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Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

> “just works”

if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software

and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac

like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.

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> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

> but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues

These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"

By those standards neither Mac nor Windows just work. No modern OS expect maybe ChromeOS just works.

I've never used a computer that didn't have occasional hiccups. The Mac I have for work has lots of weird bugs. One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.

I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.

Can any OS gracefully handle switching between WiFi and Ethernet without at least a blip in connectivity?

In my experience Linux can yeah.

Without a blip maybe not but is it noticeable?

I've been regularly plugging/unplugging my usb-c docking connected to ethernet while being on teams video call without issues on both linux and windows but ultimately it depends on the protocol. Web/https stuff is usually more forgiving thanks to sessions being maintained "externally" from the protocol itself. Copying files via sftp be a different experience I reckon because you usually use a different source ip address when you switch and need to initiate a new connection.

if it's just about connectivity then yes, that should be normal, a OS should only switch the default interface _iff_ the interface it switches to is up and ready.

Idk. about desktop Linux, but my phone does the (WLAN -> Mobile) switch just fine.

If it's about _not reconnecting_ (e.g. which for many apps might require some manual pause/resume of streamed data or similar), then things are more complex as you can't keep your IP, so it then depends on weather the application uses HTTP3/Quick or similar protocols in implementations which are designed to be able to freely roll over to different IP addresses.

So both yes and no :)

It works fine with my Linux Laptop.

> One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.

macOS has a 'service (priority) order':

* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...

It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):

* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...

And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.

By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.

Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.

I've never experienced this behavior with a Linux or Windows machine.

I'm not talking about sessions dropping. It has the symptoms of an IP conflict, absolutely no traffic can pass until I disable Wi-Fi. Any other laptop I have ever used would just switch, maybe drop an SSH session, but not this.

There's also the fact that I can never trust the clipboard to actually copy when I tell it to. Several of my co-workers have expressed the same issue, so it's not just me. Sometimes, no matter whether I use the context menu or ctrl+c, it just doesn't copy what I have highlighted and paste whatever the last thing I copied was instead.

this line

>> > and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

is for how how to have a reliable acceptable Linux experience and I have less issues with rare occasional hick ups then I had on Windows and Mac in the past. But that is long ago. Through just looking at all the AD/snooping issues, how often windows seem to have broken updates etc. this is way nicer on Linux and seem to be still not worse on Linux then Mac.

> > but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues

the example here with my gaming setup _doesn't_ require "have enough Linux know-how",

after the initial setup it so far just did works

The initial setup was just running a trivial install + ~2 simple to do and find through search, but should-be-unneeded initial tweaks (both Steam specific).

through I currently happen to only care about games both available on Steam and running on Linux without Linux specific manual setup/tweaks (like Silk Song, Nine Sols, Detroit Become Human (but all native 4k)). And it's all AMD and no "unusual" consumer hardware components.

> if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software

> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.

At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.

> issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions

Could it be due to a poor support of Linux by these proprietary apps? Possibly even intentional.

These are web apps, they are unlikely to use anything other than what the browser/OS provide them. This is most likely due to lousy audio drivers, an issue plaguing desktop Linux since its very inception.

Interestingly, Firefox handles all three like a champ. Even uses XDG portals so I can share a single window or just audio if I want. Chrome took ages to get support, and it's still hit & miss.

Teams refuses to work on Firefox, or at least did so not so long ago (like as in it "tells you no won't try" not as in "has bugs"). Same for slack.

I think to remember that the most absurd thing was that if you tell Teams "this is chrome" (even when it's FF) it did work just fine.

> issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions

I don't know about the app but it has been a solved problem on linux using the web browser early in 2020 when people started getting sent home due to the covid and remaining bugs were quickly ironed out.

I had very few issues using Pop OS on a Dell for all sorts of corporate stuff. It wasn't perfect - the sleep behaviour was particularly terrible - but it worked well with Teams and Google Meet. I later installed Fedora and that more or less fixed the sleep issue too.

I bounced around between Windows and Linux on my personal computers for the last 20 years. Generally I'd run Linux until something died or I needed Windows, and I'd return for a bit. I've been exclusively using Linux since 2019 or so. I don't think I'm going back.

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