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People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your ti

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert. So yes, I may just want to turn the key and have my car work. But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car, so I can better understand what was wrong, and whether I can fix it myself or if I needed a professional. I run Linux on all my machines, and my family generally uses Mac (both sides), but all those years tinkering with Linux, they still come to me for help with their Mac machines that they insisted would Just Work. All that out of the way, I agree with your fundamental premise: hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Linux is for work. I wouldn’t consider running anything else (Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, etc.) for my services.
- nesarkvechnep 3y ago
  Consider FreeBSD, because it’s great.
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Just for my router
JohnClark1337 3y ago
[dead]
riquisimo 3y ago
I really like the way you put that.
teh_infallible 3y ago
Your comment makes me think of my 3d printing journey. A lot of printers require maintenance and tinkering just to keep them functional. To an extent, since they are targeted towards “makers” who like to play with these things, that’s fine. But sometimes the thing you’re trying to build is of central importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be exploring your ideas with a machine that’s already fully functional.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Sometimes the holiday is the destination. Sometimes the fun is in the getting there, not being there. Tinkering can be fun. But these days I mostly want results, achievements etc. I want to tinker to a successful goal, not just tinker for tinkers sake.
bruce511 3y ago
I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value. I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting. I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so. The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along. In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.
- secstate 3y ago
  I think the awkward part of your first post is that you appear to start with a value judgement that tinkering is for poor people who's time is worthless. That's not remotely fair to either poor people, or rich people who like to tinker. No one's time is worthless. Not your time. Not mine. It's all just time.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Fair enough, and no I didn't mean to impinge time is worthless. It's not the value of time that changes, but the amount of it you have. In a work context a shortage of time (more customers than you can handle) means you need to discriminate, which means you can't make everyone happy. Which usually means differentiating based on value. (Aka, you get more expensive. ) For personal time you also become more discerning. Spend time with spouse, or build another computer, or lie under a car etc. Life has more demands, so there are more choices. Incidentally, one of those choices is to work less. The tinkering never goes away, but I prefer to tinker in profitable areas now. (I get to tinker for work.)
- macintux 3y ago
  > Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so. Building a Linux box led me back to Apple. I had been using UNIX at home, school and work for several years, and decided it was time to build my 3rd Linux box. Went to CompUSA out of idle curiosity to see what equipment they had, and the only computer in the store with Internet access was a Mac. I hadn't used a Mac since the SE/30 days, and I suddenly realized that the NeXT acquisition which I'd mostly ignored had changed everything. Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software (for, admittedly, significantly more money). Never looked back.
zozbot234 3y ago
> Linux is only free if your time is worthless! This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)
- audunw 3y ago
  That argument doesn’t sound very convincing to me. How would I know an avoiding Ubuntu is reasonable? That still seems to be the go-to distro for many people I know that like to use Linux but aren’t Linux experts. How do I know which hardware is natively supported? With Windows 10/11 I’ve never had any problems, either with pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smooth as well. My experience with Linux as an OS has been fairly good for many years, regardless of the distro. It’s the applications that could be an issue. Feels like it’s only very recently (post Steam deck in particular) that gaming seems to be viable at all. And it’s hard to beat the MS Office package for work. I recently got the idea to have two user accounts on my home computer where I have an account dedicated to working from home, logged into my office 365 account from work.. and it was honestly amazing how suddenly everything was just perfectly synced between my work and home computer.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    > How do I know which hardware is natively supported? You buy preinstalled. Works for me.
    - lanstin 3y ago
      Yeah preinstalled. And I never had issues with Ubuntu breaking in ways like arch or gentoo. Breaking includes trying to install some new thing or uograde and having random other stuff have to be googled.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - 3y ago
Gracana 3y ago
