Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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That's quite surprising, since I hardly met any machine since 2003 where one of the common live-CDs wouldn't boot to a workable state out of the box.

Bizarrely, I was able to live-CD boot to my newer machine fine. I even ran Ubuntu as my main OS for about 3 months until there was something I needed to do that wouldn't run under Wine. It worked "ok".

- I needed to reboot it 3 or 4 times a day because the sound would just stop working for no reason I was ever able to resolve.

- I could never get it to use the native resolution of my monitors. I suspect it was driver issues with my perfectly normal nvidia card.

- Video playback, flash, etc. all ran unacceptably slow.

To be honest, I'm willing to accept that not everything will "just work" perfectly out of the box. But if it takes me longer than a 2 or 3 hours to resolve a minor issue, I'm done.

One thing that still befuddles me to this day is the plethora of perfectly earnest looking GUI configuration odds and ends in Ubuntu which seem to have virtually no effect. Anything that I was able to resolve had to be done by opening up an xterm and editing some config file someplace (which usually wasn't in the place pointed to by most of the online help I could find).

I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux. I hear a lot about insurmountable issues with these OSs, hardware that won't work or whatever. But I've almost never had an issue I couldn't resolve by downloading the correct driver for the device, clicking setup.exe and rebooting. The few times I couldn't it was because the hardware was bad.

(though there was one time I was trying to get bluetooth to work on a laptop I had, I did the above, but it borked the machine and I got a bluescreen. 30 minutes of googling gave me the magic incantations to fix it and get me back up and running...turns out the laptop was one of the submodels that didn't actually have bluetooth hardware...meh)

Now finding the drivers can sometimes be hard, especially if the hardware is oddball or very old.

Fun fact about sound: I discovered yesterday that one can restore sound on a Ubuntu 11.04 system by killing the pulseaudio process (it will instantly restart and restore sound.) No reboot required, in my case.

This is now one of the more frequent activities I do on my machine. Next step is to make a desktop shortcut or applet "Fix my Sound" or a command-line script, to avoid going through the incantation to find and kill the right proces. Then install Windows.

With the GUIs, problem is that Gnome and KDE and Canonical have gone through so many changes to their config systems (supposedly freedesktop.org D-Bus or something is supposed to fix that, but there is always at least one team starting up a vendetta against another team, and breaking compatibility), and even if there is new stuff that works, there are tons of packages in the Canonical repository that happily edit config that your environment isn't actually using (gtk vs gconf vs dconf vs kde vs gnome, etc)

The thing that surprises me most, and something I'd find absolutely unacceptable to release, is that the stock GUI config tools are broken or do nothing. This is a QA issue. I personally don't care if it took them a decade to properly test and sort this out. You should never release, release level software with broken GUI components like that.

Taking the car analogy further, suppose I tried to turn on my radio, only to find out the volume knob (which I can quite clearly see and manipulate) doesn't work, 2 or 3 days of Googling into it lets me know that there's a new knob, over on the other side of the steering wheel to control volume, that's undocumented, doesn't work properly, and dumps all the petrol from the gas tank if it goes above 7.

The actual way to resolve the volume knob operation is to swap out the radio the car came with with another one, except doing so will cause an engine conflict requiring a new transmission and a green left rear tire. Until of course the radio stops working, which requires you to rearrange the spark plugs in a random order. But hey, the new radio you put in has satellite radio that works so long as the windshield wipers aren't on intermittent wipe...so you can check that feature box I suppose.

Reading the manual for illumination it says: "to lengthen the distance of wave propagation attenuation from the magnetic speaker drivers, rotate the amplitude control clockwise (unless south of the equator where clocks work double negatively backwards <G>)"

Searching the Internet for help always ends up with conversations like

"you shouldn't have bought that radio, every body knows that"

"which one, the stock one, or the new one? I didn't have a choice with the stock one"

"RTFM"

"I did and it's entirely not helpful"

"did you try removing your shoes?"

"no"

"do that, it'll fix it. I have the same car you have, but from 1962, and that's how I solve my tire problem everytime"

"I don't have a tire problem, I have a radio problem"

"that's what you think...."

blah blah blah blah

and in the end we're talking about different cars anyways

> Anything that I was able to resolve had to be done by opening up an xterm and editing some config file someplace (which usually wasn't in the place pointed to by most of the online help I could find).

The price of flexibility is a lack of conformity. This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.

However, for a home user trying to do a specific thing to their one computer, being able to Google their solution and follow the instructions is very important. Fedora and Debian might be G/L but if you only have instructions for one you'll have to know how to translate it to the other, and that's beyond most people's ken. In contrast, Windows is Windows.

The only common affliction is hardware, but Linux still draws the short straw here. But it could be worse, at least you're not making yourself a Hackintosh.

This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.

Which explains why most enterprises, once they settle on a distro, will stretch that version of the distro out for years -- all their technical staff will learn it, their greybeards will know how to wrangle weirdness out of it, they'll build an internal knowledge base how to resolve the particular 10 issues they have with it...etc. Once it's configured according to the 100 step config guide it'll run like an appliance and nobody will think anything about it unless some hardware fails.

For the end user, the endless twiddling just to get something running on their system kills any dubious efficiency improvements once it's up and running. No wonder folks are simply grabbing the useful tools and replacing the broken desktop OS with OS X.

> I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux.

When switching from windows Me to Vista, my stepmother had to change her scanner and printer that were perfectly working because there aren't any driver. They both still work with the latest Linux (and Mac OS X).

This is quite typical of the problems under windows : forced upgrades, nagwares, malwares...

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