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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

The thing you get with Linux is "more _predictable_ shit to deal with", not "less shit to deal with", no large capable desktop OS is perfect and never will be.

Anxiety from what Apple's agenda will do to your computer next update? anxiety from if a 1hr windows update is awaiting you when you turn your pc on? ... Linux awaits.

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Linux awaits and then when it comes it borks WLAN driver, because canonical decided to replace a perfectly working one with WIP FOSS alternative, forcing users to switch to cable LAN until it reached feature parity.

Linux awaits and then when it comes it borks AMD driver, because AMD decided not to support older cards on the new FOSS driver, and the old perfectly working driver is not compatible with modern kernels, driver ABI be dammed.

Linux awaits and then when it comes it breaks hard disk encryption forcing a full install, and feeling lucky that I actually backup /home regurlarly.

Linux awaits and then when it comes half of the stuff doesn't work in Wayland.

Eventually I rather just deal with macOS, Windows, Android and leave Linux just for the kernel itself.

I haven't had to deal with any of that, but I've had Windows straight up refuse to boot multiple times and the only fix I found was to reinstall. I've now had to advise multiple people who couldn't turn on their WiFi in Windows (the switch just did nothing). I also couldn't fix that without a reinstall (not for a lack of trying). My family iMac refuses to import photos from an iPhone into Photos, failing the transfer silently. I have no idea how I'd even go about fixing that besides calling Apple and forcing them to fix it.

No man gets to deal with all of the possible computer problems, thankfully. But in my experience, most Linux problems have been fixable and I managed to fix them, while more closed OSs have left me stumped many times. I no longer believe that a computer can work without problems, so my priority is making sure that when problems appear, I can diagnose them and fix them easily.

Windows sometimes has these artificial problems, purely for market share play. Hell, I'm still a bit angry at them because of what they did to RE-DOS with Win 3.1 Beta. I was working in a small computer shop and we were blindly recommending MS-DOS as we were sure RE-DOS had compatibility problems. The tracking, and the constant nagging, silly software signing shenanigans...

So I agree, Linux problems are usually much more fixable.

You can see debug logging about photo import in Console.app. When I do it, it takes forever but eventually works.

Thanks, I already tried that. It does give an (easily missed) error from the underlying library there, but it's just some number that some other people are also complaining about on support forums.

If you have any other insights, I'd be happy to hear them. We have a workaround, but It'd be nice to get imports working again.

Well, that's why I use nixos where I can just easily rollback select programs or even my entire system if some upgrade goes wrong.

To each their own I guess, but in 20+ years of using Linux I've never had any of those issues. Maybe it's because I'm cheap an I run it on older laptops.

As for Windows... really no issues there other than forced errors of whatever absurd company policies are in place that cause software I don't want or need being forced on my machine.

Hell no. I work with RHEL every day, and while I'm by no means an expert, I would say I'm reasonably proficient with Linux.

Every time I've tried using Linux on the desktop, it's worked just fine until I tried to update something. Sooner or later, there's some broken patch or some incompatible thing here or there that breaks my window manager and throws me to the command line, ruins my network settings, overwrites my boot config or some other maddening mess. Linux works brilliantly, AS LONG AS YOU NEVER TOUCH ANYTHING

That's true in most Linux distros, I've been there, even with the most robust ones (like Debian). But then I found Manjaro, with a semi-rolling update system, that is a perfect balance between recent version updates and rock-solid stability.

I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 2008

Today my mouse and keyboard were acting as if they weren't plugged in. Just no power, no reason, no change. Reboot fixed it for now

The thing that's changed recently is that I had to update the kernel to support my audio interface.. which was also a pain in the tits

The only relevant search results are StackOverflow spam talking about a version 10 years old

Linux awaits

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