5 ms·

(The page isn’t accessible from Turkey. I had to enable VPN to read the article) As I understand, the author’s main motive to try alternative operating systems

by sedatk 2y ago

(The page isn’t accessible from Turkey. I had to enable VPN to read the article) As I understand, the author’s main motive to try alternative operating systems is his frustration with mainstream operating systems, a lack of control and understanding so the speak. The fallacy of that is that instead of encountering a few significant problems with a mainstream OS, now the author has to experience a death by thousand cuts: hundreds of small issues, a missing driver there, a DPI incompatibility here, and now they spend more time fixing these issues than they spend time charging their laptop two more minutes because a weather widget decided to make a web request. I’m not saying those issues are negligible, I already said “significant”, but our perception of an open and hackable OS saves us time might as well be a myth. If you like hacking, more power to you. But, if you want to get things done, focus on those scenarios. See how well you can do your job and how much you are hindered on each OS. Not a MacOS fan myself, but I find this kind of hiraeth (missing a place that doesn’t exist[1]) a sign of being distracted. [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiraeth https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiraeth

arghwhat 2y ago
There are frustrations on Linux, but there's also a lot of development where its Windows or macOS that gives "death by a thousand cuts" so there are definitely reasons for you to pick that over Windows or macOS - even with WSL2. Having to forward hardware over HyperV can give a lot of headaches. Windows machines infected by corporate also have crippling I/O speeds. I have a fun example at a customer where even running a Linux VM on the same machine will give 10x compile speed, and something like 100x git operation speeds than the same operations on the host... If you need it in a corporate setting, Lenovo ships both Fedora and Ubuntu on their thinkpads, with certified hardware support. Someone running Gentoo or Arch Linux are sure to burn many hours on the machine itself which they may or may not enjoy, but you don't have to go that route. It's not too hard to be on well-supported hardware either - people pick from a handful of laptops to run macOS, so it doesn't seem to unreasonable to also pick the machine for Linux. Think of it as being somewhere in between macOS "runs here only" and Windows "well it came with it" when it comes to having to select your machine.
- int_19h 2y ago
  These days, Windows is trying to solve the dev I/O scenario by having a separate "developer optimized" partition: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. What an amusing band-aid. It's weird that they're mixing ReFS into it, as NTFS is not at all the problem. It feels like they're either using this as a random opportunity to air ReFS again, or as a decoy to make it sound like the dev partition is a fancy special filesystem optimization, rather than the more likely reality of it being duct tape on their weird VFS layer, likely doing away with stuff like in-line Windows Defender I/O interception as all the usage warnings and corp group policy references would suggest to be the case...
    - sedatk 2y ago
      What’s weird about Microsoft’s VFS layer?
      - arghwhat 2y ago
        The primary peculiarity and cause of issues is the Microsoft "filter driver" concept that allows I/O to be intercepted for a variety of purposes. A primary use-case for this is Just-in-Time anti-virus scanning, both for Windows Defender and third party products, which makes tasks that involve many small I/O operations (like compiling sources, using git, dealing with training sets or unzipping something with many files) very slow.
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      Yes, the major benefit of Dev Drive is that the default filter driver stack is minimized from OS drive defaults, including Defender's and other AV's realtime drivers. NTFS itself wasn't the problem. Microsoft seems to acknowledge that the filter drivers in the wild are a part of the problem, and a partition opt-out is useful. (Of course all those warnings about corp group policy also point out that Enterprises are given the ability with group policy to force turn on a lot of those filter drivers for Dev Drive partitions, because Microsoft loves giving Corporations ways to shoot their own feet in Group Policy. What would Group Policy even be if it wasn't just Footgun as a Service?) It does seem like this is some sort of "trojan horse" (but not in a bad way) play for ReFS. But I'm not sure it is for sinister reasons: Encouraging Developers to use ReFS for their main development partition is a good way to encourage lots of free app compatibility testing on top of ReFS and suss out the minor bugs in applications that assume all Windows runs solely on NTFS. It seems like a play to increase reliance on the VFS layer and its abstractions and further get away from code assuming NTFS specifics.
hnlmorg 2y ago
Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal laptop running Linux: - various USB and Thunderbolt hubs not working correctly - multiple monitors, and macOS forgetting which screen is which - screen flicker of a older LCD (it’s the screen that’s shit, but still, it doesn’t flicker in Linux) - literal kernel panics coming out of sleep. Turns out it didn’t like a USB DAC I don’t think I’ve had a missing driver problem with Linux in something like 20 years. Your mileage might vary but this old meme that “Linux is buggy and has missing drivers” hasn’t been true in two decades. So why do people seem to spend more time hacking at Linux? The answer is probably just selection bias: those who want to tinker will generally gravitate towards a platform that lets them tinker. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be a tinkerer to use Linux.
- TheRoque 2y ago
  Sorry, but this is still true IMO. For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. Not even talking about software availability and functionalities. I have had other issues, but anyways I don't want to list them all. I also find it misleading to claim that Arch Linux is "rock solid", just look at the news to see the amount of "manual intervention needed" listed. I love Linux and especially Fedora and OpenSUSE, but it still has its issue that make me sigh and say "ok... I'll just get windows".
  - persnickety 2y ago
    The nvidia situation is more of a "one big issue" than "death by a thousand cuts".
  - fragmede 2y ago
    > For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. If you have a GTX 1080. For everyone else that has moved on from an 8 year old graphics card, they won't run into that particular issue. Hence some people reporting a rock solid experience with Arch Linux.
Tor3 2y ago
I'm not sure what you're saying, but if it's that if the author installed his BSD/Linux (or whatever variant) he would instead have to handle missing drivers and tons of other small problems.. that's really not true. Only if the hardware is kind of non-mainstream. Take this Fujitsu laptop, provided by my employer.. it's just Intel inside for everything, and a Linux distro was installed without a hitch and has been working problem-free for years. And it's always like that unless the hw is unusual. After all I've been trying this since 1992, back then there was a bit of manual tinkering involved. Or this NEC-branded super-light laptop I bought in Japan.. same story. Install and forget. Zero issues. Heck, every developer at work doing their job stuff and development on various Linux computers, except for a couple of guys using Linux under Windows.
helpfulContrib 2y ago
[dead]
atahanacar 2y ago
>The page isn’t accessible from Turkey. I had to enable VPN to read the article I can access it just fine, no VPN, no DPI-prevention tools.
- sedatk 2y ago
  Might be an ISP issue then.
cess11 2y ago
I refuse to do work under Windows due to the bugs, inconsistencies, driver problems and shitty default UI. For years I've just pushed in Debian with the unfree packages and let it do its hardware sensing stuff and it works, except at one job, where they had a lot of security installation and configuration in pre-made bash scripts for initial setup that were tested on Ubuntu so I used that. It was worse, mainly due to snapd being an annoying turd, but not as bad as Windows. Multimonitor just works, automatic fan control just works, Bluetooth just works. It's been Toshibas and Lenovos and Samsungs. From my point of view mainstream Linux distros have been solid for fifteen years or so.
- Koshkin 2y ago
  If I refused to do work under Windows, I'd be fired.
  - cess11 2y ago
    Not if you end the contract yourself, but then you might not get unemployment insurance. Either way, my recommendation is that you prepare for an exit out of the abyssal misery that is Windows and then make the jump.
- sedatk 2y ago
  I’d been trying to install Ubuntu or Mint on my desktop and miserably failed. In my case, nothing worked properly: OS picked the wrong monitor as main display, secure boot issues with unhelpful messages, no default HiDPI configuration. Basically, nothing worked out of the box while everything had been working fine with Windows. Here are my adventures: Ubuntu: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knjwn2bsls2u https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knjwn2bsls2u Mint: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knp2yv3tqc22 https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knp2yv3tqc22
  - cess11 2y ago
    It's just some inscrutable screenshots. You don't even describe the hardware involved. I can't tell if you caused these issues yourself.
zamalek 2y ago
I spent an actual month fixing the container story on MacOS where I work, as the first employee with an M1 (eventually wrote a facade for colima). Over the following 6 months I kept a tracker of time lost to MacOS nonsense in an effort to convince my employer to allow us to use Linux. I have objective data showing that MacOS wastes huge amounts of time. MacOS is an objectively incompetent development OS, if you only count what is possible with what Apple provides. Even if you do consider 3rd party (brew, nixpkgs, colima) it remains a complete fucking mess. Even Windows supports native [Windows] containers. Linux containers in WSL were flawless last I used them (a few years back). And this isn't a critique of colima, that it is a tireless and thankless project that does what it can to pave over the utter incompetence of Apple. I have since been allowed to use Linux, as the sole person trusted to self-serve IT. I see people in Slack struggling with something new in MacOS weekly.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

