced bottom-shelf el cheapo laptop with whatever it has preinstalled. Heck, normal users don't see a device in terms of hardware and software, it's just "the flip-open-thing that gets me cat pictures".

- Dunno what bluetooth you're using, but cheapo USB ones off Amazon work as well as my laptop's Intel built-ins.

- `radeon` is in the box (for Fedora, I assume Ubuntu) and has worked on half a dozen different cards over the last decade. I've never installed `amdgpu` but it looks no more difficult than nVidia's proprietary drivers?

- Thunderbolt is a continuing problem, though TB3 is significantly improved IME. Docks and multi-monitor over DisplayPort MST are fine. Haven't tried PCIe extensions.

- Many-buttoned mice work better than they do on Macs, I'll tell you that much.

AMD cards now with AMDGPU are vastly more convenient than Nvidia ones under Linux. AMDGPU is fully open source, so everything JustWorks™ without installing anything. Everything is shipped in Mesa and the kernel itself, and it does not require anything else.

Cool, good to know. I didn't realize that it was more like `nouveau`. That's awesome!

None of these cards need any additional driver under Linux, unless it's extremely obscure hardware made by some Chinese company. Damn AMD has even rewrote its entire Linux graphic drivers from scratch, now they are fully open and work fantastically out of the box. I bought an RX 580 specifically because now I can just install Linux and have everything working perfectly without caring about even installing a single package.

I bought a WiFi + Bluetooth PCIe card last month; it was one of those cheap Chinese no-brand cards that consist in an Intel WiFi chip slapped on a board. It worked instantly without installing anything, with just the drivers shipped in the Linux source tree that every distribution has. My mouse is a Logitech mouse with 5 buttons and it too works out of the box.

How long has it passed since the last time you installed Linux? It has changed a lot in the last 10 years; lots of things work flawlessly now. I haven't had to meddle with any driver since at least 2010, when my shitty ATi Radeon X1600 still only worked under FGLRX or when I tried to use a crappy Chinese WiFi dongle whose drivers were only distributed as source on a CD (damn you realtek)

Windows:

Sometimes Windows Update can't automatically find an appropriate driver the first time a device is connected and I have to install one manually. Time lost: fifteen minutes, tops.

Linux:

Last time I bought a USB wifi dongle, I bought one with a Linux penguin on the box. It turned out that the driver was a realtek fork and I had to manually apply their patches and rebuild every time my kernel updated. Could never get DKMS working quite right. Time lost: two hours.

I have dual monitors, one running on an Intel integrated card, one running on NVidia. Either one can run on the open source drivers alone, but I cannot activate both at the same time. The Intel drivers output hot garbage when Nouveau is running. There's a "flicker free" mode which eliminates a similar problem, but the Intel driver appears to ignore my config in this duel head configuration. Time lost: eight hours.

My experience:

WiFi device comes with CD but I have no CD-ROM. Then I try to google this no name brand and find the official website but fail.

I plug the device in Linux and figure out exactly the real chip used (many devices reuse same chips and put their own antenna and branding on top).

Now I know the real chip name but the guys that make it do not offer driver downloads to regular users, so I need to Google and find some driver.

Then the next problem, what website that offers driver downloads should I trust? I never heard of any of them, in the end I remember that many years ago I was downloading stuff from softpedia, decided that I already spent too much time on this and since it was my son PC I can risk it and grabbed a few potential drivers from there.

After that I needed to refresh my memory how to install drivers when you don't have a wizard and read a quick tutorial and follow it.

Conclusion, there are tons of hardware , as a Linux users in more then 15 years I can list only this issues(I am not using 4K or multiple screens setups):

- a few years back AMD catalyst driver dropped support for my 1 year old laptop (maybe the chip was older) forcing me to decide if I use older software or the crappy at that time open source software ( this costed AMD sicne I bought NVIDIA next time)

- for latest NVIDIA driver I just need to google , find and enable and official repository and now I can install from a list of drivers versions, I do not need to make an NVIDIA account to get updates.

- my Cannon printer was detect fine, I had to select a similar model from a dropdown and change a setting from RGM to CMYK (I had to google this)

- I had issues with microphones on cheap headphones, my solution was to buy USB headphones - they just work (including Microsoft ones) no driver installs

I never had to install an audio or network driver on Linux, on Windows I had issues with same hardware where installing drivers from Windows and not from the original CD would make the audio and network conflict (both were Realteck chips and Windows would get confused).

Btw I am not saying your experience is not happening, I am sure that some new hardware will be missing support and some other hardware might experience bugs, I added my experience to put things in balance.

Windows: Still has no package manager. Setting all software up takes time. Hardware was done by the laptop manufacturer, don't know how much work that would be. Works fine for the most part. Keyboard, mouse, wacom etc require a bit of fiddling.

Linux: Software setup is really easy. All hardware worked out of the box.

MacOS: Reading instructions, preparing installer etc. Got it "working" in a VM but without graphics accel, which makes it not really useful.

Time lost: A few hours more for windows, but quite comparable.

There technically is a “Windows package manager” https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli, though it doesn't manage installed packages yet (that seems to be planned for v1.0 sometime next year https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...).

Windows has like six 3rd party package managers. Chocolatey and Scoop have large repos and have been around since Windows 8. Modern Windows devices ship with the specific drivers required for the hardware and download drivers for unknown hardware automatically. Building my gaming PC from scratch, I didn't have to manually install drivers for anything. I've never even heard of a keyboard/mouse that didn't work out of the box.

Laptop suspend, ALSA sound, Bluetooth, and WiFi are almost always sources of constant frustration. I loved Linux but until they get that ironed out, I won't use it for a desktop solution.

I hate getting jerked around by Apple but not as much as I hate driver issues.

I won't buy non-Thinkpad laptops because I'm reasonably assured that they'll work with Fedora, but IME desktop hardware has a much higher chance of Just Working.

Who are "they", and why would they care about someone's demands? Don't get me wrong, I got bitten by some of these issues occasionally, too, but Linux is not an actual product I pay for. It's a bunch of free code. I can choose to contribute or not, but I can't expect that anyone is obliged to care about my demands.

This is a straw man argument. I wasn't making demands, never claimed Linux wasn't free, and never said anyone was expected to care about my situation.

I just said until they (contributors, obviously) have a better solution, I'll choose to pay for a desktop environment that suits my needs.

But why pay Apple tax for a Mac when you can pay $0 extra for a Thinkpad/Thinkstation that's certified tested to run multiple GNU/Linux distros well, or a Dell XPS “Developer Edition” or System76, Purism, or similar laptop with one preinstalled, and not be 'jerked around by' a single company?

Usually when a new series of GPUs is first released the driver support on Linux is pretty bad and even if it works its unstable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com