Hacker News Reader

Comment by jebarker | Hacker News Reader

Nope, I came directly from an MS Teams meeting where the desktop linux users had no audio.

I'm on Windows, and my work laptop has no audio via its headphone jack.

I have no idea how this is supposed to even work, and since it's not my computer I don't mess around trying to install drivers. I just use my phone to call in for Teams.

Things happen, let's not act like any OS is perfect.

MacOS is definitely not perfect. I'm being snarky. But it has been my anecdotal experience as both a user and observing colleagues that MacOS is more reliable and stable for desktop use than Linux. This is unsurprising since it's easier to build a stable walled garden than an open ecosystem.

Macs are generally more reliable, but if you buy a year old ThinkPad Linux will be just as stable .

The only issue Linux really has is when new chipsets come out you might need to wait 6 months or so for the drivers to be updated. But to be completely fair, on one of my laptops I had no webcam support for like six or seven months until Windows update decided to finally install it for me.

If you need a significant amount of hard drive space, Macs are almost always exorbitantly expensive. I make music so I find myself dual booting between windows and Linux. I don't want to speed 3k+ on a MacBook just to get a 4TB SSD I can add to any Windows PC for 200$.

Plus on Linux you can customize your personal experience to a much greater level. If you dislike X,Y,Z you can disable it or find an alternative.

Both OSX and Windows are cramming so much monetization into the OS, there's a very real feeling that I'm just sharing my computer with a giant corporation rather than actually owning it.

It’s less convenient when you are on the go, but you can pack an external SSD and offload stuff to it. A friend of mine had one velcroed to the back of the screen.

It's actually cheaper to own a MacBook Air for things that need to work 100%, like a coding interview, and then a secondary laptop when you're playing video games or making music .

That's basically what I do now, my old M1 MacBook air is more than good enough for LeetCode and I'm more or less know it's never going to fail.

> But it has been my anecdotal experience as both a user and observing colleagues that MacOS is more reliable and stable for desktop

You mean a few month after a new MacOS version has shipped and they've got time to fix all the bugs it introduced, right?

I haven't personally experienced that problem. Updates on Mac have always been smooth for me. But I'm a sample of one and it's probably workflow dependent.

MS Teams audio issues aren't the best example -- ask anyone forced to use Windows

I came from meet where none of the macs could screen share due to recent OS updates :)

Presumably these users have audio in other contexts? Are they running the web app version of teams? Do other web apps play audio? From 10000 feet up, I wouldn’t start by blaming Linux here (even as a non-Linux-desktop user,)

This isn't a hill I want to die on, but isn't it the case that even if the problem is in MS software compatibility with Linux that still results in desktop Linux being a less reliable platform for day to day use?

Depends on the day to day use. I have experienced a lot more pain on Windows than on any other platform. Perhaps HP-UX or AIX 3.x were more painful.

Last year I was using a Windows laptop for work and Teams was very unreliable with audio and video. And don’t even think of using the nice camera on top of the expensive video conferencing monitor on my desk.

The inability of the people you work with to use their devices means almost nothing. It’s as if you said nothing.

to be fair Teams barely works on Windows

Team barely works, period. It’s almost a feature, actually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com