6 ms·

Compared to Windows, I find that most linux desktop distros have what I would call ‘stability vulnerabilities’ where the user has to tread carefully when doing

Compared to Windows, I find that most linux desktop distros have what I would call ‘stability vulnerabilities’ where the user has to tread carefully when doing something basic like updating graphics drivers or applying other updates, or changing resolution. Otherwise they end up with an OS that wont start or will just show a blank screen. I wouldn’t recommend linux for general business or personal use unless this kind of tinkering is enjoyable or you have sufficient IT staff.

jaredhallen 3y ago
I hear this sentiment frequently, but it doesn't match my experience. I sure can relate to the idea, but that was a decade ago. I install a fair variety of Linux distros on a pretty wide variety of hardware between my work and personal efforts, and it pretty much just seems to work these days. The last grief I recall in this regard was trying to run Ubuntu 64 on a Pi4 with Vulkan, but that was a couple years ago when things were known to be unstable. That or maybe doing something obviously inadvisable like trying to change distro on a live system by changing the apt source files on a Debian install to Ubuntu repositories and running an apt upgrade. And honestly even things like that work a surprising amount of the time. I know it's good to be introspective and truthful about shortcomings, but I really have to hand it to all the open source contributors, package maintainers, and all the rest. The modern Gnu/Linux ecosystem is pretty remarkable, in my opinion.
- NewLogic 3y ago
  On the contrary, Linus of LTT managed to uninstall the GUI of his PopOS install within an hour while attempting to install Steam only last year. https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=618 https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=618
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    By forcibly overriding the safeties that stop you from doing that. I can run `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` in less than an hour, too, and it's just as meaningful.
emodendroket 3y ago
True but the older your hardware is the less you encounter it… so I guess the best use for it is giving life to old hardware.
- xslvrxslwt 3y ago
  I'm sorry but this is all but true. I've a 13700K and a 4090 and it's more reliable than 2 of my old hardware machines..this is slowly becoming a myth unfortunately as new versions of either DEs or desktop protocol (s) are slowly deprecating tons of stuff..
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    I’ve had good luck with Xubuntu on a couple older machines so far but I’m not trying to run it on anything modern. My experience trying to do desktop Linux on a recent machine is quite old so maybe things are different.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  I would imagine this is only true to a certain point. Like, I would not be surprised if there were issues trying to run an AGP or PCI video card. There's probably a sweet spot where some hardware is old enough to have had all the major bugs worked out, but not so old that nobody bothers developing and testing it anymore.
kdklol 3y ago
There are the same exact problems on Windows though. Microsoft nowadays basically treats it's install base as beta testers and you regularly hear about breaking updates. There are devices out there with funky drivers, most notably Nvidia cards, but if you can avoid those (I know many people can't, me included) and choose a stable distro, I genuinely fail to observe these supposed instabilities on Linux. Personally, I think the real reason why companies are not switching is familiarity. Think of all that money spent on MS product training over X employees. Billions are spent yearly in this industry I'm sure.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Which is why the first thing I do on any Windows install is disable or block automatic Windows Updates and only run them once every blue moon when I've set aside time to waste on borkage. And before anyone says I'm in danger by running unpatched Windows: NO. My threat model is such that the time lost and wasted from updates breaking shit is significantly greater than the dangers posed by hypothetical threats those patches ostensibly guard against. Updates are simply and literally not worth my time and concern compared to having systems that just work every day all year long. If I need to comply with regulations or audits or I am the target of focused attacks, then yes the scales shift the other way. But as a general, and particularly personal, concern? No, updates are a waste of my time. Linux is even worse because I don't even need to run updates for something to break and waste my time.
  - kdklol 3y ago
    Your comment feels like it came straight from 2014's /g/. This is literally "My time is too valuable to do X" argument. But perhaps you don't care. Fair enough. You do you. You are, however, absolutely in danger running unpatched Windows, unless it's an airgapped industrial PC or something similar. Even then, such systems can and were compromised (stuxnet, for instance). >If I need to comply with regulations or audits I hope you are not handling any customer info on such systems... or are you?! There seems to be a deeper issue at play. I've seen it many times, even here on HN. So very few people actually know anything about information security, and if they do they only have horrifying misconceptions from god knows where. No wonder why there's so many data leaks when the responsible people have these attitudes.
Propelloni 3y ago
I respect your individual experience but this hasn't been the mainstream situation for many years now. Back in 2012 I was the Head of IT for an A series start-up with about 80 people and we ran almost all machines on Linux (mostly Ubuntu) and it worked like a charm. We scaled to about 400 people before switching to Chromebooks in 2015 for the vast majority of users. Our IT operations team never had more than 4 FTE at any point in time, which compares very favorably with any other company. This was possible because Linux environments are extremely easy to maintain for a trained IT staff and, obviously, because we mostly avoided the MS Office crapware (which was less crappy back then than it is today). Google Suite served us fine and the rest was custom web-based software. Today I'm at a different company, no longer in the trenches, and use MS Windows machines for my work and there is not a single week going by without need to call tech support. Adding the counter-productive helpfulness of MS Office applications I sometimes think MS is paid by our competitors to destroy our productivity. That's a "stability vulnerability".
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> changing resolution. Er, this decade? How would setting resolution go badly today? (The closest thing I can think of is that once upon a time you could mess up CRTs with bad settings.)
ryandrake 3y ago
Coincidentally, I ran into one of these this week. I decided to upgrade my bog-standard Debian installation on a headless NAS from buster to bookworm. Should have been easy peasy: Update sources.list and then apt full-upgrade, right? Wrong. Half way through, Debian seems to have lost[1] libcrypt.so.1, which everything important in the system relies on. Could no longer sudo (needs libcrypt) from the session I was logged into. Couldn't re-log in at all either over the network (ssh needs libcrypt) or locally (local authentication needs it too). Could not even get to single-user mode because init=/bin/bash didn't even work. I ended up having to boot from a liveCD, re-assemble the raid partition containing my root filesystem, and manually copy libcrypt into /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ All because I tried to upgrade Debian from 10 to 12, skipping a version, which, apparently you can't do anymore. As much as I can't stand Windows and I grin-and-bear macOS, I've never had an experience even close to as bad as that on those systems. 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993755 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993755
- laserdancepony 3y ago
  It was unsupported to jump releases while upgrading twenty years ago when upgrading woody to sarge as is now. Don't spread rumours. I've been there and the READMEs are still online for reference [1]. And unsupported does not mean impossible. One just can't blame the distro for a failed install. And if you had bothered to read the Release Notes for bookworm: It's in there [2]. Also you are instructed that only upgrades from bullseye are supported, and to upgrade to bullseye first if you are running an older version. Nobody else to blame for your fall. [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/release-notes/ch-... [2] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#libcrypt-upgrade-from-buster https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I've been using Debian since before woody, and am well aware of the usual caution against jumping versions. I have jumped versions in the past with very little pain despite it being officially unsupported. Obviously this time I gambled and lost as it clearly breaks your system more severely than usual. None of that changes the user-experience comparison with mainstream OS's or parent's point about Linux's "‘stability vulnerabilities’ where the user has to tread carefully". Linux is well known for being a sharp tool without safety guards. That, and the "RTFM" tone of the typical response to trouble, are some reasons why the Year Of The Linux Desktop is perpetually stuck somewhere in the future.

