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Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

> I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on Linux when I had it as my daily driver for over a decade.

What did you spend that time on? I never need to look at anything; it's a big reason I use Linux: my system today is the same as it was yesterday, and last year. And will be the same tomorrow, and next year. Of course Firefox and the Linux kernel and all these tools get updates, but overall it's pretty stable from my user-visible perspective. I certainly don't have upgrades which completely change the UI like Windows 8/10/11 "forced" on me, and if something does go wrong (which it rarely does), I can usually figure things out – Windows: not so much.

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Not who you asked, but here's my answer:

- Webcam on MacBook Pro (some dude reverse engineered it but I packaged it into dkms .deb so I didn't have to compile every time I updated the kernel)

- vpn through company firewall (which didn't support Linux, and wasn't openvpn compatible, took absolutely ages to get it working)

- getting the thing to properly sleep, wake and not chew the battery

- fuck Nvidia and Lenovo (different laptop)

I still prefer Linux and use it as my daily driver.

> vpn through company firewall (which didn't support Linux, and wasn't openvpn compatible, took absolutely ages to get it working)

I'm cherry picking here but in this case you're just doing your company's endpoint management job for them.

This was my last job and I have also spent a lot of time packaging and scripting (for autoconfiguration, I don't like presenting the end user with technical questions if we already know the answer to). On entirely supported platforms.

This kind of thing is a full time job in many companies so if you go outside of the supported path and do your own then obviously it's going to take considerable time :)

Yep. Palo Alto. There is very limited Linux support, but not for the authentication method we used (which did some browser-based auth that I don't quite remember)

> I'm cherry picking here but in this case you're just doing your company's X job for them.

This is a recurring theme with Linux, because guess what, many companies want nothing to do with desktop Linux, for better or for worse.

So you'll have to do their job for them, as a side gig.

Well, or you can use the tools they give you to do your job :)

I agree the focus isn't there. I was managing everything "not Windows" as an endpoint architect and it was very difficult to get other teams to consider them. Makes sense because "not Windows" was less than 1% of our userbase. So I had to really push for them to select tools like VPN and antivirus that support Linux and Mac.

However we did manage. What I did see a lot was that R&D users didn't want to use the standard supported distro (which by the way I picked with their input). They complained about all the mandatory antivirus software (which was not my choice, but the security team's mandate). But really there was a very high amount of "I just want to manage everything myself" going on too. You can't have it both ways though. Either you get a managed endpoint and you have to roll with some of the decisions or you do it all yourself (and in some cases are locked out of some critical environments due to security policy)

This is fine (well fine by me, but not by our security team!) but then don't complain about how hard it is to get it set up.

I can see how WSL fits well into this for companies, though I prefer real Linux myself too. A lot of R&D users would be on Mac as it's a "Linuxy enough" OS with much less hurdles in a corporate environment (native MS Office available etc).

I used Linux as my daily for 10 years and every time there was a major update either sound or networking or both broke. I love Linux, I still use it regularly, but my experience was that basic stuff kept getting broken. I was using very standard Thinkpad laptops throughout.

I guess I got fairly lucky when I was using Linux as a daily driver. The only thing that I would need to fix after a major update was my Nvidia drivers, and I ended up writing a Bash script to do it for me since 99% of the time it was just installing the latest version.

Nvidia drivers turned me away from Linux completely.

I dont remember exactly but i think it was Fedora 25 or 26 (or around there) where they removed some symbols because some fucking moron thought "they arent used by anything" so they pushed them to torvalds linux repo. And the changed got accepted.

You know what used them? Nvidia drivers.

So after a couple of hours fixing that, which at one point started involving rebuilding the kernel and other things that a normal user shouldnt have to EVER do, i just said fuck it, and installed Windows. That laptop is still running decently as a browser/media player at my folks

Now im just using a Mac as a day to day pc, and a windows laptop for gaming.

Even if i deal with Linux at work on servers, and with containers and stuff, i'll never go back to linux.

How do you keep your machine up to date across the board? I bet your PDF reader/writer is way out of date.

Windows does not have a proper central packager mechanism so if you let it, your software will get really ... floppy.

They said they used Mac as their daily driver. Anyway pdf viewer is usually built into the web browser now days is it not?

Yet there are millions of us chugging along just fine every day with linux.

I've never used a Thinkpad due to the Linux hostility I regularly read about. I never seem to have problems with HP/E or Dell laptops that I specify nor any old random desktops I grab. I use Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debbie and others. They are all Linux.

