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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

I just moved to Linux as my primary OS; been fucking great. 11/10

Overall, everything seems to "just work" at least as well as on MacOS and is not quite (for me) as endlessly frustrating as Windows. Gaming has also been effortless and honestly just the most delightful surprise about the whole thing. I can write code AND play games... on the same machine... and it's running Linux?! I would've lost that bet ten years ago.

I was/am totally prepared to use GPU pass-through to a Windows VM to get native gaming performance or work around bugs-- but I haven't needed to.

I'm using PopOS but am pretty indifferent toward the distro I use. I honestly got it confused for different distro, but it was still Debian/Ubuntu based so I'm chill (ha).

Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice. It's a little weird to even think about dialing in the aesthetic more to my liking coming from the world of MacOS. But I've found themes like Nord (https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/) provide some visual familiarity while maintaining their own unique aesthetic qualities.

Making apps, or interacting with the OS, is absurdly easy using GTK and Python vs anything Microsoft or Apple have to offer. I have the same effective level of support which is to say none-at-all or via the community of volunteers. I can't ever imagine calling Microsoft or Apple for meaningful help (roflcoptr and we say we pay for support).

Linux is rocking the desktop hard, if you haven't tried it in a few years or just maintain a Windows installation to play games-- seriously give it a try. It's wonderful.

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> Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice.

I agree, and what really sold me was Plasma Desktop, as someone that couldn't stand KDE 3 & 4. It used to be that GNOME was the desktop environment you could turn into a Windows or macOS clone, but it looks like that switched with GNOME 3 and KDE 5.

I have Plasma Desktop set up[1] to take advantage of my macOS muscle memory when it comes to the GUI and keyboard short cuts, and I couldn't imagine going back.

> Linux is rocking the desktop hard, if you haven't tried it in a few years or just maintain a Windows installation to play games-- seriously give it a try. It's wonderful.

It's not just developers or power users that Linux shines for, either. I'm of the opinion that if ChromeOS would suit a person's needs, so would a polished distribution like Ubuntu along with a browser like Firefox or Chrome. Ubuntu has an app store-like interface to install Zoom, Slack, and other work apps.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23607374

I finally got fed up with tweaking Arch/DWM and switched to Manjaro with KDE on my main machine, I went through all the versions of Manjaro and all had their problems and I finally settled on KDE.

Looks good, allows me some tweaking, runs surprisingly light. Although, still some annoying bugs, the most annoying being when I open an application on my 1440p screen, KDE often opens it on my second monitor for no real reason.

If you hare looking for a more arch experience again, check out endeavouros. Phil and the Manjaro group have increasingly proved their incompetence.

There is funny business going on at manjaro, but by god do they deliver! I run 5 linux computers at home for various ends and I got tired of putting a new Ubuntu on them every now and then. At the time I looked at manjaro, other rolling distros couldn't even survive an update from the latest installation media to current (sidux). Arch is/was a hobby in itself and the opposite of what I was seeking, but it is an excellent foundation. Manjaro has kept these 5 machines for over 5 years through every possible update and it never broke them. Kernel switching is a joy. Driver installing switching is a joy. This is a very tall order.

That said I do hope endeavouros or others can fill Manjaro's immense boots.

Might I suggest Arcolinux to you? It sits closer to Endeavour and Arch with its packages, but also comes with many things preconfigured.

> Although, still some annoying bugs, the most annoying being when I open an application on my 1440p screen, KDE often opens it on my second monitor for no real reason.

This here is my most hated thing about KDE. I run it on Debian so my version is pretty old compared, has it been fixed in newer versions? I have been thinking about switching to Neon, but I don't care for the Ubuntu base verses vanilla Debian.

No it hasn't, it's very inconsistent though. Emacs and some other software does it everytime, although most seem well behaved. I'm on 5.20, probably not the latest version I'd have if I were on Arch though.

Neon is not that much better and doesn't fix a lot of the issues.

I've found XFCE and cinnamon are the most stable/reliable DE's. I'm rocking Manjaro cinnamon right now.

XFCE had some weird virtual desktop behaviour where when I opened an application from the tray, it would open in my current desktop and not the desktop that I'd placed it.

Aside from that it was great, and there was probably some configuration option to stop that behaviour but I could not find it.

Actually I quite enjoyed Cinnamon, I cannot even remember what things I disliked but I'd just saw the new release of KDE and those small niggles were enough of an excuse to switch back to KDE hah.

