5 ms·

I have a reasonably noob-unfriendly linux distro (arch) on my bleeding edge kaby lane xps 13 laptop (month or two old) and even the touchscreen worked without a

I have a reasonably noob-unfriendly linux distro (arch) on my bleeding edge kaby lane xps 13 laptop (month or two old) and even the touchscreen worked without any messing around with config files and so on. It came with ubuntu pre-loaded and I assumed they tweaked the arse out of the configs for it, and so expected pain when I replaced the OS. Turns out I was wrong. Vanilla with a minimal distro and even the touchscreen and suspend worked. Woah? I was impressed anyway.. As someone who's suffered OS pains you wouldn't believe (I mean.. I ran solaris 10 on a hp probook as my main workstation for a year one time...) and for well over a decade -- things are MUCH better these days then they were. Windows? Fair enough for you I guess. I'm not trying to convert you... I'll come off badly here, but I'll be honest: I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum. I'm not an elitist or at least; I'm really not trying to be.. Please don't take me wrong. At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver. If you're a photo editor or a journalist or writer or something, sure -- I get why that stack works.. Programmer? Sysadmin? I can't get my head around it. I'd like to understand, though.. What do you do? What tools do you use? Are you just living inside some IDE all the time and not interacting with lots of different tools? Thinking out loud as I type, maybe that's the difference here then? We *nix folks tend to use lots of small tools and if you're just sat in one big IDE perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter so much to you as it does to us??

