Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems.

Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment.

My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot.

Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?

The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.

I've been using Kubuntu for years with good results. I prefer KDE to Gnome, which Kubuntu takes care of, and I normally add in the flatpak repositories so I don't need snap. That has generally worked well for me in the last 5 years.

For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.

There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:

- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)

- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops

- Worse battery life on laptops

If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.

I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.

We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.

My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5

> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?

No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.

With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.

Could you share the model of your laptop?

Not at all.

I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.

> Does this line up with others’ experience?

Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?

> If yes, what actually works long-term?

Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).

Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?

Edited: My bad, I misread, started ranting about Gimp, how terrible this software was

GIMP is definitely not a daemon; I don't think it even has a run in the background mode. Maybe something with snaps?

No no, just misread, my fault, sorry. Mixed "dragging up demons" and then it reminded me of my traumas with GIMP, PulseAudio, CUDA, etc

Ah, fair and understandable :)

Gimp is not typically used as background process. It's primary use is as an interactive tool with a UI, therefore it's not typically a daemon. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)

Thank you for the kind and actually helpful answer, especially in the face of a rant. I will pay more attention next time.

It's not the greatest, for sure, but it's a complex tool for a complex task.

If you think Gimp is terrible you'll hate something like DaVinci Resolve.

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