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Comment by saejox | Hacker News Reader

These days i cant recommend Windows to anybody. Even gamers should move to linux.

Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide". You dont do anything illegal in your point of view. AI tracking you might think otherwise.

A sudden knock on your door might happen because of an ambigious search/propmt.

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There's a huge number of gamers moving to things like CachyOS. Some are stuck because of Valorant, LoL or Battlefield DRM, but it's a big move lately.

I'd never play one of those games but the excuse for the kernel modules spying on you is usually anti-cheat not DRM as they are online games.

There are droves of people petitioning Valve to add kernel anti–cheat to CS2.

It's both and the main reason why anti-cheat is needed is the central matchmaking model, which is itself a form of DRM. If people were still hosting smaller community-moderated servers there would not be a need for invasive anti-cheat but people could also pay on cracked servers without paying.

Others say

"I need it to work on a random Thursday, not wait for fsck after ever reboot"

https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS/issues/1104

I have the same issue on Windows 11. It's been bugging me to press a button or "check my drive" on every startup for at least half a year, no matter how often I let it run the check...

Same thing happened to me recently

Why have you linked a bug report for a niche userland application that may be causing disk corruption as evidence against linux reliability? That seems like a pretty uninformed conclusion.

This isn't a one-off niche user. Just look for more of these. You will find them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1cvwo93/arch_run...

This supports my initial reply. This was an f2fs bug in a bleeding edge kernel released only seven days earlier. The thread suggests perfectly reasonable mitigations, especially for an arch user: use the lts kernel or downgrade to 6.8.9.

If you're not familiar with linux and/or don't want to deal with trivial issues periodically, don't hang out at the bleeding edge. There are plenty of boring and/or beginner friendly choices out there.

I'm not saying linux is perfect, but your conclusions in this instance appear to be uninformed rather than supported by the facts.

Ok fair point, here's plenty more of the same on stable. My point is Linux is always fine right until it isn't. Then you're back to a day of debugging your update.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218770

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-f2fs-devel/20240409203411.1885...

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2511.2/07280.html

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2511.2/07260.html

https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1226043

https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/bugs@lists.opensuse...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/15478...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/63175

Most of these links weaken your claim rather than support it. The lkml links are patch submissions in a _development_ discussion, not ordinary users running a stable distro. The f2fs bugzilla links are the same issue we already discussed, a regression in the brand-new 6.9 kernel released only days earlier, with the fix landing in 6.9.3. The suse bug is an upstream e2fsprogs issue. This is precisely the kind of issue distro package maintainers can catch, patch, or avoid before it reaches ordinary users on a stable release. The launchpad link is another development discussion, not an example of ordinary users experiencing a bug in a stable release.

Linux does experience regressions, but your argument conflates upstream development, bleeding edge releases, and stable distro releases. Those distinctions are fundamental to how linux distributions work, and these links don't support the claim you're making.

>Most of these links weaken your claim rather than support it.

Yep. Good catch, I think you win the argument. These are all distros that are under development and their underlying issues should never be called-out as handing the user frustration as they willingly chose to become a victim of the kernel.

Do those users use the OS that randomly takes hours to shut down because it desperately needs to install updates right now - and then it won't shut down at all and reboot instead. And even if it doesn't do that shutdown takes ages and you need to attend it and can't just walk away because the OS will drop you in a logged in desktop when some random application decides to interrupt the shutdown process.

I don't know why you'd choose one of the smaller OSes, I'm required to use Ubuntu at work and it just works fine for me, every day.

It's also a bit rich especially to complain when Microsoft also suffers from forced autoupdates and the like.

> Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide".

I hate how pervasive this argument is. I'm so tired. Sometimes I wish they'd get the total panopticon they want so much. I'm sure the government will be able to find some crimes to hang them with.

The best response is always:

"That's not up to you."

When people claim they have nothing to hide, always point out that's not up to their determination. That freaks them out, it disarms their shrink-from-confrontation move.

And you can point it out super fast, in a plain six word statement. No need to launch into a deep discussion unless prompted.

Alternatively, simply respond with: yes you do. When they reply: "what?" - "every single thing you have ever done wrong across your entire life." Everybody has done something they would prefer to keep hidden, the cowards just lie about it.

I always say, "okay, unlock your phone and give it to me for 30 minutes". of course they refuse. "so you don't give your phone to a friend for half an hour, but it's fine if the government and intelligence agencies spy on you 24/7?"

Just because I have nothing to hide doesn't mean I have anything I want you to see.

People are entitled to privacy because they enjoy it. No further justification is needed.

Anyone got tips or guides to starting a linux OS that protects privacy without sacrificing utility?

Considering putting linux on a 2nd PC

Essentially any Linux distro protects privacy. You'd kinda have to go out of your way to find one that doesn't, because there's no online account connected to your install for any of them.

If you're reasonably technical, you can make nearly any use-case work on nearly any distro, but if you have choice paralysis, my top recommendations would be CachyOS if you plan to play games, and Mint otherwise.

Personally I'm happy with EndeavourOS. I picked it to find a general purpose distro similar to the Steam Deck (KDE and arch based) but with a more user-friendly installer.

Pretty much all of them. None require online accounts or anything like that. Browser choice is probably more important.

For something that just works I recommend Fedora or Ubuntu. It's what I'd put on my mom or wife's PC.

Currently using Omarchy on my laptop though which is a tad more exotic, it's Arch + Hyprland and is pretty polished for that stack (at least the current version, 4.0) but still a tiny bit of jank.

omarchy.org

many games work flawlessly on Linux now. enough to make the switch anyways. a lot more than on mac.

Genuine question: does Linux have an AI image editor as easy to use as the win11 paint/photos?

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