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points by bajard 4 days ago | 0 comments

Linux: Install and use. Windows: Fight 3 days with the installer. Spend 4 weeks tweaking it... And do it all again after any random update.

[–] the__alchemist 4 days ago

This is a broad generalization, and inconsistent with my experience. Especially notable as Linux refers to a diverse family of operating systems.

[–] 8note 4 days ago

youve missed the joke, that the descriptions used to be swapped

[–] vor_ 4 days ago

Well, I mean, they still are for most of the public.

[–] the__alchemist 4 days ago

Sorry - I think you're right. I had a hard time telling with several of the early comments in this thread. (The new ones are more serious) What's that rule about it being tough to tell on the internet?

[–] anal_reactor 4 days ago

Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.

Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.

Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.

Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.

Day 44: $DEVICE works.

Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.

In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.

Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.

[–] jswelker 4 days ago

Debian+xfce or even lxqt are about as plug and play as you can get with UX straight out of 2002 in the best way. Hell it probably even runs on 2002 hardware.

[–] anal_reactor 4 days ago

Linux users who ignore critique and claim "yeah bro but have you tried MY distro" are like potheads "yeah bro but have you tried MY strain".

[–] jswelker 4 days ago

Ok my guy have fun grinding that axe. I don't care pick any distro and it's gonna be more stable and less user hostile than Windows. Meanwhile tell me how Windows 11 is actually great and we are all using it wrong. All we need is the right magic strain of regedits and post install cleanup scripts. Brb let me send those steps to my grandma for her PC so it stops uploading all her files to the cloud every 5 minutes.

[–] hexasquid 4 days ago

I particularly liked the presence of windows, .WMA and xbox controllers in this.

[–] anal_reactor 3 days ago

Well, I was moving away from Windows so it's natural I wanted to replace things I had working on Windows.

Lossless WMA is an ancient exotic format so yeah, fair to push back. But Xbox controllers are the standard gaming controllers so there's no excuse. The rest of my complaints are Linux fuckery.

BTW my keyboard is also from Microsoft and someone did all the difficult things in the driver except one simple last step, which is like two extra lines of code. There are like ten forks of this driver on GitHub, each of them adding the same two lines.

The driving wheel is NOT Microsoft. The whole software stack had a critical bug that made the wheel unusable after a few minutes of gameplay. People worked on this for a long time. It finally got fixed, a few months after I joined the Linux party. BTW the Linux driver/userland tool implemented correctly LEDs on the wheel EXCEPT they were missing a parser of a file format that took me a day to manually implement and connect. It would take me at least a week though to make it a quality contribution. If I need to redo this for a new game, I'll publish my code.

I feel like there's a common theme that Linux usually almost works and for every functionality you need to spend a day fixing it because the developers did do all the difficult work, but then either botched UI, failed to implement non-core functionalities, or didn't test less common use cases. When my Fedora refused to update until I removed Wine, the official response was along "your program your problem".

[–] Good4boothee 4 days ago

After another "Year of the Linux Desktop", the "It works for me on $DISTRO" is still very common reply in forum support threads. In past I hoped Canonical will make Ubuntu the obvious (and default) choice, but it never went beyond very popular distribution. And they already have some controversial decisions on record, they literally experimented with ads in "start menu" before MS.

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

"Year of the Linux Desktop" is already here, however most folks won't accept how it ended up being delivered.

WSL and Virtualization Framework.

[–] prmoustache 4 days ago

> Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable. > > Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.

Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.

> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.

Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.

The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.

The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.

[–] com2kid 4 days ago

> Linux: Install and use.

I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.

I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".

Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.

[–] samiv 4 days ago

Unfortunately this is still the reality of many Linux distros. On every update something breaks.

Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.

Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.

Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.

Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!

(And I'm a Linux user since red hat 7.2)

[–] anthk 4 days ago

I stopped to care since Flatpak. Pull down the same dependencies everywhere. Oh, disk usage, right. It's 2026, and BTRFS either compresses stuff and/or deduplicates.

[–] anthk 4 days ago

Get an inmutable distro. For everything else, Flatpak. For gaming, AppImages are not sandboxed but you can always create a user account for gaming and logout/login again to avoid nasty surprises.

For instance, I use RecompLauncher as an AppImage, but I launch the recompilations themselves from a desktop shortcut after closing the launcher to get every CPU cycle for the game.

