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The assertion that Linux needs tinkering to use is absurd. Fedora, for example, works great out of the box. Some people may choose to change a few settings in a

The assertion that Linux needs tinkering to use is absurd. Fedora, for example, works great out of the box. Some people may choose to change a few settings in a GUI but that isn't tinkering in the way that I think that you mean it and it certainly isn't unique to Linux.

lkirkwood 2y ago
I used to feel this way but having installed Ubuntu on a friend's old laptop for him, it's crazy the amount of stuff you forget you do because it's second nature. I certainly think it's too far to say "absurd".
Aleklart 2y ago
Installing codecs, drivers (several times by different guides usually) and disabling Red Hat telemetry from command line is what user have to do to make it usable for something more than running neofetch
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Since we are comparing to Windows, the "disabling Red Hat telemetry from command line" step doesn't really count, since Windows out of the box is loaded with telemetry.
  - smolder 2y ago
    Windows is practically spyware now, all they're doing with the platform is enshittification. WSL was the last "good" windows feature and it's just an Embrace Extend Extinguish play.
Simran-B 2y ago
I have to disagree to a limited extent. I recently tried to boot multiple current Linux distros from a USB stick for evaluation and all of them had issues. Fedora wasn't usable at all due to lack of space because it lost the RAM partition in the boot process and had severe graphical glitches. Ubuntu had issues with the Intel iGPU and installing drivers for the dGPU isn't possible in a live boot without persistence (and Ubuntu showed a blank error message when using the GUI for switching drivers). It also somehow managed to trigger secure boot so that I had to use a recovery key to get my data back. Zorin can download Nvidia drivers during boot and thus worked decently but the system would randomly freeze and had graphical artifacts when using the desktop cube. There were also other issues on Ubuntu and Zorin like with the permissions for bubble wrap to make Flatpaks work and so on. If it already requires tinkering before installing or with a completely fresh OS, then I find it hard to believe that desktop Linux can be a daily driver.
- walteweiss 2y ago
  [dead]
meibo 2y ago
Not sure what hardware you are doing this on, but installing Fedora 40 on my mid-range gaming PC from 2022 last month got me flickering windows (it only ships with a Wayland session) and broken sound out of the box. My screens still don't both turn on when I wake it up from sleep, if it does. If that is outside of "absurd" to you then the Linux desktop world clearly needs to keep cooking a little longer. My non-IT friends would not have been able to figure this out and I don't think they should have to.
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
  Up until a year or so ago, windows wouldn’t recognize the webcam of my hp-recommends-windows laptop. On a different laptop, it refused to output 4k@60 through the HP dock. After it started working, waking from sleep would be a coin toss whether I would get any image at all, or something garbled. I’m “IT” and had no idea how to fix these. Even installing all the provided oem drivers made no difference. A new development is Windows using the us English layout, although it’s not enabled. I have to add and remove it to fix it. Everything worked perfectly on Linux since day 1.
  - sfn42 2y ago
    Sounds more like a HP issue than a Windows issue to me.
    - amlib 2y ago
      Windows machines have the benefit of official Windows support where the integrator worked out the kinks and built-in a bunch of hacks to fix whatever half-broken things the manufacturer cobbled together. Linux machines don't usually have such affordances, you just install it on a random _Windows_ machine and hope it works. It's actually amazing it works well 90% of the time.
    - vladvasiliu 2y ago
      How's it different from meibo's post? If the hardware is well supported by the OS, everything works fine. If it's not, you're gonna have a bad time. My point is that you can't say Xos is great because it works well on this particular hardware.
bob1029 2y ago
I spent a solid 2 days trying to get Ubuntu Server working on a WRX80 threadripper machine. Never once saw the actual installation process. Day 3, I grab an image of windows server 2022. It boots instantly to the install process and just works. I know you can make Linux work, but the amount of suffering is still unbelievable compared to the alternatives in many cases. By the time I get the Linux thing figured out, I'll have forgotten about what it was I wanted to originally build. I wouldn't mind a bit of tinkering, but this is sad. I happily pay Microsoft if this is the alternative.
- smolder 2y ago
  This is such MS propaganda I'm flabbergasted. Windows is a joke OS at present day.
  - bob1029 2y ago
    How has your experience been installing Linux on the platform I described?
    - Numerlor 2y ago
      The double standards when discussing Linux are ridiculous, every issue people have with Linux must be because they're incompetent and using windows must mean you're fighting the OS every second
      - kylebenzle 2y ago
        It's not a double standard but the simple truth. It is true, if you are having a problem with Linux 9 time out of 10 it's possible it fix the problem, aka, you are the problem. My limited experience with paying for an OS means if there's a problem your just out of luck.
        bob1029 2y ago
        > you are the problem. I wonder if Linux advocates could take a small amount of ownership over the user/customer experience instead of projecting all flaws upon the user. It's an operating system. Most people aren't interested in making it their hobby or full time job.
josephg 2y ago
I use Linux mint at home. It usually works great, but it definitely needs tinkering to keep the system working. Just in the last few months: - My nvidia drivers stopped working because the drivers I had (which didn’t auto update) apparently weren’t kept up to date with the kernel (which had auto updates enabled). - My computer wouldn’t boot at all last week after I disconnected an external usb drive running zfs. It showed the logo and just kind of stalled out. I had to use a recovery grub setting to disable zfs from the boot process. This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. My rodecaster doesn’t have all its audio interfaces show up in the default audio devices list. HDMI audio broke last year from a kernel update. IntelliJ stopped scaling according to the HiDPI mode I have set up. And so on. It’s fine. It’s worth it for me. But it’s definitely less reliable than macOS or windows.
- smolder 2y ago
  > This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. Yes, the free OS is occasionally worse than the trillion dollar companies product.
  - nehal3m 2y ago
    For this audience these are inconveniences. For others it’s unusable.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      OTOH windows OSes autosuicide themselves. On my works laptop I had initially kept the corporate windows install on the original drive and installed Fedora on a second non drive. I would fire up the windows machine once every other week for a few hours so it gets its updates. But every single time I would enter the firmware settings or boot Fedora the OS bootlocker would lock itself and force me to go to https://aka.ms/recoverykey https://aka.ms/recoverykey to get a recovery key the next time I booted windows. Until one day it started not booting even after giving the correct key. Bitlocker basically bricked itself. So don't tell me that windows is more usable. And this is even without tackling the non functionning parts of windows when it accepts to boot, like the broken keyboard for anyone not using english language that Microsoft never even tried to fix in more than 30 years. People used to laugh about a sliding date for linux to be "read for thr desktop" but windows has never been ready either.
rty32 2y ago
Nah, give me a freshly installed Windows 11, I can be productive and start actually working on things within five minutes. Give me any Linux distribution, not without an hour. I say this as a professional software engineer who works on a Linux VM 8 hours a day plus off work.
- legends2k 2y ago
  Can you give some example tasks that you do on both OSes? Just curious to know how the difference is so stark.
yonatan8070 2y ago
When I started at my current job I asked if I can install Linux on my work machine, and was relieved to hear a "yes" I then booted up Fedora KDE 40, and installed it with 0 issues or tinkering. Have been using it ever since and it has been working flawlessly.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
It really depends on what hardware you are working with. HiDPI support is more than a bit sketchy still, especially on nvidia, and especially if you attach multiple screens to the computer and don't want all of them to have the same scaling. Webcam support is also still quite sketchy. It'll work, but actually configuring the thing to e.g. select the resolution or adjust the white balance, feels like a regression to 2004.