I love KDE and think it is the best Linux desktop in terms of features and customization. Unfortunately it's just so damn buggy. Not in in unstable way, but there are just enumerable ways you can break it. It gets to the point that when you try something new that it has, you pause and think "Is this gonna break or stop working thus ruing my workflow again?"

It's why I went back to cinnamon. I mean in the realms of the phrase "Fuck, marry, kill", I'd fuck KDE, marry cinnnamon, and kill MATE.

KDE maintainers have been pretty responsive when I opened bug reports, so if you haven't tried that avenue, it can't hurt.

I'll have to try KDE again, I always found it really messy and disorganised (but that was many years ago).

It's really hard not to have some bias, but I used OSX for work for about five years, currently been using Windows at work for about two years, and I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.

Do give KDE a try. I recently helped a friend migrate from Windows 10 to KDE. I have personally been using i3, XFCE and GNOME back and forth during the last decade, and the one time I tried KDE a few years back, it did not boot to desktop so I just switched back to GNOME.

After helping my friend setting up KDE I discovered the level of polish and customizability that KDE now offers. That same day I installed KDE on my own machine and soon after removed every GNOME component from my system. I have been using it the last few weeks and really feel at home!

Yeah, I was a Gnome user for past years ago along with Fedora. And I share the same Greg K.H feeling about that such big change called Gnome 3 that honestly I was not able to track it at all from UI perspective on a Fedora machine at that time. They together never convinced me for my daily job. In the other hand, KDE has evolved without that big major difference like Gnome 3 and now with Plasma 5 we have a very polished interface with great performance resulting is a pleasant experience on my daily basis. Basically now with ArchLinux + KDE on my laptop I have everything that I want as developer: an OS performing and booting at high speed (around 10 secs the whole OS + desktop env) and a great desktop experience. Such experience that you can not afford it using Windows or "even" Macos.

That's Linux empowering your computer. So that simple.

Have you tried Cinnamon? I would recommend Mint for trying it, you can install newer Kernel via Update Manager there.

Mint is great and I recommend it too for using Cinnamon but it's not remotely the only viable choice to try it out. Cinnamon works just fine in Debian/Devuan, and in Fedora, from my experience.

> I'll have to try KDE again, I always found it really messy and disorganised (but that was many years ago).

This was my reason for not using KDE for years. The UI these days is cleaner and leaner, rivaling XFCE in resource usage.

> I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.

This was my initial impression, as well. But if you want to do something that the GNOME team feels is superfluous, you're either out of luck or depending on some plugin that will break your DE if you upgrade GNOME.

On Plasma Desktop, almost everything is configurable, but it isn't overwhelming and disorganized like it was in KDE 3 & 4. There's a considerable amount of polish. Plugin bugs don't take down the entire desktop environment, either.

It still is tbh.

So you install Linux to install a bunch of proprietary software on it? I don't get the point.

Linux isn't just an OS you use because you want to use free software.

For a good number of people it's just better than Windows and macOS.

Maybe so, maybe other people just don't know, for those who don't know it may be good to read how this all got started, so here's my two cents: https://www.gnu.org/

I understand this, and I am someone who started using free software for philosophical reasons. But if you're interested in free software succeeding, it's a better strategy to meet people where their needs are rather than push any particular selling point. If someone switches to Linux because their Steam games run smoother than on Windows, more power to them! And then we can sell them on all the free software that their distribution just happens to come with, and also educate them about the philosophical underpinnings along the way.

This is the way.

Linux with a few blobs is still light-years better for your freedom than osx or windows. Plus, from a platform perspective, software built on windows or osx is categorically not free (in the strictest sense - even if the software is gpl, if it's built for a nonfree os, it's still not very useful in the grandest scheme of things even if it's better than if it were proprietary as well). However, software written for linux can be truly free.

Note when I say "written for" I'm not even really speaking very technically - lots of programs written nowadays won't really have any particular dependency on a library that's only available on a certain OS. But if you're using an application that's written in a platform-agnostic way but the programmer only develops it and uses it on a Mac, it's usually easy to tell. Both in terms of system interop/integration and how bugs are prioritized.

So, even if people do things you don't like on their linux install, it's still far better to have as many people on linux as we can get.

Even if you keep all of your proprietary applications, switching from Windows to Linux still means your system is less proprietary than before, so it's still a step in the right direction.

I'd prefer not to use Zoom or Slack, but my clients use them, so I end up using them, as well. Matrix is getting better, and I've heard good things about Jitsi and its clones, so hopefully one day I can ditch the proprietary apps for open ones.

> Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice.

This has been my experience recently as well. For laptops at least, as long as you buy a system with known good Linux support, the vast majority of the common complaints I see are not really valid.

If you need macOS or Windows to run a specific application exclusive to that platform, great. If your software all runs on Linux, you can gain a lot of freedom and privacy for little effort these days.

My last three laptops (3y/laptop) have been bought without consideration for Linux. All three worked splendidly.

> as long as you buy a system with known good Linux support

And that is where the problem lies. With Windows I can buy pretty much any laptop and expect it to work with. With Linux I have a limited selection of laptops, if I want it to work fully. I'm a developer and I know my way around Linux pretty well, still I usually run into "missing drivers", "package management is broken", "hardware working mostly but not fully" when I try Ubuntu or Debian.

I sympathize with this as I had a laptop with Nvidia Optimus and installed Linux on it back before it was really supported, which wasn't fun.

However with Dell XPS Linux version, Lenovo has a couple, and also System76 and things you have now hundreds of laptops guaranteed to work and many more that actually still will. Just research them first if you're not sure. These days there is so much info on laptops that work well.

The first class supported ones like XPS (which I'm on my second) get firmware updates etc. it gets easier and easier every year.

One of the best things of Linux support is that the more mundane the laptop is, the better supported it tends to be. And also cheaper.

All I'm doing to have perfect Linux support in all my laptops is to go for the boring models. No RGB keyboard, no bleeding-edge dGPU's, and no dual, or foldable screens.

Adding to sibling: If you are in europe, check out https://www.tuxedocomputers.com

Disclaimer: Content customer

Same here. Awesome material!

This sounds like you're trying to buy brand new laptops and then slap distros with years old kernels on them. With most laptops, the network card is the only area where support is still not solid.

I think in general there is just very little hardware as attractive as a MacBook Pro that supports Linux well. If we take the requirements as being roughly: HiDPI screen, thin and light all metal body, USB C charging, tenkeyless keyboard with centered trackpad and reasonable expectation of mostly working out of the box with a standard Ubuntu iso.

Your options are pretty much just the Dell XPS/Precision line and the Lenovo X1 Extreme series? Anything else?

No hardware provider really uses a standard network adapter, and as I said that's the main thing to check when purchasing a laptop. You can't have a reasonable expectation of just working, but that's all you should need to check.

Though, isn't the issue more that your listed requirements show a strong personal preference to macbooks?

Seriously? Intel MBP now has proprietary T2 chip, has other non-common chips, useless TouchBar instead of F keys, poor cooling design. It's also no future for Linux because they transitioning to Apple Silicon. It uses ARM for cpu march but they use original GPU that I think never be used for Linux. It also uses original boot sequence rather than UEFI.

Did any of you replying actual read my comment or did you just auto-reply "buy a supported Linux laptop"? I said ". With Windows I can buy pretty much any laptop and expect it to work with", and you are saying "Just research if the laptop you want to buy works with Linux", you are completely missing the point. I do not want to have to bother researching if a specific laptop will run Linux and research if all the hardware in that particular laptop will work. I want to buy the laptop I like and I want Linux to support that laptop, since it is commodity hardware. Same as I expect of Windows and Windows delivers in this aspect.

I, too, would like to live in a world where I do not need to research if a particular laptop will work with Linux.

The reason I don't live in that world is because laptop manufacturers, in the general course of things, don't ship their laptops with Linux; they ship them with Windows.

The obvious answer is to buy from manufacturers who ship their laptops with Linux. You could try Dell or System76.

Incidentally, it would be nice to live in a world where I didn't have to check for MacOS compatibility; I could just buy MacOS from Apple and run it on whatever. The answer is very similar: if you want that experience, buy it from the laptop manufacturer that ships their machines with MacOS.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...

Except that's not true, you can buy a laptop that has windows installed and it typically works. However trying to install windows yourself, you often run into all sorts of issues.

windows installation have improved dramatically over the last 3 years.

i always have had a debian and a windows laptop. for at least 20 years. 95% of my time is on the debian one.

this year was the first time where i thought a windows laptop might be enough. i am waiting for the next release of the WSL2 and i think i'm jumping ship for good.

Most recently I got a cheap HP laptop with some online caveats. But it actually works nearly perfectly, better than most versions of Windows I've used. I started using Linux desktop eight years ago and it's only gotten better (and I've always gotten random bargain PCs).