jaredhallen 3y ago

I hear this sentiment frequently, but it doesn't match my experience. I sure can relate to the idea, but that was a decade ago. I install a fair variety of Linux distros on a pretty wide variety of hardware between my work and personal efforts, and it pretty much just seems to work these days. The last grief I recall in this regard was trying to run Ubuntu 64 on a Pi4 with Vulkan, but that was a couple years ago when things were known to be unstable. That or maybe doing something obviously inadvisable like trying to change distro on a live system by changing the apt source files on a Debian install to Ubuntu repositories and running an apt upgrade. And honestly even things like that work a surprising amount of the time. I know it's good to be introspective and truthful about shortcomings, but I really have to hand it to all the open source contributors, package maintainers, and all the rest. The modern Gnu/Linux ecosystem is pretty remarkable, in my opinion.

NewLogic 3y ago
On the contrary, Linus of LTT managed to uninstall the GUI of his PopOS install within an hour while attempting to install Steam only last year. https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=618 https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=618
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  By forcibly overriding the safeties that stop you from doing that. I can run `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` in less than an hour, too, and it's just as meaningful.

emodendroket 3y ago

True but the older your hardware is the less you encounter it… so I guess the best use for it is giving life to old hardware.

xslvrxslwt 3y ago
I'm sorry but this is all but true. I've a 13700K and a 4090 and it's more reliable than 2 of my old hardware machines..this is slowly becoming a myth unfortunately as new versions of either DEs or desktop protocol (s) are slowly deprecating tons of stuff..
- emodendroket 3y ago
  I’ve had good luck with Xubuntu on a couple older machines so far but I’m not trying to run it on anything modern. My experience trying to do desktop Linux on a recent machine is quite old so maybe things are different.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
I would imagine this is only true to a certain point. Like, I would not be surprised if there were issues trying to run an AGP or PCI video card. There's probably a sweet spot where some hardware is old enough to have had all the major bugs worked out, but not so old that nobody bothers developing and testing it anymore.

