7 ms·

My experience is somewhat opposite. I love Linux. I've used it for over a decade in various roles. But it always ends up the same - either some obscure Bluetoot

My experience is somewhat opposite. I love Linux. I've used it for over a decade in various roles. But it always ends up the same - either some obscure Bluetooth or graphics bug frustrates me to the point I can't stand it anymore, or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS. In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there. I get and support the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but find YMMV to be very much true.

ekianjo 7y ago
> or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS. Not sure about the Bluetooth part (i had this kind of issue once in like 10 years) but the battery life, getting 2 hours is not common anymore. Sure, you won't get as long as Windows on the same hardware more of the time, but 5 to 7 hours on a full charge is what you can expect, if not longer.
- mrozel 7y ago
  This and it's come a long way in the last 10yrs but it's more dependent on hardware. Optimus still an issue with nvidia (3hrs) vs 630(5hrs) and have to switch between. However, just bought a pair of (used) x270's to travel with - one has Fedora and the other windows 10. Linux lasts 8-9 hours and the Windows about the same (maybe less).
  - p_l 7y ago
    Maxed out X250 had been reported to last 26h hours online, with plain debian install, no tricks like Macs' "oh, you look outside, I'll go to sleep now"
- dkersten 7y ago
  Anecdotally, my cheapo $500 linux laptop gets a full work day (so 6-8 hours depending on what I'm doing, unless I run docker, then it gets maybe 3 hours tops) while my previous 2017 $2000 macbook pro typically got around 4 hours for the same type of work. I did spend about 2 hours optimising for battery when I got the laptop, but it was a once-off thing.
minimaul 7y ago
Yeah, this is exactly my experience too. I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes every time at this point. Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc. But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens, the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of those two OSes. I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at the moment I keep falling back to macOS. It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that works well.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  There are discussions happening on LKML right now about how to solve this. I don’t have a link handy, but saw them either here or on LWN recently. I used to have that problem too, but it went away when I stopped using JetBrains products :). Not for any reason other than the contract I was working on ended.
  - minimaul 7y ago
    Then I shall live in hope that it will be fixed :) And I didn't even have a JetBrains product in the loop, it was a mix of virtualbox and VS code, along with browser, mail client, etc.
    - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
      I saw it as more of a Java problem on Linux than a Jetbrains one with Android Studio. When Android Studio is run with large code base on emulator, memory issues were frequent in Linux with halting issues. SO has several such cases. No such issues with macOS, even with mutiple Jetbrains IDEs in parallel(Same memory config). I wonder how Android Studio is doing on ChromeOS, considering many of those are low end machines. I'm sure they had to optimize it, but I assume the issue would persist till the Linux kernel itself is fixed.
CarVac 7y ago
I guess this all depends on your dependence on mobile hardware. Bluetooth? I don't even use it. Battery life? I'm on a desktop.
colmvp 7y ago
Same. I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu) on my work/study computer and I love it. But, weird hardware issues popped up now and then which I didn't have to deal with on my MacBook, such as the wifi card that had to be manually installed, the headphone jack sometimes doing weird things, the processors overheating. I was able to solve those problems by searching online and finding others who had the same issue which lead to instructions to fix the problem, but I just can't imagine my family members who have never used the Terminal in their entire life having the same success. The fact is that with my old MacBooks (and the computers I've given to my family) the only hardware related issue we've had over the last 10+ years is the battery related issues from the MBP.
mickael-kerjean 7y ago
> I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life As I'm typing this, I got 14hours and 33minutes of battery left and it's only charged to 83%. In hardcore scenarios out of the grid for a few days (where I go sailing) I got a few spare batteries. (the laptop is the Lenovo X270) > In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there. The time investment goes down significantly over time. After a decade using linux on as a daily driver, I don't remember the last time I've tweak anything. > fed up ... and go back to macOS. Same thing but the other way around. I stay away from my Mac except for: - making sure my applications look good enough on a Mac and are usable - making music as I'm not patient enough to relearn everything on a different platform but that's just laziness from my end
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  > After a decade using linux on as a daily driver I mean, this is hardly an endorsement for people early in their careers who haven't already concluded the Linux is the best path forward.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Actually, it is. I'm in my fourth decade of technical activity. I'm leveraging skills and tools I learned in my first day using Unix, in the mid-1980s. Over the same time, I've gained, and obsoleted, skills on CPM, MacOS, VM/CMS, MVS, VMS, DOS, Windows 3x, WinNT, and classic Macintosh. Yes, there are a few flavours of Unix -- BSD, SysV4, Solaris, HPUX, Irix, AIX, FreeBSD, and numerous Linux flavours. Those, and even OSX/MacOS share far more in common than all the other platforms. Unix knowlege has proved extraordinarily durable, as have the tools. Though there are new utilities and environments coming out frequently, old standards remain available and still work. I'm not forced onto that treadmill, most especially not for my personal work. GRRM still uses Wordstar. Works for him. (That's ... one of the editors I've used as well, though I vastly prefer vim these days -- one of those "first day on Unix" skillsets I'm still earning dividends on.)
    - 7y ago
city41 7y ago
I've been using Linux full time for 3 years now and I agree. Linux comes with lots of little, edge casey bugs. Like a thousand paper cuts, they add up and hamper productivity. I can finally say Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for me is pretty solid. There's still two issues I wrestle with, but other than that it's been very dependable for me. When it comes to OSes these days, I feel like you have to pick the least bad one. A truly rock solid OS just doesn't exist in my experience.
hpcjoe 7y ago
I've not had obscure graphics or bluetooth problems for like 4 years now. Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade. I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently. Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance. All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics. Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it. I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting. I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration. I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better. My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop. Of course, YMMV.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  > Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade. Except one happens to have a laptop with an older AMD card or Optimus Intel/NVidia combo.
  - zokula 7y ago
    Older AMD? Any AMD card or igp made in the last 14 years works out of the box with Linux, save their newest GPU arch.
logicprog 7y ago
I've been using Linux for the last two years, having switched from macOS, and I haven't had a single weird problem. Not one. I use Arch Linux, and a combination of KDE and i3 so one would expect me to have a ton of rediculous problems. But I haven't had a single problem. It took me a single day to set up my computer how I wanted it (I've used Linux before) and I haven't had to touch a config file since. Part of this might be that in using a Dell XPS DE, which is designed to work well with Linux, but I think it might just be a YMMV situation. And I do a lot of back end, applications, web and front end development (mostly in my spare time), so I think I've hit a lot of programmer use-cases. Also, I get 15 hour battery life streaming 4K video on my 4K touch screen, and more doing other stuff. I also used an Apple Magic Touchpad or whatever over Bluetooth with it, including gestures and it worked really well. Better, actually, as far as Bluetooth, than my Mac. I only stopped because it wasn't good for my hand and wrist health. Just adding my anecdata. Overall my experience with Linux has been hugely positive.
amelius 7y ago
It's a good idea to research any components for compatibility before buying them. It's true that Linux won't run with all hardware, but this is even more true for MacOS ;)

