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The reason I left Linux was having to spend days on incantations to make my sound card or network adapter work. I got tired of having to figure out what codec

The reason I left Linux was having to spend days on incantations to make my sound card or network adapter work. I got tired of having to figure out what codec incantations I needed to make videos play. Much of the support was snarky "RTFM" or forum postings from 2007 about different distros. Every couple years I try it again when people on HN insist it's better now, and within minutes there's a showstopper hardware compatibility issue or something. I'm scheduled to try it again about a year from now.

jlokier 6y ago
I'm a huge Linux fan and used Linux natively on several laptops for nearly 20 years. Even with all that experience and care picking good laptops, and even after Ubuntu and Xorg autoconfig made the driver situation much better, I found myself having to: Fix kernel graphics driver bugs (spans of random pixels occasionally drawn on the screen due to something extremely subtle deep in the Intel driver), sound driver bugs, and being annoyed that nothing worked right with Nvidia on one of them (neither Nvidia's driver nor Nouveau worked properly), and debugging unreliable suspend. Now I run Linux in a VM, and that's been perfect for userspace development. On a Mac, the four-finger swipe switches beautifully between Mac and Linux full-screen desktops, as if neither OS is really in charge. It feels more like running Xen, two OSes side by side, with Apple-quality GUI for switching and organising OSes. Of course, not so good when the Apple device bricks. The symptoms people are reporting now are very similar to what I saw when upgrading to Catalina - hours stuck on "about a minute remaining", many reboots and with what looked like glitchy display errors and "starting from scratch" progress bars, leading to a worrying feeling it was stuck in a reboot cycle or just bricked. I was immensely relieved when it eventually finished after hours of doing whatever it was doing, as I didn't have a spare working computer (all my old Linux laptops have broken :-/) And that was after leaving it for nearly a year (I installed Catalina this summer), so the problems should have been "ironed out" by then. I'm really glad I haven't follow the system notification's prompt to update to Big Sur. From the Catalina experience, I suspect I'd be one of the brickage victims, and I can't afford that right now. If it were always possible to restore from backup (as it generally is with Linux and Windows) that would be fine, I'd take the risk. But when Apple updates go wrong, it can be more serious as you can't necessarily boot at all, even to restore from backup.
- ianai 6y ago
  What virtualization are you using to swipe like that between Linux and Mac?
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Possibly VMWare Fusion Pro, since I do the same on my mac. Fullscreen the Linux VM, it becomes another desktop. Just swipe into it and continue working.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    VMware Fusion (now changed name to VMware Player). But I would expect it to work the same for other virtualisation software, because that's what MacOS does for full-screen apps. It's nice that the swipe gesture is intercepted by the host instead of passed to the guest. I swipe to full-screen remote desktops too (in this case to access another work laptop on my desk via my main monitor), it's really nice having them all available this way. It's like having a deluxe KVM, which also has a zoom-out thumbnail viewer when needed :-)
    - Qerub 6y ago
      > VMware Fusion (now changed name to VMware Player). It's still called VMware Fusion but is now available in the variants Player and Pro: https://www.vmware.com/se/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation.html https://www.vmware.com/se/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation....
    - Qerub 6y ago
      I used to work this way too but get fed up with keyboard and mouse buttons getting stuck in VMs making them go bananas when the system was under load. Really nice experience apart from that and the half-broken support for Retina displays.
vmchale 6y ago
Hardware is still bad, inferior to Windows. With Catalina, my Mac speakers intermittently stopped working though. So it's getting more competitive as Mac gets worse.
addicted 6y ago
With Lenovo, Dell and HP all supporting official Linux models, I suspect this should be less of an issue now at least if you buy a supported model.
binarymax 6y ago
Same. I've been trying to use Ubuntu full time since 2010. These days I run a (toy) deep learning rig in my cool basement that has Ubuntu. I've gone through 4 (FOUR!) different hardware attempts at wifi trying to get higher than 1Mbps to the router: 2 different internal cards, and 2 different external sticks. I spent a good 2 to 3 hours of incantations for each of those 4 options. I finally gave up and bought a $50 wifi extender that has ethernet out, which finally worked and am now getting 5g speeds to the router. Before that it was an issue with different GPU/CUDA binaries causing conflicts and forcing a full reinstall of the system at random times when I was swapping conda envs for different python stacks. I really really really want to be able to use Linux full time, but I haven't even got to the point of wanting to use something like video conference from a linux install, which I've heard is a nightmare.
- harha 6y ago
  I’ve gone to using cables wherever I can. Depending on the wiring a power line network adaptor might speed up things substantially. That being said, setting up WiFi is a pain, I frequently set up raspberry pis with Ubuntu and just can’t get it right without needing to connect a screen.
- lisnake 6y ago
  Managing CUDA install on Windows is a big PITA too
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jlokier 6y ago

