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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

There's not a lot to learn, desktop Linux is pretty much the same as windows was when it was still good.

Can any distribution handle automatic updates?

Most can, although you probably don't want it. Updates on linux are already infinitely better than windows. That's not the question to ask. You should ask if a laptop goes to sleep on linux, will it wake up ? Nobody knows.

>You should ask if a laptop goes to sleep on linux, will it wake up ? Nobody knows.

I've only been using Linux for 20 years so can you explain what you mean by this?

If you have never had such issues (not had them and fixed them, that doesn't count), consider yourself lucky...

Modern sleep (s0ix) is a mess on linux. Laptops will either not sleep, or sleep but not wake up, or drain the battery while they are asleep, or peripherals won't work after they wake up, or monitors won't light up, or things won't be where you left them on the monitor, or wifi or bluetooth won't work after resume, or they'll get stuck in a low frequency mode, ....

Would you believe I've had all of these problems in Windows on a Surface Pro? Modern sleep was a mistake.

Modern sleep also drains your battery and heats up your laptop on Windows too (but not most of the other problems). I miss the days when you could put a sleeping laptop in a bag, but now, on Windows, you have to either re-enable hibernation (for however long they allow that), or fully shut down. Modern sleep was a mistake.

Or the issue that currently annoys the hell out of me: if I disconnect my laptop from the docking station and reconnect it, will it continue running or will it spontaneously restart (Dell laptop and docking station, Ubuntu 22.04, Wayland)?

I have never heard or never had myself any problems with sleep on Linux laptops and i'm using Linux(Arch, Debian, Lubuntu) as my only driver for past 10 years

That's been my experience with Debian. I used to have problems with that stuff, but those went away years ago.

Well, on Thinkpad (which, unlike many, is actually intended to support Linux users) you have to specifically charge something in BIOS to make it work, so one at least has to be aware. Also, I have some old Asus lying around, which after some update started having a lot of trouble with both going to sleep and waking up. Never figured out what it was, I didn't really need it anymore, so now it's just lying somewhere in the closet, maybe will use it for something someday.

So, no, "no problems" is a bit of overselling it.

If they are infinitely better why wouldn't I want them? Sorry that's confusing.

You can opt for security only automatic updates which a lot of server admins do. However, if you are running something in production, you don't want to risk any breakage due to an automatic update. This is independent of the operating system.

This. Security-only updates are the only ones I allow automatically. Broader updates are too risky to allow to happen without supervision. I think this is independent of the operating system being used.

And power management. Battery life is much worse on Linux

Always, always, always enable automatic security updates only every os on every install.

Linux's updates occasionally require manual intervention on some distros, which is why they don't do it automatically. The more popular/stable ones should have less though.

I’ve been usually ubuntu LTS for a very long time now and can’t remember the last time I had a bad update experience. Now if you live on the edge with Arch your chances go way up, especially if you wait too long between updates.

All of them? On Debian and Ubuntu you can also enable security updates only (red hat claims to support this but apparently security is a paid feature for them). This helps for stability since it only applies security updates automatically.

Pretty trivial to put pacman -Syu in your crontab, though I'm not sure why anyone would want to automate potentially breaking changes.

That begs the question, was Windows ever good? OTOH, the Linux desktop experience may be better than Windows, but (as someone who uses Linux both on my home PC and work laptop) I also wouldn't describe it as 100% "good". It works most of the time, but if you run into issues, good luck - especially with things like Wayland, that Ubuntu simply decided to let loose on its unsuspecting users...

It is not

... until you need dx12 support.

isn't VKD3D good enough?

There are directX to vulkan translation layers such as https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk for up to dx11. For dx12 specifically, you have vkd3d: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/vkd3d/-/wikis/home

Valve's proton and VKD3D basically covers all of that. The only games that I have any trouble running on my fedora/amd system are those that use invasive anti-cheat.

To the downvoters: I am well aware that Linux can run modern games. In fact my gaming rig is a KDE Neon 6.2 install with all latest mesa, amdgpu, etc. I play the latest dx12 games just fine on it.

But the original point wasn't whether Linux could, but whether it's different from Windows.

And as someone who compiles DXVK from git: dx12 won't work out of the box; it is different from Windows. Not particularly difficult, but different...

delusional take

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