[–] tom_alexander 4 days ago

Both AMD and Intel have open source graphics drivers which are upstreamed into the Linux kernel, so that situation would be impossible with an AMD or Intel graphics card. Any driver issues are a pain that nvidia decided to inflict on you.

[–] prmoustache 4 days ago

I am not sure you know what you are talking about. What is the "alt-tab service" you are speaking about. There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.

Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?

Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.

[–] com2kid 3 days ago

> There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.

Cosmic desktop uses a separate executable just for alt-tab. Currently there is a bug where sometimes it falls to grab ahold of a surface when the system wakes from sleep, and the process dies, and then alt-tab doesn't work.

> Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?

If I run my distro's updater, and I then reboot when it asks me to reboot, I expect my system to properly start up.

I've had that not happen so many times now that before rebooting I ask Claude if rebooting is safe.

Most recently I was informed that my kernel had been updated, my old graphics driver uninstalled, but the installation of the new graphics driver had not proceeded as expected. Mind you the updater reported everything as a-ok.

[–] prmoustache 2 days ago

> I was informed that my kernel had been updated, my old graphics driver uninstalled, but the installation of the new graphics driver had not proceeded as expected. Mind you the updater reported everything as a-ok.

It may have been ok anyway. Without further details we can't say. Most drivers are included with mainline kernels so your "old graphic driver" may have been an out of distribution gfx driver (nvidia?) that doesn't support new version of kernel for example or said driver may have been replaced by something else with a different name.

[–] com2kid 1 day ago

The driver binaries for the old kernel got cleaned up and new ones never got downloaded. I'd have been stuck on the CLI, which wouldn't have been the end of the world, I'd just have to pull the drivers down myself.

But not an experience for non-technical friends.

I am using Nvidia so I have to be very careful. I regularly run into issues with system vs flatpak driver versions getting out of sync and losing acceleration in most of my apps. Thankfully it has happened so many times now I know how to resolve it quickly.

[–] switchbak 4 days ago

I installed it on a laptop for a friend after not having used it since the mid 2000’s. What a piece of flaming dogshit that whole platform is. How is this the output of a multi billion dollar company?

Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.

There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.

[–] nukanse 4 days ago

You just made me check the CNN website. It had black font on black background. Run by incompetents.

[–] toast0 4 days ago

Looks fine to me?

https://lite.cnn.com/

Sometimes, some articles don't have content, but eh. Works for me.

NPR's site is nice too:

https://text.npr.org/

[–] pteraspidomorph 4 days ago

It took me longer than 3 days to set Linux up for my (multi-specialty) needs, but I can see absolutely no reason anyone would ever want to go back to Windows at this point. You know what else lets me customize my menus? KDE.

My last few years of Windows were more frustrating than Linux has ever been. Everything locked down and a never ending string of crashes and issues that are impossible to properly diagnose or repair. At least on Linux, when there's an issue, it's clear what it is and where to report it.

(Disclaimer: I have an AMD GPU and I don't play competitive multiplayer games. All other games have just worked so far.)

[–] mihaaly 4 days ago

I have some Lenovo 'temporary UI removal tool' (don't remember its name exactly, do not care that much to look for it from this Mac) that comes back with each update. The tool, as my AI agent explains, regularly (24h) wakes the computer from hibernation (yes, I took care of being that available, I need that, despite as a MS SE says: they know me better than I, so they removed that possibility only coming back by tweaks) to check if the post-installation temporary UI something is still there, and removes if it is there. But keeps running - it is a service or what -, still waking after removal, every 24h, including weekends. Checking if the already removed UI thingy that it removed is still there. They then have some service restoring service too watching if the UI removal service was stopped/disabled/removed, restoring that. One need to kill/unset both through command line to have some remedy. Which both come back at each Windows update. Yes, it is Lenovo. But yes, it is Windows delivering this way sometimes just few days apart with frequent 'updates'.

[–] zamalek 4 days ago

And yet you still hear "Linux is only free if your time is worthless."

It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).

Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._

[–] IshKebab 4 days ago

IMO that is still kind of true. Windows 11 LTSC gives a totally bloat free experience, the only downside is you can only reasonably get it through grey market cdkey sites.

Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)