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Comment by vehemenz | Hacker News Reader

1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting.

2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs.

3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and the choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.

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I'm gonna disagree on everything here...

> 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting.

I do loads of interesting stuff on linux, I use it for research, numerical computing, biology etc. None of these things cause linux to skip a beat.

> 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs.

The world is not black and white! There are degrees to which people behave, and there is a spectrum of behaviour that abides by certain principals and doesn't. I had someone say to me recently that they didn't believe there are 'ethical people', instead people make use of the opportunities presented to them. This isn't true and is more a sign of how they've justified their own life choices.

> 3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and the choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.

I, like many people, tend to use more than one application, so I find the OS does matter. On Windows 10, when I hit the start bar, and start typing the name of an application I want to launch, I really do care when the bar sits there loading up, scraping internet data to show me its suggested apps and adverts.

I don't necessarily agree with your first point.

When I (and many others) first started out using Linux, this was when the most trouble was likely to crop up. Over time, one learns and adapts to certain intricacies, hardware or methodologies used, and hopefully good practises, such as avoiding utterly rubbish or quaint distributions. Of course no scenario is bound to be 100% trouble free, but this is a far cry from an inexperienced user.

Even if I were to accept the premise that the other users are simply "doing nothing interesting", what would your idea of interesting be? Is it heavily exotic in nature (which I do agree in this case), or things that fall outside the purview of web browsing, document editing and leisurely activities? These things can also cause trouble outside the fault of a user for any reason, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they are inexperienced or do nothing interesting.

If you can elaborate more, I'd be interested to gauge if I agree in a new context.

> 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting.

There are 3 type of person who knows a lot about cars:

1. A Car mechanic 2. People who love cars, and tinker them constantly 3. People who have a shitty car and something always breaks.

Personally I'm not a car guy, I treat them as tools. I can do this because I always had a reliable car. I have a friend who once mocked me for my inexperience. I had to reminding him why he knew so much about cars. He was a Type 3 guy. No a shitty car tho, but something always broke on it anyway.

So getting back to you, can we just have something Works? Is that a high bar?

My point here is that if you use Linux enough, then you will encounter issues, period, regardless of your technical level.

The same thing is true if you use a pencil enough. The question is whether you run into issues significantly more often than the commercial alternatives.

And if you use Windows enough, particlarly 10 or 11, you will encounter issues as well.

Just less frequently. Also, we should agree on what those "issues" are, really. Beside the lack of popular commercial applications on Linux, the existing, open source variants, are often inferior if not frustrating.

We disagree strongly then.

You conclusion for your second point seems to include a lot of unstated assumptions.

Which principles do you think are at play?

> If principles mattered more than convenience

What principles? Is this another BSD vs GPL licensing turf war you're trying to start here? I think there are obviously coherent sets of principles on which it makes sense to prefer the latter.

> If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs.

I'm chiming in with everybody else here, but why do you think that my principles are better served by licensing that is less supportive of my principles?

Point 2: What makes you say that, and what principles specifically are you assuming every gnu/linux user has that would lead them to Free/OpenBSD (and not dragonfly or net)?

1) Yes for quite some time I only do fairly basic/uninteresting things. That being said, gnu/linux has become far easier to use than it was, say 20 years ago.

This is an important list.

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