criddell 10y ago
> perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter Of course it doesn't matter. Windows, macOS, and Linux are all good enough. More than ever, you pick the operating system and hardware to support the applications you want to run.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  Well, okay. The tools I use will work on all these operating systems, but I wouldn't consider windows or OSX 'good enough' for me. I suspect most developers could get their stacks to work on everything from freebsd to windows (well, unless you're a .net dev) -- so that's not really the reason to pick one or the other? I don't run linux becuase 'vim' works better than it does on opensolaris... right?
  - criddell 10y ago
    I'm guessing we don't really disagree on this. You are right about vim. It works well everywhere, so that's not likely to be the application that dictates what the rest of your system is. If you use vim and play a lot of Call of Duty, then you are probably going to use Windows. If you use vim and absolutely depend on Final Cut Pro, you're going to be on a Mac.
cm2187 10y ago
It's easy to forget how obscure is a technology to someone who doesn't have the experience and understanding of all the underlying concepts. I tend to do the same with programming. I tend to think certain things are trivial, until I see a beginner struggling with concepts that are so obvious I didn't think it was worth spending more time than just mentioning them. I am a beginner on linux, and outside of a few basic settings, I find myself very quickly in front of a terminal window, trying to guess the state of the system or what syntax could work and not break anything.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  Yep so I'm definately being biased by personal experience here -- not claiming otherwise. I've been using and working with unixy types for >15 years or so and probably type 'grep' a hundred times a day (I'm a lead dev). I'm genuinely just curious how your world looks as it's so different to mine -- I must live a sheltered life but even junior devs I have with routinely push makefiles and bash scripts etc.. Are you a dev? Do you just live in one big contained environment like visual studio or such that has all these kind of tools rolled in?
  - cm2187 10y ago
    That's the thing. I'm not a dev, I am a banker. And there are only so many hours I am willing or able to spend on a week end relearning the basics. GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc. I know a few command lines for some basic things I do all the time, but for things I do occasionally, it is just not worth me investing time doing it with a CLI, like creating a VM. But then I am hostile to this new Microsoft...
    - cyberpunk 10y ago
      Hmm. I've never worked with the 'frontend' of finance -- I know how your infra, payement processing, massive enterprisey stacks etc work but the day to day stuff the folks on the desks are doing I've not really observed. It's a wide field I guess, but at the end of the day would I be safe to assume that you're mostly playing with data in interesting ways then telling various services/apps (aforementioned chunky java apps, for e.g) to do things based on what you work out from those manipulations? If that's the case, then I really think there is an advantage for you in mastering the 'unix ide', but only if you're doing really custom stuff all the time... If you're working with a bunch of tools that do everything you already need them to do, then of course there's no point in working out how to do the same with different tools. If you're constantly hitting the limits of how you can play with your data, then perhaps it's worth looking into a language which is good at manipulating data and you'd be suprised how powerful this mysterious CLI can be..
archon 10y ago
> At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver. Because it's way less work. Simple as that. Windows, in my experience, just works. The things about it that don't work are the exceptions. Windows gets out of my way and lets me work with minimal setup and maintenance. Linux, on the other hand, has been a pain in the butt every time I've tried to make it my primary desktop OS, and I have tried multiple times (granted, the last time was 6 years ago). Editing endless config files; building some obscure driver from source to make a device function correctly; and heaven help you if you want to do an OS version upgrade.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  Well, my point was kinda exactly that things are better now..... Yours was the exact reason I used OSX for almost 6 years; it stopped being true and I switched back to linux at the end of last year. Since then, I've had exactly one time my laptop didn't wake up from sleep in around 2 months VS daily crashes and annoying popups from my last mac. Also lots of grateful family/friends who recieved all my old apple gear ;)
  - jasonlotito 10y ago
    > things are better now Ubuntu 16.10 can't handle an external monitor with a DPI/resolution. And keeps throwing up error boxes after a fresh install on a Linux machine that came with Ubuntu by default. Better? Maybe. Good? Hardly.
- mcbits 10y ago
  After hopping back and forth between Windows and Linux for 6-12 months at a time for a many years, I've realized that I spend at least as much time dorking around with Windows and related software after a clean install as with desktop Linux distros. Still I keep hopping, because both worlds get too frustrating after a while. Out of the box, Ubuntu & friends (which have improved a lot in 6 years) are far more functional than Windows, assuming the hardware is properly detected and configured. When something goes askew, it's a toss-up whether it will be easier to fix on Windows or Linux. Familiarity/experience play a huge role here.
quanticle 10y ago
>I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum. In return, I judge people who use technology choice as an indication of skill as inexperienced. At one point, I was like that too. I was all about tweaking and customizing Linux; getting it to run just so on hardware that, in some cases, was actively hostile to it (I still haven't entirely forgiven Broadcom). Moreover, at that time I was time-rich and cash-poor, so it made sense for me to spend extra time in order to gain open-source versions of closed-source tools that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But, at some point, I realized that I wasn't really getting anything out of it. Watching stuff fly by on the command line, and tweaking config files by hand makes you feel like a 1337 h4x0r the first time you do it. But after you've had to tweak config files to get your wifi working for the twelfth time, after you've had to apologize to your collaborators because you can't edit their documents, after you've wasted people's time because your laptop can't connect to a projector, you realize that the real determinant of success isn't whether you're using Windows or Linux. It isn't whether you've memorized man pages or obscure command line flags. It isn't whether you can rattle off the contents of your xorg.conf and smb.conf by heart. It's whether you get stuff done. All the rest of it is just means to that end. And I realized that Linux, on the client, was more of an impediment to getting stuff done than a help. I still use Linux. I have a half-dozen or so Linux VMs running on this machine right now for various projects. The fact still remains that new programming languages and server technologies come to Linux first, OSX second and Windows much later. But in terms of desktop/laptop experience? Linux still requires far too much tweaking and configuration, and I find it much easier to get stuff done with Linux on the server and Windows on the client.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  Super late reply and I supect I'm talking to myself at this point, real life got in the way again. I did see your comment when you posted it and did mean to respond at the time. Well, better late than never. First off; I totally agree with you. I wasn't trying to say that ability to configure xorg or tweak your desktop setup constantly was any indicator of technical skill and I've also met a lot of people who think that it is and they irritate me significantly too. I'm not one of those. I don't judge skill on how well one can edit config files and I disregard the views of most of those who do as juvenile and in search of a measuring tape. I had a similar journey to you w/r/t the need to get shit done vs having a fragile mess of customization to maintain and eventually it drove me to OSX (one 'yum update' before going away for lunch and coming back to an 80x25 console just as a change window opened was the straw for my particular camel). I was comfortable there for a bit. It stayed the hell out of my way for most of the time (I just have fullscreen terms and a browser) which is what I needed from a machine that I'm working on. OSX stopped being the best tool for that job recently, but that's a post for another time. So, back to my judgmental/biased statement.. I'm not really sure in both what I'm trying to say here or how to say it, but I'll try again for the hell of it. I have found through years of personal observation (YMMVx1000) that windows users in any tech position that I'm involved with is an immediate smell of lack of technical skill. Again, that sounds really bad. Once again to be clear: I'm not saying there aren't smart .net or whatever folks around and I'll be proven wrong at some point (happily!), however I'm sticking to my view that as far as I've seen, on any team I've had (be it java devs or sysadmins) that the one or two folks using windows are always the weakest members of those teams. While you can shoot me for being honest, I find the idea that a capable ops engineer or java developer would willingly choose MS as a driver, after they're at the point where they understand the issues around closed source and privacy, incomprehensible.
cube2222 10y ago
As one of those people: I've used Linux for quite a while in the past but switched to windows since windows 10 came out. As someone else in this thread pointed out, I've only seen the Candy crush ad once, that's all. With bash on Ubuntu on windows, great hyperv based docker and the windows system I'm just much more flexible. I have an the advantages of Linux with WSL (windows subsystem for Linux) and at the same time I don't have to spend time on getting my computer to work. Whenever I see someone presenting using Linux, they have to spend like 10 minutes configuring their beamer. I'm just connected, with great scaling handling and ready to go. Additionally, I have a surface pro 4, so whenever I want I can just start sketching on it (great for a programmer). Stop judging people by the technology they use, because maybe you're the one being fixated. EDIT: Oh, and PowerShell is actually a nice to use terminal.

