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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The way to fight this has been out there since before most of these companies and products have existed – use FOSS. If you want more convenience and polish then just remember that you are trading it for privacy and autonomy. There is no middle option.

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Calling it "more convenience and polish" is a bit of an understatement. My experience with open-source software is that if it breaks or it's missing a feature and you want your needs to be addressed then you will have to hack on it yourself. While this is great for people who enjoy hacking it's not great once you get bored of it.

I always enjoyed macOS (at least pre-Catalina) because it's Unix but without the requirement to constantly hack on the OS and userland like you have to do with Linux. That means I have all the development tools I appreciate but I can focus on what I actually want to do instead of fixing system-level bugs.

When Catalina came out I stopped updating so I can't speak for how the OS is nowadays.

I've needed 0 Seconds of hacking since using Fedora for 2 years. Linux has evolved in the last 14 Years

Oh yeah? I tried Silverblue a couple years ago, and the Nvidia driver stopped working after a motherboard swap. I tried Kinoite but KDE Plasma's subpixel antialiasing looks terrible on HiDPI displays. Maybe that's some of the "convenience and polish" that you just have to sacrifice in order to use FOSS, but I could also just use software that's properly polished and not care whether it is FOSS or not.

And no, I'm not rebuilding my computer for linux, you would not be the first person to point out that I should replace my Nvidia GPU with an AMD one.

I will note though that GNOME is one of the nicest DEs I've ever used, at least back when graphics acceleration worked. Trackpads finally seem to be a first-class citizen, something Apple has already been doing for almost two decades (and, in fact, it's an Apple trackpad that works quite well with it).

Was nvidia driver foss or proprietary?

I think Silverblue comes preconfigured with the proprietary one, but I don't know how to check and also don't think it's possible to change it, since it's an immutable system.

It worked fine until that happened and basically made it unusable since I don't have an iGPU.

Maybe I'll try some other Fedora, or just go back to X11 on Arch, which worked well enough.

I can easily trust my older relatives to do fine on macOS, Linux would be either painful or more realistically a no go.

Older relatives aren't the ones complaining about auto updates and having full control of their hardware/software. iOS, macOS, Windows and the rest are in fact built with them in mind. This conversation is naturally about more technically inclined users.

I wouldn't really say so, updates break and change things for them all the same as they do for you and me, and just like us, they're unhappy about it. You simply won't usually hear their voices loudly on platforms like HN and the like.

On the contrary, I let older relatives use Linux so I don't need to support macos and windows constantly breaking.

In 5 years I've had 2 family support calls: one to setup a new WiFi on a Chromebook and one for turning the Chromebook on and off.

I've tried to get multiple non-family members set up with Linux and have failed, with constant bugs from Linux, and confusion from the family members. Windows is far more reliable and easier for them to use.

This clearly invalidates your point, and supports "Linux would be either painful or more realistically a no go", because it's obviously not enough for some relatives to be able to easily use Linux - most of them need to be able to. The fact that you have more capable-than-normal relatives or more Linux-friendly-than-normal hardware is irrelevant to the fact that most people do not.

I installed Mint on two older relatives computers and they're both fine with it. They also do only browse, youtube, maybe open a PDF or edit a Word (rather, let someone else edit on their machine). Zero complaints for this use case.

This is not the case for the majority of people or computers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39130904

Depends on how old they are. My grandpa used to run on a linux pc we gave him.

All he needed was a web browser, an email client and a word processor. And that's it. So Lubuntu did the job perfectly.

Obviously more expectations may be harder to meet

One of my relatives is in her early 20's and has a large amount of difficulty using Linux (even for relatively simple needs like what you describe above), despite dozens of "support interactions" and assistance. Other relatives are in their 40's and failed to use it as well.

It's not enough for some people to be able to use Linux - if you want to recommend it for general use, it has to be usable for almost everyone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39130904

Every single one of the 6 desktop-class devices that I've used over the past decade have had multiple issues running Linux, some of which I was never able to resolve. This soundly refutes your point, because it's not enough for Linux to run well on one computer - it has to run well on most of them.

I run it on a ThinkPad T470, I guess the Overlap between People Run Linux on a Laptop and it's a ThinkPad is pretty big

With proprietary software, how many times a producer did fix breakage or add missing feature for you because you bought a licence (subscription)? How fast was it?

Nobody's done anything for me specifically, but if it's something multiple people need in their workflows, I've seen plenty of examples of things being added due to community demand. It's not fast, but nobody gave me a "do it yourself and open a pull request" attitude, which is one of my greatest gripes with open-source software.

Was there something specifically negative about Catalina you were avoiding or did you just get tired of OS updates at that point.

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