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I work with Linux for compiling Android images (with VSCode on Windows through SSH), and I also customize the kernel (drivers and DT, mostly). I also do some Qt

by scoutt 4y ago

I work with Linux for compiling Android images (with VSCode on Windows through SSH), and I also customize the kernel (drivers and DT, mostly). I also do some Qt porting to Linux, but I used Windows my entire life (apart from DOS). And honestly, I won't boot my PC from Linux (at home or work) because I'm afraid it will break. I'll explain: I have some VMs with Ubuntu and, from time to time, I hit some problem that made the system unrecoverable. For instance, filesystem breaking or not mounting, I also remember Nvidia drivers updates that generated a black login screen (1), or strange error messages showing up before seeing the Ubuntu login screen (that I wonder myself what should I do with them?). Not to mention the times my SSH connections to development servers don't work, and I have to physically go there and reset the PCs. I don't want to be twiddling with my main PC, which puts food on my family table. The fear of coming to work (or from work at home) and turning on my PC just to find out that some partition isn't mounting, my printer is not working anymore or some other problem that would take me an hour to fix... is too much of a risk for me and my mental health. On the functional side... there are some things that I can't understand... It's been years already and I cannot control the scroll speed of the mouse wheel in Ubuntu without hacking with the xinput system. What does that tell me? And why asking my password every 5 minutes? I always said: if you want to remember a phrase, use it as your Ubuntu password. You'll be asked for it for every little thing and in a couple of hours you will remember the phrase forever. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1129516/black-screen-at-boot-after-nvidia-driver-installation-on-ubuntu-18-04-2-lts https://askubuntu.com/questions/1129516/black-screen-at-boot... PS: I love-hate Ubuntu, and I am not saying that these things don't happen on Windows, but from personal experience, Windows is much more stable since like the past 10 years.

ace_hunter 4y ago
I have been using ubuntu and flavors for well over 12 years. I gotta tell you, never has anything of what you describe happen to me. And I am a menacingly wild-user. I put my systems through a lot! I do a lot of full-stack development, arduino(and other iot stuff) coding, blender work (3d), inkscape, gimp, a lot of audacity for audio, a lot of kdenLive for video-editing.. and my laptops (although always being mediocore in spec) never broke a sweat. And I have never ever had to 'format' my PC cuz I'm locked out of it. So, maybe, it's you who doesn't understand how to use the system. Maybe!
- neoberg 4y ago
  Yeah but is it really user's problem if a system requires lot's of knowledge to do computer stuff without breaking the system? I don't have the time neither want to learn the intricacies of an operating system to do my work.
- scoutt 4y ago
  > So, maybe, it's you who doesn't understand how to use the system. Maybe! It is possible that you are 100% right. But I also believe your answer (or that kind of answer) is part of the general problem. I have to say that I'm totally capable of fixing those issues since I do it all the time for Android (which I debug and customize). The problem is: I don't want to. Not on my main PC. On the other side, what am I possibly doing wrong to generate those problems? I install Qt, Firefox, Thunderbird, Git, build-essentials. I never hibernate, I always do a clean shutdown and... that's it... The "Ubuntu has experienced an internal error..." dialog box still appears from time to time
pmoriarty 4y ago
In Windows you're much more likely to wake up one day the victim of some ransomware which has encrypted your files and demands bitcoin to get your files back again. It's not unknown for Windows updates to break systems either, and when you do have serious problems on Windows there's a limited amount of things you can do because the system is so opaque. At least on *nix you (or expert users helping you) can dive in to the source to figure out what's happening. With Windows you can be left at the mercy of waiting for Microsoft or whatever closed-source software you're depending on for a fix.
jotm 4y ago
Eh, Linux is more stable than Windows 10 in my experience, even with a bunch of extra bs and custom configuration that I needed. Windows 7 was rock stable. Indeed, it was W10 that caused me this kind of headache a few times - just updated itself overnight and blue screened. No way to recover even with their recovery tools. Still have no clue what was wrong with it. Oh and it still to this day starts hibernating randomly on my ZBooks, with the event log saying it is caused by a CPU overheat event. First of all, it was not overheating. Second, Windows or any other OS should never handle these events, it was always and should always be handled at a hardware/firmware level. Also, hibernating when overheating? Lol, yeah, that's very helpful. Good luck doing that when the processor is actually overheating. On that note, Microsoft Answers is the most useless website/service in existence and I don't know why they even bother keeping it up.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "it still to this day starts hibernating randomly on my ZBooks, with the event log saying it is caused by a CPU overheat event." Hybernating or thermal throttling? Thermal throttling is done on the hardware level and can happen while using any operating system, including Linux.
  - jotm 4y ago
    It's hibernating. Apparently, Windows has the ability to perform some actions based on ACPI, which presumably is disabled by default. For whatever reason, some update enables this feature (once every 6+ months, but not right after restoring from backup, strange as hell), but I guess the thermal zones are improperly calibrated? No idea. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/acpi-defined-devices https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/br... It just hibernates. Passive or active cooling setting, disabled thermal controls in group policy or not, registry tweaks or not. Tried everything. It just hibernates, middle of work or not. At least it doesn't shut down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I'd say upon reaching ~60-70 degrees on the CPU, but it does it at idle (<50degC) too, so it seems more random than anything. Once, it stopped when I had a Kali Linux VM with a USB Wifi adapter passed through to it (only difference at the time) running. Worked for a few days, then it started doing it regardless. People with some Dell and Lenovo laptops also have this problem, and it seems so rare that the most common answer is "lol, it's overheating dumdum, thank Microsoft or it would break". Only surefire solution is to restore from backup. If it did that under Linux, at least I could easily tell it to ignore everything and let the hardware handle it.
gs17 4y ago
I switched to Linux specifically because Windows kept breaking. One update broke compatibility with the stock SSD in my laptop, but the symptom was random bluescreens with seemingly different errors each time. I installed Mint to see if I could get a better error about which bit of hardware was faulty, but it never had any issue in Linux. At least if a kernel update broke something similar, it'd be easy to boot from an older one. Windows sticks you with the version you have or a full reset.