I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.
- rpdillon 3y ago
  This is a great point. I sort of detest becoming an expert at proprietary stuff, because I know they'll just change it before long. I've lamented about this elsewhere as modern software creating "permanent amateurs". Even those that want to invest in expertise often find their knowledge outdated in a handful of years, and those that don't want to invest can easily justify it by pointing out this effect.
  - lupire 3y ago
    Microsoft, at least before Cloud happened, supported their tech stacks with backward compatibility for decades.
- xattt 3y ago
  Proprietary or not, tinkering help you develop an intuition of what might be wrong.
  - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
    Yeah I mean, whoever made the original statement is just not an OS engineer.
    - mandeepj 3y ago
      > just not an OS engineer. Or not just an engineer
      - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
golergka 3y ago
For you, me, other people on HN who generally make a living by understanding computers, definitely. For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No.
- Nab443 3y ago
  Even as a dev with 3 environment I've not had to tinker my kernel since I left gentoo something like 15 years ago, Ubuntu takes care of it..
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  > For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No. when it was needed to do it last time, in way more troublesome than Windows system updates?
Aurornis 3y ago
> Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert. I have plenty of other things I’d rather tinker with and become an expert on, though. My computer is a tool to let me work with those things. It’s not fun when I have to debug and fix the tool for hours or days before I can even start working on the things I want to work on.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Exactly. Why do I want to be neck deep in some XML config hell when I could be playing music?
- matwood 3y ago
  This is me. The range of things I want to tinker with has grown. Various house projects, jiu-jitsu, cooking, etc... are all things I tinker with and learn from. Building computers, I've done and don't feel the need to do again. I even built a Gentoo install long ago when I was learning the nuts and bolts of linux.
blfr 3y ago
I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't randomly pop up. Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that. Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.
- willdr 3y ago
  If you sincerely believe this, you've tinkered enough that the massive knowledge barrier that is Linux seems like nothing to you. I would never sit my 70 year old mother down in front of a Linux machine. We're not at "caring that video files download too slowly" - we're at "how do I put a file on a USB".
  - WJW 3y ago
    Put USB stick into computer, click on "Files" in the program chooser, select the USB drive (helpfully listed as "USB drive" even), drag your files there? Same as on Windows and MacOS really. I don't dispute that Linux has rough edges, but putting files on a USB stick is not one of them tbh.
  - acomjean 3y ago
    I have very little Linux sys admin knowledge and have been using it on my home notebook for 5years and my work one two years now. Really no issues with the OS. I was using the very excellent 2015 Mac book pro before, but despite hardware that isn’t quite as nice (not bad though) that hardware I can’t go back to Mac OS. I know I pay a premium to get it pre installed over windows, but it’s not bad.
  - akho 3y ago
    I do sit my 75-y.o. mother in front of a Linux machine, and it's fine.
jstummbillig 3y ago
> the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise). > But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.
- doubled112 3y ago
  Disclaimer: This became more of a rant than I intended. I've become pretty unhappy with the general quality of the "professionals" I've interacted with lately. I just can't agree with this take. It sounds that simple, but it's not. I happen to enjoy learning and fixing. It would take me a long time to build that trust. Nobody cares about my things and my family's safety like I do. Most people are a long way from making as much money as an expert would charge them. In the last couple of years, I have had some terrible times when I call for help. When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look myself. Plus one time they left my fuel pump loose and I had to pay (in time and money) for an extra round trip with Uber, and the fuel it sprayed onto the road. They didn't fix the original problem, which cost me another round trip. Another time, I had technicians (experts) out to look at my leaking hot water tank 4 times before they decided it was time to replace it. I wasted the time calling, babysitting, coordinating, figuring out how to shower without hot water, etc. If this is the average "expert" count me out. I'll do it myself. Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun.
  - jstummbillig 3y ago