by sedatk 2y ago

arghwhat 2y ago

There are frustrations on Linux, but there's also a lot of development where its Windows or macOS that gives "death by a thousand cuts" so there are definitely reasons for you to pick that over Windows or macOS - even with WSL2. Having to forward hardware over HyperV can give a lot of headaches. Windows machines infected by corporate also have crippling I/O speeds. I have a fun example at a customer where even running a Linux VM on the same machine will give 10x compile speed, and something like 100x git operation speeds than the same operations on the host... If you need it in a corporate setting, Lenovo ships both Fedora and Ubuntu on their thinkpads, with certified hardware support. Someone running Gentoo or Arch Linux are sure to burn many hours on the machine itself which they may or may not enjoy, but you don't have to go that route. It's not too hard to be on well-supported hardware either - people pick from a handful of laptops to run macOS, so it doesn't seem to unreasonable to also pick the machine for Linux. Think of it as being somewhere in between macOS "runs here only" and Windows "well it came with it" when it comes to having to select your machine.

int_19h 2y ago
These days, Windows is trying to solve the dev I/O scenario by having a separate "developer optimized" partition: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Thanks for the link. What an amusing band-aid. It's weird that they're mixing ReFS into it, as NTFS is not at all the problem. It feels like they're either using this as a random opportunity to air ReFS again, or as a decoy to make it sound like the dev partition is a fancy special filesystem optimization, rather than the more likely reality of it being duct tape on their weird VFS layer, likely doing away with stuff like in-line Windows Defender I/O interception as all the usage warnings and corp group policy references would suggest to be the case...
  - sedatk 2y ago
    What’s weird about Microsoft’s VFS layer?
    - arghwhat 2y ago
      The primary peculiarity and cause of issues is the Microsoft "filter driver" concept that allows I/O to be intercepted for a variety of purposes. A primary use-case for this is Just-in-Time anti-virus scanning, both for Windows Defender and third party products, which makes tasks that involve many small I/O operations (like compiling sources, using git, dealing with training sets or unzipping something with many files) very slow.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    Yes, the major benefit of Dev Drive is that the default filter driver stack is minimized from OS drive defaults, including Defender's and other AV's realtime drivers. NTFS itself wasn't the problem. Microsoft seems to acknowledge that the filter drivers in the wild are a part of the problem, and a partition opt-out is useful. (Of course all those warnings about corp group policy also point out that Enterprises are given the ability with group policy to force turn on a lot of those filter drivers for Dev Drive partitions, because Microsoft loves giving Corporations ways to shoot their own feet in Group Policy. What would Group Policy even be if it wasn't just Footgun as a Service?) It does seem like this is some sort of "trojan horse" (but not in a bad way) play for ReFS. But I'm not sure it is for sinister reasons: Encouraging Developers to use ReFS for their main development partition is a good way to encourage lots of free app compatibility testing on top of ReFS and suss out the minor bugs in applications that assume all Windows runs solely on NTFS. It seems like a play to increase reliance on the VFS layer and its abstractions and further get away from code assuming NTFS specifics.

hnlmorg 2y ago

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal laptop running Linux: - various USB and Thunderbolt hubs not working correctly - multiple monitors, and macOS forgetting which screen is which - screen flicker of a older LCD (it’s the screen that’s shit, but still, it doesn’t flicker in Linux) - literal kernel panics coming out of sleep. Turns out it didn’t like a USB DAC I don’t think I’ve had a missing driver problem with Linux in something like 20 years. Your mileage might vary but this old meme that “Linux is buggy and has missing drivers” hasn’t been true in two decades. So why do people seem to spend more time hacking at Linux? The answer is probably just selection bias: those who want to tinker will generally gravitate towards a platform that lets them tinker. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be a tinkerer to use Linux.