by scoutt 4y ago

ace_hunter 4y ago

I have been using ubuntu and flavors for well over 12 years. I gotta tell you, never has anything of what you describe happen to me. And I am a menacingly wild-user. I put my systems through a lot! I do a lot of full-stack development, arduino(and other iot stuff) coding, blender work (3d), inkscape, gimp, a lot of audacity for audio, a lot of kdenLive for video-editing.. and my laptops (although always being mediocore in spec) never broke a sweat. And I have never ever had to 'format' my PC cuz I'm locked out of it. So, maybe, it's you who doesn't understand how to use the system. Maybe!

neoberg 4y ago
Yeah but is it really user's problem if a system requires lot's of knowledge to do computer stuff without breaking the system? I don't have the time neither want to learn the intricacies of an operating system to do my work.
scoutt 4y ago
> So, maybe, it's you who doesn't understand how to use the system. Maybe! It is possible that you are 100% right. But I also believe your answer (or that kind of answer) is part of the general problem. I have to say that I'm totally capable of fixing those issues since I do it all the time for Android (which I debug and customize). The problem is: I don't want to. Not on my main PC. On the other side, what am I possibly doing wrong to generate those problems? I install Qt, Firefox, Thunderbird, Git, build-essentials. I never hibernate, I always do a clean shutdown and... that's it... The "Ubuntu has experienced an internal error..." dialog box still appears from time to time

pmoriarty 4y ago

In Windows you're much more likely to wake up one day the victim of some ransomware which has encrypted your files and demands bitcoin to get your files back again. It's not unknown for Windows updates to break systems either, and when you do have serious problems on Windows there's a limited amount of things you can do because the system is so opaque. At least on *nix you (or expert users helping you) can dive in to the source to figure out what's happening. With Windows you can be left at the mercy of waiting for Microsoft or whatever closed-source software you're depending on for a fix.

jotm 4y ago

Eh, Linux is more stable than Windows 10 in my experience, even with a bunch of extra bs and custom configuration that I needed. Windows 7 was rock stable. Indeed, it was W10 that caused me this kind of headache a few times - just updated itself overnight and blue screened. No way to recover even with their recovery tools. Still have no clue what was wrong with it. Oh and it still to this day starts hibernating randomly on my ZBooks, with the event log saying it is caused by a CPU overheat event. First of all, it was not overheating. Second, Windows or any other OS should never handle these events, it was always and should always be handled at a hardware/firmware level. Also, hibernating when overheating? Lol, yeah, that's very helpful. Good luck doing that when the processor is actually overheating. On that note, Microsoft Answers is the most useless website/service in existence and I don't know why they even bother keeping it up.

pmoriarty 4y ago
"it still to this day starts hibernating randomly on my ZBooks, with the event log saying it is caused by a CPU overheat event." Hybernating or thermal throttling? Thermal throttling is done on the hardware level and can happen while using any operating system, including Linux.
- jotm 4y ago
  It's hibernating. Apparently, Windows has the ability to perform some actions based on ACPI, which presumably is disabled by default. For whatever reason, some update enables this feature (once every 6+ months, but not right after restoring from backup, strange as hell), but I guess the thermal zones are improperly calibrated? No idea. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/acpi-defined-devices https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/br... It just hibernates. Passive or active cooling setting, disabled thermal controls in group policy or not, registry tweaks or not. Tried everything. It just hibernates, middle of work or not. At least it doesn't shut down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I'd say upon reaching ~60-70 degrees on the CPU, but it does it at idle (<50degC) too, so it seems more random than anything. Once, it stopped when I had a Kali Linux VM with a USB Wifi adapter passed through to it (only difference at the time) running. Worked for a few days, then it started doing it regardless. People with some Dell and Lenovo laptops also have this problem, and it seems so rare that the most common answer is "lol, it's overheating dumdum, thank Microsoft or it would break". Only surefire solution is to restore from backup. If it did that under Linux, at least I could easily tell it to ignore everything and let the hardware handle it.

gs17 4y ago

I switched to Linux specifically because Windows kept breaking. One update broke compatibility with the stock SSD in my laptop, but the symptom was random bluescreens with seemingly different errors each time. I installed Mint to see if I could get a better error about which bit of hardware was faulty, but it never had any issue in Linux. At least if a kernel update broke something similar, it'd be easy to boot from an older one. Windows sticks you with the version you have or a full reset.