    > When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look myself. Regrets about not becoming more of investing the time to be an intuitive handy man is a very different category from "let's see if there's a video on yt to help me fix that in 5 minutes". My message is definitely not "don't get your hands dirty" but "be practical". Doing the yt/google/chatgpt thing to get an idea is mostly practical. > If this is the average "expert" count me out. You disclaimed, no problem — but I did write "build a network of experts you trust". Just calling someone and being annoyed that they are not good (and I agree, most of them are not) is not that. It's going to take time and money, but decidedly less so, because you get into the habit if doing it, you learn, you see red flags, network effects are real (people know people) and relationships on average last long enough. That is my experience, at least, but I have no reason to believe I would be special here. > Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun. That's true, in my case, only for very few problems. Most problems I would rather not solve myself. I'll admit: All of this is a concession to reality, at least my perception of it. Learning is fun. I would really love to be good at a great many things. It's just increasingly unreasonable to invest the time necessary, because things get more complicated and change more quickly. Staying good at a few things, learning whatever is most important next, and getting better at throwing money at the rest, will have to do.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eastbound 3y ago
Your argument is excellent and made me evolve my point of view about Mac. I use Mac for efficiency, and yet, I was wrong about what kind of efficiency I’ve been developing. Tinkering is so important, even if just for the fun of it.
datavirtue 3y ago
These days, if you have the skills and tools to swap a transmission you have to tow it into a dealership and beg them to flash the transmission so it will work in your truck. If you want to avoid that you better know where to find the strategy code and match it up before purchasing another transmission. Same goes for touch screens and a whole slew of essential parts. While we weren't looking the rug was completely pulled out from underneath us. Now your family mechanic is beholden to the dealership.
john-radio 3y ago
> hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers. Part of this might be that making Hackintoshes is so much harder now, but part of it might also be that OOTB desktop Linux is luxuriously good these days compared to where it used to be. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS linux are absolutely on par with MacOS for a user who meets the (admittedly higher) entry requirements for using Linux.
Aeolun 3y ago
At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.
- ghoover1978 3y ago
  I think that everyone knows that's a pretty ridiculous statement. Installing Windows 11 is basically putting in a USB stick, waiting about 8 minutes, clicking a few things and typing out your login and password. I love Linux, first started playing with it about 20 years ago now. There's not a single dist I've ever seen that is that simple. Just a basic fact, sorry.
  - mattl 3y ago
    As I found out this week, making the Windows 11 USB stick is far harder than it ought to be if you don’t have Windows already.
    - josteink 3y ago
      If you use UEFI, all you need is to copy the files from the ISO over to the USB stick. Am I missing something? (And the same applies to UEFI capable Linux-distros)
      - mattl 3y ago
        Windows installer images have some files too large for most tools to understand and also I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted too. Virtually any tool for making a USB stick would fail in various ways on macOS.
        josteink 3y ago
        > Windows installer images have some files too large … I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted That’s true. I forgot! While it’s not part of the UEFI spec many (most?) consumer BIOSes will be able to UEFI boot from NTFS as well, so formatting as that might also be an option. Both that and exfat should be easy to do on Linux. No idea about MacOS. Which brings me to > too large for most tools to understand This I don’t understand. What tools? What tools do you need beside “cp”?
jonathankoren 3y ago
>Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert. Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out. But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago. [] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.
dylan604 3y ago
This is a gross misunderstanding of the GP's point though. It's not that they are against doing any of these things. In fact, they said they were more than happy to do it in their youth. I am in full agreement with the GP's sentiment as well. Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have. But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it. your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now
- joshspankit 3y ago
  There’s another perspective: even if OP is done, if we shut the door (or let it be shut by companies like Apple) then the currently-young won’t be able to tinker and won’t grow to gain the same knowledge.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    They are free to continue that kind of work, it just gets harder. Look at Asahi Linux. While it might not be Hackintosh in the same sense, it is the same spirit. Hackintosh worked because the systems were built on commodity hardware. Now that Apple is using custom chips, they've definitely made it a bit more difficult, but in my experience that just brings out the really talented that step up to the plate to take a swing.
yieldcrv 3y ago
