Just in the last few months:
- My nvidia drivers stopped working because the drivers I had (which didn’t auto update) apparently weren’t kept up to date with the kernel (which had auto updates enabled).
- My computer wouldn’t boot at all last week after I disconnected an external usb drive running zfs. It showed the logo and just kind of stalled out. I had to use a recovery grub setting to disable zfs from the boot process.
This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. My rodecaster doesn’t have all its audio interfaces show up in the default audio devices list. HDMI audio broke last year from a kernel update. IntelliJ stopped scaling according to the HiDPI mode I have set up. And so on. It’s fine. It’s worth it for me. But it’s definitely less reliable than macOS or windows.
Yes, the free OS is occasionally worse than the trillion dollar companies product.
On my works laptop I had initially kept the corporate windows install on the original drive and installed Fedora on a second non drive.
I would fire up the windows machine once every other week for a few hours so it gets its updates. But every single time I would enter the firmware settings or boot Fedora the OS bootlocker would lock itself and force me to go to https://aka.ms/recoverykey to get a recovery key the next time I booted windows. Until one day it started not booting even after giving the correct key. Bitlocker basically bricked itself.
So don't tell me that windows is more usable. And this is even without tackling the non functionning parts of windows when it accepts to boot, like the broken keyboard for anyone not using english language that Microsoft never even tried to fix in more than 30 years. People used to laugh about a sliding date for linux to be "read for thr desktop" but windows has never been ready either.
Now, assume your hourly consulting rate is $200. You would only have to spend about 40 hours of time tinkering on linux before windows would have made more sense for the time/money equation.
Frustration is another economy that I think is even more important for getting things done. How badly do you actually want to build? Maintaining morale through the hard bits of the target problem domain is usually already a struggle. Why do you want to be fighting with boot loaders, drivers and arguments on various forums on top of all of that?
Kind of a weird basis for comparison when everyone seems to be talking about the desktop experience.
I love Linux for servers, but not for the desktop.
Conversations about the utility, costs, and feature sets of Windows vs. Linux. vs. macOS tend to ignore the reality that business conditions often dictate that you must use one or the other for a given use case. Sometimes you do have the option, and if you've already got an appreciable investment in one, then you tend to select for that one almost by default.
Free just means it did not cost you any money, a free hammer does not also imply a free new roof or whatever you want to build with it.
Linux is a tool, men use tools, be a man and use Linux.
Last week I reinstalled Windows on my work machine because the TPM was reset because I opened the case and all the MS account thingies got borked beyond repair.
Now there are a bunch of borken things. Like icons randomly disappearing in the taskbar (the button is still there and functional, but no icon). And every other time I boot it, something messes up the input language settings. It gets set to US English, although that layout doesn't show up in the enabled languages in the settings app. I have to add it and remove it to unbreak this.
And then there's my gaming box, which worked OK for a few months, but now something happened with the BitLocker screen and there's no more text, just the blue screen. If I type in my pin, it actually works.
I am fine with fedora on my main and professional laptop because they are used almost daily and then are kept updated regularly. And honestly I had one small breakage in 10 years and I could just boot with the previously installed kernel for a week until the problem was fixed so it wasn't that big of a deal.
I have another computer that serve as a streaming box in my leaving room connected to my video projector. I use this one much less frequently, especially in summer so I don't want to have to spend a lot of time doing updates. For this one I decided to install almalinux. Since it is a very long term support distro it only receive security updates and major bug fixes so it is very reliable, the kernel version is well tested and the frequency of system update is very low.
In the past, people would have complained these distro were lacking important newer versions for their own usage and needs. This is not an issue anymore with flatpaks, container tools, distrobox, VMs + that trend of dev/devopa software installed on your homedir directly via curl | bash or some versions manager like nvm, sdkman, pyenv. Nowadays you can use the very latest versions of software on top of a dinosaur.
I'd much rather a "native" linux distro that has a reasonably modern kernel, with support for io_uring and recent nvidia drivers. And I want a good, modern window manager with hidpi support. And I need to be able to install modern compilers, toolchains and software - like rustc, intellij, nodejs, spotify, firefox, davinci resolve, zfs, automatic1111 and so on.
