7 ms·

I have outgrown a few laptops since 2006 when I finally gave up dual boot and just ran with Linux. Linux admittedly does have the occasional mixup (especially

by mback00 11y ago

I have outgrown a few laptops since 2006 when I finally gave up dual boot and just ran with Linux. Linux admittedly does have the occasional mixup (especially about competing graphical interfaces and init systems) and does sometimes need a little experimentation to get things working as I would like; however, these seeming inconveniences are mostly caused by newly presented "options" and are not about forced lock-in. Besides, Linux also has some very positive qualities that have become essential to me. Linux maintains compatibility with old code (sometimes very very old code) that is still useful to me. Linux puts an astounding array of tools at my fingertips that help me automate work and learn new things. Linux also keeps me secure, virus-free and conveniently keeps everything installed on disk up-to-date... and it gradually (every 6 mos for me) gets better all the time -- for free. I can't see a reason why I would ever want to return to an OS as restrictive and inconvenient as Windows.

frozenport 11y ago
MS Office
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Run a Windows VM on Linux (Windows 7 runs great), problem solved Install, back up the VM image, a lot less problems than having it as your main OS
  - gelasio 11y ago
    Or, if you want a great desktop experience that is really stable and has stood the test of time - run Windows as the host and Linux as guest.
- eru 11y ago
  MS Office is a good point. But: MS Office is available even for Android these days. Otherwise Wine should work, and ain't there some cloud MS Office these days?
  - frozenport 11y ago
    Except it doesn't. Office 2007 is over eight years old and runs with significant bugs. The cloud versions are incomplete and don't work with plugins like Endnote. The cloud version of PowerPoint struggle with movies and large resources.
- DanBC 11y ago
  The vast majority of people using MS Office would do fine with Libre Office or gnumeric and Abiword.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    Not if they need to swap documents with other Office users.
    - Silhouette 11y ago
      This is, unfortunately, very true. Try collecting some accounting records in LibreOffice Calc and then finding your accountant uses Excel. Time lost fixing the mess is probably worth more than the cost of MS Office for a single incident. If you need this kind of interoperability more than very occasionally, that alone could be a deal-breaker. Also, LibreOffice 5 on Windows 7 appears to be a disaster. We installed it for the first time a few weeks ago, on one new PC at work just to try it out, and it's exhibited numerous very obvious graphical glitches, crashes and performance problems so far even just doing basic spreadsheet work. It also seems to have arbitrarily changed a bunch of things from earlier versions, such as the default colours available for colouring or highlighting cells in Calc. Maybe the stability is better on Linux, but even then the changes from LO4 are presumably still the same and just as frustrating.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        Can you be more specific? In regards to changing defaults, that's often the case. Microsoft do the same thing, possibly worse.
        Silhouette 11y ago
        Sure. The first example we noticed was that we loaded one of our most important spreadsheets into Calc, and found that most of the colours we use to code different cells don't seem to match the default palette any more. Where we used to just click a couple of times on the toolbar, now it seems we have to manually configure the exact colour or use format painting. Someone in our organisation has to update this particular spreadsheet very often, and that kind of change is going to be horribly frustrating for them (or would be, I suppose, since presumably we're not going to actually migrate any existing systems to LO5 in its current state).
- blue1 11y ago
  that, and the Adobe Creative Suite.
div 11y ago
Gaming
- digi_owl 11y ago
  More and more games are console "ports" (Both the PS4 and XbOne are basically an AMD x86 PC). And those that are not are "indie" games that work across all platforms supported by the likes of steam.
- pavanky 11y ago
  Wine and / or PCI pass through to a windows VM. The second one takes a bit of setup, but it works wonderfully.
- barbs 11y ago
  I have a linux gaming rig. It's actually a dual-boot setup but I'm in Linux 99% of the time. Depends on the games you want to play, but there is a decent selection of games on Linux, and with frameworks like Unity it's pretty easy for devs to make Linux builds. Most games I play are native Linux builds, and then I have Wine for other games. I do use the windows partition as a last resort but it's rare (since building the computer I've used it once for GTA5)
danieldk 11y ago
I can't see a reason why I would ever want to return to an OS as restrictive and inconvenient as Windows. I have never been a Windows users, but there are some reasons why I use another 'restrictive' OS after using Linux and BSD for 13 years (including on laptops): - Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is simply not compatible enough. Though, people are moving more and more to Google Docs, so this issue might disappear in the future. - No GUI isolation in Linux. It scares the hell out of me that any application can read any other applications keystrokes, mouse events and viewports. When you have some vulnerability in some client (browser, mail), it could listen in on passwords that you type in a terminal as well. AFAIR Wayland will solve this. But the ecosystem did not move there yet. - The lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts across applications. - Supposedly stable upgrades that break stuff (especially in Ubuntu and to some extend RHEL, never had this problem in my many years with Slackware). - The lack of cutting-edge hardware with good driver support. I love my 12" MacBook and wouldn't want to go back to anything heavier and worse keyboard/trackpad. For other users, I can imagine that these are also problems: - Installing applications outside the distribution's repositories is still unnecessarily hard. - There is a lot of inertia - people do not want to invest the time to learn something new. - Business my still have many older win32 applications that do not run on other systems. --- Anyway, I don't think the traditional Linux desktop or Mac OS X are serious threats to Windows. It's Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS. Edit: I don't want to sound too negative about desktop Linux. I just wanted to give some possible reasons why not everybody may be happy to switch.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  You are complaining about compatibility and you believe that people are moving to Google Docs to handled this?!?
  - danieldk 11y ago
    No. People are using Google Docs for (some) new documents, because it handles collaboration far better. When you are using Windows or OS X, you can use both.
    - 11y ago
feld 11y ago