a frustrating freely accessible experience being priceless is not mutually exclusive from your time being worthless but I’m sure your point will inspire someone
rmbyrro 3y ago
Ubuntu is so easy to use. I enjoyed using Arch before, but got to a point where I also just wanted my PC to work without any tinkering. Ubuntu is very good at that.
throwaway22032 3y ago
To be honest, none of that stuff has been true for 15+ years anyway. Linux just works now. You put in the Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/whatever USB, you install it, it just works. I can't remember the last time anything broke on any of my desktop machines and it wasn't my fault for intentionally doing breaky things.
shirro 3y ago
You need to understand the bias of many HN commenters. They are running businesses, aspire to run businesses or employed by businesses that are monetizing the work of tinkerers and packaging it for a mass market where they can sell higher volumes or mine more personal data. There are a lot of people who will recommend spending massive amounts of time and money learning and renting proprietary services over learning fundamental concepts and owning your own stack. I just ignore them along with the crypto bros before them and the AI pumpers now. Renting proprietary closed services to people who don't know better is their bread and butter.
chewz 3y ago
> People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! But it is exactly why I quit Linux and returned to macOS. I used to run Linux on cheap 2nd hand ThinkPads and for 3 years on Macbook as main system. But after another upgrade destroyed gain all network connectivity I have quit. macOS isn't perfect but it works in most imposrtant areas and I can tinker with small stuff when I feel like it.
resource_waste 3y ago
[flagged]
pjmlp 3y ago
On my days we used to tinker in proprietary 8 and 16 bit home computer systems, The Way of Linux (TM) is not the only path to enlightment.
flohofwoe 3y ago
Do you not have any hobbies to "waste time" with? I would assume that most Hackintosh enthusiasts do this as a hobby, not for a living or even to save money on hardware.
lionkor 3y ago
All my PCs and servers run Linux, and its certainly not out of some idealism or anything. I'm fundamentally lazy, but I have a high standard for how things should be. As a result, I tend towards the highest quality, lowest cost (time, money, etc.), and thats Linux for me. Specifically, the setup I run on almost all my machines, which is the most optimal way I have found to write and run software, and play games. If Windows was easier to use, more stable, less of a hassle, easier to fix, I would use it, but its neither of those (for me). When I have a windows problem, I can either try magical incantations to fix it, reinstall, or give up, and each of those takes much longer than most things I could possibly do on my linux systems. Even if my linux box fails to boot, the drivers break and my ssd doesnt mount, all those fixes together take less time and effort than finding a fix for the most trivial of windows problems. The most trivial problem on Windows has been that the right click menu doesn't fully populate on first right click. I reported the issue, and thats all I can do. Its been a year and nothing has changed. On linux, a less trivial problem (a calculator crashing with a series of very weird inputs) was solved by me opening it in gdb and fixing the code, making a PR and having it merged. I guarantee a lot of people are on linux because its easier, and for no other reason. I dont need it to "just work", because I will break it. I need any possible fix to be possible in bounded time.
- causality0 3y ago
  Windows has been disconnected from user needs for a very long time. Any logical person would've put a "right click" icon in the Control Panel that would give the user full control of what does and doesn't appear in the menu, their order, etc.
3abiton 3y ago
That was a beautiful analogy.
al_borland 3y ago
This argument makes a lot of sense. I get more upset than I probably should about car issues, likely because I never spent the time to tinker with them, so I feel rather helpless… and I don’t like feeling helpless. In my youth I did a lot of tinkering with computers and it has paid dividends. It gave me a career. These days though, I want to be able to tinker on my own schedule. I want my primary computer, phone, and car to “just work”. That means any low level tinkering needs a second thing. That can work fine for computers, because they’re small and relatively cheap. The idea of having a project car isn’t something I ever see myself doing, as it’s big and expensive. I can still tinker on some things with my primary computer without it being a problem. Tinkering on writing software, running servers, or whatever, isn’t going to kill my ability to do other things on the computer. A lot of tinkering can be done without tinkering with the OS itself.
pradn 3y ago
There's levels to tinkering though. When I was running Ubuntu, a lot of the tinkering came down to searching for what config files to update. Sure, that freedom is nice if you care to use it, but it's mostly just searching, configuring, experimenting. This is hardly fun or instructive. A deeper form of tinkering is actually working on the code. I think an instructive example is writing your own X windowing system with xmonad. You get to see exactly how a whole windowing system works.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

