Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

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Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another.

My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal laptop running Linux:

- various USB and Thunderbolt hubs not working correctly

- multiple monitors, and macOS forgetting which screen is which

- screen flicker of a older LCD (it’s the screen that’s shit, but still, it doesn’t flicker in Linux)

- literal kernel panics coming out of sleep. Turns out it didn’t like a USB DAC

I don’t think I’ve had a missing driver problem with Linux in something like 20 years.

Your mileage might vary but this old meme that “Linux is buggy and has missing drivers” hasn’t been true in two decades.

So why do people seem to spend more time hacking at Linux?

The answer is probably just selection bias: those who want to tinker will generally gravitate towards a platform that lets them tinker. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be a tinkerer to use Linux.

> Each year I spend close to zero hours

> My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up

I think the honest way to calculate maintenance time is to amortise setup time over the years your laptop is in active duty.

That becomes like at least five hours per year for me. My Linux installations usually live for 2-3 years, and ArchLinux typically takes 1-2 evenings to set up:

Partly because I enjoy it and want to explore if I should switch file system, login manager, terminal emulator, window manager, etc.

Partly because I want to maintain my sysadmin katas.

Partly because this step isn’t automatic, so even if I want “same as before”, some hardware is different, and installing software is still manual (I’m choosing NixOS next time).

> those who want to tinker will generally gravitate towards a platform that lets them tinker

My Linux is always in some state of disassembly. My MacBook always has working audio and video.

I set up my Arch install on my machine in 2015 and it took me a couple of days. That OS install has seen 5 SSDs so far, and 4 machines.

My secret? I only buy hardware that's known to work well with Linux, mostly thinkpads, and I really don't do anything on the machine beyond coding and web browsing + some light CAD, so I never get anything with GPUs.

I use the same strategy, but I only copy dotfiles.

I think setup can be automated further.

My latest thinkpad had a GPU.

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell.

Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it.

I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I used for a considerable period of time include both Ubuntu and Gentoo. I’ve seen the spectrum. But this is just ludicrous.

2004 was round about the last time I had a major driver issue. I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer, the name which escapes me. Weirdly FreeBSD worked just fine with any WiFi radio I threw at it.

Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality.

I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges.

These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease.

So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues.

edit:

just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.

> I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer

ndiswrapper

Imo the maintenance thing is not always true. When I install Linux on a relatives computer I usually never hear from them again because they finally have a OS to run their browser on that doesn't constantly nag them.

For my use, sure I break it. But I broke Macs too and never had a stable environment there either.

Some of us where using Linux desktop/laptops more than 20 years ago (I had a Toshiba Tecra upgraded to 48MiB RAM running happily Debian Linux in '97). And it wasn't a big deal. And I've seen this discussion every so often in the last thirty years. It's always the same: don't buy bleeding edge hardware.

Now we are lucky to have a good choice of laptops that are Linux friendly.

On the flip side, I could confidently bet any amount of money that I do proportionally more MacOS maintainance than I do on Linux. And I'm even using Nvidia drivers, it's probably lower still if you've got an AMD card with built-in kernel level support.

> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it.

This was me for a decade. Since I left, any time I check in on Linux it’s like “how did I live like this?!” I was absolutely blind to how many little things I had to do to keep it happy, or how often I was avoiding using my computer ways that should have been fine but that bugs had trained me not to. I still have to force myself to remember drag-n-drop for anything other than moving files around is an option, and will probably work fine and do something reasonable on the platform I use now—though to be fair Windows also helped train me to avoid that particular thing, not just Linux. Took me more than a year to stop feeling anxious when I just closed my laptop without first doing some manual dance to be sure it went to sleep.

> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it.

That's probably true, but it's true of everything; the stupid papercuts that Linux users are used to are different from the stupid papercuts that Windows users are used to, but it is not clear to me that they're worse.

According to Wikipedia [1], Debian Woody came out in 2002, Sarge in 2005 and Etch in 2007.

The first Ubuntu lts was 2006.

This timeframe sounds about right to me - that's when things started to get better than windows hw support in some sense.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

> Not a chance in hell.

In 2003 I was using a Pentium III Dell laptop with Linux (2.4) on it. Everything worked, including wifi.

I agree. I have a Windows 11 laptop for work. It's had a few issues, including wifi connection problems for a while, but the one that has been most horrible is that it may or may not detect an external display. It's infuriating to plug it in and nothing happens. A reboot always fixes it, but that's no fun.

