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Comment by erinaceousjones | Hacker News Reader

> written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro

oh... oh you poor soul :P

I used to use Arch on a high end gaming laptop when I was younger and had time to waste on things like dotfiles and perfecting my vim config and jumping through hoops like Bonus level Sonic.

Now I opt for lovely simple boring functional Dell laptops from my employer and install Fedora on everything.

Out of Windows OSX and Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora/Sabayon (Gentoo variant), Fedora wins the "everything just works" thing by miles on the supported Dell HW and _still_ supports stuff better out of the box with my home desktop.

Yeah yeah I know everyone's experience is different, but...... Out of using all of the operating systems on the daily for 15 years, linux is the one I consistently begrudge the least.

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The main reason I switched over to a windows box (after WSL2 was released) was because I hate dealing with obtuse hardware and driver issues.

I am a software engineer, but I work in user space and have zero interest in managing hardware issues. When I plug in a device to a Mac or Windows box it just works 95% of the time or more. I never have to touch textual config files, I never have to adjust DNS settings and routing settings to work with the VPN, when I plug in my headphones it plays audio through them, and my webcam works nicely. I don’t have to use the terminal to get my GPU to kick in at appropriate times.

I have tried to make the switch to Linux so many times, I love the computational model, but I’m too busy to spend my time working out the user experience, and too cheap to use a Mac now that WSL2 gives me a real Unix environment on Windows.

“Cheap, User Friendly, or Dev friendly, pick two” Was my mantra before WSL2 made windows dev friendly too… I’m not a fan boy for Windows, just too lazy to care anymore. I’d be happy to try Fedora…but I have my doubts…

> When I plug in a device to a Mac or Windows box it just works 95% of the time or more.

I quit using Macs a long time ago because I find I have to spend way too much time configuring them and adapting to the workflow, but between Windows and Linux I find devices work pretty much the same. If anything Linux has a better success rate, things "just work." On Windows it seems like every single time I plug in a mouse Windows starts "installing drivers." Even though it has the drivers. Usually "installing drivers" seems like it's a nothing but sometimes it actually seems to be downloading things and installing them while the PnP mouse already should work.

Definitely, as a rule plugging things into Windows it can take 10-15 seconds to pick up while Linux works much faster on average.

I think that rings true to my experience. It does _not_ ring true to my experience with audio peripherals in particular or with networking concerns.

Don’t want to jinx it but the process has been painless. Technically I’m using EndeavourOS. Had to install with a USB wireless adapter but after the driver, it’s great. Everything “just works” including suspend/wake with lid, keyboard backlighting, brightness/volume fn keys etc.

Printing on HP deskjet? What about scanning? Can you share your files on a local network with samba? (painlessly I mean)

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