Linux is for work. I wouldn’t consider running anything else (Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, etc.) for my services.

nesarkvechnep 3y ago
Consider FreeBSD, because it’s great.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Just for my router

JohnClark1337 3y ago

[dead]

riquisimo 3y ago

I really like the way you put that.

teh_infallible 3y ago

Your comment makes me think of my 3d printing journey. A lot of printers require maintenance and tinkering just to keep them functional. To an extent, since they are targeted towards “makers” who like to play with these things, that’s fine. But sometimes the thing you’re trying to build is of central importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be exploring your ideas with a machine that’s already fully functional.

bruce511 3y ago
Sometimes the holiday is the destination. Sometimes the fun is in the getting there, not being there. Tinkering can be fun. But these days I mostly want results, achievements etc. I want to tinker to a successful goal, not just tinker for tinkers sake.

bruce511 3y ago

I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value. I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting. I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so. The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along. In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.

secstate 3y ago
I think the awkward part of your first post is that you appear to start with a value judgement that tinkering is for poor people who's time is worthless. That's not remotely fair to either poor people, or rich people who like to tinker. No one's time is worthless. Not your time. Not mine. It's all just time.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Fair enough, and no I didn't mean to impinge time is worthless. It's not the value of time that changes, but the amount of it you have. In a work context a shortage of time (more customers than you can handle) means you need to discriminate, which means you can't make everyone happy. Which usually means differentiating based on value. (Aka, you get more expensive. ) For personal time you also become more discerning. Spend time with spouse, or build another computer, or lie under a car etc. Life has more demands, so there are more choices. Incidentally, one of those choices is to work less. The tinkering never goes away, but I prefer to tinker in profitable areas now. (I get to tinker for work.)
macintux 3y ago
> Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so. Building a Linux box led me back to Apple. I had been using UNIX at home, school and work for several years, and decided it was time to build my 3rd Linux box. Went to CompUSA out of idle curiosity to see what equipment they had, and the only computer in the store with Internet access was a Mac. I hadn't used a Mac since the SE/30 days, and I suddenly realized that the NeXT acquisition which I'd mostly ignored had changed everything. Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software (for, admittedly, significantly more money). Never looked back.

zozbot234 3y ago

> Linux is only free if your time is worthless! This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)

audunw 3y ago
That argument doesn’t sound very convincing to me. How would I know an avoiding Ubuntu is reasonable? That still seems to be the go-to distro for many people I know that like to use Linux but aren’t Linux experts. How do I know which hardware is natively supported? With Windows 10/11 I’ve never had any problems, either with pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smooth as well. My experience with Linux as an OS has been fairly good for many years, regardless of the distro. It’s the applications that could be an issue. Feels like it’s only very recently (post Steam deck in particular) that gaming seems to be viable at all. And it’s hard to beat the MS Office package for work. I recently got the idea to have two user accounts on my home computer where I have an account dedicated to working from home, logged into my office 365 account from work.. and it was honestly amazing how suddenly everything was just perfectly synced between my work and home computer.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > How do I know which hardware is natively supported? You buy preinstalled. Works for me.
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Yeah preinstalled. And I never had issues with Ubuntu breaking in ways like arch or gentoo. Breaking includes trying to install some new thing or uograde and having random other stuff have to be googled.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago

Gracana 3y ago

I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.

rpdillon 3y ago
This is a great point. I sort of detest becoming an expert at proprietary stuff, because I know they'll just change it before long. I've lamented about this elsewhere as modern software creating "permanent amateurs". Even those that want to invest in expertise often find their knowledge outdated in a handful of years, and those that don't want to invest can easily justify it by pointing out this effect.
- lupire 3y ago
  Microsoft, at least before Cloud happened, supported their tech stacks with backward compatibility for decades.
xattt 3y ago
Proprietary or not, tinkering help you develop an intuition of what might be wrong.
- i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
  Yeah I mean, whoever made the original statement is just not an OS engineer.
  - mandeepj 3y ago
    > just not an OS engineer. Or not just an engineer
    - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

golergka 3y ago

For you, me, other people on HN who generally make a living by understanding computers, definitely. For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No.

