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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

What about when windows decides to update the sound driver underneath you and you stop having sound until the next restart?

Because it happened to me on windows, but never did anything like that happen on linux, where if it works once, it will continue to work.

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This happened to me, but with a microphone instead of sound output. One day I boot my laptop, join a Teams call, and my microphone is not getting any sound anymore. I had to figure out later that Windows Update automatically installed a new driver, and it didn't work right for some reason. I had to search for the old one online, find the right version, and only then it was fixed.

Driver regressions are not unknown on Linux. Just because it never happened to you personally doesn't mean it never happens.

But they are not arbitrary “runtime” regressions due to an auto-update in the background.

Also, compared to things like NixOS’s boot into previous working config, windows is lightyears away.

I am not so sure about that...maybe you don't run updates in the background but some of the distros do and there are random strange problems until you reboot. Windows is definitely worse at that but Linux is not 100% safe either. Also there is always a chance that your Linux update will cause things to stop working, it happened to me a lot more often than with Windows. If you have a tablet without kb attached Linux is a major PITA as the on screen kb and touchscreen work 90% of the time and then randomly stop. If you think that 90% is good, try it and see for yourself...spoiler: try to unlock your screen when kb is not working...or try to select a menu that keeps closing as soon as you touch it without selecting the item...or try to search for application in Gnome activities with touchscreen. It is so, so close but not quite there yet...and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. NixOS is another great idea with sub-par implementation. Two things that made me wipe it off the computer: 1) compile your own program and now try to run it on NixOS computer...good luck. 2) upstream program is marked as abandoned, I guess you don't need it until someone starts maintaining it again...W.T.F!!!!

Regarding 1) on NixOS: you can install steam-run, which runs your program in a regular ubuntu-like environment by linux mount-magic (it just creates a directory structure with programs placed under /usr and the like). It works well for ordinary programs, and you can also specify specific dependencies.

To be fair, colloquial-Linux-the-operating-system (namely, apt et al) loves doing this (and worse) due to bogus transitive dependencies on things like gcc-10-base, or systemd-shitwared, or nvidia-brick-the-install. The real difference in this regard is that you can effectually force Linux to stop.

apt and traditional dependency managers are not the state-of-the-art, as nix is.

But they are still much better than run this graphical installer that may or may not do what it claims, while littering dynamic libs all around the place.

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