I've often found that simply buying an older model of a relatively popular brand is more than enough to get a working combo.

My go-to is Lenovo, and sticking to the Thinkpad line. Occasionally I've had some growing pains, but I've found using a model that's at least 12-18 months old is more than sufficient for patches to have made it upstream.

Obviously if you have some specific need for a rather new model, then going for something like the Dell XPS line or some other "Linux Certified" line is a better plan. But for my needs, anything within the last 6 years will likely be good enough in my book. I tend to kick intensive jobs off to my local server or set up a one-off in the cloud.

+1 to this -- invested in a desktop earlier this year to tinker more with ML projects, and dual-booted Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 18 LTS) on separate SSDs with separate HDs for data storage for each system.

I have spent 95% of my time in Linux, and only get into Windows for a game or two that I haven't bothered to figure out a Windows VM setup for.

Definitely recommend Linux for those looking for dev machine alternatives to a Mac. There are certain finiticky things when setting up, and it doesn't have the immense MacOS polish, but I would say it's 80-90% of the way there to a good, intuitive dev machine that gives you a very similar experience to a Mac programming setup.

Note, I'm referring to a desktop setup, no idea about how it works with laptop hardware and I have a MBP for my portable needs.

re: linux laptops, I'm writing this from one of the new Lenovo Carbon X1 models that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. I prefer pop!_os (except for the name) so I installed that when I first got the machine, and it's worked with no issues. I've had it for a few weeks and zero complaints. The fingerprint reader even works with linux, which wasn't the case on my previous gen CX1 laptops.

Let me also just say that I am basically at the point where I may soon recommend a pop!_os machine to my parents (who are in their late 60's and have limited abilities on computers). Given that I'll personally be on the hook for any and all tech support, take that as a strong vote of confidence!

I setup Debian on an old desktop for my mum a few years back, and she was able to use it happily with no issues or support from me - for the average person that just wants a web browser and some word processing it works great!

When it comes to development I find it immensely better, and found that it has also made me much more confident when I poke around on servers - no context switching between my local environment and remote.

The only thing I miss is Adobe lightroom, but I don't do so much photography these days so it's not a deal breaker

wsl2? eat your cake, and have it.

I've used Bibble 4/5 in the past (a decade ago!), which was cross platform and worked on Linux, and has evolved into Corel AfterShot Pro - still cross-platform and working on Linux. Maybe not as famous and powerful as Lightroom, but it's a pretty solid software.

> I have spent 95% of my time in Linux, and only get into Windows for a game or two that I haven't bothered to figure out a Windows VM setup for.

Have you tried Steamplay/proton (https://www.protondb.com/) or Lutris? (https://lutris.net/)

I second that. It's oddly under-advertised and not installed by default, but it works amazingly well. However, I still pay Ferral for their full ports to support the effort (most recently Shadow of the Tomb Raider).

I'm using PopOS (with i3 instead of Gnome) on a System76 laptop. I have some serious issues with resume from sleep. All browsers and electron apps have significant rendering issues after I resume and I have to close them down and restart them. I was able to fix Chrome and Firefox by enabling Vulkan, but Slack still requires a restart after every resume.

My external monitors periodically stop working due to an NVIDIA driver bug.

Have you had any similar issues?

Yeah outside of Lubuntu I’ve had bad luck with resuming sleep on laptops. My desktop doesn’t ever go to sleep (Nvidia 1660x) but that’s because over the years I’ve just had so much trouble. I’d still take Fedora or Ubuntu over Windows any day as that’s my only complaint. Then again I’ve been a Linux users since 2006 so to I’m amazed at how great driver support is now even compared to a few years ago.

I am using pop on an oryx and my external monitor doesn’t wake up from sleep. Most flat pack apps don’t work right - especially anything electron based.

Zoom is a hot mess and fractional scaling still doesn’t work right.

I just tried disabling the hidpi daemon in hopes my monitor wakes up correctly. We’ll see.

All that said I am addicted to the speed of the OS compared to windows or Mac OS. I feel like I’m using the full power of the laptop.

I’ve not tried plasma but I miss a lot of my Mac shortcuts like super + left or right going to the end of the line. Still don’t have that working.

It’s so much better than it used to be but I would love to see one of the desktops reach the same level of polish as Mac or windows 10.

It's possible the Chromium/Electron thing is this bug[1], which affects new proprietary nvidia drivers on recent Chromium versions. I also experienced that bug, though I don't think it affected Firefox for me.