lkirkwood 2y ago

I used to feel this way but having installed Ubuntu on a friend's old laptop for him, it's crazy the amount of stuff you forget you do because it's second nature. I certainly think it's too far to say "absurd".

Aleklart 2y ago

Installing codecs, drivers (several times by different guides usually) and disabling Red Hat telemetry from command line is what user have to do to make it usable for something more than running neofetch

TaylorAlexander 2y ago
Since we are comparing to Windows, the "disabling Red Hat telemetry from command line" step doesn't really count, since Windows out of the box is loaded with telemetry.
- smolder 2y ago
  Windows is practically spyware now, all they're doing with the platform is enshittification. WSL was the last "good" windows feature and it's just an Embrace Extend Extinguish play.

Simran-B 2y ago

I have to disagree to a limited extent. I recently tried to boot multiple current Linux distros from a USB stick for evaluation and all of them had issues. Fedora wasn't usable at all due to lack of space because it lost the RAM partition in the boot process and had severe graphical glitches. Ubuntu had issues with the Intel iGPU and installing drivers for the dGPU isn't possible in a live boot without persistence (and Ubuntu showed a blank error message when using the GUI for switching drivers). It also somehow managed to trigger secure boot so that I had to use a recovery key to get my data back. Zorin can download Nvidia drivers during boot and thus worked decently but the system would randomly freeze and had graphical artifacts when using the desktop cube. There were also other issues on Ubuntu and Zorin like with the permissions for bubble wrap to make Flatpaks work and so on. If it already requires tinkering before installing or with a completely fresh OS, then I find it hard to believe that desktop Linux can be a daily driver.

walteweiss 2y ago
[dead]

meibo 2y ago

Not sure what hardware you are doing this on, but installing Fedora 40 on my mid-range gaming PC from 2022 last month got me flickering windows (it only ships with a Wayland session) and broken sound out of the box. My screens still don't both turn on when I wake it up from sleep, if it does. If that is outside of "absurd" to you then the Linux desktop world clearly needs to keep cooking a little longer. My non-IT friends would not have been able to figure this out and I don't think they should have to.

