4 ms·

It’s also a good system for people who don’t have time to hack on things that aren’t related to their core interests. Like me. I stopped building my own PCs in

It’s also a good system for people who don’t have time to hack on things that aren’t related to their core interests. Like me. I stopped building my own PCs in 2001 (when I switched to laptops almost exclusively) and stopped fighting with both Windows and Linux desktop configuration horrors in 2006 (when I switched to Mac OS X as my host system). I have things that I think are far more interesting to work on than worrying about hardware compatibility. If I ever reach a point on Apple hardware + software where I can’t hack on the things that I want to hack on, then I will leave it. But as of right now, it gets out of my way and lets me do those things that I want to do. (Some of the various Linux distros have gotten better about this, but they aren’t there yet, even for me—and definitely not for my wife.)

dingaling 12y ago
> I have things that I think are far more interesting to work on than worrying about hardware compatibility. I've never used an Apple system, but I have the impression that only a subset of third-party hardware is compatible. Is that accurate? I've perhaps deduced incorrectly from the number of one-star Amazon reviews that decry 'lack of Apple drivers'. To me that would be frustrating since there are only two parties that can resolve such an issue ( Apple and the vendor ) rather than in OSS world where there's a chance of reverse-engineering a driver.
- pdpi 12y ago
  This might or might not be an issue. Personally, I've never encountered it.
- halostatue 12y ago
  I suspect that it’s accurate to a point. Most of the hardware that I use is also limited and/or works through reasonably well-defined interfaces. I’m a software guy, so I’m mostly not trying to plug in hardware that does fancy things. (I will note that it works just fine with the MicroView Arduino I backed on Kickstarter.)
davidw 12y ago
I've been buying Dells with Ubuntu for something like 10 years, and once in a while have a minor annoyance with something, but not more than I see people complaining about on twitter with their Macs. And I have had occasion to hack on low-level stuff like kernel drivers, now and then, so knowing the whole system well because I use it every day has been an advantage.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  I'm astounded by the stories of misery I hear from computer people trying to install Linux in the past 5 years. I agree that an appliance like Apple or Google produces might be more useful for them: in the worst case, they can just send it back to the company, and since it's going to be replaced every 1.5-2 years anyway, all problems are going to seem more ephemeral at that rate of consumerism. I'm shocked at hearing those complaints from people that want to be hired to use computers, though. If I (as a developer) couldn't handle installing a post-2010 Linux system within a few hours, I'd be ashamed, not indignant.
  - zanny 12y ago
    Well, some chipsets, gpus, etc are just broken in the kernel and do not work, and you have to put hours in trying to fix them. I recently built an OpenSuse box for a client, and since there is no "good" motherboard manufacturer for Linux, I have to just randomly hope whichever one I get works. I've gotten Gigabyte, MSI, Asrock, and ASUS boards in the past. Of those, only Asrock supports dhcp online updates to the firmware, which is nice considering most of them supply some shitty proprietary firmware installer on Windows without firmware imgs. So I went with an Asrock board. Now, I know from experience Asrock boards wipe their EFI boot menu when you update the firmware, so you need a thumb drive to boot into a Linux to readd your OS to the boot menu. Their proprietary EFI gui is all right, better than ASUS' in my book. Problem is the board came with a mini-pcie slot, which did come with an Atheros NIC, but something in that pipeline (board -> PCI -> NIC) meant that handshakes would always time on when attaching to wifi. Dmesg was never useful, it would just keep retrying requests without getting responses. And then sometimes it works, randomly. It is probably an electrical problem somewhere along the chain, but considering it was just a perky extra rather than an important part of the system, I'd rather not go through the pain in the ass of RMAing a board to get on back that might work. I think fundamentally the problem is that unless you buy from Zareason / Thinkpenguin / System76 (in the US, that does not have consumer protection laws that mandate systems be made available without OSes like in Europe) you are stuck building your own, and there is no computer you can assemble that whole stack has Linux support. I know that Mushkin and Kingston have SSD firmware updaters for Linux. AMD and Intel obviously support Linux. RAM vendors do not need to care about OS, that is the firmwares problem. But not a single motherboard vendor supports Linux, and that is a real problem.

dingaling 12y ago

> I have things that I think are far more interesting to work on than worrying about hardware compatibility. I've never used an Apple system, but I have the impression that only a subset of third-party hardware is compatible. Is that accurate? I've perhaps deduced incorrectly from the number of one-star Amazon reviews that decry 'lack of Apple drivers'. To me that would be frustrating since there are only two parties that can resolve such an issue ( Apple and the vendor ) rather than in OSS world where there's a chance of reverse-engineering a driver.

pdpi 12y ago
This might or might not be an issue. Personally, I've never encountered it.
halostatue 12y ago
I suspect that it’s accurate to a point. Most of the hardware that I use is also limited and/or works through reasonably well-defined interfaces. I’m a software guy, so I’m mostly not trying to plug in hardware that does fancy things. (I will note that it works just fine with the MicroView Arduino I backed on Kickstarter.)

davidw 12y ago

I've been buying Dells with Ubuntu for something like 10 years, and once in a while have a minor annoyance with something, but not more than I see people complaining about on twitter with their Macs. And I have had occasion to hack on low-level stuff like kernel drivers, now and then, so knowing the whole system well because I use it every day has been an advantage.

pessimizer 12y ago
I'm astounded by the stories of misery I hear from computer people trying to install Linux in the past 5 years. I agree that an appliance like Apple or Google produces might be more useful for them: in the worst case, they can just send it back to the company, and since it's going to be replaced every 1.5-2 years anyway, all problems are going to seem more ephemeral at that rate of consumerism. I'm shocked at hearing those complaints from people that want to be hired to use computers, though. If I (as a developer) couldn't handle installing a post-2010 Linux system within a few hours, I'd be ashamed, not indignant.
- zanny 12y ago
  Well, some chipsets, gpus, etc are just broken in the kernel and do not work, and you have to put hours in trying to fix them. I recently built an OpenSuse box for a client, and since there is no "good" motherboard manufacturer for Linux, I have to just randomly hope whichever one I get works. I've gotten Gigabyte, MSI, Asrock, and ASUS boards in the past. Of those, only Asrock supports dhcp online updates to the firmware, which is nice considering most of them supply some shitty proprietary firmware installer on Windows without firmware imgs. So I went with an Asrock board. Now, I know from experience Asrock boards wipe their EFI boot menu when you update the firmware, so you need a thumb drive to boot into a Linux to readd your OS to the boot menu. Their proprietary EFI gui is all right, better than ASUS' in my book. Problem is the board came with a mini-pcie slot, which did come with an Atheros NIC, but something in that pipeline (board -> PCI -> NIC) meant that handshakes would always time on when attaching to wifi. Dmesg was never useful, it would just keep retrying requests without getting responses. And then sometimes it works, randomly. It is probably an electrical problem somewhere along the chain, but considering it was just a perky extra rather than an important part of the system, I'd rather not go through the pain in the ass of RMAing a board to get on back that might work. I think fundamentally the problem is that unless you buy from Zareason / Thinkpenguin / System76 (in the US, that does not have consumer protection laws that mandate systems be made available without OSes like in Europe) you are stuck building your own, and there is no computer you can assemble that whole stack has Linux support. I know that Mushkin and Kingston have SSD firmware updaters for Linux. AMD and Intel obviously support Linux. RAM vendors do not need to care about OS, that is the firmwares problem. But not a single motherboard vendor supports Linux, and that is a real problem.