I spend way more time doing stuff on Linux than I ever did with Windows. Windows software comes from so many sources and it takes ages to find it and update.

My experience with ThinkPads is the opposite. I found them one of the more practical Linux brands.

Yep, and thing is, if you run RHEL or Fedora or really anything from Red Hat, they have a close collaboration with Lenovo and upstream, so everything Just Works™ out of the box.

I didn't use redhat but arch and ubuntu with my T480 and both of these had terrible battery life and heat management. Throttling was a real issue. Probably a fault of intels but still it was annoying to have to fix.

I never really got battery life anywhere close to windows or macos and my T480 has an extended battery which weighs a tonne.

I had a Lenovo Thinkpad that was certified for RHEL and used Fedora.

- Battery life was terrible compared to Windows (usually 3-4 hours, compared to 8 on Windows).

- The trackpad/trackpoint would often not come back after resume.

- The fingerprint scanner usually worked 20% of the time (while it always worked on Windows) and when it failed, you had to wait for a long timeout, because there is an issue where when IIRC PAM is performing authentication with one module (fingerprint), it cannot support simultaneous authentication through another method (e.g. password authentication).

- I had a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock, which worked great on Windows. On Linux, the lanes were misconfigured and HBR3 was not enabled, so it was not possible to use an external 4k screen with 60Hz.

It was the full Linux laptop experience as I remembered it. I decided to buy a Thinkpad after using Macs on the desktop for ~14 years. I had really good experiences with Linux on my Ryzen workstation as a desktop, so I thought it might be time to switch on the laptop again. Now I am fully back in Mac territory and probably won't try Linux on a laptop for at least another 5-10 years.

I could have kept the laptop since Windows worked very well. But my brain is just wired for Unix, so no dice.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used a slogan that is usually associated with Apple to ThinkPads running Linux. FWIW, I was a huge fan of the IBM ThinkPads when they still had the great keyboards. So what happened to me is that I was excited when I heard about the close collaboration RedHat and Lenovo were doing on the P53 series ThinkPads. And if you have a P53 the experience is pretty good. Not sure about other models.

I've installed various Linux distros on many laptops, and even though I could usually get everything working, the deal breaker for me was often battery life. I wonder what kind of battery life the people with RHEL on a P53 are getting.

I use both Linux and Windows at home.

Every time I do an update on the Linux PC it always breaks a bunch of things and I typically have to spend 4-12 hours to fix everything.

But the good thing is that I can usually fix everything, and after it's fixed it will stay that way and work reliably for as long as I want until I choose to do another update.

I still love Linux, the only reason I'm using Windows at all is for certain software that doesn't work on Linux (Ableton and games, also no HDR support in Linux).

What kind of stuff breaks? (not nit picking). I used to have that issue on old laptops. But I run linux on a PC now and it's been pretty much issue free. Maybe something with a major release update. But always curious about others experiences. I will say Windows updates break things as well, no experience with MacOS however.

Not the poster you're replying to, but I've had a few issues occasionally. Biggest one was an Xorg update that was done incorrectly by the maintainers. The X server itself was updated, but GLX components weren't, which led to some incompatibility between the two. Net result being that the screen was blank after boot. I've also had issues where the Ubuntu's apt repos would somehow get themselves into a locked up state where it errored out and refused to work; I don't remember what was the exact error, something to do with the upstream repos and the local cache, I just remember it was very difficult to recover; I think it might've required a reinstall of Ubuntu and I do remember it happening more then once.

Most of the other issues IIRC were annoyances more then anything else.

i sure wish all the popular distros would offer snapshot/rollback integration out of box, and thus if it happened you could just boot back into the working one, and move on until it gets fixed.

I have an Ubuntu PC that runs both Mythtv and Kodi that I use as a HTPC.

Recently did an update from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, which completely broke lirc which is the program that runs the IR remote.

So my unhappy partner was unable to use the remote in kodi until I finally worked out how to fix it (and every aspect of how they broke it).

Looks like they just changed the way it works for no useful reason. I had to manually set up every IR button again because the remote name had changed from "mce" to "devinput-32". Why??

MythTV didn't work at all because for some reason the mysql bind address had changed so it couldn't access its own database.

Once I got that working, I discovered that the remote didn't work in mythtv either. They had changed the name of the ?file? they use to send button names. I had to make a symbolic link to the new name so the remote would work in MythTV. "sudo ln -s /run/lirc/lircd /dev/lircd". Why??

Also I had a button set up on the IR remote to shutdown kodi. That stopped working and took me more time to fix.

