Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

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Bingo.

Switched from 10 years of Debian-based linux (mostly Ubuntu, recently Pop_OS) to Windows because of some MIDI driver thing I could not get to install in WINE.

I have had a significantly less pleasant time on both Win10 and Win11, and it's slow as hell. Ubuntu/Ubuntu-derivatives with Regolith as a DE + Tiling WM is the best computing experience I've ever had

(Disclaimer: Have never used a Mac. Have been told OSx is better than Linux by people who have used both for long time.)

https://regolith-linux.org/

The ironic thing is that, I later had a passing convo with a developer of a DAW, who told me that MIDI driver stuff is usually for running specific software from the vendor and that MIDI is universal over USB.

So I never even needed to switch in the first place! I was just too hardware-stupid to know this!

Oh man it hurts my soul.

I could switch back but it takes a whole weekend to properly backup + wipe and setup a machine. I think I am going to go back to Pop_OS or Ubuntu though.

> (Disclaimer: Have never used a Mac. Have been told OSx is better than Linux by people who have used both for long time.)

As someone who used both for a long time, I would agree 2-3 years ago, now though I'd say I prefer Linux. I do really love the new m1 macs in term of temperature control and performance though.

The advantage of Linux is that when it doesn't work it's much easier to diagnose and fix by yourself, that didn't use to be a problem on macs because Apple's QA was much better and they were pretty stable (if you skipped the first 3-4 months of a new OS release) but nowadays, it's a lot less stable, my mac cannot even go to deep sleep properly (which ironically used to be a major pain on linux) and it's just a black box that's hard to diagnose but doesn't work well enough to justify it being a black box. And for the mac, I used to use things like SIMBL to modify the system exactly how I liked it but all of that has been slowly removed by Apple. Now I just want the flexibility of Linux.

  > "I would agree 2-3 years ago, now though I'd say I prefer Linux"

This is an interesting anecdote. Do you have anything in particular that makes you think this, or is it an overall shift in feel? Also curious to hear which distro you use

Call me a heretic, but I am jealous of the M1 performance-for-price being outside the Apple ecosystem and have thought to buy an M1 laptop and wipe it + put Asahi Linux on it hahaha

I mostly use Arch Linux. Used to use Gentoo for years before that. Mostly it's the continuous QA problem I've been getting (my mba not going to deep sleep is a big one), the dumbing down of the OS X interface and the fact that I can no longer easily use tools like SIMBL to extend applications.

It's a bit the straw that broke the camel back. As time went on, little things became more and more aggravating.

I'm eagerly watching Asahi Linux's progress :)

I have a core i5 mini computer which I spin up every couple of months and it always amazes me that for the first 20 minutes or so the CPU runs at 100% while windows checks for updates (obviously this wouldn't happen if I ran it daily, but still Linux never does this)

>slow as hell It's surprising how poorly Windows performs. Many people who don't use it may have not noticed how bad it's gotten in the last 5 years.

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