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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but compared to Windows 10, any Linux distro has objectively more bugs. Things like bluetooth not working, GPU-related failures, update issues, all the classics. While the current status of Linux is amazing, I still cannot recommend it to a non-tech person because I know something will fail at some point and then it's going to be my problem.

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Windows has tons of problem, but you don’t see them. That is, you see the problems, but attribute them to bad hardware. It works like this:

Headset does not work on Linux: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from Linux!”

Headset does not work on Windows: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from these headphones!”

(Re-post from 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32541772>)

But invariably, the hardware does work on Windows. I can't remember the last time I had that problem.

I can, just recently Windows update installed a firmware update to my network card (without asking) and made it unusable on both Windows and Linux. I had to run a manufacturer tool to get the network adapter to work again.

Intel dropped support for older WiFi chips in the newer drivers some time ago.

After successfully installing Windows 11 and connecting to a WiFi network, Windows automatically upgraded all drivers, which resulted in WiFi not being able to detect some WiFi networks.

Solution was to manually downgrade to an older Intel driver, but figuring out the root cause took quite a while.

I can.

Last Friday I went to the office and my 5 yo fully intel win11 laptop only detected the full resolution of my external screen if it was connected during boot. Unplug it or even just let it sleep when going to the bathroom, and I’d return to a blurry mess of an image. Sometimes, if there’s a driver update, it can also fix the issue until the next time the screen turns off. This used to work somewhat reliably before.

It also refuses to connect to my Shure and Sony BT headphones. It sees them, says it’s connected, then immediately says it’s disconnected. The BT keyboard works fine. No issue whatsoever under Linux, so the hardware works fine.

YMMV today I literally lost all sound in the middle of an MS teams meeting on my win11 works laptop. When opening the mixer, I could see the little vumeter when sound should have been played. Unplugged the trs cable to my amp, sound would not play from the external speaker, connected my bluetooth headset, nothing (still that vumeter moving when playing random youtube videos to test), tried with cabled headphones, selecting thw default devices manually, different apps, nope, not any better.

In the end I rebooted and sound was working again. Something related to sound (driver, subsystem) had probably crashed randomly.

It was the third time I lost sound in the last 2 months. That is not counting the many windows updates that fail randomly with obscure codes, the randomly undetected monitors, windows Apps that randomly change my selected monitors after I lock and unlock my session and a number of other bugs I encountered in the last 6 months

This never happened in the last 6 years I had been making videocalls with MS Teams on Linux. Only issues I had back then was Teams not always showing new plugged/connected audio devices but this also happens frequently on windows so I fault MS Teams, not the OS in this case.

I won't say Linux never has bugs but statistically it seems to me that on well supported laptops (thinkpads), Linux is much more reliable than windows.

YMMV, I have 2 headsets I've never been able to make working reliably under windows 10 and 11. Cheap stuff, but they are are flawless under linux and with my phone on android. Not to say there are no issue on Linux, but these days it's way better than 15 years ago.

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