Comment by erddfre3423 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erddfre3423 | Hacker News Reader

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>Yet you've decided that the best solution for her is an OS that requires debugging miscellaneous hardware and driver issues and runs a mishmash of software with no consistent UI language.

I guess you've never tried Linux Mint with Cinnamon or anything similar. I've honestly had way more issues with Windows 10 than Mint. Before switching to it I had never even touched Linux, yet I found the transition to using it as my daily driver very easy. Everything I need to do for basic use can be done through UI, it's intuitive and quite similar to what I got used to with Windows 7. The only thing I miss is some Windows-software like MS Office.

It's all about which distro you choose. At work I use RHEL with Gnome and it's nowhere near as beginner-friendly as Mint with Cinnamon.

I've tried Fedora, Arch Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Linux Mint. They all have issues you won't discover in the initial honeymoon stages but will randomly discover issues like sleep mode not working consistently, wifi disconnecting, second monitor not working, battery draining, etc.

If your hardware combination works with 0 issues, consider yourself lucky, but if you plan to upgrade your hardware you need to set aside hours of your time just in case you have issues.

If you're making any sort of serious $$ with your machine and Linux is not a hard requirement, good luck making that investment of time worth it.

I know that if I have an issue with Windows a quick Google search and I can find a solution within minutes. But I don't think I will ever return to debugging for hours why my 2nd monitor with an AMD card refused to work after my Ubuntu desktop went to sleep.

Yeah, I think that for new hardware there's more chance of compatibility issues. But when it comes to old hardware that's too slow for Windows, I think installing used SSD and something like Mint is always a good idea over buying a new machine just to run browser on Windows. Good for the planet and your wallet. Personally I use a Thinkpad from 2011 as my daily-driver outside of work, couldn't be happier but it probably wouldn't really work well with Win 10.

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