Linux is not that great at compatibility with old code or old binaries. Windows has always been better at this. An example of a *nix with good backwards compat is FreeBSD. The FreeBSD cluster has binaries from FreeBSD 2 (1994) that still run. Try that with Linux -- I guarantee you the kernel and glibc broke compatibility. Hell, there are Linux games from early ~2000s that won't run anymore.
- vetinari 11y ago
  Linux a.out binaries also still run - provided you have the a.out shared libs. But if you have the old binary, why wouldn't you have the old libs? Also the Linux games from early 2000s do run - you need the libraries they were built against.
- hjek 11y ago
  True, Linux binaries are not as backwards compatible as Win32 binaries. However, with Wine and Mingw64 being around, Win32 binaries are a totally valid way of distributing software for Linux.
- VLM 11y ago
  With qemu and other virtualization technology, even software emulation in 2016 will be faster than real hardware was in the 90s. And unlike Windows there are no legal problems with licensing.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > Linux is not that great at compatibility with old code or old binaries. The default on Linux is source code availability. If the ABI changes but the fix is to recompile or change a couple of lines then it's a much smaller issue than it would be on Windows when you can code. And even if you can't, since the default is also redistributability, someone who can may have done it already and the fix will be in the package manager before you even knew it was a problem. Or you can submit a bug which, when the fix is that simple, some random hacker will fix it for you because it looks good on a cv or github history. This compared with Windows where you have e.g. some driver with sources unknown that needs to be updated to support AMD64, which already supported x86 and was 64-bit clean for some RISC architecture, but now you can't do it at all. Or even more frustratingly, you have the driver source and the fix is very simple but you can't actually use or redistribute it because you're not up for the five grand and six months it takes to get a certificate for code signing.
gbuk2013 11y ago
Same here. A friend switched me to Debian in 2002 and I haven't looked back since. These days interacting with Windows (even 7 which is similar to what I remember) feels unpleasant. I use a tiling window manager and again I would never want to go back. My job does not require me to modify other people's Office documents and for reading them LibreOffice is acceptable. My own documents I usually write in AsciiDoc and share them as a PDF. For something that I really care about I will break out TexStudio and the result will blow Word out of the water. Most of my time is spent in either Firefox, vim, or a terminal for which Linux is also ideal. Gimp + Inkscape cover all of my occasional photo / diagram needs. For video there really is nothing better than mpv (mplayer successor) and ffmpeg. I do have a Windows 7 VM that I use for Outlook and Lync at the office and it works fine, but it's just another Linux app. ;-)
- tokenizerrr 11y ago
  What tiling window manager do you use? I've been using Awesome but it completely messes up when dragging Chrome tabs on your non-primary monitor. It is very frustrating. Or maybe the bug is in Chrome and has nothing to do with tabs and Awesome...
  - gbuk2013 11y ago
    I also use Awesome WM, which is ... awesome. :-) I think I see what you mean - is it the crazy flickering when you drag the newly created window around? I was able to get rid of that if I set the parent Chromium window status to "floating" (Mod+Ctrl+Space in Debian default config).
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      Sadly not that. What I mean is when Chrome is on my non-primary monitor the second you begin to drag a tag it pops out the window, goes to the primary monitor and refuses to be merged back into any Chrome window not on a primary monitor. It's really strange and quite obnoxious.
eloff 11y ago
I went in the other direction. I used to use Linux (Ubuntu) but I got tired of essential things breaking after updates, like Nautilus, and the constant battle with getting the printer to work. Eventually I just got too frustrated, went out and bought Windows for $300 and considered it cheap. Now I need Linux for work (software dev) again, so I gave dual-boot a try. I installed OpenSuse, Ubuntu, and Debian a total of 7 times since Christmas, each time ending up with something unbootable within days. And I spent a couple thousand dollars of my time getting them to work, fixing the horrible fonts on OpenSuse, etc. Eventually I gave up and bought VMWare where Ubuntu now sits happily isolated from real hardware, a configuration that it's somehow more stable in. And at least I have automatic snapshots on every reboot, so when something goes wrong I just roll back. Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time. I really like Windows, not because it's a pleasure to use (Windows 8 with that metro crap was terrible!) but because it just works. If I can't get desktop Linux to work nicely as software engineer, what chance does your average person have? Unless some company does to Linux what Apple did to BSD (SteamOS?), I don't see any hope for it ever being anything but a niche desktop OS.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  I wonder if you used hardware than is actually supported by the distributions you tried? If you need/want Linux I would highly recommend buying something pre-installed. You don't have to use the pre-installed OS but at least you can reasonably assume that drivers will be available.
  - eloff 11y ago
    Nothing exotic: NVIDIA 970 graphics card, Gigabyte motherboard with Intel NIC, Haswell CPU, Samsung SSD and a couple HDDs.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      I seriously don't recommend checking Linux compatibility on laptops this way (component by component). What about the wifi? How about your system's screen brightness controls? Trackpad? Etc. Getting something that is OK is takes work and getting something really good is a lot of work. For comparison. Try installing Windows on a Chromebook. It'll suck. Install Linux on a made for windows laptop and it'll sort of work if your lucky and suck if you're not. If you want to use Linux just buy laptops that are certified -- it's easy and there are several options these days (I'm not going to name any but google for them).
Bahamut 11y ago
I only have a computer with Windows for two reasons currently - games, and for debugging frontend web code on an actual Windows machine (more uncommon - pretty much only has been for open source work). Otherwise, I too have found Linux/OS X to be sufficient. However, for many of my friends, other reasons tie them to Windows, such as music DAWs.
livus 11y ago
I would pay an arm and a leg to be able to use Linux (specifically Ubuntu) as my day to day OS. I miss the tools, ecosystem, flexibility and most importantly the shell. I have been toying with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the past few months. Managed to get it up and running after an intensive weekend. Few days later I forgot to wake up the laptop from sleep before disconnecting the external monitor. All hell literally broke loose...