Nab443 3y ago
Even as a dev with 3 environment I've not had to tinker my kernel since I left gentoo something like 15 years ago, Ubuntu takes care of it..
matkoniecz 3y ago
> For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No. when it was needed to do it last time, in way more troublesome than Windows system updates?

Aurornis 3y ago

TylerE 3y ago
Exactly. Why do I want to be neck deep in some XML config hell when I could be playing music?
matwood 3y ago
This is me. The range of things I want to tinker with has grown. Various house projects, jiu-jitsu, cooking, etc... are all things I tinker with and learn from. Building computers, I've done and don't feel the need to do again. I even built a Gentoo install long ago when I was learning the nuts and bolts of linux.

blfr 3y ago

I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't randomly pop up. Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that. Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.

willdr 3y ago
If you sincerely believe this, you've tinkered enough that the massive knowledge barrier that is Linux seems like nothing to you. I would never sit my 70 year old mother down in front of a Linux machine. We're not at "caring that video files download too slowly" - we're at "how do I put a file on a USB".
- WJW 3y ago
  Put USB stick into computer, click on "Files" in the program chooser, select the USB drive (helpfully listed as "USB drive" even), drag your files there? Same as on Windows and MacOS really. I don't dispute that Linux has rough edges, but putting files on a USB stick is not one of them tbh.
- acomjean 3y ago
  I have very little Linux sys admin knowledge and have been using it on my home notebook for 5years and my work one two years now. Really no issues with the OS. I was using the very excellent 2015 Mac book pro before, but despite hardware that isn’t quite as nice (not bad though) that hardware I can’t go back to Mac OS. I know I pay a premium to get it pre installed over windows, but it’s not bad.
- akho 3y ago
  I do sit my 75-y.o. mother in front of a Linux machine, and it's fine.

jstummbillig 3y ago

> the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise). > But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.

doubled112 3y ago
Disclaimer: This became more of a rant than I intended. I've become pretty unhappy with the general quality of the "professionals" I've interacted with lately. I just can't agree with this take. It sounds that simple, but it's not. I happen to enjoy learning and fixing. It would take me a long time to build that trust. Nobody cares about my things and my family's safety like I do. Most people are a long way from making as much money as an expert would charge them. In the last couple of years, I have had some terrible times when I call for help. When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look myself. Plus one time they left my fuel pump loose and I had to pay (in time and money) for an extra round trip with Uber, and the fuel it sprayed onto the road. They didn't fix the original problem, which cost me another round trip. Another time, I had technicians (experts) out to look at my leaking hot water tank 4 times before they decided it was time to replace it. I wasted the time calling, babysitting, coordinating, figuring out how to shower without hot water, etc. If this is the average "expert" count me out. I'll do it myself. Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  > When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look myself. Regrets about not becoming more of investing the time to be an intuitive handy man is a very different category from "let's see if there's a video on yt to help me fix that in 5 minutes". My message is definitely not "don't get your hands dirty" but "be practical". Doing the yt/google/chatgpt thing to get an idea is mostly practical. > If this is the average "expert" count me out. You disclaimed, no problem — but I did write "build a network of experts you trust". Just calling someone and being annoyed that they are not good (and I agree, most of them are not) is not that. It's going to take time and money, but decidedly less so, because you get into the habit if doing it, you learn, you see red flags, network effects are real (people know people) and relationships on average last long enough. That is my experience, at least, but I have no reason to believe I would be special here. > Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun. That's true, in my case, only for very few problems. Most problems I would rather not solve myself. I'll admit: All of this is a concession to reality, at least my perception of it. Learning is fun. I would really love to be good at a great many things. It's just increasingly unreasonable to invest the time necessary, because things get more complicated and change more quickly. Staying good at a few things, learning whatever is most important next, and getting better at throwing money at the rest, will have to do.

