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Comment by incrudible | Hacker News Reader

> About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.

My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.

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However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

Are these "updates" or "upgrades"? If the problems are with updates, I would say that your experience is not typical of most Linux users.

Its a shame that you are having problems because the modern Linux experience is pretty slick.

They were updates. I have attempted an upgrade once, it broke the system. Now I just do clean installs in favor of upgrades.

I had the same experience with ubuntu upgrades. Something was always broken.

I don't think you can blame linux, it's just a specific distro trying to do a task which is too hard and fail.

Not sure if it's still the case with ubuntu, I just run Arch which is a rolling release distro; I decide when to upgrade and what it implies + their info on breaking updates is always punctual.

> I don't think you can blame linux

No, of course you can't but that's also the problem. It's always someone else's fault.

If you try to upgrade Ubuntu you're told to RTFM. If you try to upgrade Raspbian, you're told you should have just installed a new image.

Linux distros routinely offer up options and features that do not work and there's no responsibility to be had.

With Windows, it's Microsoft's fault and they fix it (eventually).

Kind of changing the goalposts of MS...windows fails too

I see nothing has changed in 10 years.

Linux Mint has addressed this specifically. They enabled auto-updates in 20.1 only after they launched and tested Timeshift, which is a backup tool that enables you to boot into a past snapshot of the system much like FreeBSD's snapshots. It's geared mainly towards btrfs however, as ext4 doesn't support snapshots.

And to be fair, updates broke my Windows systems multiple times in the past as well. This isn't really a problem by itself since errors and mistakes happen, the problem is that the state of recovery tools in both systems is somewhat lacking. Linux can be repaired from Live USB and has Timeshift, but it doesn't have an easily accessible built-in rescue environment that's actually useful. Windows has DaRT, but all decent Live USB's for it are third-party and it's very hard to repair its internals if the existing tools don't work. FreeBSD is probably the closest to being bulletproof, but it has its own problems.

> I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.

"Unlucky" is probably the wrong word, since I doubt all those failures were independent, but you're presumably in some niche with a high probability of update failure (just as the users failing their Windows updates are). For a counter anecdote, I've used Linux laptops/workstations (primarily Debian/Ubuntu, but dabbled in others) exclusively for 15 years and have never had an update break _anything_.

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a hardware compatibility issue? Linux can still be a _terrible_ experience relative to Windows if you have strong opinions about the hardware you want to use. IME, all the people who talk about Linux being a vastly superior user experience to OS X/Windows are those whose hardware preferences line up with good Linux support.

> This has never happened to me with Windows.

Lucky you! When this happened to me with Windows last time, I had no idea what to do and how to diagnose it even though I spent a lot of time on it and had the knowledge of all of the Internet available. I had to reinstall and painstakingly redo my whole setup.

When it happened to me with GNU/Linux, it gave me enough rope to actually debug what happened, so I could fix it and get back to where I was before. And I went through several Ubuntu and Debian dist-upgrades, and now I'm even using Arch which is a rolling distro that's somewhat expected to break from time to time.

So sure, it does happen more often than it did on Windows - but I don't think I actually waste more time with that than I did when using Windows.

I never had a problem with LTS versions of Ubuntu MATE.

If you want modern-looking LTS, try KDE Neon.

https://neon.kde.org/

I had Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a Dell Inspiron 3137. I ran apt-get update and it crashed and would not boot. I was preparing to lend the laptop out to family so I had to put Windows back on it. It happens. Your personal experience is not everyone's experience.

I would be intrigued to know what happened with this one.

Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that.

Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot.

For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).

I also would love to know more about this. The thing I do is wait for LTS version 20.04.1 or 20.04.2 before installing so all the kinks will be ironed out.

I've been running linux on the desktop for 3 years now and have never had an update break anything. If you stick to the more stable debian derivatives and forgo some of the bleeding edge features in a rolling distro like Arch (btw I do not use Arch), the update process should be pretty seamless.

This is another popular trope. "You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"

I never said they were doing it wrong. I said the distribution matters. If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.

Saying "linux" has a poor update process or stability issues is meaningless.

You just said it again...

> If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.

"You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"

Not "doing it wrong", making a tradeoff.

That's true of software in general. You can use (often older) more stable tech and lose access to some newer features, or you can used the latest and greatest and get a few more features and accept a reduction in stability in exchange.

Is that not the point here? Labeling something a "trope" isn't a self-contained argument. The reliability of Linux systems is terrible for certain contexts: modern gaming[1], universal hardware compatibility, taking advantage of bleeding-edge software updates (the analogue to which doesn't exist on Windows), etc.

IME, there's a lot of talking past each other when it comes to OSes. The vastly superior experience that Linux fans describe requires a couple of one-time boxes to be ticked, like constraining yourself to known compatible hardware platforms and stable software versions. There are plenty of people who don't realize this dynamic exists and trip over it, and it's not dodging the question to make them aware of these limitations and let them decide whether the cost/benefit fits their situation. Eg, in my case, I like Thinkpads, don't game, and need a stable, reliable, and performant system that I can be productive on. The pitfalls of Linux don't affect me personally, and I obviously can't meet the needs I describe with a Windows system (or to a lesser extent, OS X).

[1] I hear this is getting much better with things like Valve's Proton, but I assume that Linux is still far worse than Windows for a dedicated PC gamer that wants to play new games.

I think you make an excellent point. Many of the posts admonishing Windows speak to the loss of freedom but, as you pointed out, you have to willingly give up a great deal of freedom if you want stable Linux.

I'm not trying to bash on Linux, merely point out that for everything it does right there's just as much it does wrong. The same is true of Windows and MacOS.

No arguments there! It's a pretty good rule of thumb that the no-exceptions maximalist view is wrong, on almost any topic over which there's meaningful disagreement.

I've had Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora break on me, all of them stable releases. Fedora was the worst.

I've been running Debian testing for a long time, where I kind of expect things to break now and again; and I'm pretty surprised by your experience. The only breakage I've experienced were minor inconveniences, maybe it's familiarity with the OS? Modern Linux DE experience is quite good now a days.

I've never once ran into an issue with Fedora.

> I've never once ran into an issue with Fedora.

Fedora (at around version 20 iirc) was the absolute worst in my experience. I haven't used it since.

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