by mback00 11y ago

frozenport 11y ago

MS Office

raverbashing 11y ago
Run a Windows VM on Linux (Windows 7 runs great), problem solved Install, back up the VM image, a lot less problems than having it as your main OS
- gelasio 11y ago
  Or, if you want a great desktop experience that is really stable and has stood the test of time - run Windows as the host and Linux as guest.
eru 11y ago
MS Office is a good point. But: MS Office is available even for Android these days. Otherwise Wine should work, and ain't there some cloud MS Office these days?
- frozenport 11y ago
  Except it doesn't. Office 2007 is over eight years old and runs with significant bugs. The cloud versions are incomplete and don't work with plugins like Endnote. The cloud version of PowerPoint struggle with movies and large resources.
DanBC 11y ago
The vast majority of people using MS Office would do fine with Libre Office or gnumeric and Abiword.
- peteretep 11y ago
  Not if they need to swap documents with other Office users.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    This is, unfortunately, very true. Try collecting some accounting records in LibreOffice Calc and then finding your accountant uses Excel. Time lost fixing the mess is probably worth more than the cost of MS Office for a single incident. If you need this kind of interoperability more than very occasionally, that alone could be a deal-breaker. Also, LibreOffice 5 on Windows 7 appears to be a disaster. We installed it for the first time a few weeks ago, on one new PC at work just to try it out, and it's exhibited numerous very obvious graphical glitches, crashes and performance problems so far even just doing basic spreadsheet work. It also seems to have arbitrarily changed a bunch of things from earlier versions, such as the default colours available for colouring or highlighting cells in Calc. Maybe the stability is better on Linux, but even then the changes from LO4 are presumably still the same and just as frustrating.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Can you be more specific? In regards to changing defaults, that's often the case. Microsoft do the same thing, possibly worse.
      - Silhouette 11y ago
        Sure. The first example we noticed was that we loaded one of our most important spreadsheets into Calc, and found that most of the colours we use to code different cells don't seem to match the default palette any more. Where we used to just click a couple of times on the toolbar, now it seems we have to manually configure the exact colour or use format painting. Someone in our organisation has to update this particular spreadsheet very often, and that kind of change is going to be horribly frustrating for them (or would be, I suppose, since presumably we're not going to actually migrate any existing systems to LO5 in its current state).
blue1 11y ago
that, and the Adobe Creative Suite.