deleted 3y ago

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eastbound 3y ago

Your argument is excellent and made me evolve my point of view about Mac. I use Mac for efficiency, and yet, I was wrong about what kind of efficiency I’ve been developing. Tinkering is so important, even if just for the fun of it.

datavirtue 3y ago

These days, if you have the skills and tools to swap a transmission you have to tow it into a dealership and beg them to flash the transmission so it will work in your truck. If you want to avoid that you better know where to find the strategy code and match it up before purchasing another transmission. Same goes for touch screens and a whole slew of essential parts. While we weren't looking the rug was completely pulled out from underneath us. Now your family mechanic is beholden to the dealership.

john-radio 3y ago

> hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers. Part of this might be that making Hackintoshes is so much harder now, but part of it might also be that OOTB desktop Linux is luxuriously good these days compared to where it used to be. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS linux are absolutely on par with MacOS for a user who meets the (admittedly higher) entry requirements for using Linux.

Aeolun 3y ago

At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.

ghoover1978 3y ago
I think that everyone knows that's a pretty ridiculous statement. Installing Windows 11 is basically putting in a USB stick, waiting about 8 minutes, clicking a few things and typing out your login and password. I love Linux, first started playing with it about 20 years ago now. There's not a single dist I've ever seen that is that simple. Just a basic fact, sorry.
- mattl 3y ago
  As I found out this week, making the Windows 11 USB stick is far harder than it ought to be if you don’t have Windows already.
  - josteink 3y ago
    If you use UEFI, all you need is to copy the files from the ISO over to the USB stick. Am I missing something? (And the same applies to UEFI capable Linux-distros)
    - mattl 3y ago
      Windows installer images have some files too large for most tools to understand and also I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted too. Virtually any tool for making a USB stick would fail in various ways on macOS.
      - josteink 3y ago
        > Windows installer images have some files too large … I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted That’s true. I forgot! While it’s not part of the UEFI spec many (most?) consumer BIOSes will be able to UEFI boot from NTFS as well, so formatting as that might also be an option. Both that and exfat should be easy to do on Linux. No idea about MacOS. Which brings me to > too large for most tools to understand This I don’t understand. What tools? What tools do you need beside “cp”?

jonathankoren 3y ago

>Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert. Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out. But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago. [] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.

dylan604 3y ago

This is a gross misunderstanding of the GP's point though. It's not that they are against doing any of these things. In fact, they said they were more than happy to do it in their youth. I am in full agreement with the GP's sentiment as well. Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have. But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it. your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now

joshspankit 3y ago
There’s another perspective: even if OP is done, if we shut the door (or let it be shut by companies like Apple) then the currently-young won’t be able to tinker and won’t grow to gain the same knowledge.
- dylan604 3y ago
  They are free to continue that kind of work, it just gets harder. Look at Asahi Linux. While it might not be Hackintosh in the same sense, it is the same spirit. Hackintosh worked because the systems were built on commodity hardware. Now that Apple is using custom chips, they've definitely made it a bit more difficult, but in my experience that just brings out the really talented that step up to the plate to take a swing.

yieldcrv 3y ago

a frustrating freely accessible experience being priceless is not mutually exclusive from your time being worthless but I’m sure your point will inspire someone

rmbyrro 3y ago

Ubuntu is so easy to use. I enjoyed using Arch before, but got to a point where I also just wanted my PC to work without any tinkering. Ubuntu is very good at that.

throwaway22032 3y ago

To be honest, none of that stuff has been true for 15+ years anyway. Linux just works now. You put in the Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/whatever USB, you install it, it just works. I can't remember the last time anything broke on any of my desktop machines and it wasn't my fault for intentionally doing breaky things.

