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> 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 This argument is quite out of date.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

> 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 This argument is quite out of date.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]
- TylerE 3y ago
  That would be a firing offense at my company. Company files stay on company hardware. Personal files stay on personal hardware, and never should the two meet.
  - musicale 3y ago
    That may be sensible if you want or need stronger security and isolation. However, many companies do support BYOD, especially on mobile where it's a pain to carry two phones around. There is some support for this. For example, Apple supports dual Apple IDs and separate encrypted volumes for personal and corporate data. Microsoft apps (Outlook) also have some support for separating personal and corporate data. The benefits of BYOD can include lower equipment costs, lower friction, and potentially higher employee happiness and productivity.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Mobile is a totally different story, to me. The security model allows them to be compartmentalized in the way a desktop never could be.
  - indymike 3y ago
    I would never work at your company. I use my own tools, thank you.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Are you required to maintain PCI compliance? Do you touch customer personal info?
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      You're own tools are your own personal files? Interesting. How do your vacation pictures help you do your job?
      - indymike 3y ago
        > How do your vacation pictures help you do your job? This question is why I don't want the company laptop.
- chasil 3y ago
  If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare offer either free or low-cost options to address that. Windows update is enormously painful compared to Linux. There can be no argument of this fact.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps. I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to restart your computer!” is not a particularly good reason to damn it.
    - chasil 3y ago
      Windows update is agony compared to apt/yum. A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot. Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?). Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.
      - mrcsharp 3y ago
        > especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down I have been a Windows user since XP. Never, not even once did Windows decide to reboot without asking first. Never. The only way this could've have happened is if Windows kept asking you over the span of a week or 2 to restart to apply the updates and you kept postponing it. Either way, "Hot Patching" will soon be a thing on Windows so restart won't be required every month [1]. [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-wants-to-update-your-windows-11-pc-without-forcing-you-to-reboot https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...
mmcnl 3y ago
This is absolutely false. I run dual-boot Windows and Linux on hardware that has 100% Linux support. Windows just works, the same cannot be said for Linux unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify So what exactly isn't working?
  - WJW 3y ago
    Not OP, but the fact that I have an easily accessible text file on my desktop with the exact commands to run in my terminal to recompile the graphics driver when upgrading packages breaks graphics again should speak volumes. I don't really mind, because running 3 commands in the terminal a few times per year is not particularly difficult for me. I could see it being difficult for non-devs though. What does get annoying is when such an OS upgrade breaks the wifi drivers and I have to setup a bluetooth hotspot on my phone to access the github repo and fetch the latest driver version for the wifi dongle.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    These have been pain points for me. Not saying they're impossible to solve on Linux, but it's nontrivial especially compared to Windows Change trackpad scrolling speed Set up suspend-then-hibernate GPU drivers (I have a box with an AMD APU and no idea how to actually utilize it) Many games (Proton is amazing and a huge leap forward, but om average it's still more work than gaming on Windows. eg fiddling with different versions of Proton or finding out that a game's anti cheat will ban you for using Linux) Higher res video streaming (I think this is usually a DRM issue?) Full disclosure: I'm posting this list because I'm hoping that someone will tell me I'm wrong and that Gnome actually has an easy way to set the trackpad scroll speed
    - fsflover 3y ago
      Thanks! Turns out, I don't really need those things.
jrflowers 3y ago
This is a great linux post because while taking the time to type out distros to avoid is worth it, saying what distros to try is not.
matkoniecz 3y ago
> avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu which one you would recommend?
- theodric 3y ago