div 11y ago

Gaming

digi_owl 11y ago
More and more games are console "ports" (Both the PS4 and XbOne are basically an AMD x86 PC). And those that are not are "indie" games that work across all platforms supported by the likes of steam.
pavanky 11y ago
Wine and / or PCI pass through to a windows VM. The second one takes a bit of setup, but it works wonderfully.
barbs 11y ago
I have a linux gaming rig. It's actually a dual-boot setup but I'm in Linux 99% of the time. Depends on the games you want to play, but there is a decent selection of games on Linux, and with frameworks like Unity it's pretty easy for devs to make Linux builds. Most games I play are native Linux builds, and then I have Wine for other games. I do use the windows partition as a last resort but it's rare (since building the computer I've used it once for GTA5)

danieldk 11y ago

I can't see a reason why I would ever want to return to an OS as restrictive and inconvenient as Windows. I have never been a Windows users, but there are some reasons why I use another 'restrictive' OS after using Linux and BSD for 13 years (including on laptops): - Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is simply not compatible enough. Though, people are moving more and more to Google Docs, so this issue might disappear in the future. - No GUI isolation in Linux. It scares the hell out of me that any application can read any other applications keystrokes, mouse events and viewports. When you have some vulnerability in some client (browser, mail), it could listen in on passwords that you type in a terminal as well. AFAIR Wayland will solve this. But the ecosystem did not move there yet. - The lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts across applications. - Supposedly stable upgrades that break stuff (especially in Ubuntu and to some extend RHEL, never had this problem in my many years with Slackware). - The lack of cutting-edge hardware with good driver support. I love my 12" MacBook and wouldn't want to go back to anything heavier and worse keyboard/trackpad. For other users, I can imagine that these are also problems: - Installing applications outside the distribution's repositories is still unnecessarily hard. - There is a lot of inertia - people do not want to invest the time to learn something new. - Business my still have many older win32 applications that do not run on other systems. --- Anyway, I don't think the traditional Linux desktop or Mac OS X are serious threats to Windows. It's Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS. Edit: I don't want to sound too negative about desktop Linux. I just wanted to give some possible reasons why not everybody may be happy to switch.

chris_wot 11y ago
You are complaining about compatibility and you believe that people are moving to Google Docs to handled this?!?
- danieldk 11y ago
  No. People are using Google Docs for (some) new documents, because it handles collaboration far better. When you are using Windows or OS X, you can use both.
  - 11y ago

feld 11y ago

Linux is not that great at compatibility with old code or old binaries. Windows has always been better at this. An example of a *nix with good backwards compat is FreeBSD. The FreeBSD cluster has binaries from FreeBSD 2 (1994) that still run. Try that with Linux -- I guarantee you the kernel and glibc broke compatibility. Hell, there are Linux games from early ~2000s that won't run anymore.

vetinari 11y ago
Linux a.out binaries also still run - provided you have the a.out shared libs. But if you have the old binary, why wouldn't you have the old libs? Also the Linux games from early 2000s do run - you need the libraries they were built against.
hjek 11y ago
True, Linux binaries are not as backwards compatible as Win32 binaries. However, with Wine and Mingw64 being around, Win32 binaries are a totally valid way of distributing software for Linux.
VLM 11y ago
With qemu and other virtualization technology, even software emulation in 2016 will be faster than real hardware was in the 90s. And unlike Windows there are no legal problems with licensing.
AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> Linux is not that great at compatibility with old code or old binaries. The default on Linux is source code availability. If the ABI changes but the fix is to recompile or change a couple of lines then it's a much smaller issue than it would be on Windows when you can code. And even if you can't, since the default is also redistributability, someone who can may have done it already and the fix will be in the package manager before you even knew it was a problem. Or you can submit a bug which, when the fix is that simple, some random hacker will fix it for you because it looks good on a cv or github history. This compared with Windows where you have e.g. some driver with sources unknown that needs to be updated to support AMD64, which already supported x86 and was 64-bit clean for some RISC architecture, but now you can't do it at all. Or even more frustratingly, you have the driver source and the fix is very simple but you can't actually use or redistribute it because you're not up for the five grand and six months it takes to get a certificate for code signing.