shirro 3y ago

You need to understand the bias of many HN commenters. They are running businesses, aspire to run businesses or employed by businesses that are monetizing the work of tinkerers and packaging it for a mass market where they can sell higher volumes or mine more personal data. There are a lot of people who will recommend spending massive amounts of time and money learning and renting proprietary services over learning fundamental concepts and owning your own stack. I just ignore them along with the crypto bros before them and the AI pumpers now. Renting proprietary closed services to people who don't know better is their bread and butter.

chewz 3y ago

> People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! But it is exactly why I quit Linux and returned to macOS. I used to run Linux on cheap 2nd hand ThinkPads and for 3 years on Macbook as main system. But after another upgrade destroyed gain all network connectivity I have quit. macOS isn't perfect but it works in most imposrtant areas and I can tinker with small stuff when I feel like it.

resource_waste 3y ago

[flagged]

pjmlp 3y ago

On my days we used to tinker in proprietary 8 and 16 bit home computer systems, The Way of Linux (TM) is not the only path to enlightment.

flohofwoe 3y ago

Do you not have any hobbies to "waste time" with? I would assume that most Hackintosh enthusiasts do this as a hobby, not for a living or even to save money on hardware.

lionkor 3y ago

All my PCs and servers run Linux, and its certainly not out of some idealism or anything. I'm fundamentally lazy, but I have a high standard for how things should be. As a result, I tend towards the highest quality, lowest cost (time, money, etc.), and thats Linux for me. Specifically, the setup I run on almost all my machines, which is the most optimal way I have found to write and run software, and play games. If Windows was easier to use, more stable, less of a hassle, easier to fix, I would use it, but its neither of those (for me). When I have a windows problem, I can either try magical incantations to fix it, reinstall, or give up, and each of those takes much longer than most things I could possibly do on my linux systems. Even if my linux box fails to boot, the drivers break and my ssd doesnt mount, all those fixes together take less time and effort than finding a fix for the most trivial of windows problems. The most trivial problem on Windows has been that the right click menu doesn't fully populate on first right click. I reported the issue, and thats all I can do. Its been a year and nothing has changed. On linux, a less trivial problem (a calculator crashing with a series of very weird inputs) was solved by me opening it in gdb and fixing the code, making a PR and having it merged. I guarantee a lot of people are on linux because its easier, and for no other reason. I dont need it to "just work", because I will break it. I need any possible fix to be possible in bounded time.

causality0 3y ago
Windows has been disconnected from user needs for a very long time. Any logical person would've put a "right click" icon in the Control Panel that would give the user full control of what does and doesn't appear in the menu, their order, etc.

3abiton 3y ago

That was a beautiful analogy.

al_borland 3y ago

This argument makes a lot of sense. I get more upset than I probably should about car issues, likely because I never spent the time to tinker with them, so I feel rather helpless… and I don’t like feeling helpless. In my youth I did a lot of tinkering with computers and it has paid dividends. It gave me a career. These days though, I want to be able to tinker on my own schedule. I want my primary computer, phone, and car to “just work”. That means any low level tinkering needs a second thing. That can work fine for computers, because they’re small and relatively cheap. The idea of having a project car isn’t something I ever see myself doing, as it’s big and expensive. I can still tinker on some things with my primary computer without it being a problem. Tinkering on writing software, running servers, or whatever, isn’t going to kill my ability to do other things on the computer. A lot of tinkering can be done without tinkering with the OS itself.

pradn 3y ago

There's levels to tinkering though. When I was running Ubuntu, a lot of the tinkering came down to searching for what config files to update. Sure, that freedom is nice if you care to use it, but it's mostly just searching, configuring, experimenting. This is hardly fun or instructive. A deeper form of tinkering is actually working on the code. I think an instructive example is writing your own X windowing system with xmonad. You get to see exactly how a whole windowing system works.