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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 drive

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.
- legends2k 2y ago
  I agree with your sentiment and I use Linux religiously too. Respect it for what it has accomplished and continues to. Most of my friends don't care. They're into productivity more than passion for computing in general. They don't care one way or another. Tomorrow if there's another proprietary OS that makes their work easier they'll easily pay for that OS and move on. Just saying that our sentiment isn't shared by everyone.
- jahnu 2y ago
  It’s not free when it’s costing me time.
  - bob1029 2y ago
    A licensed copy of the most feature-packed Windows Server Datacenter edition will run you ~$6k (16 core license). Now, assume your hourly consulting rate is $200. You would only have to spend about 40 hours of time tinkering on linux before windows would have made more sense for the time/money equation. Frustration is another economy that I think is even more important for getting things done. How badly do you actually want to build? Maintaining morale through the hard bits of the target problem domain is usually already a struggle. Why do you want to be fighting with boot loaders, drivers and arguments on various forums on top of all of that?
    - snozolli 2y ago
      A licensed copy of the most feature-packed Windows Server Datacenter edition will run you ~$6k (16 core license). Kind of a weird basis for comparison when everyone seems to be talking about the desktop experience. I love Linux for servers, but not for the desktop.
      - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
        I agree. But to continue the point - even if I wanted to spend 40 gross hours of billable time at $200/hr for a single installation of a server OS, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right OS for the goal I'm trying to accomplish, no matter how bad or excellent the configuration experience happens to be. Conversations about the utility, costs, and feature sets of Windows vs. Linux. vs. macOS tend to ignore the reality that business conditions often dictate that you must use one or the other for a given use case. Sometimes you do have the option, and if you've already got an appreciable investment in one, then you tend to select for that one almost by default.
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    That's not how "free" works at all... Free just means it did not cost you any money, a free hammer does not also imply a free new roof or whatever you want to build with it. Linux is a tool, men use tools, be a man and use Linux.
vladvasiliu 2y ago
Meh, this looks like a YMMV kinda situation. I never had to "tinker" with anything since I installed Arch on the machine on which I'm typing this, almost four years ago. Last week I reinstalled Windows on my work machine because the TPM was reset because I opened the case and all the MS account thingies got borked beyond repair. Now there are a bunch of borken things. Like icons randomly disappearing in the taskbar (the button is still there and functional, but no icon). And every other time I boot it, something messes up the input language settings. It gets set to US English, although that layout doesn't show up in the enabled languages in the settings app. I have to add it and remove it to unbreak this. And then there's my gaming box, which worked OK for a few months, but now something happened with the BitLocker screen and there's no more text, just the blue screen. If I type in my pin, it actually works.
- massysett 2y ago
  Installing Arch is one big tinker session. The install instructions have “To verify the boot mode, check the UEFI bitness” as one of the first steps.
  - jcelerier 2y ago
    There's a thousand of graphical frontend installer for Arch and Arch-derivatives, like cachyOS, endeavour, etc. Hell, it even has an archinstall script nowadays. I installed it a couple times by hand for fun but if you want a rolling-release Linux distro that uses pacman there are many ways as easy as Ubuntu
prmoustache 2y ago
Maybe you are using the incorrect distro model for you and would benefit of a slower release distro? I am fine with fedora on my main and professional laptop because they are used almost daily and then are kept updated regularly. And honestly I had one small breakage in 10 years and I could just boot with the previously installed kernel for a week until the problem was fixed so it wasn't that big of a deal. I have another computer that serve as a streaming box in my leaving room connected to my video projector. I use this one much less frequently, especially in summer so I don't want to have to spend a lot of time doing updates. For this one I decided to install almalinux. Since it is a very long term support distro it only receive security updates and major bug fixes so it is very reliable, the kernel version is well tested and the frequency of system update is very low. In the past, people would have complained these distro were lacking important newer versions for their own usage and needs. This is not an issue anymore with flatpaks, container tools, distrobox, VMs + that trend of dev/devopa software installed on your homedir directly via curl | bash or some versions manager like nvm, sdkman, pyenv. Nowadays you can use the very latest versions of software on top of a dinosaur.
- josephg 2y ago
  Maybe. But personally, I hate running all my actual software in docker or a VM. It chews through drive space, slows down IO, and it makes sharing files around a headache. (Like, run tool X on directory Y - oh, oops - the tool and the data are in different containers. Ugh what was the command to fix that?). I'd much rather a "native" linux distro that has a reasonably modern kernel, with support for io_uring and recent nvidia drivers. And I want a good, modern window manager with hidpi support. And I need to be able to install modern compilers, toolchains and software - like rustc, intellij, nodejs, spotify, firefox, davinci resolve, zfs, automatic1111 and so on. Maybe these problems wouldn't show up as much with another distro? But if I spend time distro shopping to avoid tinkering with mint, I'm worried I'll end up wasting more time doing that than I would save. Most of the bugs I've run into with mint are actually bugs in ubuntu, that mint is based on. Is fedora / arch / etc really more stable than ubuntu? If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
easyThrowaway 2y ago
I wonder how many developers at Red hat or Canonical actually "dogfood" their OSes at stock desktop configuration, instead of immediately going the "pro" route of basically using a custom kernel, disabling autoupdates, using a barebone DE, removing Pulseaudio / Wayland etc. I've seen posts like yours a million times, and they can always be summed up as "no mantainer actually uses the default setup for more than a few hours before removing anything that could cause a conflict between nominally unrelated packages".
- opan 2y ago
  Somehow I doubt the default setup has nvidia (with proprietary drivers at least) and ext4 in mind.