I'm a huge Linux fan and used Linux natively on several laptops for nearly 20 years. Even with all that experience and care picking good laptops, and even after Ubuntu and Xorg autoconfig made the driver situation much better, I found myself having to: Fix kernel graphics driver bugs (spans of random pixels occasionally drawn on the screen due to something extremely subtle deep in the Intel driver), sound driver bugs, and being annoyed that nothing worked right with Nvidia on one of them (neither Nvidia's driver nor Nouveau worked properly), and debugging unreliable suspend. Now I run Linux in a VM, and that's been perfect for userspace development. On a Mac, the four-finger swipe switches beautifully between Mac and Linux full-screen desktops, as if neither OS is really in charge. It feels more like running Xen, two OSes side by side, with Apple-quality GUI for switching and organising OSes. Of course, not so good when the Apple device bricks. The symptoms people are reporting now are very similar to what I saw when upgrading to Catalina - hours stuck on "about a minute remaining", many reboots and with what looked like glitchy display errors and "starting from scratch" progress bars, leading to a worrying feeling it was stuck in a reboot cycle or just bricked. I was immensely relieved when it eventually finished after hours of doing whatever it was doing, as I didn't have a spare working computer (all my old Linux laptops have broken :-/) And that was after leaving it for nearly a year (I installed Catalina this summer), so the problems should have been "ironed out" by then. I'm really glad I haven't follow the system notification's prompt to update to Big Sur. From the Catalina experience, I suspect I'd be one of the brickage victims, and I can't afford that right now. If it were always possible to restore from backup (as it generally is with Linux and Windows) that would be fine, I'd take the risk. But when Apple updates go wrong, it can be more serious as you can't necessarily boot at all, even to restore from backup.

ianai 6y ago
What virtualization are you using to swipe like that between Linux and Mac?
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Possibly VMWare Fusion Pro, since I do the same on my mac. Fullscreen the Linux VM, it becomes another desktop. Just swipe into it and continue working.
- jlokier 6y ago
  VMware Fusion (now changed name to VMware Player). But I would expect it to work the same for other virtualisation software, because that's what MacOS does for full-screen apps. It's nice that the swipe gesture is intercepted by the host instead of passed to the guest. I swipe to full-screen remote desktops too (in this case to access another work laptop on my desk via my main monitor), it's really nice having them all available this way. It's like having a deluxe KVM, which also has a zoom-out thumbnail viewer when needed :-)
  - Qerub 6y ago
    > VMware Fusion (now changed name to VMware Player). It's still called VMware Fusion but is now available in the variants Player and Pro: https://www.vmware.com/se/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation.html https://www.vmware.com/se/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation....
  - Qerub 6y ago
    I used to work this way too but get fed up with keyboard and mouse buttons getting stuck in VMs making them go bananas when the system was under load. Really nice experience apart from that and the half-broken support for Retina displays.

vmchale 6y ago

Hardware is still bad, inferior to Windows. With Catalina, my Mac speakers intermittently stopped working though. So it's getting more competitive as Mac gets worse.

addicted 6y ago

With Lenovo, Dell and HP all supporting official Linux models, I suspect this should be less of an issue now at least if you buy a supported model.

binarymax 6y ago

Same. I've been trying to use Ubuntu full time since 2010. These days I run a (toy) deep learning rig in my cool basement that has Ubuntu. I've gone through 4 (FOUR!) different hardware attempts at wifi trying to get higher than 1Mbps to the router: 2 different internal cards, and 2 different external sticks. I spent a good 2 to 3 hours of incantations for each of those 4 options. I finally gave up and bought a $50 wifi extender that has ethernet out, which finally worked and am now getting 5g speeds to the router. Before that it was an issue with different GPU/CUDA binaries causing conflicts and forcing a full reinstall of the system at random times when I was swapping conda envs for different python stacks. I really really really want to be able to use Linux full time, but I haven't even got to the point of wanting to use something like video conference from a linux install, which I've heard is a nightmare.

harha 6y ago
I’ve gone to using cables wherever I can. Depending on the wiring a power line network adaptor might speed up things substantially. That being said, setting up WiFi is a pain, I frequently set up raspberry pis with Ubuntu and just can’t get it right without needing to connect a screen.
lisnake 6y ago
Managing CUDA install on Windows is a big PITA too

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]