vladvasiliu 2y ago
Up until a year or so ago, windows wouldn’t recognize the webcam of my hp-recommends-windows laptop. On a different laptop, it refused to output 4k@60 through the HP dock. After it started working, waking from sleep would be a coin toss whether I would get any image at all, or something garbled. I’m “IT” and had no idea how to fix these. Even installing all the provided oem drivers made no difference. A new development is Windows using the us English layout, although it’s not enabled. I have to add and remove it to fix it. Everything worked perfectly on Linux since day 1.
- sfn42 2y ago
  Sounds more like a HP issue than a Windows issue to me.
  - amlib 2y ago
    Windows machines have the benefit of official Windows support where the integrator worked out the kinks and built-in a bunch of hacks to fix whatever half-broken things the manufacturer cobbled together. Linux machines don't usually have such affordances, you just install it on a random _Windows_ machine and hope it works. It's actually amazing it works well 90% of the time.
  - vladvasiliu 2y ago
    How's it different from meibo's post? If the hardware is well supported by the OS, everything works fine. If it's not, you're gonna have a bad time. My point is that you can't say Xos is great because it works well on this particular hardware.

bob1029 2y ago

I spent a solid 2 days trying to get Ubuntu Server working on a WRX80 threadripper machine. Never once saw the actual installation process. Day 3, I grab an image of windows server 2022. It boots instantly to the install process and just works. I know you can make Linux work, but the amount of suffering is still unbelievable compared to the alternatives in many cases. By the time I get the Linux thing figured out, I'll have forgotten about what it was I wanted to originally build. I wouldn't mind a bit of tinkering, but this is sad. I happily pay Microsoft if this is the alternative.

smolder 2y ago
This is such MS propaganda I'm flabbergasted. Windows is a joke OS at present day.
- bob1029 2y ago
  How has your experience been installing Linux on the platform I described?
  - Numerlor 2y ago
    The double standards when discussing Linux are ridiculous, every issue people have with Linux must be because they're incompetent and using windows must mean you're fighting the OS every second
    - kylebenzle 2y ago
      It's not a double standard but the simple truth. It is true, if you are having a problem with Linux 9 time out of 10 it's possible it fix the problem, aka, you are the problem. My limited experience with paying for an OS means if there's a problem your just out of luck.
      - bob1029 2y ago
        > you are the problem. I wonder if Linux advocates could take a small amount of ownership over the user/customer experience instead of projecting all flaws upon the user. It's an operating system. Most people aren't interested in making it their hobby or full time job.

josephg 2y ago

I use Linux mint at home. It usually works great, but it definitely needs tinkering to keep the system working. Just in the last few months: - My nvidia drivers stopped working because the drivers I had (which didn’t auto update) apparently weren’t kept up to date with the kernel (which had auto updates enabled). - My computer wouldn’t boot at all last week after I disconnected an external usb drive running zfs. It showed the logo and just kind of stalled out. I had to use a recovery grub setting to disable zfs from the boot process. This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. My rodecaster doesn’t have all its audio interfaces show up in the default audio devices list. HDMI audio broke last year from a kernel update. IntelliJ stopped scaling according to the HiDPI mode I have set up. And so on. It’s fine. It’s worth it for me. But it’s definitely less reliable than macOS or windows.

smolder 2y ago
> This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. Yes, the free OS is occasionally worse than the trillion dollar companies product.
- nehal3m 2y ago
  For this audience these are inconveniences. For others it’s unusable.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    OTOH windows OSes autosuicide themselves. On my works laptop I had initially kept the corporate windows install on the original drive and installed Fedora on a second non drive. I would fire up the windows machine once every other week for a few hours so it gets its updates. But every single time I would enter the firmware settings or boot Fedora the OS bootlocker would lock itself and force me to go to https://aka.ms/recoverykey https://aka.ms/recoverykey to get a recovery key the next time I booted windows. Until one day it started not booting even after giving the correct key. Bitlocker basically bricked itself. So don't tell me that windows is more usable. And this is even without tackling the non functionning parts of windows when it accepts to boot, like the broken keyboard for anyone not using english language that Microsoft never even tried to fix in more than 30 years. People used to laugh about a sliding date for linux to be "read for thr desktop" but windows has never been ready either.

rty32 2y ago

Nah, give me a freshly installed Windows 11, I can be productive and start actually working on things within five minutes. Give me any Linux distribution, not without an hour. I say this as a professional software engineer who works on a Linux VM 8 hours a day plus off work.

legends2k 2y ago
Can you give some example tasks that you do on both OSes? Just curious to know how the difference is so stark.

yonatan8070 2y ago

When I started at my current job I asked if I can install Linux on my work machine, and was relieved to hear a "yes" I then booted up Fedora KDE 40, and installed it with 0 issues or tinkering. Have been using it ever since and it has been working flawlessly.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

It really depends on what hardware you are working with. HiDPI support is more than a bit sketchy still, especially on nvidia, and especially if you attach multiple screens to the computer and don't want all of them to have the same scaling. Webcam support is also still quite sketchy. It'll work, but actually configuring the thing to e.g. select the resolution or adjust the white balance, feels like a regression to 2004.