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20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representativ

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell. Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I used for a considerable period of time include both Ubuntu and Gentoo. I’ve seen the spectrum. But this is just ludicrous.

hnlmorg 2y ago
2004 was round about the last time I had a major driver issue. I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer, the name which escapes me. Weirdly FreeBSD worked just fine with any WiFi radio I threw at it. Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality. I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges. These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease. So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues. edit: just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.
- 4878241143 2y ago
  > I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer ndiswrapper
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
herbst 2y ago
Imo the maintenance thing is not always true. When I install Linux on a relatives computer I usually never hear from them again because they finally have a OS to run their browser on that doesn't constantly nag them. For my use, sure I break it. But I broke Macs too and never had a stable environment there either.
guenthert 2y ago
Some of us where using Linux desktop/laptops more than 20 years ago (I had a Toshiba Tecra upgraded to 48MiB RAM running happily Debian Linux in '97). And it wasn't a big deal. And I've seen this discussion every so often in the last thirty years. It's always the same: don't buy bleeding edge hardware.
- gbin 2y ago
  Now we are lucky to have a good choice of laptops that are Linux friendly.
talldayo 2y ago
On the flip side, I could confidently bet any amount of money that I do proportionally more MacOS maintainance than I do on Linux. And I'm even using Nvidia drivers, it's probably lower still if you've got an AMD card with built-in kernel level support.
vundercind 2y ago
> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. This was me for a decade. Since I left, any time I check in on Linux it’s like “how did I live like this?!” I was absolutely blind to how many little things I had to do to keep it happy, or how often I was avoiding using my computer ways that should have been fine but that bugs had trained me not to. I still have to force myself to remember drag-n-drop for anything other than moving files around is an option, and will probably work fine and do something reasonable on the platform I use now—though to be fair Windows also helped train me to avoid that particular thing, not just Linux. Took me more than a year to stop feeling anxious when I just closed my laptop without first doing some manual dance to be sure it went to sleep.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. That's probably true, but it's true of everything; the stupid papercuts that Linux users are used to are different from the stupid papercuts that Windows users are used to, but it is not clear to me that they're worse.
e12e 2y ago
According to Wikipedia [1], Debian Woody came out in 2002, Sarge in 2005 and Etch in 2007. The first Ubuntu lts was 2006. This timeframe sounds about right to me - that's when things started to get better than windows hw support in some sense. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history
Koshkin 2y ago
> Not a chance in hell. In 2003 I was using a Pentium III Dell laptop with Linux (2.4) on it. Everything worked, including wifi.

hnlmorg 2y ago

2004 was round about the last time I had a major driver issue. I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer, the name which escapes me. Weirdly FreeBSD worked just fine with any WiFi radio I threw at it. Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality. I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges. These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease. So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues. edit: just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.

4878241143 2y ago
> I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer ndiswrapper

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

herbst 2y ago

Imo the maintenance thing is not always true. When I install Linux on a relatives computer I usually never hear from them again because they finally have a OS to run their browser on that doesn't constantly nag them. For my use, sure I break it. But I broke Macs too and never had a stable environment there either.

guenthert 2y ago

Some of us where using Linux desktop/laptops more than 20 years ago (I had a Toshiba Tecra upgraded to 48MiB RAM running happily Debian Linux in '97). And it wasn't a big deal. And I've seen this discussion every so often in the last thirty years. It's always the same: don't buy bleeding edge hardware.

gbin 2y ago
Now we are lucky to have a good choice of laptops that are Linux friendly.

talldayo 2y ago

On the flip side, I could confidently bet any amount of money that I do proportionally more MacOS maintainance than I do on Linux. And I'm even using Nvidia drivers, it's probably lower still if you've got an AMD card with built-in kernel level support.

vundercind 2y ago

> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. This was me for a decade. Since I left, any time I check in on Linux it’s like “how did I live like this?!” I was absolutely blind to how many little things I had to do to keep it happy, or how often I was avoiding using my computer ways that should have been fine but that bugs had trained me not to. I still have to force myself to remember drag-n-drop for anything other than moving files around is an option, and will probably work fine and do something reasonable on the platform I use now—though to be fair Windows also helped train me to avoid that particular thing, not just Linux. Took me more than a year to stop feeling anxious when I just closed my laptop without first doing some manual dance to be sure it went to sleep.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. That's probably true, but it's true of everything; the stupid papercuts that Linux users are used to are different from the stupid papercuts that Windows users are used to, but it is not clear to me that they're worse.

e12e 2y ago

According to Wikipedia [1], Debian Woody came out in 2002, Sarge in 2005 and Etch in 2007. The first Ubuntu lts was 2006. This timeframe sounds about right to me - that's when things started to get better than windows hw support in some sense. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

Koshkin 2y ago

> Not a chance in hell. In 2003 I was using a Pentium III Dell laptop with Linux (2.4) on it. Everything worked, including wifi.