7 ms·

I used Linux as a daily driver for about a decade until a few weeks before I started university in fall 2017. That’s when I bought my first Mac in well over a d

I used Linux as a daily driver for about a decade until a few weeks before I started university in fall 2017. That’s when I bought my first Mac in well over a decade. Why did I switch just before school? Because I didn’t want the stress of trying to troubleshoot breakage from updates when I was in the middle of assignments and midterms etc. During all of that decade of using Linux daily, there was never a time when I felt like things wouldn’t randomly break (usually from an update) to the point where X wouldn’t even start at boot, requiring a deep dive into display manager configuration, drivers, initial ramdisks, kernels, and everything in between. Macs just work. The trackpad support is unbeatable. Ditto for battery life. And the terminal ecosystem is fine with homebrew. I’m not one of those people who insists on having the GNU version of all the basic tools, so I don’t mind the old BSD versions of most things.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> Why did I switch just before school? Because I didn’t want the stress of trying to troubleshoot breakage from updates when I was in the middle of assignments and midterms etc. I am certain your experience was as your describe but I do wonder if the community is making a mistake by continuing to recommend Ubuntu or the like as I've always heard most stories of this nature from there. Which is kind of funny considering Arch is generally considered not stable, but I am was able to depend on it during my uni years as well as now when I am a full-time software dev, running close to a decade without major issues in fact.
- pmontra 6y ago
  To add a data point, I upgraded Ubuntu from 19.10 to 20.04 a week ago. It was 99% uneventful maybe for the first time in 10 years. I didn't have to reconfigure even the dozen Gnome Shell extensions I use. The missing 1% is the new openssl. It didn't let me connect to a few servers with old ciphers. I had to google how to enable them again. Hardly Ubuntu's fault and I don't have control on those servers or I would have upgraded them too and solved the problem in the right way.
- Leherenn 6y ago
  I would tend to agree. I think the issue is the LTS model, it's great for servers, but not so much for users. As the LTS version gets older, most of your software starts to get seriously out of date, so every time you need something newer, it's easy to make a mess because you will have multiple versions of the same thing, as well as the dependencies and so on. Upgrades are also quite scary, and often results in broken systems. Rolling releases like Arch are much more user friendly in that regard, and breakage are uncommon. Installing older versions of already installed software is also much less frequent, and with the AUR it's really easy (at least compared to PPAs).
- chongli 6y ago
  I deliberately omitted the distribution from my comment in order to avoid having the discussion head down this path. Now that I see that it was unavoidable, I will mention that Arch was my distribution of choice throughout the bulk of my time with Linux (it’s still installed on my desktop), apart from some brief forays into NixOS. I think this is just more evidence of the problem. There is so much infighting between the distributions that the community is unable to come together to create a solution. Linux is a tool for developers, not users, and its values put the convenience of developers ahead of the needs of users.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    The only reason I mentioned Arch specifically is because from personal experience it plays nicer with more hardware than other distros I've tried, probably because of bleeding edge components and I generally had success with it when things didn't work otherwise. > I think this is just more evidence of the problem. There is so much infighting between the distributions that the community is unable to come together to create a solution. With all due respect, but I think this completely misses the mark, the various distros do in fact do things in different ways, I know to Windows/macOS users this may seem baffling but even if we were to come together and create a single distro I think many Linux users, myself included, would reject that. You see, there's a certain philosophy that is behind most major distros and is whichever philosophy you sync up most with, that's the distro you tend to sick with. Windows/macOS suffer from the lowest common denominator problem for many power users and that's fine as long as there's an out for them, like Linux provides right now. If you're just going to have a single distro, you recreated exactly the same problems current Linux users ran away from originally. I don't know why everybody has to conform to a singular interface or vision, it seems wrong to me. If Linux is just for developers because of that, fine. Developers are users too and if they're not well served by the proprietary platforms, I think it's pretty legitimate for Linux to be what primarily speaks to them. I do have plenty of stories of non-developers, (even digital artists), being happy with Linux, but that's for another time. As for "the community is unable to come together to create a solution", looking at major cross distro projects like GNOME, KDE, GNU etc. nothing can be further from the truth. There's a great amount of cross-distro collaboration happening there. That does not mean one cannot compare or contrast the distros, that's not immediately 'infighting'. For example even if I prefer Arch, I do use CentOS on some of my server deployments and I certainly appreciate it and by extension what the Fedora folks are doing. This push to be uniform everywhere, in terms of interfaces, opinions, consensus etc. is not healthy nor sophisticated in my opinion. If you look at the world of politics, all that gets you is two parties who both agree to launch offensive wars. Some healthy, principled differences aren't a bad thing per se.
- alfalfasprout 6y ago
  I do like Arch and use it on my desktop, but the fact is there are so many great productivity apps on OSX that I'm not willing to give it up. Eg; Things.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    That's fair. Coincidentally I just saw this article about using org-mode + mobile apps for task management [1]. 1 - https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/825837/068043ae2c5657be https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/825837/068043ae2c5657be