ekianjo 7y ago

> or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS. Not sure about the Bluetooth part (i had this kind of issue once in like 10 years) but the battery life, getting 2 hours is not common anymore. Sure, you won't get as long as Windows on the same hardware more of the time, but 5 to 7 hours on a full charge is what you can expect, if not longer.

mrozel 7y ago
This and it's come a long way in the last 10yrs but it's more dependent on hardware. Optimus still an issue with nvidia (3hrs) vs 630(5hrs) and have to switch between. However, just bought a pair of (used) x270's to travel with - one has Fedora and the other windows 10. Linux lasts 8-9 hours and the Windows about the same (maybe less).
- p_l 7y ago
  Maxed out X250 had been reported to last 26h hours online, with plain debian install, no tricks like Macs' "oh, you look outside, I'll go to sleep now"
dkersten 7y ago
Anecdotally, my cheapo $500 linux laptop gets a full work day (so 6-8 hours depending on what I'm doing, unless I run docker, then it gets maybe 3 hours tops) while my previous 2017 $2000 macbook pro typically got around 4 hours for the same type of work. I did spend about 2 hours optimising for battery when I got the laptop, but it was a once-off thing.

minimaul 7y ago

Yeah, this is exactly my experience too. I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes every time at this point. Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc. But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens, the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of those two OSes. I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at the moment I keep falling back to macOS. It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that works well.

tonyarkles 7y ago
There are discussions happening on LKML right now about how to solve this. I don’t have a link handy, but saw them either here or on LWN recently. I used to have that problem too, but it went away when I stopped using JetBrains products :). Not for any reason other than the contract I was working on ended.
- minimaul 7y ago
  Then I shall live in hope that it will be fixed :) And I didn't even have a JetBrains product in the loop, it was a mix of virtualbox and VS code, along with browser, mail client, etc.
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    I saw it as more of a Java problem on Linux than a Jetbrains one with Android Studio. When Android Studio is run with large code base on emulator, memory issues were frequent in Linux with halting issues. SO has several such cases. No such issues with macOS, even with mutiple Jetbrains IDEs in parallel(Same memory config). I wonder how Android Studio is doing on ChromeOS, considering many of those are low end machines. I'm sure they had to optimize it, but I assume the issue would persist till the Linux kernel itself is fixed.

