Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

As a Linux enthusiast, I cringe every time I read "year of the Linux desktop". (Bear with me, this is on-topic)

Linux is a very usable OS today. Windows, comparatively, is a much less usable OS. USB drivers that need 3 minutes to set up every time I plug my mouse in a different port. More issues with sound than there are with Pulseaudio. And, yes, this is a huge peeve of mine: Only a tiny fraction of windows software is ever ported to 64 bit. WTF?

Almost all linux software is readily available on 64 bit, as 64 bit; this includes Chrome/Chromium from the very, very early days. So now, a major web browser was released as 64 bit on Windows. Congratulations. Maybe 2014 will be the year of the Windows desktop.

View on HN

Windows, comparatively, is a much less usable

I wouldn't call it much less usable, depends on what you're used to I guess.. Actively using both, each for their own task, I find them on par with each other. But I don't expect Windows too give me a super easy to setup server with a mighty commandline, and I don't expect Linux to give me a super smooth Desktop UI that can be used as a digital audio/video workstation, for instance. Cause they both suck at those tasks equally as it's far from their target experience. And I also don't have the WTF feeling you have as I never had the problems you talk about: three minutes? Really? More issues than Pulseaudio? Almost sounds like you try to run Windows 7 on an old pentium with crap drivers :P

I'm running Windows 7 on a current top of the line box.

Speaking of that, when I swapped out my old motherboard for a new one, Windows refused to boot, giving me a bluescreen every time. I googled around and found that this was, in fact, a very common issue and the only solution is a full reinstall. Woah.

More issues than Pulseaudio, yes. In fact, I have zero issues with Pulseaudio and plenty of issues with Windows. Not like stuttering, but devices not being recognized and a terribly confusing UI when it comes to, for example, switching sound playback devices (getting sound to work on my TV has been an awful experience).

Every time I have to boot into it it's an awful, awful experience. Here is just ONE reason why: https://superuser.com/questions/33142/ctrlbackspace-inserts-...

If you sysprep generalize the machine before you swap the board it'll work afterwards. It's like moaning that your brain transplant resulted in you not being able to move your arms or something similar.

The analogy is unsound, you can do this with any Linux/BSD/Solaris system just fine. It's Windows who requires a more complex procedure here.

So yes, it's user's fault, but the point is that in this particular instance Linux is more user friendly compared to Windows. The user needs more knowledge and expertise to do the same operation with a Windows machine compared to a Linux machine.

I disagree.

If you take the disks out of a Dell and stuff them in an HP machine with the same chipset, Linux gives you no guarantee the Ethernet ports will be the same order on startup.

It's just different and you see the differences as misfeatures.

> Linux gives you no guarantee the Ethernet ports will be the same order on startup

Systemd does.

a) Debian stable, Ubuntu, rhel6 don't have systemd. So no our servers don't.

b) it can't assume heuristics like that if the vendor changes so no it can't. This was based on a complete data transplant.

When I complain about Windows, I'm expected to complain about things that are still present in the latest version of windows (8.1 currently), not things that are no longer an issue since XP. In return, I expect you to do the same when complaining about Linux.

This is a solved problem and systemd is coming to debian as well.

In that case that would be complaining about windows 9. There are no mmainstream distributions shipping systemd yet.

Windows 8.1 is not mainstream either, compared to 7.

I'm sitting in an office with 120x 8.1 systems at the moment so...

And I'm sitting in an office with over 200 Fedora and Arch Linux machines. What's your point?

I swapped my motherboard and CPU too a month ago (from an SB i3 on an H61 mobo to an Ivy Bridge Pentium on a B75 mobo) and everything worked fine on the same installation. I only had to install the chipset INF drivers, Ethernet and USB3 drivers.

Most likely you didn't set up the SATA controller on the same mode (AHCI vs RAID vs IDE legacy).

To change sound playback device, you simply right-click on the speaker in the system tray > Playback Devices > choose what you want and click on Set Default.

Sounds like most of your issues mostly relate to just not knowing how to do certain things in Windows. Which that's basically the same reason people have issues with Linux.

It's fine to be comfortable in Linux, that's actually a great thing, but Windows is incredibly capable and usually easier to use for more advanced things. The basic UIs are similar enough to not be a big deal.

I always thought that Windows gave me a super easy to setup server too because of the fact that I don't have to use the command line.

With Linux server setup, if I haven't done something in a while - I must go and hunt down the information on what files I need to configure and commands that I need to run. Sometimes it takes hours of reading. With Windows I can usually take a look at the standard management interface provided with the server software and just figure it out or be guided through it.

Your use of the fact that "almost all Linux software is readily available on 64 bit" (to imply that Windows developers are doing a bad job of porting software to 64bit) is misleading: there is far, far more software for Windows than there is for Linux. Of course it's not all ported to 64bit. Windows developers also seem to generally respect the notion of backwards compatibility, so I am prepared to cut them some slack.

I think you're being a little bit unfair. (My personal preferences are not flowing into this assessment: I am a Linux enthusiast and in the past two years have only ever used Windows to play video games.)

> Of course it's not all ported to 64bit.

Pretty much none is ported to 64bits, including software that is available on Linux 64 bits since ever.

This is probably because many major developers say they at best would gain ~1% more performance out of the change for a decently large investment of man hours. The opinion of those devs (whether you or I agree with them or not) is that time can be better spent making other improvements to their codebases.

"Pretty much none"? It's more likely that "pretty much" every application that would actually benefit from being 64 bit is already ported.