  Well I'm just a rando, and you didn't ask me, but I agree with the sentiment, so: Fedora. Or openSUSE. I'd be more comfortable giving a newbie Fedora. I was a Debian devotee for nearly 25 years, but I've found it to be less foolproof and fault-free lately, and it has always lagged behind current package versions in Stable, forcing you to run Testing (or -backports) or even Unstable to get newer versions-- with corresponding potential for breakage.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    Debian Stable was very out of date 25 years ago, but ever since mid '00s (after Ubuntu got popular) it improved by miles. Debian Stable is akin to Ubuntu Stable LTS. Ubuntu Stable non-LTS is a 6 month snapshot from Debian Testing, does not get supported for long. If you run Debian Unstable, you're probably running something akin to a rolling distribution. What is best all depends on your goal and purpose of the task. Personally, I very much like the Debian ecosystem and would prefer any Debian(-based) OS. However these days, Docker can trivialize a lot (and also mitigates your mentioned issue), ZFS and other filesystems allow to rollback in case of issues (useful on a rolling distribution, but also on Debian Unstable), and hypervisors allow snapshotting, multiple OSes, and all that, too. For a server I'd recommend Proxmox (especially since ESXi is now only for enterprise). From there, have fun with different OSes. Proxmox on a desktop is a bit meh, but possible. There's a lot of useful Linux desktop OSes out there. For example if you want to perform pentesting you can use Kali Linux. The one which interests me most from a security standpoint however, is Qubes OS (Fedora-based, sadly, but you can run anything on top of it). For gaming, SteamOS is neat (Arch-based, these days) and could even be fun to have a kid play around with Linux, too. As for macOS, I played around with Hackintosh a couple of times in the past with success. But I never liked it much because you'd lag behind on security patches, and every new update would be praying it'd work. I did get it to work under Proxmox though, that was fun, but had to install a second (dedicated) GPU for that. I latest M-series ARM-based Macs work very well, only disadvantage is the fat price upgrade for RAM and SSD (often even soldered!). That part is terribly sad.
theshackleford 3y ago
> You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates Utter fantasy. They complete whilst I sleep, taking zero of my time at all.
_ugfj 3y ago
This is 100% false. I have been running Ubuntu then Arch as my daily driver 2004-2017. As I started a consultant working for Western companies I thought they will care about me being clean copyright wise so I went 100% Linux. This was obviously not so but what did I know? I deeply regret doing this now. (I was dual booting before.) With Ubuntu, upgrades every six month or so meant you were better off reinstalling and reconfiguring -- no matter which way you went, it was 2-3 days of work lost to tinkering the system. With Arch, the whole system doesn't shatter, it's just this and that doesn't work and it's frustrating. Bluetooth, multifunction scanner-printers being in the forefront. In fact, I needed to sell a perfectly working Samsung MFC at one point because Samsung ceased to make drivers, the old ones didn't work with newer Linux and while open source drivers surfaced that only happened years later. Let's not even talk multimedia. https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same. Neither systems were great on connecting to weird enterprise networks, be it enterprise wifi or strange VPN. At one point I was running an older Firefox as root (!) to be able to connect to the F5 VPN of my client because the only thing supporting 2FA for that VPN was a classic extension -- and the binary helper disappeared in the mists of time. The only Linux related discussion was ... the IT head of my client asking how to connect Linux to his VPN now that he turned 2FA on and being told it doesn't work. https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-edge-client-for-big-ip-apm/91549 https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-ed... well I made it work but faugh. I have been running Windows 10 + WSL since 2018 January and all is well. It reboots sometimes while I am asleep and that's about it. You need to run O&o shutup like once in a blue moon. Right now I am on Win 11 as my primary laptop is being repaired, you need to run ExplorerPatcher but that's it. It's been indeed six years and there was never an update where the OS just didn't start up or a hardware driver decided to call it quits after an upgrade. Also, updates are not forced, I control my machine thanksmuch via Group Policy. https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.
- sergeykish 3y ago
  I am Linux user since 2006, Ubuntu then Arch. Bluetooth mouse, keyboard, headphones, controller works. Intel iGPU works, including hardware accelerated video in browsers. VPN: Pritunl worked without issues, Perimiter 81 initially failed, works with update. Wayland, Pipewire, Wine, Proton - Steam Deck is widely successful multimedia device. Priorities are same, NVK joined open source drivers. Linux does not connect to "enterprise wifi or strange VPN" - ok.
starky 3y ago
That is patently wrong. I run Fedora on my Framework because it is the most supported and recommended distro for it and I mostly just need a web browser for most of the things I do on it. I've had kernel upgrades break wifi completely, the fingerprint reader doesn't work properly out of the box, 6GHz Wifi isn't supported (though neither is it supported in Windows 10), VLC (which I hate using) is the only media player that supports playing from SMB shares on Linux, Wayland isn't compatible with Synergy type software (and my web browser doesn't work well with xorg), etc. Most of these things worked without any fuss in Windows and I can't think of any notable Windows issues I had to deal with on the laptop before I installed Fedora.