CarVac 7y ago

I guess this all depends on your dependence on mobile hardware. Bluetooth? I don't even use it. Battery life? I'm on a desktop.

colmvp 7y ago

Same. I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu) on my work/study computer and I love it. But, weird hardware issues popped up now and then which I didn't have to deal with on my MacBook, such as the wifi card that had to be manually installed, the headphone jack sometimes doing weird things, the processors overheating. I was able to solve those problems by searching online and finding others who had the same issue which lead to instructions to fix the problem, but I just can't imagine my family members who have never used the Terminal in their entire life having the same success. The fact is that with my old MacBooks (and the computers I've given to my family) the only hardware related issue we've had over the last 10+ years is the battery related issues from the MBP.

mickael-kerjean 7y ago

> I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life As I'm typing this, I got 14hours and 33minutes of battery left and it's only charged to 83%. In hardcore scenarios out of the grid for a few days (where I go sailing) I got a few spare batteries. (the laptop is the Lenovo X270) > In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there. The time investment goes down significantly over time. After a decade using linux on as a daily driver, I don't remember the last time I've tweak anything. > fed up ... and go back to macOS. Same thing but the other way around. I stay away from my Mac except for: - making sure my applications look good enough on a Mac and are usable - making music as I'm not patient enough to relearn everything on a different platform but that's just laziness from my end

smallnamespace 7y ago
> After a decade using linux on as a daily driver I mean, this is hardly an endorsement for people early in their careers who haven't already concluded the Linux is the best path forward.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Actually, it is. I'm in my fourth decade of technical activity. I'm leveraging skills and tools I learned in my first day using Unix, in the mid-1980s. Over the same time, I've gained, and obsoleted, skills on CPM, MacOS, VM/CMS, MVS, VMS, DOS, Windows 3x, WinNT, and classic Macintosh. Yes, there are a few flavours of Unix -- BSD, SysV4, Solaris, HPUX, Irix, AIX, FreeBSD, and numerous Linux flavours. Those, and even OSX/MacOS share far more in common than all the other platforms. Unix knowlege has proved extraordinarily durable, as have the tools. Though there are new utilities and environments coming out frequently, old standards remain available and still work. I'm not forced onto that treadmill, most especially not for my personal work. GRRM still uses Wordstar. Works for him. (That's ... one of the editors I've used as well, though I vastly prefer vim these days -- one of those "first day on Unix" skillsets I'm still earning dividends on.)
  - 7y ago

city41 7y ago

I've been using Linux full time for 3 years now and I agree. Linux comes with lots of little, edge casey bugs. Like a thousand paper cuts, they add up and hamper productivity. I can finally say Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for me is pretty solid. There's still two issues I wrestle with, but other than that it's been very dependable for me. When it comes to OSes these days, I feel like you have to pick the least bad one. A truly rock solid OS just doesn't exist in my experience.

hpcjoe 7y ago

I've not had obscure graphics or bluetooth problems for like 4 years now. Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade. I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently. Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance. All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics. Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it. I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting. I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration. I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better. My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop. Of course, YMMV.

pjmlp 7y ago
> Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade. Except one happens to have a laptop with an older AMD card or Optimus Intel/NVidia combo.
- zokula 7y ago
  Older AMD? Any AMD card or igp made in the last 14 years works out of the box with Linux, save their newest GPU arch.

logicprog 7y ago

I've been using Linux for the last two years, having switched from macOS, and I haven't had a single weird problem. Not one. I use Arch Linux, and a combination of KDE and i3 so one would expect me to have a ton of rediculous problems. But I haven't had a single problem. It took me a single day to set up my computer how I wanted it (I've used Linux before) and I haven't had to touch a config file since. Part of this might be that in using a Dell XPS DE, which is designed to work well with Linux, but I think it might just be a YMMV situation. And I do a lot of back end, applications, web and front end development (mostly in my spare time), so I think I've hit a lot of programmer use-cases. Also, I get 15 hour battery life streaming 4K video on my 4K touch screen, and more doing other stuff. I also used an Apple Magic Touchpad or whatever over Bluetooth with it, including gestures and it worked really well. Better, actually, as far as Bluetooth, than my Mac. I only stopped because it wasn't good for my hand and wrist health. Just adding my anecdata. Overall my experience with Linux has been hugely positive.

amelius 7y ago

It's a good idea to research any components for compatibility before buying them. It's true that Linux won't run with all hardware, but this is even more true for MacOS ;)