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Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

Along with the Xbox app and eye tracking software that took forever to get rid of (with many-many steps--that still got reinstalled with subsequent updates) out of my "Professional" Windows installation, having co-pilot embedded in every screen finally convinced me to switch to Linux--forever.

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Have you switched, though? I hear people talking about it, but I doubt they stay the first time they need to configure WiFi. Get a MacBook.

I think your Linux knowledge might be out of date by about decade.

Well, unless someone gets recommended Arch Linux as a first Linux experience

Pfft, when was the last time you installed Linux, 1998? Nowadays it's all about getting audio to work ;)

I switched a month or two on my desktop. Then when that turned out good, I switched my laptop to Linux, too. No hardware issues on either one, and the WiFi on the laptop works just fine. (My desktop is connected by Ethernet.)

Linux is fine now, and has been for at least the past 5 years if not more. Even HiDPI works just fine now which has been a pain point for a while (at least, it works great on KDE).

That being said, my daily driver is macOS ever since apple silicon released, purely due to the laptop hardware. I keep a reasonably powerful Beelink mini PC mounted under my desk running ubuntu server and most of my work happens there over SSH with Tailscale. If you're primarily a laptop user, I'd definitely recommend this set up (or something similar), you get the best of both worlds.

It sounds like you haven't configured Wi-Fi on Linux in the last 10 or 15 years. It just works these days.

The MacBook I use for work sucks and has weird issues when it wakes up from sleep. I've started having to restart my computer to fix them. I can't remember the last time I've had to do that.

I built a new desktop PC last fall and every Linux distro I have tried this year has WiFi working out of the box. Contrast that with Windows where I need to keep the drivers on a USB stick so I can bootstrap myself on a fresh install

With MacBooks I'm over the premium on unfixable hardware.

I've been on NixOS full time for probably 1.5 years. 0 problems, other than some games that need kernel anti-cheat to run.

EDIT: I was also able to connect to my solar panel gateway trivially from the CLI just a few days ago.

I haven't had issue with WiFi on Linux in over a decade.

Sleep/Hibernate on the other hand; well, let's just say that fast boot times "solved" those issues.

Sleep is really most useful for laptops and I'm not sure fast boot really solves that use case as well as it does on a desktop (where you really never got as much out of sleep anyways since you're always plugged in).

Just like Windows 11 isnt Windows 95, Linux today isnt Linux from 1995. Even if you use Arch, with nothing configured, still in the install CLI its pretty much just: 'station wlan0 connect "SSID"' 'enter Password:*** ' Done and this is the worst case scenario, with arch, a minimalist distro, where most things arent there or configured by default.

raises hand As of this month, my Windows-only desktop gaming computer is now dual-boot, and I only boot back to Windows for a particular game.

The main pain-point was that the remote backup service had no Linux client. I ended up solving it with restic, but I acknowledge that isn't a turnkey solution for archetypal Aunt Tillie.

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