kdklol 3y ago

There are the same exact problems on Windows though. Microsoft nowadays basically treats it's install base as beta testers and you regularly hear about breaking updates. There are devices out there with funky drivers, most notably Nvidia cards, but if you can avoid those (I know many people can't, me included) and choose a stable distro, I genuinely fail to observe these supposed instabilities on Linux. Personally, I think the real reason why companies are not switching is familiarity. Think of all that money spent on MS product training over X employees. Billions are spent yearly in this industry I'm sure.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Which is why the first thing I do on any Windows install is disable or block automatic Windows Updates and only run them once every blue moon when I've set aside time to waste on borkage. And before anyone says I'm in danger by running unpatched Windows: NO. My threat model is such that the time lost and wasted from updates breaking shit is significantly greater than the dangers posed by hypothetical threats those patches ostensibly guard against. Updates are simply and literally not worth my time and concern compared to having systems that just work every day all year long. If I need to comply with regulations or audits or I am the target of focused attacks, then yes the scales shift the other way. But as a general, and particularly personal, concern? No, updates are a waste of my time. Linux is even worse because I don't even need to run updates for something to break and waste my time.
- kdklol 3y ago
  Your comment feels like it came straight from 2014's /g/. This is literally "My time is too valuable to do X" argument. But perhaps you don't care. Fair enough. You do you. You are, however, absolutely in danger running unpatched Windows, unless it's an airgapped industrial PC or something similar. Even then, such systems can and were compromised (stuxnet, for instance). >If I need to comply with regulations or audits I hope you are not handling any customer info on such systems... or are you?! There seems to be a deeper issue at play. I've seen it many times, even here on HN. So very few people actually know anything about information security, and if they do they only have horrifying misconceptions from god knows where. No wonder why there's so many data leaks when the responsible people have these attitudes.

Propelloni 3y ago

I respect your individual experience but this hasn't been the mainstream situation for many years now. Back in 2012 I was the Head of IT for an A series start-up with about 80 people and we ran almost all machines on Linux (mostly Ubuntu) and it worked like a charm. We scaled to about 400 people before switching to Chromebooks in 2015 for the vast majority of users. Our IT operations team never had more than 4 FTE at any point in time, which compares very favorably with any other company. This was possible because Linux environments are extremely easy to maintain for a trained IT staff and, obviously, because we mostly avoided the MS Office crapware (which was less crappy back then than it is today). Google Suite served us fine and the rest was custom web-based software. Today I'm at a different company, no longer in the trenches, and use MS Windows machines for my work and there is not a single week going by without need to call tech support. Adding the counter-productive helpfulness of MS Office applications I sometimes think MS is paid by our competitors to destroy our productivity. That's a "stability vulnerability".

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

> changing resolution. Er, this decade? How would setting resolution go badly today? (The closest thing I can think of is that once upon a time you could mess up CRTs with bad settings.)

ryandrake 3y ago

Coincidentally, I ran into one of these this week. I decided to upgrade my bog-standard Debian installation on a headless NAS from buster to bookworm. Should have been easy peasy: Update sources.list and then apt full-upgrade, right? Wrong. Half way through, Debian seems to have lost[1] libcrypt.so.1, which everything important in the system relies on. Could no longer sudo (needs libcrypt) from the session I was logged into. Couldn't re-log in at all either over the network (ssh needs libcrypt) or locally (local authentication needs it too). Could not even get to single-user mode because init=/bin/bash didn't even work. I ended up having to boot from a liveCD, re-assemble the raid partition containing my root filesystem, and manually copy libcrypt into /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ All because I tried to upgrade Debian from 10 to 12, skipping a version, which, apparently you can't do anymore. As much as I can't stand Windows and I grin-and-bear macOS, I've never had an experience even close to as bad as that on those systems. 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993755 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993755

laserdancepony 3y ago
It was unsupported to jump releases while upgrading twenty years ago when upgrading woody to sarge as is now. Don't spread rumours. I've been there and the READMEs are still online for reference [1]. And unsupported does not mean impossible. One just can't blame the distro for a failed install. And if you had bothered to read the Release Notes for bookworm: It's in there [2]. Also you are instructed that only upgrades from bullseye are supported, and to upgrade to bullseye first if you are running an older version. Nobody else to blame for your fall. [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html https://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/i386/release-notes/ch-... [2] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#libcrypt-upgrade-from-buster https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I've been using Debian since before woody, and am well aware of the usual caution against jumping versions. I have jumped versions in the past with very little pain despite it being officially unsupported. Obviously this time I gambled and lost as it clearly breaks your system more severely than usual. None of that changes the user-experience comparison with mainstream OS's or parent's point about Linux's "‘stability vulnerabilities’ where the user has to tread carefully". Linux is well known for being a sharp tool without safety guards. That, and the "RTFM" tone of the typical response to trouble, are some reasons why the Year Of The Linux Desktop is perpetually stuck somewhere in the future.