criddell 10y ago

> perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter Of course it doesn't matter. Windows, macOS, and Linux are all good enough. More than ever, you pick the operating system and hardware to support the applications you want to run.

cyberpunk 10y ago
Well, okay. The tools I use will work on all these operating systems, but I wouldn't consider windows or OSX 'good enough' for me. I suspect most developers could get their stacks to work on everything from freebsd to windows (well, unless you're a .net dev) -- so that's not really the reason to pick one or the other? I don't run linux becuase 'vim' works better than it does on opensolaris... right?
- criddell 10y ago
  I'm guessing we don't really disagree on this. You are right about vim. It works well everywhere, so that's not likely to be the application that dictates what the rest of your system is. If you use vim and play a lot of Call of Duty, then you are probably going to use Windows. If you use vim and absolutely depend on Final Cut Pro, you're going to be on a Mac.

cm2187 10y ago

It's easy to forget how obscure is a technology to someone who doesn't have the experience and understanding of all the underlying concepts. I tend to do the same with programming. I tend to think certain things are trivial, until I see a beginner struggling with concepts that are so obvious I didn't think it was worth spending more time than just mentioning them. I am a beginner on linux, and outside of a few basic settings, I find myself very quickly in front of a terminal window, trying to guess the state of the system or what syntax could work and not break anything.

cyberpunk 10y ago
Yep so I'm definately being biased by personal experience here -- not claiming otherwise. I've been using and working with unixy types for >15 years or so and probably type 'grep' a hundred times a day (I'm a lead dev). I'm genuinely just curious how your world looks as it's so different to mine -- I must live a sheltered life but even junior devs I have with routinely push makefiles and bash scripts etc.. Are you a dev? Do you just live in one big contained environment like visual studio or such that has all these kind of tools rolled in?
- cm2187 10y ago
  That's the thing. I'm not a dev, I am a banker. And there are only so many hours I am willing or able to spend on a week end relearning the basics. GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc. I know a few command lines for some basic things I do all the time, but for things I do occasionally, it is just not worth me investing time doing it with a CLI, like creating a VM. But then I am hostile to this new Microsoft...
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    Hmm. I've never worked with the 'frontend' of finance -- I know how your infra, payement processing, massive enterprisey stacks etc work but the day to day stuff the folks on the desks are doing I've not really observed. It's a wide field I guess, but at the end of the day would I be safe to assume that you're mostly playing with data in interesting ways then telling various services/apps (aforementioned chunky java apps, for e.g) to do things based on what you work out from those manipulations? If that's the case, then I really think there is an advantage for you in mastering the 'unix ide', but only if you're doing really custom stuff all the time... If you're working with a bunch of tools that do everything you already need them to do, then of course there's no point in working out how to do the same with different tools. If you're constantly hitting the limits of how you can play with your data, then perhaps it's worth looking into a language which is good at manipulating data and you'd be suprised how powerful this mysterious CLI can be..

archon 10y ago

> At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver. Because it's way less work. Simple as that. Windows, in my experience, just works. The things about it that don't work are the exceptions. Windows gets out of my way and lets me work with minimal setup and maintenance. Linux, on the other hand, has been a pain in the butt every time I've tried to make it my primary desktop OS, and I have tried multiple times (granted, the last time was 6 years ago). Editing endless config files; building some obscure driver from source to make a device function correctly; and heaven help you if you want to do an OS version upgrade.

