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Comment by herczegzsolt | Hacker News Reader

If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings.

It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.

Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.

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I use ubuntu and the default remote desktop just stopped working since 24: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rdp-stopped-working-after-upg...

With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.

>>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.

Mate there are bugs in windows and macos that have been unfixed for years. This is not a good argument in my opinion.

I think the difference (at least with macOS) is the fundamental things that -were- working don't suddenly break*

*macOS26 excepted

> find no help coming anytime

Well, see sibling thread: Looks like you just need to post your bounty in HN and somebody will do within a few hours. Somebody to that for Windows or macos.

Sometimes I feel the bounty topic isn't well served yet. On the GNOME bug tracker it doesn't seem to be very discoverable. Are there current good platforms to advertise bounties where people actually look?

Are you proposing that the linux community offers worse support than any kind of software support that you pay for? I've found strangers on the internet to be worlds better than anything I've ever gotten from a vendor.

>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.

I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, run virus scan, and defrag your ssd".

If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.

> If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.

Not only that, but in the past I've cooked hacky bash scripts to work around issues while waiting for upstream fixes. I'd imagine that'd be harder with other OSs.

Also a long-time Linux user/administrator. Whenever I've tried searching for Windows answers to issues, I've been genuinely shocked by how low quality the answers are. I've got just a basic understanding of Windows, but it's obvious to me that over 99% of all Windows advice is from people who are just posting meaningless answers so that they can get points for answering or similar.

I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.

On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.

People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows

Most explorer issues are really file system issues. It's touchy. chkdsk in offline repair mode usually fixes it. For the rest, clear the thumbnail cache.

The ways Windows breaks are different from the ways Linux breaks, but there are still ways to fix it. Most of the rest are solved with one or two commands, and it's usually the same two: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-the-system-fil...

I did try those, but it did not solved the issue. But searching around I came to know, this was a rare known explorer bug. Which was not resolved ... so that's that.

The default remote desktop client on Windows 11 can have his picture freeze. Mouse and keyboard input still goes through though. (Which is especially dangerous because enraged users will smash their keyboard.) Years without a fix from Microsoft. Just a registry hack as a workaround.

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