3 ms·

hard to enjoy the parts that work great when you have a corrupted grub boot loader, nonfunctional networking and graphic driver issues.

mixmastamyk 8y ago
None of these have ever happened to me, and I started with slackware. (Maybe once around y2k a nic wasn’t supported but after waiting six months it was.)
- neuronic 8y ago
  Corrupted GRUB happened to me 7 times, so maybe we shouldn't throw around anecdotes?
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Sounds like there’s more to the story.
  - keithnoizu 8y ago
    Windows dual boot specifically likes to corrupt it or has in the past. I've periodically checked in on nix desktops over the last 20 years. Red Hat, Centos, Fedora, Suse, SLED, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, Gentoo on a SGI O2, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Open BSD, FreeBSD, DSL, Puppy Linux, Solaris, Open Solaris, IRIX, Arch, OsX, the venerable hackintosh, and last off the top of my head BeOS which was somewhat POSIX compatible if not a nix. So, the crap that sucked in 1998 is the same stuff that sucks today. Inconsistent clipboards, graphic driver/X11 support, multi monitor support and debugging/positioning issues, poorly documented or improperly configured out of the box network management tools, firewall, etc. tools. Boot loader failures, and (more significantly recovery). Inconsistencies between Qt, Gnome, Kde apps, graphic sub system freezes. Pulse or whatever sound system of the month suddenly failing one day. DVD playback, MDADM failures, Drive partitioning and resizing difficulties, File system corruption (is it disk based sure but windows is less prone to it on the older file system types, ZFS, XFS, etc. are nicer). If you want to compile an application, run a server, etc. nix beats out windows any day. If you want to be able to install this great new linux thing you heard about on your existing computer, surf the web, manage your photo collection, hook up your scanner to copy in those old pictures of your kids, setup your Nvidia card and play some games on Steam, find and install the latest or a specific version of an app with out hitting the command line and typing things out like madison, then Linux is not the desktop for you. edit and don't get me started on high end xeon and intel chip support/speed step handling, or version upgrades running successfully.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Corrupted grub sounds like a hard drive failure. Regarding nic and graphics drivers it is possible to find hardware with good hardware support it is probably impossible for volunteers to fix all possible issues with closed source or proprietary software/hardware. Consider choosing accordingly. If you want someone to select the hardware for linux compatibility consider buying hardware that comes with linux.

mixmastamyk 8y ago

None of these have ever happened to me, and I started with slackware. (Maybe once around y2k a nic wasn’t supported but after waiting six months it was.)

neuronic 8y ago
Corrupted GRUB happened to me 7 times, so maybe we shouldn't throw around anecdotes?
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Sounds like there’s more to the story.
- keithnoizu 8y ago
  Windows dual boot specifically likes to corrupt it or has in the past. I've periodically checked in on nix desktops over the last 20 years. Red Hat, Centos, Fedora, Suse, SLED, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, Gentoo on a SGI O2, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Open BSD, FreeBSD, DSL, Puppy Linux, Solaris, Open Solaris, IRIX, Arch, OsX, the venerable hackintosh, and last off the top of my head BeOS which was somewhat POSIX compatible if not a nix. So, the crap that sucked in 1998 is the same stuff that sucks today. Inconsistent clipboards, graphic driver/X11 support, multi monitor support and debugging/positioning issues, poorly documented or improperly configured out of the box network management tools, firewall, etc. tools. Boot loader failures, and (more significantly recovery). Inconsistencies between Qt, Gnome, Kde apps, graphic sub system freezes. Pulse or whatever sound system of the month suddenly failing one day. DVD playback, MDADM failures, Drive partitioning and resizing difficulties, File system corruption (is it disk based sure but windows is less prone to it on the older file system types, ZFS, XFS, etc. are nicer). If you want to compile an application, run a server, etc. nix beats out windows any day. If you want to be able to install this great new linux thing you heard about on your existing computer, surf the web, manage your photo collection, hook up your scanner to copy in those old pictures of your kids, setup your Nvidia card and play some games on Steam, find and install the latest or a specific version of an app with out hitting the command line and typing things out like madison, then Linux is not the desktop for you. edit and don't get me started on high end xeon and intel chip support/speed step handling, or version upgrades running successfully.

michaelmrose 8y ago

Corrupted grub sounds like a hard drive failure. Regarding nic and graphics drivers it is possible to find hardware with good hardware support it is probably impossible for volunteers to fix all possible issues with closed source or proprietary software/hardware. Consider choosing accordingly. If you want someone to select the hardware for linux compatibility consider buying hardware that comes with linux.