AsyncAwait 6y ago

> Why did I switch just before school? Because I didn’t want the stress of trying to troubleshoot breakage from updates when I was in the middle of assignments and midterms etc. I am certain your experience was as your describe but I do wonder if the community is making a mistake by continuing to recommend Ubuntu or the like as I've always heard most stories of this nature from there. Which is kind of funny considering Arch is generally considered not stable, but I am was able to depend on it during my uni years as well as now when I am a full-time software dev, running close to a decade without major issues in fact.

pmontra 6y ago
To add a data point, I upgraded Ubuntu from 19.10 to 20.04 a week ago. It was 99% uneventful maybe for the first time in 10 years. I didn't have to reconfigure even the dozen Gnome Shell extensions I use. The missing 1% is the new openssl. It didn't let me connect to a few servers with old ciphers. I had to google how to enable them again. Hardly Ubuntu's fault and I don't have control on those servers or I would have upgraded them too and solved the problem in the right way.
Leherenn 6y ago
I would tend to agree. I think the issue is the LTS model, it's great for servers, but not so much for users. As the LTS version gets older, most of your software starts to get seriously out of date, so every time you need something newer, it's easy to make a mess because you will have multiple versions of the same thing, as well as the dependencies and so on. Upgrades are also quite scary, and often results in broken systems. Rolling releases like Arch are much more user friendly in that regard, and breakage are uncommon. Installing older versions of already installed software is also much less frequent, and with the AUR it's really easy (at least compared to PPAs).
chongli 6y ago
I deliberately omitted the distribution from my comment in order to avoid having the discussion head down this path. Now that I see that it was unavoidable, I will mention that Arch was my distribution of choice throughout the bulk of my time with Linux (it’s still installed on my desktop), apart from some brief forays into NixOS. I think this is just more evidence of the problem. There is so much infighting between the distributions that the community is unable to come together to create a solution. Linux is a tool for developers, not users, and its values put the convenience of developers ahead of the needs of users.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  The only reason I mentioned Arch specifically is because from personal experience it plays nicer with more hardware than other distros I've tried, probably because of bleeding edge components and I generally had success with it when things didn't work otherwise. > I think this is just more evidence of the problem. There is so much infighting between the distributions that the community is unable to come together to create a solution. With all due respect, but I think this completely misses the mark, the various distros do in fact do things in different ways, I know to Windows/macOS users this may seem baffling but even if we were to come together and create a single distro I think many Linux users, myself included, would reject that. You see, there's a certain philosophy that is behind most major distros and is whichever philosophy you sync up most with, that's the distro you tend to sick with. Windows/macOS suffer from the lowest common denominator problem for many power users and that's fine as long as there's an out for them, like Linux provides right now. If you're just going to have a single distro, you recreated exactly the same problems current Linux users ran away from originally. I don't know why everybody has to conform to a singular interface or vision, it seems wrong to me. If Linux is just for developers because of that, fine. Developers are users too and if they're not well served by the proprietary platforms, I think it's pretty legitimate for Linux to be what primarily speaks to them. I do have plenty of stories of non-developers, (even digital artists), being happy with Linux, but that's for another time. As for "the community is unable to come together to create a solution", looking at major cross distro projects like GNOME, KDE, GNU etc. nothing can be further from the truth. There's a great amount of cross-distro collaboration happening there. That does not mean one cannot compare or contrast the distros, that's not immediately 'infighting'. For example even if I prefer Arch, I do use CentOS on some of my server deployments and I certainly appreciate it and by extension what the Fedora folks are doing. This push to be uniform everywhere, in terms of interfaces, opinions, consensus etc. is not healthy nor sophisticated in my opinion. If you look at the world of politics, all that gets you is two parties who both agree to launch offensive wars. Some healthy, principled differences aren't a bad thing per se.
alfalfasprout 6y ago
I do like Arch and use it on my desktop, but the fact is there are so many great productivity apps on OSX that I'm not willing to give it up. Eg; Things.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  That's fair. Coincidentally I just saw this article about using org-mode + mobile apps for task management [1]. 1 - https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/825837/068043ae2c5657be https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/825837/068043ae2c5657be