Maybe these problems wouldn't show up as much with another distro? But if I spend time distro shopping to avoid tinkering with mint, I'm worried I'll end up wasting more time doing that than I would save. Most of the bugs I've run into with mint are actually bugs in ubuntu, that mint is based on. Is fedora / arch / etc really more stable than ubuntu? If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
Can't give you a definite answer on that, I am quite happy with Fedora but only using ZFS on my almalinux and freebsd system and my only experience with Ubuntu in recent years were LTS releases on servers and that was pre v20.
I remember that the kernel changed something a few years ago that broke openzfs and it took time to get back support on some distros so I would be afraid the kernel break something and force me to avoid kernel security upgrades while it is worked on if I was relying on it on a Fedora.
I believe running nvidia hardware and ZFS, or anything that is not using a driver included in the mainline kernel, is unsuitable for a distro running fairly recent kernels if you care about potential breakage. That is what LTS distro are for.
One alternative to super bleeding edge distro such as Arch is to use something like opensuse slowroll which is a kind of hybrid model between standard and rolling release. Every month or so it gets an upgrade to the lastest snapshot from the OpenSuse Tumbleweed rolling release and between each snapshot it only gets security updates correcting major bugs or CVEs. I only have used it for a few weeks in a VM but I guess if a major breakage would impact tumbleweed you would continue getting security updates until tumbleweed is fixed. But I have no idea if OpenSuse is an openzfs friendly shop, I think they are full on btrfs adoption instead.
> If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
When I say a dinosaur, I was exagerating. For example all the toolchains and software you mention in your posts are perfectly usable on a long term distro such as almalinux 9. I can't speak about nvidia because I don't have any machine with it but Almalinux is a better proposal for openzfs. Nodejs is easily installed through nvm, I am using the most recent firefox, librewolf and ungoogled chrommum from the flatpaks, etc. It is not using an old glibc.
Apparently lldb is part of almalinux 9 but I have no idea if the version is modern enough for your use case: https://almalinux.pkgs.org/9/almalinux-appstream-x86_64/lldb...
But as said before, you are just 2 commands away from a more recent Fedora toolbox available at your keyboard fingertips [1]:
$ toolbox create --distro fedora --release 40 $ toolbox enter fedora-toolbox-40
[1] and distrobox is available as a package on EPEL repos so you would have an arch or ubuntu available easily the same way.
I've seen posts like yours a million times, and they can always be summed up as "no mantainer actually uses the default setup for more than a few hours before removing anything that could cause a conflict between nominally unrelated packages".
Day 3, I grab an image of windows server 2022. It boots instantly to the install process and just works.
I know you can make Linux work, but the amount of suffering is still unbelievable compared to the alternatives in many cases. By the time I get the Linux thing figured out, I'll have forgotten about what it was I wanted to originally build.
I wouldn't mind a bit of tinkering, but this is sad. I happily pay Microsoft if this is the alternative.
It is true, if you are having a problem with Linux 9 time out of 10 it's possible it fix the problem, aka, you are the problem.
My limited experience with paying for an OS means if there's a problem your just out of luck.
I wonder if Linux advocates could take a small amount of ownership over the user/customer experience instead of projecting all flaws upon the user. It's an operating system. Most people aren't interested in making it their hobby or full time job.
This is so true. Whenever the power is out, my neighbors are all outside complaining, ”the power grid doesn’t work!!”
I try to tell them, if your power goes out and you can’t build your own wind turbine, maybe the power grid isn’t the problem.
If that is outside of "absurd" to you then the Linux desktop world clearly needs to keep cooking a little longer. My non-IT friends would not have been able to figure this out and I don't think they should have to.
On a different laptop, it refused to output 4k@60 through the HP dock. After it started working, waking from sleep would be a coin toss whether I would get any image at all, or something garbled.
I’m “IT” and had no idea how to fix these. Even installing all the provided oem drivers made no difference.
A new development is Windows using the us English layout, although it’s not enabled. I have to add and remove it to fix it.
Everything worked perfectly on Linux since day 1.
My point is that you can't say Xos is great because it works well on this particular hardware.
I say this as a professional software engineer who works on a Linux VM 8 hours a day plus off work.
I then booted up Fedora KDE 40, and installed it with 0 issues or tinkering. Have been using it ever since and it has been working flawlessly.
HiDPI support is more than a bit sketchy still, especially on nvidia, and especially if you attach multiple screens to the computer and don't want all of them to have the same scaling.
Webcam support is also still quite sketchy. It'll work, but actually configuring the thing to e.g. select the resolution or adjust the white balance, feels like a regression to 2004.