Comment by hpcjoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpcjoe | Hacker News Reader

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Not a lawyer. Zoom client on Linux works and is IMO more reliable (e.g. doesn't BSOD me) than windows, about the same reliability on Mac.

Teams is unreliable on every platform (having used it for years on Linux, Mac, Win). Would recommend against it.

Clearing documents metadata in Libreoffice, yes. It existed as far back as 7 years ago when I was running my own company, and my lawyers and I would be exchanging documents with potential investors.

This said, I also (when needed) run windows 10 in a kvm window, with Office installed, when libreoffice, or office365 is simply inadequate. This is ... rare. I mostly boot the kvm to patch it these days. Haven't needed its capabilities in at least a year (then again, I am not a lawyer).

Dongles (yubi-key, etc) all work great on Linux/Mac. YMMV though, if they aren't common systems. Again, you can run windows on a VM, and pass through that specific port (USB, etc.). It works, though sometimes the software is buggy so that it sends a reset, and you have to unplug/replug the dongle. This is from my Yubi-key experience on my windows kvm running on my linux laptop.

It does keep running and using CPU after exiting though, so I always have to ‘pkill -f zoom’ it.

> Zoom client on Linux works and is IMO more reliable (e.g. doesn't BSOD me)

The Windows client has never BSODed on me. Sounds like a problem at your end.

I'm not the only one at my co that has experienced it BSODing. Windows generally BSODs on work machine at least once a week. Windows 10 patched monthly, locked down as hard as a machine can be under Windows.

30 plus years of Windows tech has taught me not to trust it with anything important.

If you have a system that is experiencing BSODs on the order of once a week, you have a _serious_ problem that is absolutely atypical of normal Windows behavior.

Blaming the operating system hasn't brought you to a solution, perhaps the issue lies elsewhere.

It might even be damaged RAM

Or an unreliable power supply or EM interference, if it's affecting multiple machines.

I don't think you understand how enterprise managed windows machines work. They come full of very intrusive tooling and usually custom built windows images.

Dell on the other hand - on of the largest suppliers of enterprise PCs - offers no warranties for any custom image Windows machines even if they use Dell official driver bundles.

I once came into a Windows Enterprise shop with the same arrogance and thought I could easily fix their issues, but I was proven wrong. You're welcome to try it yourself.

I don't directly deal with Windows desktops but am directly responsible for an estate which includes north of 40k Windows Server systems. As a result, I do have a pretty solid handle on managing Windows at scale (at least in the datacenter). We don't see a BSOD a week across that entire estate, let alone a single system.

BSODs are a sign that something is SERIOUSLY WRONG. Usually, failing hardware or sometimes shitty drivers. Almost never is it a sign of something fundamentally wrong with the operating system itself.

Or they're simply running Blender. I had a tonne of BSoDs when running Blender back when I ran Windows. It probably exposed some bug in the NVIDIA driver or something

Agreed, if a Windows machine is BSOD'ing then it's almost always a hardware issue: usually RAM or the video card.

On the note of stability, at my old (pre-COVID) gig, the brand new top-of-the-line Mac computers were the least stable computers we used; they'd regularly crash during video editing and couldn't be trusted for live-streaming our events. For live-streaming, they used Windows or nix computers (depending on the function). All of our broadcast partners used Windows or *nix computers as well.

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