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]
TylerE 3y ago
That would be a firing offense at my company. Company files stay on company hardware. Personal files stay on personal hardware, and never should the two meet.
- musicale 3y ago
  That may be sensible if you want or need stronger security and isolation. However, many companies do support BYOD, especially on mobile where it's a pain to carry two phones around. There is some support for this. For example, Apple supports dual Apple IDs and separate encrypted volumes for personal and corporate data. Microsoft apps (Outlook) also have some support for separating personal and corporate data. The benefits of BYOD can include lower equipment costs, lower friction, and potentially higher employee happiness and productivity.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Mobile is a totally different story, to me. The security model allows them to be compartmentalized in the way a desktop never could be.
- indymike 3y ago
  I would never work at your company. I use my own tools, thank you.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Are you required to maintain PCI compliance? Do you touch customer personal info?
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    You're own tools are your own personal files? Interesting. How do your vacation pictures help you do your job?
    - indymike 3y ago
      > How do your vacation pictures help you do your job? This question is why I don't want the company laptop.
chasil 3y ago
If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare offer either free or low-cost options to address that. Windows update is enormously painful compared to Linux. There can be no argument of this fact.
- afavour 3y ago
  > This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps. I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to restart your computer!” is not a particularly good reason to damn it.
  - chasil 3y ago
    Windows update is agony compared to apt/yum. A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot. Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?). Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.
    - mrcsharp 3y ago
      > especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down I have been a Windows user since XP. Never, not even once did Windows decide to reboot without asking first. Never. The only way this could've have happened is if Windows kept asking you over the span of a week or 2 to restart to apply the updates and you kept postponing it. Either way, "Hot Patching" will soon be a thing on Windows so restart won't be required every month [1]. [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-wants-to-update-your-windows-11-pc-without-forcing-you-to-reboot https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

mmcnl 3y ago

This is absolutely false. I run dual-boot Windows and Linux on hardware that has 100% Linux support. Windows just works, the same cannot be said for Linux unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify.

fsflover 3y ago
> unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify So what exactly isn't working?
- WJW 3y ago
  Not OP, but the fact that I have an easily accessible text file on my desktop with the exact commands to run in my terminal to recompile the graphics driver when upgrading packages breaks graphics again should speak volumes. I don't really mind, because running 3 commands in the terminal a few times per year is not particularly difficult for me. I could see it being difficult for non-devs though. What does get annoying is when such an OS upgrade breaks the wifi drivers and I have to setup a bluetooth hotspot on my phone to access the github repo and fetch the latest driver version for the wifi dongle.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  These have been pain points for me. Not saying they're impossible to solve on Linux, but it's nontrivial especially compared to Windows Change trackpad scrolling speed Set up suspend-then-hibernate GPU drivers (I have a box with an AMD APU and no idea how to actually utilize it) Many games (Proton is amazing and a huge leap forward, but om average it's still more work than gaming on Windows. eg fiddling with different versions of Proton or finding out that a game's anti cheat will ban you for using Linux) Higher res video streaming (I think this is usually a DRM issue?) Full disclosure: I'm posting this list because I'm hoping that someone will tell me I'm wrong and that Gnome actually has an easy way to set the trackpad scroll speed
  - fsflover 3y ago
    Thanks! Turns out, I don't really need those things.

jrflowers 3y ago

This is a great linux post because while taking the time to type out distros to avoid is worth it, saying what distros to try is not.

matkoniecz 3y ago

> avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu which one you would recommend?