It resolved itself for me recently in all apps except Slack. I have no idea why. I'm fairly sure I didn't update anything.

While it was still reproducing, I tested a purported fix in the upcoming Chromium 87 (or 88?) and it was resolved. So just wait a bit or try Canary. More specific info in the bug thread of course.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=111304...

Yep. Only Slack ever had that problem for me. I reopen it again after every resume, when I have to work with my customers. I don't use Slack for anything else.

I can't stand the electron client of Slack, so I use ripcord instead.

I have same problem. It’s 100% with Slack (and I suspected because Electron) but only occasional with Zoom and rarely with Firefox.

I think this is a common problem on Nvidia. Firefox used to crash for me all the time coming out of hibernate. You can try Nvidia's solution.[1]

[1]: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/455.38/READ...

I'm running Pop_OS on my IdeaPad and have very few problems. From time to time, the Wifi doesn't come back up after resume (particularly when I've let it in sleep overnight, or switches networks while sleeping) and I have to reboot. As the machine boots in less than 12 seconds that's a tolerable annoyance though.

The machine is Ryzen5/Vega so it requires no proprietary driver though it isn't Linux certified at all. The only piece of non-working hardware is the fingerprint reader (apparently a driver will come someday...).

I have this exactly same problem - Chromium, Firefox, Electron - and it's apparently an unfixed bug in the nvidia drivers. For me it only started a few months ago. I'm on Ubuntu 20.10 and it's still a problem.

> I have the same effective level of support which is to say none-at-all or via the community of volunteers.

I find community support for linux much much better (askubuntu, superuser and numerous blogs rather than official ms forums). Not sure if this is because I am software developer and am used to stackoverflow-like kind of support or windows "community support" is a mess.

Official (free) support from Microsoft is pure garbage, but at least in my experience it is much easier to get support from the Windows community than Linux for a few reasons: 1) no ideological bullshit, 2) there aren't 100 different distros, 3) the way things are done doesn't change drastically every few years.

1) I agree, but it is quite easy to ignor. I do not see it often though.

2) Agree, but with popular distributions it is relatively easy to find help. With unpopular ones not so much, but you can always choose more common one. If you need to use some special distro experience can be worse.

3) Sorry, cannot disagree more. For me OS utilities in Ubuntu are dead simple and this works for me quite well. But once upon a time windows 10 decided that for some reason I must have 3 different English laouts (UK, US and Latin or smth like that). I did manage to remove redundant ones by performing some unobvious actions in unobvious settings sections. And extra layouts kept returning after reboots. I had other similarly annoying problems and they were difficult to resolve because solutions posted literally month before had completely different settings layout on screenshots compared to mine. In windows 10 settings do change drastically every few... months?

Command-line-based interfaces seem more stable. And most common issues are already have accessible solutions if you use stable release of popular Linux distro. At least in my experience.

I literally dread ever having to Google for help on Windows related issues because the various forums are some of the worst cesspools of crowdsourced ignorance out there[0]. Every question has a dozen or more responses and almost none of them have anything useful to say. Absolutely awful.

I suspect the reason the quality of the community support for Linux is so much better is that the community is smaller, self-selecting, and generally more knowledgeable versus the majority of the Windows community. Up until recently it required a certain commitment to run Linux on the desktop and that still bleeds through.

Normally when I buy a new computer I just get a Macbook Pro but, with Apple seeming a bit off the rails, and working from home making a desktop machine more viable again, I'm thinking about building my own machine. I'm also seriously considering Linux because Windows 10, I'm afraid, drives me to distraction most days (I have to use it for work unfortunately).

[0] The StackExchange sites aren't quite as bad, but the other forums are absolutely grim.

Personally I'm not a fan of gnome, but If you have a MacOs background Its understandable to prefer it on top of other Desktop-Environments. Do not forget to give a try to other D.E's thou, its always good to check new stuff, I always find delightful stuff effortlessly (: For a long time I tried to make my Linux desktop look similar to my old windows machine, until recently I understood that I was compromising my productivity, so I started to look for new looks for my desktop, its like shopping at a free mall haha, I love it.

In 2018 I ended up calling both Apple and Microsoft for phone support within a few months of each other and, to my surprise, got excellent support from both of them. The Apple issues turned out to require an NvRAM/SMC reset to fix a weird performance issue. The Apple support person was very polite, helpful and knowledgeable.

