Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
Inversely, I've ran KDE on bleeding edge for three years now and have only ran into a handful of bugs, and nothing critical that required me to drop to a terminal to fix. The networking issue seems particularly specific and I have never seen this occur across any of my desktop or laptops.
Im on PopOS and I had one boot problem where I had to pop in a ubuntu flash drive to run boot repair on, but that was like 3 years ago. There are definitely issues that come up sometimes when I upgrade to a new kernel version but it mundane stuff like my printer wont scan duplex. But now AI just helps me fix that stuff I don't spend too much time on it.
There's definitely some rough edges still. I wasn't ever able to get CUPS to work with the specific model of Canon imageRunner printers we had in the office. I also never need to print, so I stopped trying after it wouldn't take a few test prints.
LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.
vitro · · focus · HN ↗
cosmic_cheese · · focus · HN ↗
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
0x1ch · · focus · HN ↗
trinsic2 · · focus · HN ↗
I wrote an article on my transition [0]
[0]: <a href="https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-windows-to-linux/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
0x1ch · · focus · HN ↗
LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.