cyberpunk 10y ago
Well, my point was kinda exactly that things are better now..... Yours was the exact reason I used OSX for almost 6 years; it stopped being true and I switched back to linux at the end of last year. Since then, I've had exactly one time my laptop didn't wake up from sleep in around 2 months VS daily crashes and annoying popups from my last mac. Also lots of grateful family/friends who recieved all my old apple gear ;)
- jasonlotito 10y ago
  > things are better now Ubuntu 16.10 can't handle an external monitor with a DPI/resolution. And keeps throwing up error boxes after a fresh install on a Linux machine that came with Ubuntu by default. Better? Maybe. Good? Hardly.
mcbits 10y ago
After hopping back and forth between Windows and Linux for 6-12 months at a time for a many years, I've realized that I spend at least as much time dorking around with Windows and related software after a clean install as with desktop Linux distros. Still I keep hopping, because both worlds get too frustrating after a while. Out of the box, Ubuntu & friends (which have improved a lot in 6 years) are far more functional than Windows, assuming the hardware is properly detected and configured. When something goes askew, it's a toss-up whether it will be easier to fix on Windows or Linux. Familiarity/experience play a huge role here.

quanticle 10y ago

>I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum. In return, I judge people who use technology choice as an indication of skill as inexperienced. At one point, I was like that too. I was all about tweaking and customizing Linux; getting it to run just so on hardware that, in some cases, was actively hostile to it (I still haven't entirely forgiven Broadcom). Moreover, at that time I was time-rich and cash-poor, so it made sense for me to spend extra time in order to gain open-source versions of closed-source tools that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But, at some point, I realized that I wasn't really getting anything out of it. Watching stuff fly by on the command line, and tweaking config files by hand makes you feel like a 1337 h4x0r the first time you do it. But after you've had to tweak config files to get your wifi working for the twelfth time, after you've had to apologize to your collaborators because you can't edit their documents, after you've wasted people's time because your laptop can't connect to a projector, you realize that the real determinant of success isn't whether you're using Windows or Linux. It isn't whether you've memorized man pages or obscure command line flags. It isn't whether you can rattle off the contents of your xorg.conf and smb.conf by heart. It's whether you get stuff done. All the rest of it is just means to that end. And I realized that Linux, on the client, was more of an impediment to getting stuff done than a help. I still use Linux. I have a half-dozen or so Linux VMs running on this machine right now for various projects. The fact still remains that new programming languages and server technologies come to Linux first, OSX second and Windows much later. But in terms of desktop/laptop experience? Linux still requires far too much tweaking and configuration, and I find it much easier to get stuff done with Linux on the server and Windows on the client.

cyberpunk 10y ago
Super late reply and I supect I'm talking to myself at this point, real life got in the way again. I did see your comment when you posted it and did mean to respond at the time. Well, better late than never. First off; I totally agree with you. I wasn't trying to say that ability to configure xorg or tweak your desktop setup constantly was any indicator of technical skill and I've also met a lot of people who think that it is and they irritate me significantly too. I'm not one of those. I don't judge skill on how well one can edit config files and I disregard the views of most of those who do as juvenile and in search of a measuring tape. I had a similar journey to you w/r/t the need to get shit done vs having a fragile mess of customization to maintain and eventually it drove me to OSX (one 'yum update' before going away for lunch and coming back to an 80x25 console just as a change window opened was the straw for my particular camel). I was comfortable there for a bit. It stayed the hell out of my way for most of the time (I just have fullscreen terms and a browser) which is what I needed from a machine that I'm working on. OSX stopped being the best tool for that job recently, but that's a post for another time. So, back to my judgmental/biased statement.. I'm not really sure in both what I'm trying to say here or how to say it, but I'll try again for the hell of it. I have found through years of personal observation (YMMVx1000) that windows users in any tech position that I'm involved with is an immediate smell of lack of technical skill. Again, that sounds really bad. Once again to be clear: I'm not saying there aren't smart .net or whatever folks around and I'll be proven wrong at some point (happily!), however I'm sticking to my view that as far as I've seen, on any team I've had (be it java devs or sysadmins) that the one or two folks using windows are always the weakest members of those teams. While you can shoot me for being honest, I find the idea that a capable ops engineer or java developer would willingly choose MS as a driver, after they're at the point where they understand the issues around closed source and privacy, incomprehensible.

cube2222 10y ago

As one of those people: I've used Linux for quite a while in the past but switched to windows since windows 10 came out. As someone else in this thread pointed out, I've only seen the Candy crush ad once, that's all. With bash on Ubuntu on windows, great hyperv based docker and the windows system I'm just much more flexible. I have an the advantages of Linux with WSL (windows subsystem for Linux) and at the same time I don't have to spend time on getting my computer to work. Whenever I see someone presenting using Linux, they have to spend like 10 minutes configuring their beamer. I'm just connected, with great scaling handling and ready to go. Additionally, I have a surface pro 4, so whenever I want I can just start sketching on it (great for a programmer). Stop judging people by the technology they use, because maybe you're the one being fixated. EDIT: Oh, and PowerShell is actually a nice to use terminal.