6 ms·

I used Linux (Ubuntu primarily, but I dabbled in the other distros from time to time) as my only OS on my netbook for 5 years (through college and my first few

I used Linux (Ubuntu primarily, but I dabbled in the other distros from time to time) as my only OS on my netbook for 5 years (through college and my first few internships / job). For that atmosphere is was great: it taught me the UNIX philosophy, I can work a command line shell and vim like a beast, I knew a lot more about OSs and programming in general than if I was using Windows, and it overall prepared me excellently for software development in the future. That said, I was young and had the time to deal with its inadequacies. I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and fiddling with kernel options. These days I get a few hours of free time when I come home from work, and then I have my weekend. If I am on the computer at all, I don't want to waste my time dealing with that stuff any more. It's either to sit down and knock out a sizable chunk of a personal project, or play some video games for entertainment. I have a proper place for all three OS flavors. My desktop runs Windows (for gaming, heavy VM work, and games development), my primary development machine is a Macbook Air (running OS X), and any servers I have run Linux. I feel like these are the perfect tools for their respective jobs, now that money isn't a factor as a poor college student. Using OSX over Linux as a development environment was like night and day. For servers, Linux is king. Having it be a usable personal OS (for the average user and programmer) will take a lot more time. While it's true that most of my time is spent either in the terminal or in the browser (I'd say about 75% of my computer usage), for the other 25% paying for a machine that runs OS X is completely worth every penny twice over. The quality of tools, utilities, and applications that aren't a browser or terminal is light-years ahead of anything that Linux offers, in terms of usability, UI, and functionality.

ori_b 15y ago
> I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and fiddling with kernel options. I haven't done that stuff since around 2005. I just install a standard distro, and leave it to do what it does. It Just Works out of the box. It even detects my Raid5 and sets that up for me. Debian is my choice because of the rolling updates in testing -- I don't even want to think about version numbers. I use Linux because it means I don't have to think about package versions, I don't have to worry about finding drivers after installing, I don't have to search around for software, etc. Thanks to distro choice, I don't even have to think about what version I'm running.
- jshen 15y ago
  About a year ago I installed linux (ubuntu) for the first time in years on a dell machine. I had to spend a few hours fiddling with the video drivers to get it to work right.
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  If you're lucky enough to own a machine that works out of the box, with all of its components, while running Linux: all the power to you. I've owned many computers over the years, of all shapes, sizes, brands, and/or custom parts, and I've never had a single one "just work."
  - ori_b 15y ago
    I've had it just work on a Fujitsu tablet, several Thinkpads, and a couple of HP laptops. And any desktop I've cared to try so far.
    - ineedtosleep 15y ago
      Pretty much what I was thinking. I've messed with Linux HP, Lenovo Thinkpads and Ideapads, and most other major manufactured laptops. From Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware, Mint and plain Debian, I've never had major issues with hardware. IIRC, the last time I had a hardware/driver issue that pissed me off to no end was back before Fedora even existed.
      - svnk 15y ago
        I have an HP dm1z, and I still haven't gotten the wireless drivers to work (RALink)
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > If you're lucky enough to own a machine that works out of the box Actually, it's the other way around. If you own a machine that doesn't work out of the box, you are terribly unlucky.

ori_b 15y ago

> I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and fiddling with kernel options. I haven't done that stuff since around 2005. I just install a standard distro, and leave it to do what it does. It Just Works out of the box. It even detects my Raid5 and sets that up for me. Debian is my choice because of the rolling updates in testing -- I don't even want to think about version numbers. I use Linux because it means I don't have to think about package versions, I don't have to worry about finding drivers after installing, I don't have to search around for software, etc. Thanks to distro choice, I don't even have to think about what version I'm running.

jshen 15y ago
About a year ago I installed linux (ubuntu) for the first time in years on a dell machine. I had to spend a few hours fiddling with the video drivers to get it to work right.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
If you're lucky enough to own a machine that works out of the box, with all of its components, while running Linux: all the power to you. I've owned many computers over the years, of all shapes, sizes, brands, and/or custom parts, and I've never had a single one "just work."
- ori_b 15y ago
  I've had it just work on a Fujitsu tablet, several Thinkpads, and a couple of HP laptops. And any desktop I've cared to try so far.
  - ineedtosleep 15y ago
    Pretty much what I was thinking. I've messed with Linux HP, Lenovo Thinkpads and Ideapads, and most other major manufactured laptops. From Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware, Mint and plain Debian, I've never had major issues with hardware. IIRC, the last time I had a hardware/driver issue that pissed me off to no end was back before Fedora even existed.
    - svnk 15y ago
      I have an HP dm1z, and I still haven't gotten the wireless drivers to work (RALink)
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > If you're lucky enough to own a machine that works out of the box Actually, it's the other way around. If you own a machine that doesn't work out of the box, you are terribly unlucky.