Yes, like chromium, something I've been using as a 64bit native app since 2009 on Linux.

So when will GNU/Linux work properly with hibernation on Laptops?

What about energy friendly scheduling and hardware resource management with application level APIs like Mac OS X and Windows do?

In 2009 or so.

Doesn't look like that in 2014. Using GNU/Linux since 1995.

And?

I was using windows from 1995-2005 and I still didn't know half the things it could do. If you're interested in getting this working (which I doubt since you sound like you'd much rather whine about it) you can read how to do it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop_Mode_Tools

Ah well, I have issues with all the major OSs.

I was surprised after I installed Windows 8 (64 pro or business or whatever it's called), and found Firefox and Chrome to both be 32bit, haven't checked Internet Explorer yet. Now I'm not sure if it even that is even an issue or not? It bugged me anyway.

I've been running a 64bit Linux OS for years now, and the most irritating thing about it was Flash plugin support. Some people deem an OS that can't play iPlayer or some such, as unusable. Anyway flash support is reasonable for me under Chrome these days (didn't Adobe say they'd abandon 64bit support on Linux?)

The missus has Windows 8 on her lappy, and both Chrome and Firefox frequently crap out, she has just gotten used to it.

>didn't Adobe say they'd abandon 64bit support on Linux?

No, Adobe abandoned NPAPI Flash, the one used by Firefox. Flash on Chrome uses PPAPI, which is still officially supported (my guess is that it's maintained/developed mostly by the Chrome guys, but it's just a guess).

Thanks for the clarification.

Linux is completely unusable for me. For instance, I've never found a good replacement for Calendar on OS X. The nicest calendar program I used on Linux had no CalDAV support (WTF?) and required me to use increment/decrement buttons to input the start/end times of my events. On top of that, it lacked any organisational features such as colour coding or a 5/7 day week view. It felt like a toy.

On OS X, I spend a significant amount of time in the command line but the occasional times I need a GUI, Linux just isn't usable. Most graphical programs lack even the most basic functionality or consideration for user experience. Linux is great for headless environments but it's awful when I occasionally need a GUI.

> I've never found a good replacement for Calendar on OS X

It's funny because iCal is like the shittiest calendar out there. Use Outlook or even Google Calendar.

Let's say you want to do something simple like... find out if your team members are busy before sending a meeting. Oh, in Outlook I just click the Invite tab and find a time, but in iCal they've simplified it so all I have to do is email the entire team to ask if the time is acceptable and then hope nobody re-books during the time it takes to pick a time. "Insanely inefficient!"

Or let's say I want to manage multiple calendars, one with read, one with write access... wait, Mac users (and I'm one of them) don't do businessy things... hipsters don't have jobs!

Want a bonus? If your Mac crashes repeatedly due to kernel panic and you take it in to the "geniuses" at the istore... they tell you to uninstall all 3rd party software. Seriously that's their solution here. "Oh I see you're running 3rd party software, you need to uninstall this." I was at a loss for words. It wasn't, "Hey Office causes some issues..." it was, "You're running 3rd party software," said with a serious sneer. That guy needs to join the ranks of the unemployed. Mac used to be really great, now they just have good hardware.

But no, Outlook has hands down the best calendar tools out there. No question. Everything else is a poor copy.

I agree Outlook is the best for business use cases but for a college student, iCal is great. I have a colour for each subject, an "events" calendar (non-academic, recurring) and a "significant" calendar for important events such as exams. The setup works great for me but I can see why it wouldn't scale.

>That guy needs to join the ranks of the unemployed.

I've never dealt with the Apple "Geniuses" but I know a lot of people have and didn't like it at all. To be honest, the only time I've had kernel panics were caused by Little Snitch (now fixed). After an update about a year ago, I've never had one since. For me, OS X is extremely reliable.

Rather than have a different color code for each type of event, I have 3 different calendars on Google Calendars. One is my personal stuff. One is my ex-wife's work schedule, which is relevant because the third one is our daughter's schedule as she goes back and forth between us. I also have some calendars added that are managed externally such as a hockey team's game schedule, etc. Each calendar displays as a different color in the UI. Google Calendar may very well be a great solution for you.

> Let's say you want to do something simple like... find out if your team members are busy before sending a meeting.

That's a standard task for business calendering, not personal calendering. It also has little to do with the front-end software and much more to do with back-end support. Calender.app supports Free/Busy and business scheduling if you're on a server that supports it like Exchange.

> Or let's say I want to manage multiple calendars, one with read, one with write access...

You can use Calender.app just fine?

You should at least have up-to-date information if you're going to shit on others choices. It hasn't been "iCal" in 2-3 years, which is a good indicator that your information is very out of date.

> Seriously that's their solution here. "Oh I see you're running 3rd party software, you need to uninstall this."

Dell will tell you the same thing. OEMs support their initial configuration. If it KPs in that configuration, they will support it. Likewise, if your Dell bluescreens with the OEM image, they will support that too.

If it's caused by a 3rd party kernel extension in OS X or a bad driver in Windows, they won't support that. No OEM would.

I'd really hesitate to mention pulseaudio as a good thing. It's the first thing to go after I install a new machine.

What is this, 2008? PulseAudio was quite unstable when Ubuntu shipped it by default before it was fully-baked, but it's been stable for years now.

No, it's 2014.

Must be my bad luck then, I had yet another instance of pulseaudio inspired madness a few weeks ago on a brand new install of Ubuntu.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com