Comment by vundercind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vundercind | Hacker News Reader

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I try one or more of the big distros every couple years, and ran Ubuntu as my main for the few years it was good. They’re terrible. Second-to-last time I tried Fedora they’d decided to make Wayland the default for the graphical installer without having a check for which video card you had, so it had a framerate of like 2fps on my quite-powerful hardware. Probably the worst showing any distro’s ever made, for me.

A Linux so small that I understand what everything’s doing is about the only kind I can tolerate. It’s too messy and janky for the hands-off “just works”. Always was, really, I just didn’t recognize how much time I was losing to it until I experienced not having that time-suck then tried to go back—death by a million cuts.

Last time I tried KDE in Fedora, I could make multiple apps crash just by attempting drag & drop onto them. JFC. A program crashes, like, maybe once a year in the world I’m used to. I’m not sure the average has even been that high.

> Last time I tried KDE in Fedora, I could make multiple apps crash just by attempting drag & drop onto them.

That's not normal, common or at all representative of the distro or Linux on desktop in general.

I’ve run, for meaningful lengths of time, perhaps eight or nine distros on probably twenty of my own desktop and laptops systems plus in some VMs (it’s far and away best-behaved on a VM under Windows or Mac) over a period of 25 years and it’s always been pretty glitchy and crashy. Fewer whole system crashes than, say, WinXP and earlier… but more graphical system crashes or corruptions forcing a restart of the windowing system, which is just as bad if you’re working in a GUI environment. Lots of application crashes or weird glitches, including in major programs like file managers.

I will note that I didn’t realize how much I’d gotten used to working around or working past problems without even noticing I was doing it, until I was no longer using graphical Linux regularly. I am 100% sure I’d have delivered a huge underestimate of the crap I was putting up with, had someone asked me before I switched. Only when trying to go back was it clear what I’d been doing.

This sounds like debian-family things.

You seem a but unreliable too, like you have an axe to grind.

No one else is running into these issues unless they are on debian-family.

I literally had a crush yesterday on a fresh Fedora 40 KDE spin after I tried to move a tab from one Firefox window to another. After just a few days of using that system I already accumulated few crashes. These things happen, sadly.

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