My work laptop, a Lenovo X1 running Windows 10, was completely busted out of the box. Sleep doesn't work, massive throttling issues running zoom (only improved a bit with firmware updates), WSL 100% CPU bugs, display port MST bugs, the list goes on and on. IT say all my issues are normal and known. About five years ago, I had a Linux Laptop for work, that was rock solid and I miss it very much.

Your post reminds me that my wife's Windows 11 laptop has a bug where it won't always shut down when she closes the lid. Sometimes I'll get up in the morning and hear the fan roaring, and the room will even be warm because of it. Guess who's the one that's going to have to figure out how to fix it. Her Windows maintenance time is low.

Sorry, but this is still true IMO. For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. Not even talking about software availability and functionalities. I have had other issues, but anyways I don't want to list them all.

I also find it misleading to claim that Arch Linux is "rock solid", just look at the news to see the amount of "manual intervention needed" listed. I love Linux and especially Fedora and OpenSUSE, but it still has its issue that make me sigh and say "ok... I'll just get windows".

The nvidia situation is more of a "one big issue" than "death by a thousand cuts".

> For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience.

If you have a GTX 1080. For everyone else that has moved on from an 8 year old graphics card, they won't run into that particular issue. Hence some people reporting a rock solid experience with Arch Linux.

The age shouldn't be an issue, and it should actually be the opposite. Also, I'm not talking about Arch Linux in this case. For Arch, my issues were with the Network card. But as I said, just hop on the "news" panel on the arch linux website, and you'll see all the tiny manual interventions you have to do. For a "rock solid" UX, I would definitely not use Arch, but probably Mint or Fedora instead.

People don’t usually mix the terms “rock solid” and “UX” like that.

Arch is stable. But I agree that its UX isn’t aimed at non-technical people.

Windows, for example, is a much easier user experience but it’s not any more stable for it.

Generally when one says “rock solid” they mean “stable”

Well… I’ve got the 1070 and it still has more than enough performance for the games I play.

Well guess what, old GPUs are still used a lot. According to steam hardware survey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ The GTX 1060 is more used than any RTX 40XX, and the 1080 is about as used as the 4080.

Turns out you buy hardware that works for your OS. You do it for OSX, why not for Linux ?

Yes, this is a good point, however when it comes to GPUs, you might not have an optimal choice at all, since some stuff come only on NVidia GPUs. However, after the GTX 1080 they released open source drivers and things should be better for more recent versions.

Unless you’re doing CUDA, almost nothing requires Nvidia GPUs specifically. And in the case of CUDA, that’s already really well supported on Linux.

My point was different, the parent was saying "pick the right GPU then". But if I pick AMD I don't have Cuda, and if I use NVidia I have CUDA but buggy graphics. Some other features might or not be well supported by Linux depending on your GPU and the driver (e.g. You might be force to used Xorg). So yeah it's kind of a mess and you have to have everything aligned (Driver, GPU and use cases) to have a flawless experience.

Good gaming machines don’t usually make good ML or mining systems, even in Windows.

There are trade offs you have to make regardless of what OS you’re running.

Well, some folks had trouble with the GTX 1080 on Windows, so by your logic Windows is also no good:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/nvidia...

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/gtx-1080-no-display-...

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics...

I don't have the time to dig into all these links, but this might be different than an OS issue, more of a manufacturer, or a poor choice of hardware from the people posting it, or they messed up with their software (not updated driver etc.). Because in theory, the NVidia drivers for the GPUs are flawless on Windows. So this doesn't play at all in the Linux VS Windows balance.

“Manual intervention” in ArchLinux is just where you need to do something in a specific order during a system update. It takes all of about 30 seconds to do and is still a hell of a lot easier than having to install software on Windows and macOS.

Yeah homebrew exists on macOSbut it’s not part of the base install, let alone official Apple product. The App Store on both Mac and Windows sucks. Not just in the availability of software but also even just raw install performance (they’re slower than pacman + Arch mirrors). Worse still, Windows and macOS still normalise googling for software and then manually downloading and installing it.

So if Arch isn’t “rock solid” because every 6 months or so (though, honestly, it's been more like once every 3 years for me) you need to be slightly more careful doing a full system update, then Windows and macOS are positively primitive by your same benchmark.

To be clear, I’m not a Linux fanboy by any measure, but it’s literally the concept of package management that pushed me towards modern distributions like SuSE and Arch and one of the biggest annoyances I have with Windows and macOS.

Package management in most Linux distro is a bliss, this I 100% agree on.

I will also be much happier while troubleshooting any Linux system than any Windows or MacOS system.

Might be worth grabbing an RX 6600 to replace the GTX 1080 and sell it on FB marketplace or similar. Assuming you want to stick to similar or slightly better performance.

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