TheRoque 2y ago
Sorry, but this is still true IMO. For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. Not even talking about software availability and functionalities. I have had other issues, but anyways I don't want to list them all. I also find it misleading to claim that Arch Linux is "rock solid", just look at the news to see the amount of "manual intervention needed" listed. I love Linux and especially Fedora and OpenSUSE, but it still has its issue that make me sigh and say "ok... I'll just get windows".
- persnickety 2y ago
  The nvidia situation is more of a "one big issue" than "death by a thousand cuts".
- fragmede 2y ago
  > For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. If you have a GTX 1080. For everyone else that has moved on from an 8 year old graphics card, they won't run into that particular issue. Hence some people reporting a rock solid experience with Arch Linux.

Tor3 2y ago

I'm not sure what you're saying, but if it's that if the author installed his BSD/Linux (or whatever variant) he would instead have to handle missing drivers and tons of other small problems.. that's really not true. Only if the hardware is kind of non-mainstream. Take this Fujitsu laptop, provided by my employer.. it's just Intel inside for everything, and a Linux distro was installed without a hitch and has been working problem-free for years. And it's always like that unless the hw is unusual. After all I've been trying this since 1992, back then there was a bit of manual tinkering involved. Or this NEC-branded super-light laptop I bought in Japan.. same story. Install and forget. Zero issues. Heck, every developer at work doing their job stuff and development on various Linux computers, except for a couple of guys using Linux under Windows.

helpfulContrib 2y ago

[dead]

atahanacar 2y ago

>The page isn’t accessible from Turkey. I had to enable VPN to read the article I can access it just fine, no VPN, no DPI-prevention tools.

sedatk 2y ago
Might be an ISP issue then.

cess11 2y ago

I refuse to do work under Windows due to the bugs, inconsistencies, driver problems and shitty default UI. For years I've just pushed in Debian with the unfree packages and let it do its hardware sensing stuff and it works, except at one job, where they had a lot of security installation and configuration in pre-made bash scripts for initial setup that were tested on Ubuntu so I used that. It was worse, mainly due to snapd being an annoying turd, but not as bad as Windows. Multimonitor just works, automatic fan control just works, Bluetooth just works. It's been Toshibas and Lenovos and Samsungs. From my point of view mainstream Linux distros have been solid for fifteen years or so.

Koshkin 2y ago
If I refused to do work under Windows, I'd be fired.
- cess11 2y ago
  Not if you end the contract yourself, but then you might not get unemployment insurance. Either way, my recommendation is that you prepare for an exit out of the abyssal misery that is Windows and then make the jump.
sedatk 2y ago
I’d been trying to install Ubuntu or Mint on my desktop and miserably failed. In my case, nothing worked properly: OS picked the wrong monitor as main display, secure boot issues with unhelpful messages, no default HiDPI configuration. Basically, nothing worked out of the box while everything had been working fine with Windows. Here are my adventures: Ubuntu: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knjwn2bsls2u https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knjwn2bsls2u Mint: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knp2yv3tqc22 https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3knp2yv3tqc22
- cess11 2y ago
  It's just some inscrutable screenshots. You don't even describe the hardware involved. I can't tell if you caused these issues yourself.

zamalek 2y ago

I spent an actual month fixing the container story on MacOS where I work, as the first employee with an M1 (eventually wrote a facade for colima). Over the following 6 months I kept a tracker of time lost to MacOS nonsense in an effort to convince my employer to allow us to use Linux. I have objective data showing that MacOS wastes huge amounts of time. MacOS is an objectively incompetent development OS, if you only count what is possible with what Apple provides. Even if you do consider 3rd party (brew, nixpkgs, colima) it remains a complete fucking mess. Even Windows supports native [Windows] containers. Linux containers in WSL were flawless last I used them (a few years back). And this isn't a critique of colima, that it is a tireless and thankless project that does what it can to pave over the utter incompetence of Apple. I have since been allowed to use Linux, as the sole person trusted to self-serve IT. I see people in Slack struggling with something new in MacOS weekly.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]