theodric 3y ago
Well I'm just a rando, and you didn't ask me, but I agree with the sentiment, so: Fedora. Or openSUSE. I'd be more comfortable giving a newbie Fedora. I was a Debian devotee for nearly 25 years, but I've found it to be less foolproof and fault-free lately, and it has always lagged behind current package versions in Stable, forcing you to run Testing (or -backports) or even Unstable to get newer versions-- with corresponding potential for breakage.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Debian Stable was very out of date 25 years ago, but ever since mid '00s (after Ubuntu got popular) it improved by miles. Debian Stable is akin to Ubuntu Stable LTS. Ubuntu Stable non-LTS is a 6 month snapshot from Debian Testing, does not get supported for long. If you run Debian Unstable, you're probably running something akin to a rolling distribution. What is best all depends on your goal and purpose of the task. Personally, I very much like the Debian ecosystem and would prefer any Debian(-based) OS. However these days, Docker can trivialize a lot (and also mitigates your mentioned issue), ZFS and other filesystems allow to rollback in case of issues (useful on a rolling distribution, but also on Debian Unstable), and hypervisors allow snapshotting, multiple OSes, and all that, too. For a server I'd recommend Proxmox (especially since ESXi is now only for enterprise). From there, have fun with different OSes. Proxmox on a desktop is a bit meh, but possible. There's a lot of useful Linux desktop OSes out there. For example if you want to perform pentesting you can use Kali Linux. The one which interests me most from a security standpoint however, is Qubes OS (Fedora-based, sadly, but you can run anything on top of it). For gaming, SteamOS is neat (Arch-based, these days) and could even be fun to have a kid play around with Linux, too. As for macOS, I played around with Hackintosh a couple of times in the past with success. But I never liked it much because you'd lag behind on security patches, and every new update would be praying it'd work. I did get it to work under Proxmox though, that was fun, but had to install a second (dedicated) GPU for that. I latest M-series ARM-based Macs work very well, only disadvantage is the fat price upgrade for RAM and SSD (often even soldered!). That part is terribly sad.

theshackleford 3y ago

> You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates Utter fantasy. They complete whilst I sleep, taking zero of my time at all.

_ugfj 3y ago

This is 100% false. I have been running Ubuntu then Arch as my daily driver 2004-2017. As I started a consultant working for Western companies I thought they will care about me being clean copyright wise so I went 100% Linux. This was obviously not so but what did I know? I deeply regret doing this now. (I was dual booting before.) With Ubuntu, upgrades every six month or so meant you were better off reinstalling and reconfiguring -- no matter which way you went, it was 2-3 days of work lost to tinkering the system. With Arch, the whole system doesn't shatter, it's just this and that doesn't work and it's frustrating. Bluetooth, multifunction scanner-printers being in the forefront. In fact, I needed to sell a perfectly working Samsung MFC at one point because Samsung ceased to make drivers, the old ones didn't work with newer Linux and while open source drivers surfaced that only happened years later. Let's not even talk multimedia. https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same. Neither systems were great on connecting to weird enterprise networks, be it enterprise wifi or strange VPN. At one point I was running an older Firefox as root (!) to be able to connect to the F5 VPN of my client because the only thing supporting 2FA for that VPN was a classic extension -- and the binary helper disappeared in the mists of time. The only Linux related discussion was ... the IT head of my client asking how to connect Linux to his VPN now that he turned 2FA on and being told it doesn't work. https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-edge-client-for-big-ip-apm/91549 https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-ed... well I made it work but faugh. I have been running Windows 10 + WSL since 2018 January and all is well. It reboots sometimes while I am asleep and that's about it. You need to run O&o shutup like once in a blue moon. Right now I am on Win 11 as my primary laptop is being repaired, you need to run ExplorerPatcher but that's it. It's been indeed six years and there was never an update where the OS just didn't start up or a hardware driver decided to call it quits after an upgrade. Also, updates are not forced, I control my machine thanksmuch via Group Policy. https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

sergeykish 3y ago
I am Linux user since 2006, Ubuntu then Arch. Bluetooth mouse, keyboard, headphones, controller works. Intel iGPU works, including hardware accelerated video in browsers. VPN: Pritunl worked without issues, Perimiter 81 initially failed, works with update. Wayland, Pipewire, Wine, Proton - Steam Deck is widely successful multimedia device. Priorities are same, NVK joined open source drivers. Linux does not connect to "enterprise wifi or strange VPN" - ok.

starky 3y ago

That is patently wrong. I run Fedora on my Framework because it is the most supported and recommended distro for it and I mostly just need a web browser for most of the things I do on it. I've had kernel upgrades break wifi completely, the fingerprint reader doesn't work properly out of the box, 6GHz Wifi isn't supported (though neither is it supported in Windows 10), VLC (which I hate using) is the only media player that supports playing from SMB shares on Linux, Wayland isn't compatible with Synergy type software (and my web browser doesn't work well with xorg), etc. Most of these things worked without any fuss in Windows and I can't think of any notable Windows issues I had to deal with on the laptop before I installed Fedora.