Kodi was also throwing some python errors, fixed by doing "sudo apt install python-backports.functools-lru-cache"

The Kodi database also got corrupted somehow, so some files weren't showing up until I deleted the database, which meant I lost the resume times on videos we were watching. I spent a fair bit of time googling and trying to fix the database but in the end, no matter what I did those files would not show if the database was active on my movies folder.

Also the Nvidia drivers needed to be reinstalled, but I expected that because that breaks with every single update.

So yeah, that was about a week of evenings to get it working back the way it was.

What distro(s) do you use?

Ubuntu. To be clear it's a major upgrade, ie 16.04 to 18.04. I've never had anything break with the usual upgrades.

Do you mean upgrades between major versions of your distribution? Updating packages has (practically) never broken things for me, and I use Debian Testing. Before I started using a rolling release distribution, I found it easier to keep the system and my data separated on disk and just install a new distribution afresh whenever I want to install a new version.

Yes, major upgrade of Ubuntu version.

I use Linux on a self built desktop using parts I know are well supported. I can see if you use it on a laptop which may not have the best hardware support could be frustating.

This is really the way to do it. No one ever complains about Mac OS being unstable because an update breaks their install on a no-name generic laptop. Instead, they run it on hardware that Mac OS supports. Same should be the case for Linux.

For example Lenovo maintains a list of support laptop versions, and which Linux distros are certified on them. I believe Dell and HP have something similar. Just stick to the supported hardware/distro combos (well, you can typically run whatever distro but at least you have a good baseline), then you should be fine.

I bought the newest Dell XPS 15 model last year and everything was supported out of the gate, including HDR and touchscreen. The biggest problems I had were platforms (few commercial streaming sites support >1080p, let alone 4K and none that I know of support HDR on Linux), games (my steam library is still ~30% of Windows’) and random finicky ness with audio bluetooth (alsa and bluez problems).

None of that was enough to push me away from it, but those problems would also exist on a custom built desktop with fully supported hardware.

If I don't tinker with things, it stays somewhat stable until the next update. It could be anything from a -dev package distro update conflicts with but I need for something else to needing to install a package from source or out of repo that in turn needs more conflicting deps which I somehow manage to get working until something else goes crazy because I hurt its feelings by using a foreign repo or built from source.

It was a passionate love/hate relationship.

Interesting, because my experience has always been the exact opposite: stuff kept breaking on Windows, but Linux (and FreeBSD before that) has proven to be quite stable and reliable for me. I hear so many conflicting accounts on this (in this thread, and before) that I wonder what the cause of that is.

To be clear: I consider your (and other people's similar) experiences completely valid; I just wonder where the differences are. You see something similar with people reporting experiences with Debian/Ubuntu vs. Arch/Void etc, where some say one worked horribly for them and kept breaking and the other was very stable, and others report exactly the opposite!

The only serious issue I can recall was on my very budget HP laptop I got in a bind where the WiFi didn't work as Realtek didn't upstream the drivers for that when I got it (they did after a while), so I had to manually compile and load them: not something I would expect someone without Linux experience being able to do. Other than that, everything (Bluetooth, webcam, WiFi, sound) has worked fine on two Dell XPS's, that HP, and four ThinkPads for about 15 years now (although there were undoubtedly issues that I have forgotten about, none of these machines stood out as "problematic on Linux").

I used to have issues with conflicting library versions.

But this was to do with Software I was working on requiring legacy versions. I found that docker got rid of this.

Every now and again something would happen and I'd have to fix something after an update but it was very stable. I'm finding administering a Windows network is much the same. Microsoft just released an update that nuked my SMBv1 shares. So I had to fall back to SFTP. I probably should have been using that all along as it allows for a much more secure network.

I honestly think it has to do with how much time people have. In all fairness my experience is similar to others in that after the 8-10h fighting with it I probably spent all my time outside of my day job using it without any problem. But I basically had no life outside of this at the time. Others either use Linux for a living or somehow can manage their time really well.

When you feel like you have all the time it isn't an issue but after I barely got away from a very busy and very long work and all I want to do is rest for 2h and watch some entertainment or edit some document/form or even keep up with a hobby project and Linux eats away my evening/weekend, that's a different experience.

But I still like Linux a lot, the community makes it worth the fight.

One incredibly annoying thing on desktop Linux is losing sound every time I unplug my headphones and plug them back in.

On the other hand, the annoyances from Windows (general sluggishness, pop up advertising, Explorer never remembering how I want things viewed, etc) are now really starting to outweigh the annoyances on Linux, so ultimately I don’t think it matters.

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