The Microsoft issue was I’d bought a laptop which came with an Office trial, but wanted to enable Office using a license I bought through work. It required uninstalling the trial version, running a power shell command line tool to clean it up, then install the required SKU of Office. The MS rep was also very knowledgeable, logged on remotely with my permission and I watched the whole process. It took a while, but the engineer knew exactly what to do and did a great job.

That was the first time I’d had phone support from Apple or Microsoft. I wasn’t too surprised at Apple, I’ve had great support from the stores before so that extending that to over the phone wasn’t too much of a stretch. I was pleasantly surprised at the speed and quality of the support from Microsoft though, I really couldn’t have asked for more. It’s just brain bindingly ridiculous that getting their software, that’s supposedly already on the blasted machine to actually work took such a torturous set of steps to perform.

I suppose that’s all incidental to the thread, but anyway. The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time, and the awkwardness of system backups. I’m spoiled by a Time Machine I suppose, it’s the thing I miss the most on Windows as well.

[EDIT - Looks like I'm missing some options on keeping Linux up to date, thanks for the tips]

> The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time...

Run a rolling release then like Manjaro or another Arch based system. I’ve been running the latest release of my distro for years, never had to reinstall.

Also, there are plenty of free backup apps for Linux like Deja Dupe or Back-in-time. I don’t really bother with them though because all of my important stuff goes into git, even my dot files.

I'm not sure how high your requirement on the "it just werks" factor are, but I can not recommend borgbackup enough for general use. They have a script[0] for local backups one can copy-paste in a cronjob and it takes care of backups reliably from that day on. Saved me from my own stupidity more times than I'm comfortable admitting.

[0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/deployment/autom...

Not to disparage your comment or recommendation, but “it just works” typically means you don’t have to go looking for software (or muck with cron) to do things like ‘backups’.

For me, it’s reasons like that which keep me on Apple: 90% of my basic computer operation/maintenance usecases are already taken care of, or have first party software to take care of it.

I leave finessing linux operations and programs for my day job.

also restic.

> The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time

You mean migrating data to new hardware? Or do you mean clicking "Yes, please upgrade" (or typing `sudo do-release-upgrade`) doesn't provide enough options?

> The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time

I'm using Fedora as my main OS (on the laptop since 2011, on the desktop since 2015) and here it's easy to upgrade to the next release, I've been doing it for years (with only 1 full reinstall at some point):

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-u...

Similarly, I've upgraded an Ubuntu install every 6 months for the last 8 years, and it never gave an issue.

pop_os updates are fairly seamless most of the time but I usually do a clean reset anyway since I wrote a 'post-install' bash script to setup up my computer exactly how I like it. its a bit of work to set up but I would definitely recommend it.

i have all my program settings files saved in a syncthing folder and the script creates softlinks where those files are supposed to be. dconf let's you backup and restore a ton of settings in one go. the only thing I have to do after the script is done is log into websites and then my computer is fully set up

Linux Mint has an integrated backup solution called Timeshift. Upgrades are pretty seamless as well. The usual "wait a few months and let the brave ones uncover the bugs" applies here too, same as on OSX/Windows.

You need a root and a home partition, than you can do whatever, upgrade it, nuke it.

> you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time

My main dev machine started as a Thinkpad running Ubuntu 9.04 and has not only been upgraded many times but has migrated its hardware twice and is now an Intel NUC on my desktop. Never reinstalled anything.

I used to reinstall Windows machines regularly because they'd bog down to uselessness or stop working after a few months. Since it's only a games machine I have learned the best maintenance program for Windows is to toss the machine every few years and replace it with brand-new hardware and software and reinstall the games from original media (mostly Steam). Also, never reboot because it will bog down my home internet connection doing a massive set of downloads from all MS and all the driver vendors and resynching all its trackers. Also also keep it isolated in the DMZ because it should be considered asymptomatic but infected at all times.

+1 for Nord. I used it everywhere - terminal, vs code, browser theme, gtk theme

> Making apps, or interacting with the OS, is absurdly easy using GTK and Python vs anything Microsoft or Apple have to offer.

I strongly doubt Python+GTK is easier option compared to WinForms/WPF. Maybe installing IDE is blocker for you?

I use Nord in vim. I wasn't aware of the GTK theme. I'll check it out!

Are you saying it's finally the year of Linux desktop?

But I can't resist using macOS at this point and their hardware.

I'd like to see someone run Linux on the new M1 hardware.

Linux is an acceptable alternative. In reality, when you have to interact with the "real business world," you need windows.

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