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.
legends2k 2y ago
I agree with your sentiment and I use Linux religiously too. Respect it for what it has accomplished and continues to. Most of my friends don't care. They're into productivity more than passion for computing in general. They don't care one way or another. Tomorrow if there's another proprietary OS that makes their work easier they'll easily pay for that OS and move on. Just saying that our sentiment isn't shared by everyone.
jahnu 2y ago
It’s not free when it’s costing me time.
- bob1029 2y ago
  A licensed copy of the most feature-packed Windows Server Datacenter edition will run you ~$6k (16 core license). Now, assume your hourly consulting rate is $200. You would only have to spend about 40 hours of time tinkering on linux before windows would have made more sense for the time/money equation. Frustration is another economy that I think is even more important for getting things done. How badly do you actually want to build? Maintaining morale through the hard bits of the target problem domain is usually already a struggle. Why do you want to be fighting with boot loaders, drivers and arguments on various forums on top of all of that?
  - snozolli 2y ago
    A licensed copy of the most feature-packed Windows Server Datacenter edition will run you ~$6k (16 core license). Kind of a weird basis for comparison when everyone seems to be talking about the desktop experience. I love Linux for servers, but not for the desktop.
    - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
      I agree. But to continue the point - even if I wanted to spend 40 gross hours of billable time at $200/hr for a single installation of a server OS, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right OS for the goal I'm trying to accomplish, no matter how bad or excellent the configuration experience happens to be. Conversations about the utility, costs, and feature sets of Windows vs. Linux. vs. macOS tend to ignore the reality that business conditions often dictate that you must use one or the other for a given use case. Sometimes you do have the option, and if you've already got an appreciable investment in one, then you tend to select for that one almost by default.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  That's not how "free" works at all... Free just means it did not cost you any money, a free hammer does not also imply a free new roof or whatever you want to build with it. Linux is a tool, men use tools, be a man and use Linux.

vladvasiliu 2y ago

Meh, this looks like a YMMV kinda situation. I never had to "tinker" with anything since I installed Arch on the machine on which I'm typing this, almost four years ago. Last week I reinstalled Windows on my work machine because the TPM was reset because I opened the case and all the MS account thingies got borked beyond repair. Now there are a bunch of borken things. Like icons randomly disappearing in the taskbar (the button is still there and functional, but no icon). And every other time I boot it, something messes up the input language settings. It gets set to US English, although that layout doesn't show up in the enabled languages in the settings app. I have to add it and remove it to unbreak this. And then there's my gaming box, which worked OK for a few months, but now something happened with the BitLocker screen and there's no more text, just the blue screen. If I type in my pin, it actually works.

massysett 2y ago
Installing Arch is one big tinker session. The install instructions have “To verify the boot mode, check the UEFI bitness” as one of the first steps.
- jcelerier 2y ago
  There's a thousand of graphical frontend installer for Arch and Arch-derivatives, like cachyOS, endeavour, etc. Hell, it even has an archinstall script nowadays. I installed it a couple times by hand for fun but if you want a rolling-release Linux distro that uses pacman there are many ways as easy as Ubuntu

prmoustache 2y ago

Maybe you are using the incorrect distro model for you and would benefit of a slower release distro? I am fine with fedora on my main and professional laptop because they are used almost daily and then are kept updated regularly. And honestly I had one small breakage in 10 years and I could just boot with the previously installed kernel for a week until the problem was fixed so it wasn't that big of a deal. I have another computer that serve as a streaming box in my leaving room connected to my video projector. I use this one much less frequently, especially in summer so I don't want to have to spend a lot of time doing updates. For this one I decided to install almalinux. Since it is a very long term support distro it only receive security updates and major bug fixes so it is very reliable, the kernel version is well tested and the frequency of system update is very low. In the past, people would have complained these distro were lacking important newer versions for their own usage and needs. This is not an issue anymore with flatpaks, container tools, distrobox, VMs + that trend of dev/devopa software installed on your homedir directly via curl | bash or some versions manager like nvm, sdkman, pyenv. Nowadays you can use the very latest versions of software on top of a dinosaur.

josephg 2y ago
Maybe. But personally, I hate running all my actual software in docker or a VM. It chews through drive space, slows down IO, and it makes sharing files around a headache. (Like, run tool X on directory Y - oh, oops - the tool and the data are in different containers. Ugh what was the command to fix that?). I'd much rather a "native" linux distro that has a reasonably modern kernel, with support for io_uring and recent nvidia drivers. And I want a good, modern window manager with hidpi support. And I need to be able to install modern compilers, toolchains and software - like rustc, intellij, nodejs, spotify, firefox, davinci resolve, zfs, automatic1111 and so on. Maybe these problems wouldn't show up as much with another distro? But if I spend time distro shopping to avoid tinkering with mint, I'm worried I'll end up wasting more time doing that than I would save. Most of the bugs I've run into with mint are actually bugs in ubuntu, that mint is based on. Is fedora / arch / etc really more stable than ubuntu? If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.

easyThrowaway 2y ago

I wonder how many developers at Red hat or Canonical actually "dogfood" their OSes at stock desktop configuration, instead of immediately going the "pro" route of basically using a custom kernel, disabling autoupdates, using a barebone DE, removing Pulseaudio / Wayland etc. I've seen posts like yours a million times, and they can always be summed up as "no mantainer actually uses the default setup for more than a few hours before removing anything that could cause a conflict between nominally unrelated packages".

opan 2y ago
Somehow I doubt the default setup has nvidia (with proprietary drivers at least) and ext4 in mind.