Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

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> Desktop Linux is mostly install an work.

It is...until it isn't. Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch, with no weird issues or regressions, and a warm, friendly, comfortable development environment welcomes you. Then there's that one time you install it on your laptop so you have a to-go environment that matches your workstation, and BOOM! your wifi isn't recognized (what year is it again??) or your sound card sputters (damn you PulseAudio!), or your hybrid graphics screws the pooch. Hell, I built this workstation I'm typing on with GNU/Linux and BSD compatibility first in my mind, and I still had issues with some hardware right off the bat. Nothing that can't be fixed with some fiddling, but it's annoying as hell.

Yes, all of the above issues can be fixed, just like the issues you dealt with in OS X. It's a computer, after all; Garbage In (Apple/Linux/BSD developers), Garbage Out. And don't get me started on Windows 8.x; it's finally becoming usable daily, but there are a million reasons I chose to stick with 7 for Windows-specific work, and wait it out until 10 ships.

Apple broke the cardinal rule: If it isn't broken, stop fixing it! They want to innovate and improve and conquer the world, fine; but they need to remember that they had the best OS X release with Snow Leopard (and in my personal opinion, that was the best desktop OS period). In their rush to wow the masses, they broke their OS for those of us who use it to be productive and creative.

At this stage, I feel that a good old fashioned, stable OS like FreeBSD or Slackware Linux or Debian is the best choice for a solid 'nix workstation, something you can get real work done on. But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac.

I dual boot windows and ubuntu. They both have their good points and their bad points.

> Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch

Even when the installs go off without a hitch, there are always lingering pain in the ass problems and they're all related to buggy drivers, bad UI tools and dependency hell. Every time I think about making my own distro, I come back to those three big problems and think: the last two are fixable. The drivers... not so much.

I don't agree. Occasionally there are lingering problems. Not very often in my experience.

You obviously don't punish your poor system as much as I do. ;)

More wifi then Sound were common for me before don't have them now. Actually i face these issues when doing a fresh installation of Win7. Many times i had use Ubuntu to find windows drivers!

My Macbook pro Ubuntu installation went without any problems. Touch pad mouse clicks weren't as exact as OS X. I am used to it hence was not able to use Ubuntu. Maybe i should tinker a bit.

On this particular machine I'm using, some distros have excellent sound out of the box and some require snoop=0 added to the snd_hda_intel options in /etc/module.d/ to avoid stuttering audio. I didn't discover this bug until after I'd bought the motherboard and tried various distros; in my research it never came up.

And on a completely different note, I have a Dell Latitude laptop from around 2000 or so, a Pentium III machine, that has no built in networking unless you count the dial-up modem. I picked up a random CardBus wifi card for $5, and OpenBSD recognized and configured it flawlessly.

It really all comes down to whether the OS developers have access to the hardware the rest of us use. If, for example, your wifi doesn't work, it's not likely to until enough bug reports are submitted that the kernel hackers responsible for wifi drivers get their hands on the hardware and write or improve a driver. It's the same for those trackpad issues you had; someone somewhere has to debug that.

This is why it's a good idea to research your hardware if you intend to run anything other than Windows or OS X. And even with research, it's rarely 100% working out of the box. That's the tradeoff for having what (in my opinion) is a very productive and comfortable working environment.

But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac

Huh? And I am not saying that they don't have problems.

Sorry, a bit of hyperbole on my part. I was alluding to the "Vista Capable" days, when machines barely able to run XP were touted by their manufacturers as "Vista Capable", even though they knew very well that the new OS had much higher requirements than XP. Core Solo CPUs were particularly bad at running any Windows OS, and were featured in many of those machines.

My point being, even a kludgy setup like that was more tolerable than OS X 10.7 and up (again, hyperbole, but close enough to the truth in my case).

And it is that point that I am talking about, and I was wondering what problems made it that unusable. I was not saying that there is no problems.

I thought it was obvious from my clarification: Lion was the Vista of the Mac world. Major instability, much slower than SL, broken hardware drivers in my case, forced obsolescence (why drop support for perfectly capable Core Duo and even some Core 2 Duo machines?), massive changes to file saving...it would be faster to list what wasn't screwed up.

Yea I know, but this says nothing about Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

Jesus Christ. Okay, in short, ML fixed some but not all of Lion's issues, and Mavericks fixed a few more but introduced a lot of annoying "features" that still broke my workflow. Yosemite was another huge regression, almost as bad as Lion.

If you want more specific than that, you'll have to find someone who has spent more time than I have on those OS releases. I've tried each one and have yet to see anything better than Snow Leopard; if you don't like that answer, too bad. I'm done.

This does not make them that unusable. I was not implying that there is no problems.

Welcome to yuhong, he's famous for this on basically every comments page I've seen him on

You know, I started getting the feeling I was being trolled early on, but I didn't dare try calling it out here. Trolls seem to be dealt with by the staff but regular users who call them out get spanked too.

I always wonder where do people get these quirks... And I suspect mostly that's Ubuntu's fault, which is a shitty OS to begin with. It's the only distro I had problems with my graphics card (an Aspire 5050, several years ago), and the audio output.

I've been on archlinux, on testing, for christ sake, and it's been at least a year since I had an issue of any kind.

Debian was also fine by me, but the software was too old on stable; I did have installation issues with it, however, on other peoples laptops.

Ironically, Ubuntu was the only distro that didn't present audio stuttering for me out of the box. I usually run Slackware and it was present there, which led me to research it until I found a fix. I chalked it up to Ubuntu staying on the bleeding edge even with their LTS releases, along with having the largest user base by far (more users = more people with this bug = more incentive to fix it).

Either way, it was an easy fix for Slackware and the other half dozen distros I've tried on this machine, and I've found generally that Slackware is the best fit for someone who doesn't mind getting their hands dirty occasionally, in exchange for stability and lack of dependency issues.

I've tried Debian, arch and several flavors of Ubuntu (like #!). The quirks aren't in the OS, they're in the shitty drivers, which are common to all linux based oses. Just because you don't personally see an issue doesn't mean others don't. The inconsistency across hardware is a large reason apple forces people to use their OS only on approved hardware.

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