gbuk2013 11y ago

Same here. A friend switched me to Debian in 2002 and I haven't looked back since. These days interacting with Windows (even 7 which is similar to what I remember) feels unpleasant. I use a tiling window manager and again I would never want to go back. My job does not require me to modify other people's Office documents and for reading them LibreOffice is acceptable. My own documents I usually write in AsciiDoc and share them as a PDF. For something that I really care about I will break out TexStudio and the result will blow Word out of the water. Most of my time is spent in either Firefox, vim, or a terminal for which Linux is also ideal. Gimp + Inkscape cover all of my occasional photo / diagram needs. For video there really is nothing better than mpv (mplayer successor) and ffmpeg. I do have a Windows 7 VM that I use for Outlook and Lync at the office and it works fine, but it's just another Linux app. ;-)

tokenizerrr 11y ago
What tiling window manager do you use? I've been using Awesome but it completely messes up when dragging Chrome tabs on your non-primary monitor. It is very frustrating. Or maybe the bug is in Chrome and has nothing to do with tabs and Awesome...
- gbuk2013 11y ago
  I also use Awesome WM, which is ... awesome. :-) I think I see what you mean - is it the crazy flickering when you drag the newly created window around? I was able to get rid of that if I set the parent Chromium window status to "floating" (Mod+Ctrl+Space in Debian default config).
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    Sadly not that. What I mean is when Chrome is on my non-primary monitor the second you begin to drag a tag it pops out the window, goes to the primary monitor and refuses to be merged back into any Chrome window not on a primary monitor. It's really strange and quite obnoxious.

eloff 11y ago

I went in the other direction. I used to use Linux (Ubuntu) but I got tired of essential things breaking after updates, like Nautilus, and the constant battle with getting the printer to work. Eventually I just got too frustrated, went out and bought Windows for $300 and considered it cheap. Now I need Linux for work (software dev) again, so I gave dual-boot a try. I installed OpenSuse, Ubuntu, and Debian a total of 7 times since Christmas, each time ending up with something unbootable within days. And I spent a couple thousand dollars of my time getting them to work, fixing the horrible fonts on OpenSuse, etc. Eventually I gave up and bought VMWare where Ubuntu now sits happily isolated from real hardware, a configuration that it's somehow more stable in. And at least I have automatic snapshots on every reboot, so when something goes wrong I just roll back. Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time. I really like Windows, not because it's a pleasure to use (Windows 8 with that metro crap was terrible!) but because it just works. If I can't get desktop Linux to work nicely as software engineer, what chance does your average person have? Unless some company does to Linux what Apple did to BSD (SteamOS?), I don't see any hope for it ever being anything but a niche desktop OS.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
I wonder if you used hardware than is actually supported by the distributions you tried? If you need/want Linux I would highly recommend buying something pre-installed. You don't have to use the pre-installed OS but at least you can reasonably assume that drivers will be available.
- eloff 11y ago
  Nothing exotic: NVIDIA 970 graphics card, Gigabyte motherboard with Intel NIC, Haswell CPU, Samsung SSD and a couple HDDs.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    I seriously don't recommend checking Linux compatibility on laptops this way (component by component). What about the wifi? How about your system's screen brightness controls? Trackpad? Etc. Getting something that is OK is takes work and getting something really good is a lot of work. For comparison. Try installing Windows on a Chromebook. It'll suck. Install Linux on a made for windows laptop and it'll sort of work if your lucky and suck if you're not. If you want to use Linux just buy laptops that are certified -- it's easy and there are several options these days (I'm not going to name any but google for them).

Bahamut 11y ago

I only have a computer with Windows for two reasons currently - games, and for debugging frontend web code on an actual Windows machine (more uncommon - pretty much only has been for open source work). Otherwise, I too have found Linux/OS X to be sufficient. However, for many of my friends, other reasons tie them to Windows, such as music DAWs.

livus 11y ago

I would pay an arm and a leg to be able to use Linux (specifically Ubuntu) as my day to day OS. I miss the tools, ecosystem, flexibility and most importantly the shell. I have been toying with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the past few months. Managed to get it up and running after an intensive weekend. Few days later I forgot to wake up the laptop from sleep before disconnecting the external monitor. All hell literally broke loose...