Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The compromise would be to use non-hobbyist Linux.

I have never spent a weekend fixing a problem. The worst I can remember was when an update early version of Ubuntu broke X Windows and the update had run on multiple machines in a small office so needed to be fixed multiple time, and there was a delay while they fixed the problem IIRC. Still, it was a few hours.

Even now, using Manjaro which is relatively likely to have problems, I have had no major issues so far.

I have not used Macs so cannot compare, but IMO Linux compares very favourably with Windows.

Mac users I know rave about it, but every time they come up with a specific example of why they are better it turns out to be something like functionality other OSes have. Sometimes Macs have the advantage of being preconfigured (e.g. copy and paste between devices required installing software on both and pairing - but a 10 min one off when you buy a new device is acceptable to me).



I never had problems using Linux as a system.

It's the desktop space that annoys me.

- Virtual Desktop per monitor? Nope, because Xorg didn't support it back then. And now it's a 10 year bug on the Kde bugtracker.

- A Dock? It worked ok. Until Wayland came and everything broke. It's supported now, but you have to clone the latest git commit of the biggest dock project which is not almost abandoned. And it breaks while compiling. A lot.

- Global Menu? The support is all over the place.

- Fractional scaling? It works. But in MacOS (with the help of an app, I admit) I can have incredible granularity.

On top of that, add the generally inferior hardware revolving a laptop, aside CPU, storage and Ram.

The MacOS desktop feels like a Gnome2 in an alternate universe where the devs never made bad decisions, and things like Wayland (1) never occurred.

(1) Not because the project itself, but the act of breaking compatibility and passing blame to other people has sent decades of FOSS development and manpower down the drain.


I know Linux since Slackware 2.0, have used most well known commercial UNIX systems, and rather use GNU/Linux on VMs, instead of laptops, as I had enough of this.

Last attempt to try otherwise was a UEFI bios, without fallback to legacy BIOS, that just couldn't get along with whatever top distro from Distrowatch I would try to.

Apple, Google, Microsoft walled gardens are more confortable to stay on, and as long as I can have some kind of ISO C and ISO C++ support for everything else that depends upon them, I am good.


Never had such problems.

That said, my current laptop came with Linux preinstalled so I knew I would not have hardware issues.

I would also rather have one off issues to install than unpredictable issues later on. Subjective preference, of course. I have had lots of issues with Android. Never at the start, but with app upgrades.


My ASUS 1215B EEE PC, the netbook generation, came with Linux as typical of them, had wlan problems, and after the AMD driver was replaced by the open source one, it never achieved the same OpenGL capabilities as it had originally, and hardware video decoding never worked after Flash was gone.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: