Ask HN: Why don’t you use Linux as your daily driver OS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366644

by willswire • 5 years ago

98 295 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For those of you who use macOS or Windows as your primary OS, what’s keeping you (application/feature/environment) from making the switch?

sealeck2• 5 years ago

The desktop environments are really confusing. Battery software isn't good.

noir_lord• 5 years ago

Try Cinnamon.

It is in my opinion the most cohesive linux desktop especially if you are looking for the "classic" desktop experience (which isn't to say it's dated, it has all the new bells and whistles but it's not all about them either).

reportgunner3• 5 years ago

Battery software isn't good.

Have you tried using TLP ?

sealeck2• 5 years ago

Yeah I get really confused and unsure as to whether or not it's working. I probably need to buy a laptop from a vendor with first-class Linux support TBH.

chasd00• 5 years ago

Because my Mac works just fine.

atkbrah• 5 years ago

Our company main product is a windows desktop application.

oarsinsync2• 5 years ago

iCloud Photos / Photos.app is the hardest one to go without. I can't find any equivalent software that isn't less private that has an equivalent feature set as far as ML identification and collection creation.

The backend storage is easy, it's the front end / image processing that I'm struggling with.

_notathrowaway• 5 years ago

But I do.

geppetto• 5 years ago

me too. Since 2001.

Still I run Windows occasionally when I need some specific proprietary apps that are not available on other platforms (mostly electronic design suites).

dschuessler• 5 years ago

The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable. Another comment here on HN described it as the trackpad completely disappearing from your mind. You don't have to fight it at all. You don't even think about it anymore. The cursor just becomes a natural extension of your hand.

Also, as a person working with PDF documents on a regular basis, I don't know of any application that can beat the feature set and UX of Preview.app.

These are the only two things keeping me back. If there were viable alternatives in the Linux ecosystem I'd switch in a heartbeat.

SamuelAdams2• 5 years ago

I recently upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 on my Thinkpad T490 and there are noticeable trackpad improvements. Maybe it reset my settings or maybe there are driver improvements, I’m not 100% sure. Either way the default out of the box experience is faster and snappier.

Still not on the same level as MacBooks though. But it is making progress.

haileys• 5 years ago

I've been using a Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop for a year now and it's great. Two finger scroll and right click works, but it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS.

Inertial scrolling depends on the app, but Firefox implements it well and that takes care of 80% of it for me.

garblegarble• 5 years ago

it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS.

I can highly recommend BetterTouchTool, it has a wide range of features, but one of the easiest to use is map three-finger-tap to middle click

DrAwdeOccarim2• 5 years ago

Any idea on how to adjust the minimum steps? I can't figure out how to change it in firefox running on PureOS/Gnome Wayland. Also two finger swipe for back or forward doesn't work very well using the firefox extension SwipeToNavigate.

luke2m• 5 years ago

My Lenovo Flex 5 with Fedora 34 (GNOME) has an incredibly smooth trackpad experience. Also, GNOME sushi is a useful preview.app alternative, maybe not on the same level, but you should try it. I used Xfce before getting my new laptop, but on newish hardware, GNOME is great.

settrans• 5 years ago

GNOME’s equivalent of Preview.app would be evince, which is strictly inferior to Preview, but for one singular feature: the hand tool.

In fact, GNOME is in fact my daily driver and I keep a Windows VM tucked away in case I ever need to manipulate a PDF. And even that is worse than Preview.

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

I have one of those (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400) but Elementary doesn’t let me do triple-finger drag. Can you do that with GNOME Shell?

fsflover4• 5 years ago

BoxOfRain• 5 years ago

I'll always be a Linux enthusiast, but this is one of the key things that keeps me on macOS at least some of the time. To be honest I don't think there's a reason to nail your colours to the mast with any OS, there's no reason not to use two for different tasks. I juggle macOS, Linux, and to a lesser extent FreeBSD just fine, although the context switch is much more expensive adding Windows to the mix in my experience although I expect a lot of that is down to personal taste (I'm very set in my *nix ways).

ASalazarMX4• 5 years ago

The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable

Only if you use it as your main OS. If you use a combination of Windows, Linux and MacOS, the latter's trackpad tends to do the opposite of what you expect. the first thing I do is change the vertical scroll direction so it behaves like the others.

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

Funny, I change the others because they’re clearly wrong :)

phendrenad27• 5 years ago

The direction of scroll is one small part of it. The Mac trackpad is perfectly balanced in various important areas: knowing when to reject extraneous fingers, high DPI/resolution, just the right size and shape, the same height as the rest of the laptop, feels smooth rather than some weird studded plastic nonsense, etc.

hajile2• 5 years ago

That's not mac-specific.

My Pixelbook has a better trackpad experience than my M1 Macbook and it runs on Linux (ChromeOS).

The big problem is a lack of investment by either Linux or Windows. It's such a huge quality of life improvement that I really don't understand why there's not more focus.

The real downer on Linux for me (chromebook aside) is that it's hard to get good laptop battery life and even with all the tweaks, it generally still isn't as good as my macbook.

I'd give KDE and Okular a look. There are some rough edges, but I find myself missing it when I'm on my mac.

All my desktops run Linux though as it's a beast there.

phendrenad27• 5 years ago

Does the trackpad usability steeply decline when you switch from ChromeOS to, say, Ubuntu?

kitsunesoba2• 5 years ago

It's kind of crazy how long Preview.app has been one the best at what it does. I remember it being a minor revolution back in the early 2000s, running like butter compared to the clunky-even-then Adobe Reader and handily sweeping up a few different format viewers into one app.

It's been 20 years and still no other desktop environment ships with a true equivalent.

hammyhavoc10• 5 years ago

GNOME Sushi is very impressive.

miguel-muniz2• 5 years ago

It still baffles my mind that opening PDFs in Windows 10 just opens Edge

Like they couldn't have built in a PDF reader/editor?

the_only_law• 5 years ago

I swap back and forth continuously.

Half the time I end up destroying my Linux installation to a point where I don’t feel like recovering it. I think one of the more recent times, after a botched Nvidia driver update, I ended up with some super fucked config on a LUKS encrypted volume that wouldn’t boot. Asking around, it was suggested to use an EFI shell to fix some config, but of course guess what the MB didn’t provide. I’ve managed to fuck some Windows installations as well, but it’s been some years.

There are also some things I like about Windows and I also need to have a Windows machine for work related reasons. Frankly I just don’t find myself as skilled with Linux as I should be. While I’m not going to claim to be some Windows domain expert, having used it for so long I’m normally relatively familiar with the tools/processes to go to when something goes wrong and the APIs available when I want to hack with something. On Linux I haven’t really taken the time to use and understand it to be as familiar and always have to look up what to do for simple tasks. I swear to god some systems service running a docket image/VM somehow managed to change the hostname configured in my machine and I have no idea how. All I did was run the service.

I have found myself using Linux a little more as, somewhat interestingly I have a lot of hardware that only ships Linux drivers I don’t care to try and port. Software is a different story. I recently thought I was going to get involved in a domain in which the only software available (especially for real world use) was Windows only, so I went back to Windows. That ultimately never happened though.

captainmisery• 5 years ago

I'm using Windows 10. In the past year I've tried: Manjaro, Fedora, Linux Mint and some others.

Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix.

After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.

"Well, you know, you could just SUDO this, or SUDO that."

Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that. I want a operating system that just works.

I installed Windows 10, took 10 minutes, everything works great.

fortran77• 5 years ago

Same experience. I have one Linux box set up because of a project I'm working on that needs access to USB ports and doesn't work well in virtual environments.

It's just used to compile and test some software. But I do run the recommended updates (it's a Ubuntu desktop distro) and about once a week, something breaks. (X Server and monitor support are a frequent one.) This is a very standard Supermicro Mobo with Xeon CPU.

My Windows 10 machine is extremely reliable. I set it up about 2.5 years ago and I've never had to reinstall the OS, or fix display problems, or wonder why audio stopped working, etc.

gjhh244• 5 years ago

Weird how different people have different experiences. I've had way more cases of random things breaking on Win 10 than on Linux Mint. Especially corporate Win 10 on my working machine is utterly horrible, just endless problems.

lostmsu6• 5 years ago

Are any of those problems of "unchangeable 800x600 resolution" magnitude? Could you name a few?

Alan_Dillman• 5 years ago

Yeah its funny how experiences differ.

I was at my parents,and wanted to sketch out something for my dad. So I grabbed my mom's win10 laptop, went to the blender download location, downloaded, double clicked, got a popup about updates. Whatever, not my computer, not my problem. double click again. Again with the popup. Read it carefully this time. WTF? I NEED to update their store to install a third party package?

Not my computer, not my mandate.

It looked like I could install the stores' version, but of course, its not up to date. Then some more bullshit about updating.

I shut it down and went for paper and pencil.

Yeah. I know. You don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that. But I want a operating system that does what I tell it to do.

mcv• 5 years ago

I would really like to have an OS that quietly keeps itself up to date without bugging me about it. My work Macbook and Windows laptops also bug me a lot and keep demanding reboots at inconvenient times, with popup notifications blocking things I need.

Just quietly download your updates, install them in the background, and quickly switch to the new version at some point when I'm not using it.

tluyben2• 5 years ago

Like others here I have the opposite experience: to such extend that I am actually installing Ubuntu instead of Windows10 on computers of friends who are not technical and they love that it works so well.

watermelon02• 5 years ago

What magical software and hardware combination are you using, where there are less issues on Linux than on Windows?

mlok• 5 years ago

I was attending my client conference when the invited speaker had his windows machine update right in the middle of his powerpoint presentation ! The whole room had to wait about 15 minutes for windows to finish its "important update".

(Of course he probably should have done it before and certainly ignored previous warnings. But it doesn't matter : the whole room of executive was wasting 15 minutes watching the speaker being angry at his machine)

To my knowledge, Linux would not do such a thing.

throwaway888abc• 5 years ago

Exact point, no ads, no stop-working anytime

Linux / OsX just rock solid

sam0x173• 5 years ago

I've had the opposite experience with windows lately -- start menu type to search randomly stops working and I have to restart, windows will do this weird thing where you have to rapidly click their dock icon to get them to show up or they minimize. The pre-windows-11 updates have been nothing but bugs for me.

On my Ubuntu Budgie desktop I have none of these problems. Sure I have to deal with the occasional linux challenge but nothing "buggy" stuff either works or it doesn't.

phendrenad27• 5 years ago

Are you using the Win 11 beta?

kitsunesoba2• 5 years ago

A lot of these sorts of issues tend to spring up around specific hardware.

Point in case, proprietary drivers for Broadcom wifi/bluetooth and Nvidia GPUs. I had a problem where every N rounds of updates, Fedora would just eat the Broadcom drivers and I'd get stuck tethering from my phone over USB to fix it. Similar things happened albeit much less frequently with the Nvidia drivers on various distros.

Of course the best "solution" for this is to use hardware supported well by the FOSS drivers; Intel wifi/Bluetooth, Intel/AMD graphics, etc. For desktops and a shrinking number of laptops that's an option, but people using machines with soldered components are just stuck with a crappy experience and are probably better off running Windows/macOS.

cestith2• 5 years ago

I'm just a single anecdatum, but Ubuntu from the installer through the installed system has been pretty flawless on my hybrid-GPU laptop. The GPUs aren't even from the same vendor. It's an AMD APU and an nVidia discrete GPU. The right-click menu in Gnome for every program gives me the option to start the program with the discrete graphics.

At the time I tried, the Debian installer got very confused about the video situation. Fedora and Mint weren't really happy either. I didn't try Pop, Arch, or anything else.

kazinator• 5 years ago

Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix.

You mean every time you log into Windows 10, there is something to update, so you don't have time to switch?

phendrenad27• 5 years ago

My Linux machine nagged me to do a system-wide update (usually a language pack for Firefox, because they changed one word) every day. Windows 10 is a lot smarter about when to nag about updates.

OrgNet• 5 years ago

Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update

You can't be serious that the updates aren't worst in Windows... I finally got my 80yo dad to Linux because of them being ridiculous in Windows.

caeril2• 5 years ago

Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that.

This is an exceptionally good point. I've NEVER, in my life, tried to either install something, update something or, even literally open a random localhost port from a development test suite in VS Code without having to click through a UAC authorization dialog sequence on Windows.

(I know that HN encourages the assumption of good faith, but when a poster just straight up lies through their teeth about the on-the-ground reality of user authorization, it's really hard not to push the (obviously correct, hanlon's razor be damned) corporate shill angle. (sorry, dang))

oefnak• 5 years ago

I don't think it's about admin powers, but about having to type commands to fix things. That's not the same as just clicking 'allow' in UAC.

muzani2• 5 years ago

I really like snapping windows to parts of the screen. Mac doesn't do this well.

Linux, well, I do a search for it, and get this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/26346/how-to-use-window-snap...

The first answer is great. That second answer is typical with every "how do I do anything in Linux" question. It's a chain of things I dread and I end up spending an hour because I forget to type "cd .scripts" and then get lost.

Copying and pasting a bunch of code also makes me wary. There's vague hardcoded stuff like 'Paste this in, and then change your mouse id from 11 to the number from the output of the "xinput list" command.'

Do you Linux users just apply random advice like that off the internets without seeing what every line means? Do you just sudo stuff because someone said so? Instead of a single possible security hole to check for by installing a thing, it's now multiple possible security holes to check on every line of code.

Worst of all, it probably doesn't do what I want it to do. I can't tell until I'm about half an hour into doing it. I just want to sort my windows neatly. This isn't worth it.

hiram112• 5 years ago

Do you Linux users just apply random advice like that off the internets without seeing what every line means?

This isn't just a Linux issue. I've used Windows many years, and the vast majority of solutions to problems is inserting some cryptic string into the registry and rebooting.

Though I eventually dumped Linux, too, a few years ago as the solutions to the weekly show-stopping bugs, driver issues, and kernel glitches constantly required the same type of unintelligible shell commands copied and pasted from some random blog. Unlike earlier days of Linux, the commands now were completely foreign to even long-time users of Linux who understood most of the main components of a standard Linux install. It would require modifying some file in /etc or using some sub-component or binary that I'd never ever heard of and had no idea why it was even included into my "base" install of Fedora or Redhat or whatever distro was downstream.

I blame mostly RedHat for this change; Systemd may not have always been the problem, but its design and complexity (compared to traditional minimal Unix "do one thing and do it well") is a good metaphor for how modern Linux has been bastardized into just another black-box like Windows, where your only solution for many problems is some esoteric command which must be pasted off of some RHEL paid-license-required mailing list.

t-3• 5 years ago

Linux users RTFM. Command line flags aren't hard when you have the documentation at your fingertips.

runjake3• 5 years ago

I really like snapping windows to parts of the screen. Mac doesn't do this well.

Rectangle for macOS

https://rectangleapp.com/

vladvasiliu• 5 years ago

As others have said, it's funny how experiences differ. I have almost the same exact experience, only in reverse.

After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.

I have a 2560x1440 thunderbolt screen. For some reason, when if I let it go to sleep, it's very likely it won't wake up. Next, in order of probability is that it WILL wake up, but stuck at 1280x720. Sure, that's better than 800x600, at least it has the right format, but still. Display Preferences shows 1280x720 as the highest resolution. I can set it lower, though.

Then, even better, I have another screen, that does USB-C, with Display Port alternative mode. Everything works fine, at full resolution, all the way until the windows login screen. Here, it's extremely likely that the screen will go blank. In the rare event that it doesn't, as soon as I log in, the screen goes blank. I've tried reinstalling Windows from scratch, using the usb-c connection, no dice. The installer works, then on the last reboot, blank screen.

The computer in question is an HP EliteDesk with full Intel components, no exotic GPU or anything. Only "aftermarket" components are the RAM sticks.

Both screens work perfectly both on other computers and on the same computer under Linux (Arch), with no tweaking required.

simion3144• 5 years ago

Don't try the cool distros, try Ubuntu or Kubuntu LTS.

selykg• 5 years ago

Dealing with finding driver support is one.

Lack of quality apps that I can find on Mac, like Fantastical, Reeder, MindNode, and more.

But the single biggest one for me is I just want my devices to work and not have to fix them in my free time. Not to say Linux requires fixing all the time. It’s more that I’d just like things to work and Linux, last I used it, required I have to tinker and research things too much. It was fun then. But now I just want to live my life and not tinker with things when I want them to do what I want. For that reason my Macs do well enough at just continually working.

rvz2• 5 years ago

At least for me on macOS, it just works. It has one consistent desktop to work with and test and I can get on with my work without wasting time digging into dotfiles, init or rc scripts in a system folder just to get a basic task done.

I use my computer to get things done and make money and have no time to play around with verbose scripts and man files for basic tasks or the time try out tons of distros out there to "choose" which one I want.

artiscode• 5 years ago

Video games. I work on a company issued MBP and my own daily driver is an M1 MBP. My PC runs Windows mainly because of video games. Yes, I know about Steam's efforts and Proton, but Proton lacks DXR. I paid top dollar for a gaming video card and I want to see those rays traced! On a serious note once Linux allows me to play AAA titles with the same level of fidelity as I can on Windows, I am switching over to Ubuntu.

EveYoung• 5 years ago

For work, I'll need access to MS Office and the browser versions are just not good enough or lack important features. So it's macOS for me.

zbrozek2• 5 years ago

Generally unpolished quirkiness that requires time and attention to resolve. For example, in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling despite hours of fussing with X11 and compositor settings or graphics drivers. Or how my default file associations change unbidden all the time, frequently to poor choices like GIMP to open a JPEG. And more recently Internet Explorer through WINE for no clear reason.

I try every two years or so to daily drive Linux on my personal desktop. Between these kinds of rough edges and running CAD tools, I inevitably eventually go back to Windows no matter how much I enjoy my terminal emulator options in Linux.

fsflover4• 5 years ago

in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling

Sounds like a hardware/driver problem. How is this a fault of Linux? I guess your hardware came with Windows and the vendor never cared about Linux support.

zbrozek2• 5 years ago

I've had a lot of hardware over ten years, including workstations issued by my employer that were engineered for first-class Linux support. The problem is never ubiquitous - sometimes it's just one browser and not another. Further, this is just one example of dozens of rough edges that may-or-may-not be present on any given setup. Lots of people aren't visually sensitive enough to even notice. I've had to point to specific regions of the screen and describe the shape of the tear to get observers to be able to recognize them.

But your comment sort of makes the point for me. Hardware support and drivers (especially in-kernel ones) are absolutely a reason to judge an OS for suitability for desktop use. I run Arch on all my servers and it's great. But I struggle to get an acceptable user experience on the desktop.

There are, of course, tons of other rough edges. Inconsistent input grabbing behavior across desktop environments (KDE not working properly with Remmina, for example), volume controls being difficult to use or having strange response curves, compositors hanging on monitor reconnect, infinite audio and video decoding issues, etc etc etc. Sure, each of these is individually surmountable at the cost of some hours of searching the intertubes and fussing at the command line. But then you end up with a magic snowflake installation that is brittle and you're down a bunch of time. Not worth it.

curtisblaine2• 5 years ago

Who cares whose fault is it? What counts, and what OP is talking about, is just the experience.

andor• 5 years ago

For example, in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling

As I understand, making something completely tear-free is impossible with X11, which is one of the reasons for Wayland.

ISL• 5 years ago

I did use it for years, and still do for my personal work (though this message is typed on a Windows laptop... it was purchased to be linux-compatible, but haven't had the time to reformat and dance through the installation/teething problems.) Debian from 2001-present personally, 2005-2020 for work.

Switching out of academia to the "real world", my work environment runs on macOS, and hence my daily driving does too. The polish of macOS has been really nice for someone accustomed to fluxbox and CLI tools for sysadmin tasks.

If only macOS conformed to the DFSG, Debian's free-software guidelines... Free as in beer doesn't matter to me nearly as much as free as in speech.

thrower123• 5 years ago

I'm a developer that still works on a product that runs on DotNet 4.8, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Visual Studios's performance on large solutions has gotten so poor that I've switched to Rider fully, but I still need to be on the platform my stuff has to run on.

nhojb• 5 years ago

Creative Cloud. I don't think there's anything with the same feature set and polish on Linux.

rmorey• 5 years ago

I used desktop Linux for like, a decade. A few years ago I switched to the Mac, and never looked back. The major difference honestly is that now I have real income ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ imo, macOS is the best desktop experience, and has the best software ecosystem hands down, if you can afford it. But for zero cost, Linux served me well for many many years

rvz2• 5 years ago

It served me well too. Unfortunately it gets in the way of work and I don't want to play around with the system files on my computer, just to get work done.

macOS seems to do this better with sane defaults and a consistent desktop experience.

watermelon02• 5 years ago

Mostly buggy desktop environments and broken drivers (especially on laptops).

It's 2021, and it's still a miracle if we can achieve different scaling on different monitors, no tearing on multiple screens, and plug'n'play of an external monitor. Things that work on Windows/macOS out-of-the-box for the last N years.

fsflover4• 5 years ago

Mostly buggy desktop environments and broken drivers (especially on laptops).

Using Linux for years without any such issues. Consider trying a laptop designed for Linux. If you are using a Windows-certified laptop with Linux, it's your fault that it doesn't work well.

astromd2• 5 years ago

Which limits your options to like five models of computer.

camtarn• 5 years ago

At work, I use Windows Subsystem for Linux extensively, but I need to run Windows for a proprietary IDE. I'd probably consider switching over if it weren't for that.

At home, I use music programs which only run on Windows. I also game a lot, and while I hear gaming on Linux is better these days, it's just zero friction on Windows.

baal80spam• 5 years ago

1. Video games.

2. In case something broke in Linux I would spend a lot of time looking how to fix it. I use Windows since 3.1 and I know it inside out.

SamuelAdams2• 5 years ago

I go back and forth. Currently I use windows for grad school work. It’s just easier to use Microsoft Office on windows. Oftentimes professors will email me very old doc files that open fine in Word but have incompatibilities or rendering issues in LibreOffice.

Also OneNote is my primary note taking tool. It’s really easy to get going and is able to search across other notes very well. Also free built in OCR scanning is a big plus too.

zmmmmm• 5 years ago

Ultimately for me it's two things:

- reliably working hardware

- microsoft office

I lead a pretty mobile life so I flip my laptop open and closed probably 20 times a day and do loads of video conferencing in a professional setting. Even a small fraction of the time having it not wake, or Wifi isn't working, or sound and audio isn't right etc etc ... would just be a deal breaker. And every time I see these threads, people are STILL talking about all these things.

jitl• 5 years ago

This experience is based on running whatever the latest LTS Ubuntu OS was in 2018 on a Huawei Matebook Pro, a very nice thin laptop I bought at the Microsoft store in San Francisco. I also tried Fedora. Initially I tried stock Gnome whatever, before heading off for Fluxbox, Sway/i3 etc sparse style window managers after growing frustration.

- battery life worse than a full screen VM running under Windows. Need to fight tooth and nail with drivers and config files for graphics that switch from low power intel to high power nvidia based on workload, for example.

- wifi throughout worse than a full screen VM running under Windows.

- worse UI performance under load than macOS or Windows. The whole UI, eg the compositor or X server can easily grind to a halt with no “beachball” style indicator. Crashes in that process are not uncommon, and effectively lose the whole session.

- somehow I managed to break my sound output with a routine software update in the year 2019

- browsers (eg Firefox) still buggy or blurry under Wayland

rubyist5eva• 5 years ago

Because I don’t need or want complete control over my operating system. macOS does exactly what I need: stays out of my way, supports the software I use for work, barely breaks and barely asks me to maintain it manually. Also the UI hasn’t changed drastically since it’s inception, the stability on that front is nice.

Downvoted for answering the question honestly, stay classy HN.

auslegung2• 5 years ago

It's primarily because I want things to consistently work as expected. Sure, macOS doesn't always work as expected, but compared to my experiences with various Linux distros, it does.

Others have mentioned the trackpad experience, and that's a thing, but not a deal breaker for me since I use the keyboard a lot.

Hardware quality is another issue, more important than the trackpad for me. MacBooks are built like tanks compared to most other laptops, and it's not difficult to keep one running well for 8+ years. In fact, I have a 2013 MacBook Air and a 2015 MacBook Pro, both of which are running as well as ever.

kreetx2• 5 years ago

Other than the recent M1s don't the previous ones run linux? The mbp's made until 2015 sure do.

binaryblitz• 5 years ago

No, they run MacOS (or OSX for older versions), a version of Unix. The M1s still run MacOS, just on a different type of processor hardware.

auslegung2• 5 years ago

If you’re indicating I load a Linux distro on a MacBook, I did ask about that at the Apple store back in 2012 when I got my first MacBook, and the look on the “geniuses” faces were priceless.

But otherwise no, I’m not interested because of my first point, namely that I want things to consistently work as expected.

noahtallen• 5 years ago

Linux support is pretty iffy on the 2015 - 2019 (chiclet keyboard) ones. I tried once, but driver support was the main problem. Things like keyboard/WiFi/trackpad (I forget exactly which) were broken without any straightforward solutions.

sircastor3• 5 years ago

My 2014 personal laptop continues to work really well, in spite of some drops and liquid spills. I do want to move to an Apple Silicon machine but I’m not sure I have a decent reason to.

jack_riminton• 5 years ago

A better question is; why on earth would I?

Mac OS just works, brilliantly.

Windows isn't as great for web dev stuff. So Mac OS it is.

pc86• 5 years ago

Some web dev. .NET obviously works great on Windows, and once the environment is set up, node and python works as well on Windows as it does on Mac (though admittedly the env part is easier on Mac but that's a one-time thing).

hypertele-Xii2• 5 years ago

Switching OS incurs costs. The benefits must outweigh the costs. I'm a great fan of the principles and philosophies of Linux, but if I'm to use it as my daily driver, it has to be above all else a practical solution. There's so much weird shit involved with Linux that the costs outweigh the benefits.

Weird shit like, Linux refusing to let me copy files on an external hard drive because "I'm not the owner" of those files. What the hell? I've owned these files for 20 fucking years. Linux telling me I don't have permission to access my own files. GTFO.

Another big issue is lack of software. The alternatives just don't measure up. Graphics and audio editors are garbage. Gimp ain't Photoshop. A similar issue used to be games, but Valve's been fixing that very rapidly.

And then there's the analysis paralysis of too much choice. What distro do I go for? There are over 500 distros actively maintained. You'd need to study this for years to choose well. I ain't got years to switch, I need to work now.

cybwraith• 5 years ago

Linux or not, I highly suggest trying Krita instead of GIMP

hammyhavoc10• 5 years ago

Reaper might be the best DAW ("audio editor" in your own words), period. Been used for all sorts, including a Call of Duty score.

You don't need to study distros for years. Linux is Linux. Manjaro, Mint, Pop, Ubuntu, pick one, and get on with your work.

hypertele-Xii2• 5 years ago

Reaper might be the best DAW

Does not support SoundFonts, unusable for me.

A web search brings up a few plugins that might add SoundFont support, but none of them mention Linux, only Windows and Mac.

curtisblaine2• 5 years ago

It's not the DAW, it's the plugins (VSTs etc). How many of them work seamlessly on Linux? How easily can you speak to the vendor if there's an issue, without the vendor telling you "sorry, it's not tested on Linux"? What about plugins loading industry-standard libraries (like Kontakt), where the surface of what can go wrong is multiplied threefold?

bodge5000• 5 years ago

Using Win10 right now. Tried Manjaro and a few others in the past.

I haven't switched...yet. The problem is its another entry, and a particularly big entry (switching OS's if you've used one for years is quite a big job) on the good old infinite todo list, and other things are prioritised over it. Maybe eventually I'll wittle my way down to it, or it'll get moved up, but yeh, life happens.

0-_-0• 5 years ago

Last time I tried Linux I couldn't find drivers for my Wi-Fi antenna. Eventually I found something I had to compile manually, but it just failed to compile so I gave up. I sometimes have to work with Linux at work, but it seems to be a constant uphill struggle with drivers and environments (e.g. I couldn't for the life of me get the validation layers in a Vulkan graphics driver working, had to get a Windows laptop with an RTX GPU). In Windows everything I want to do just works.

Ultimately, I want an operating system with minimal friction while using it, and Linux just seems to have a philosophy with a quite different focus.

simonmales2• 5 years ago

Safari testing used to me my main excuse.

Been meaning to try dual booting my MacBook Pro (2015 model) since upgrading the SSD.

I have a VPS running for years now and I SSH into that when I need Linux in a hurry. Or the single board computer connected to my TV (LibreELEC).

simonmales2• 5 years ago

Ah, I remember when a Linux laptop was my daily driver. Suspend/Hibernate was magically on OSX.

I recall running custom kernels and the like to get it to work. And it did! But on OSX, it was smooth as butter.

IIRC it's still not so magical on Linux.

cjg• 5 years ago

I'm on Windows.

For me it's the comms apps (e.g. Teams). These tools are selected at the team or corporate level. Whilst they typically have Linux support, the Linux implementations tend to have many more bugs and fewer features. If I'm in a call and someone's screen is frozen or they drop off unexpectedly, they are usually using something non-Windows.

But I do my day to day development in a Linux-like environment - either docker, WSL or a VM.

I would prefer to be linux native, but not at the cost of being a second-class citizen when interacting with the rest of my team.

theshrike792• 5 years ago

Death by a thousand cuts.

There aren't any major showstopper faults any more. But everything is a little bit off and I'm not willing to spend the hours required to customise everything to my liking.

Also if I find a nice piece of software, it might just die because it doesn't have a business model, just 1-2 enthusiastic developers who may or may not suddenly burn out.

The old adage still holds true:

- Linux for servers

- Windows for games

- MacOS for work

Hackbraten• 5 years ago

if I find a nice piece of software, it might just die because it doesn't have a business model, just 1-2 enthusiastic developers who may or may not suddenly burn out.

One could argue that the same risk applies for almost every piece of software, be it proprietary or free.

Vendors are killing their applications all the time.

theshrike792• 5 years ago

Yes, but if the developer is motivated by money they are more likely to keep their product updated.

Many (not all) small/medium open source projects just fizzle out when the main dev moves on and doesn't dogfood their own product any more.

4ad3• 5 years ago

Where do I even begin.

1. Lack of good mobile hardware. ThinkPads used to be good, but sadly more than a decade ago they switched to 16:9 screens. Macbooks were 16:10. This was and still is an absolute dealbreaker for me. Fortunately, ThinkPads started bringing 16:10 back (but see below). There were a few non-16:9 PC laptops on the market, like the Microsoft Surface or some Dell XPS models. Absolute junk.

2. Even though we started to have 16:10 ThinkPads again, it doesn't matter, because Linux doesn't support non-integer display scaling factors well and these new screens come with dumb resolutions that would require a non-integer scaling factor. And the screens are crap compared to macBook screens still.

3. AMD ThinkPads only have crappy screens compared to their Intel counterparts. There exist Intel ThinkPads with Intel (non-Nvidia) GPUs that I would consider for buying, but they are unobtainium. They are either only sold to select countries, or require some kind of commercial agreement to buy.

4. When I used unix systems in the 90s and early 2000s the unix GUIs were better than the commercial counterparts. Now this situation is reversed. Gnome 3 is 10 years old now and I still have no idea how it works.

5. I used to use unusual window managers like fvwm and windowmaker. As things have become more and more integrated with the GUI, and as "popular" distributions like Ubuntu have taken the responsability of integrating everything in the GUI, it has become unfeasible for me to do the integration myself, so I'm stuck with crap software like Gnome 3, which I do not want.

6. RawTherapee and Darktable are usability nightmares compared to Capture One. Plus, what would I do with my C1 sessions anyway?

7. I use an iPhone and make heavy use of the integration between iOS and macOS. Specifically things like iMessages, Photos.app and Facetime. I can't do any of that on Linux.

8. Ubuntu is doing things I don't want (e.g. Snap) while Debian refuses to package useful software. if you think that niche Linux distributions like NixOS solve anything you are part of the problem.

People like to talk about "year of the Linux desktop", but I've been using Linux on the desktop in the 90s, and let me tell you it's been only downhill since.

dTal2• 5 years ago

For what it's worth:

KDE Plasma supports "non-integer scaling" perfectly, and for my money is vastly superior to any other GUI available, open or commercial.

Thinkpads with nVidia GPUs also have Intel GPUs. You don't have to use the nVidia, it costs nothing to have.

There are other distros than Ubuntu and Debian. I use Void, which I find to be a perfectly stable rolling release distro with great package coverage.

4ad3• 5 years ago

KDE Plasma supports "non-integer scaling" perfectly, and for my money is vastly superior to any other GUI available, open or commercial.

Sorry, but no, this is simply not true. Unlike Gnome, it actually tries to support it, which is laudable, but only Qt programs work reasonably well, other programs "work", but you can tell they only work through a hack. Also, it all goes to hell once you connect an external display with a different PPI...

I will agree that KDE is light years better than Gnome in usability though.

Thinkpads with nVidia GPUs also have Intel GPUs. You don't have to use the nVidia, it costs nothing to have.

No, the external HDMI port of the laptop is only connected to the nvidia GPU, you have to use it if you want to use external displays.

There are other distros than Ubuntu and Debian. I use Void, which I find to be a perfectly stable rolling release distro with great package coverage.

I'm afraid that if you don't understand the problem with this "solution", Linux on desktop will continue to be a thing of the past. For me and most people at least. I'm glad that it works for you.

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

I feel your pain. My Lenovo Flex 5 (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400) is a Ryzen 5700u, but has a pretty unremarkable screen that could have been perfect.

r3trohack3r• 5 years ago

Because I’m using FreeBSD.

1. The Handbook. I get the distinct feeling from most Linux distributions that they’re trying to do things for me. FreeBSD, in contrast, is trying to teach me how to do things. 2. Lower churn. I enjoy finding manuals from the 90s that are still relevant to how my system does things. 3. Simpler system. Feels less magical, like I have a chance at groking the system in front of me. The installer includes sources. Building from source is a Makefile. I’ve found myself reading the source code as a frequent first step before a web search since switching to FreeBSD.

hanniabu• 5 years ago

UX isn't seemless. Just try updating an app that isn't in the app store, or figuring out you need to check a box to make an executable open when you double click it. You'll never get mainstream adoption just off that stuff.

peterburkimsher• 5 years ago

I use macOS 10.13 for myself, Windows 10 at work, and Linux for servers.

Linux is the best for servers. The command-line experience is far superior.

Windows 10 is tolerable for VS Code development, but I'd use a Mac if I were allowed.

macOS 10.13 is best for Time Machine, MS Office, Skype, and the AppleScript API to let me script everything.

macOS works better with my iPhone 4S using iTunes 10.6.3 for offline sync over USB, Contacts, Calendars, Music, Bookmarks, Apps, and Photos.

Apple hardware (on my MacBook Pro 2014) is better for MagSafe, replacement parts/schematics/boardviews, and has a better trackpad (though I use an Apple Magic Trackpad on the Windows 10 PC at work), and high-resolution screen. I wish I had a removable battery, but many competitors don't even have that.

The reason I don't like Apple is because MagSafe is gone, offline sync is discontinued (even macOS Server no longer supports Contacts/Calendars/Notes), and repairability is at an all-time low. But the inconveniences of using an old Mac are still less than the inconvenience of running Linux on a new ThinkPad.

Decabytes• 5 years ago

I love Linux and have been using it as my daily driver for awhile. But recently I’ve been developing some cross platform software in Lisp, and the most difficult platform to develop it for is Windows 10. So by developing on Windows 10 I’m hoping to iron out a lot of the issues a user on that platform will face.

orangepanda• 5 years ago

Because I’m not a masochist. I use ubuntu for work, some issues I’ve encountered:

* No sleep mode by default

* Snap is cancer. When I’m sent a pdf, I cant open it directly because the current app is isolated and cant see that a pdf reader is installed. Same with all other app specific extensions.

* Snap, again. Whenever I’m sent a file on Skype, I have to reboot; It overrides my $home directory and I cant open or access anything elsewhere.

* Why do links sometimes keep opening in firefox? I dont have it installed, did a full scan and cant find where it comes from. Yeah Microsoft is pushy about Edge, but at least it respects your settings when you do change them.

* There’s a memory leak somewhere, I have to reboot every week. Probably that’s why sleep is disabled…

* spotify sometimes can no longer find an output device and everything gets muted (might be an app issue, but I haven’t encountered it on other platforms so ubuntu gets the blame)

* When disconnecting external displays, the pointer still “sees” them and disappears into oblivion. Also it doesn’t work for half the screen.

* With external displays, I sometimes have to log in twice

For personal devices, I just want reasonable defaults so I dont have to tinker with them

reportgunner3• 5 years ago

Ubuntu is a very bad example of a linux distro.

oarsinsync2• 5 years ago

What is a good example of a linux distro?

simion3144• 5 years ago

Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS is the distro for people that do not need the latest core libraries. Most issues people get on Ubuntu is when they try to install stuff from the wrong PPA or when they listen for bad advice for random clueless people.

Sure Arch users need to raise their hand and scream they use Arch and that the code is vanilla and they run GNOME with all it's bugs... do you remember how when Ubuntu went back to GNOME the Canonical developers fixed GNOMe's bugs, yes a distro actually fixing bugs upstream and not just packaging shit, some would prefer that instead of pretending the memory leaks are the fault of the user.

I used many distro including Arch, SUSE,Debian(and Sidux),Fedora, Mandriva and for years I am stuck with Kubuntu LTS because it works and I don't need latest library co compile latest XYZ program. I use this Kubuntu machine for my work so I can't and also I don't get any plesurre from rolling updates and fixing broken stuff or fighting with new bugs(I know how to work around existing ones)

CarelessExpert5• 5 years ago

That first one puzzles me. What do you mean "no sleep mode by default"? I've been running Linux on laptops for a few years now and this is the first I've heard of this...

Are you perhaps referring to hibernation?

haunter• 5 years ago

Too confusing for me. Too many different distros. Too many different DEs. Too many different package systems.

Just look at this https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Comparison_of_desktop_envir... And this one distro doesn't even cover the package systems that differs between distros and other distros based on those (see how Ubuntu is based on Debian but there are distros based on Ubuntu, it's like the Inception). Of course some of these doesn't matter on a huge scale but analysis paralysis is real. And stone me for that but I really don't believe the more choice is better. Or leads to better things in this case. Like imagine if people would work together to have _one_ better distro instead of having... hundreds or thousands of different one.

I have to use Linux for some projects in VM but that's more than enough for me.

runjake3• 5 years ago

You can just pick a distro and stick with it.

You don’t need to learn about all the package managers and all the desktop environments.

I don’t really know anything about Arch’s package manager or Fedora’s dnf.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 5 years ago

Until you ask for help and the very first response is something like "Ubuntu is a very bad example of a linux distro."[0], or "I've never had these problems with Arch", or any other variation of "try a different distro", which is incredibly common advice in the Linux Desktop community.

Not to mention that if you're googling for help on a problem, there's a good chance you'll run into posts about dozens of other distros so, if you want to use their advice, you have to understand the differences enough to know how to translate it to fit yours.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28367789

MikusR2• 5 years ago

Which one?

kaba04• 5 years ago

Mainstream distros are 90% the same thing wrapped slightly differently. Franly, it do not matter which one you choose.

So that’s no good reason to stay away from linux, imo.

DrAwdeOccarim2• 5 years ago

I just switched from macOS to PureOS running on a purism Librem 14 about a month ago. Overall, it's pretty good and I'm happy with it. It really is the kind of computer I've dreamt of since the early 2000's. All black, no logos, aluminum case. The ports I need and nothing more. The right size and weight. And privacy first.

As other have mentioned here, the trackpad experience on macOS is literally an extension of your body it's that good, so it's hard to compete. It really is pretty incredible that my 10 year old macbook air trackpad is still technologically superior to literally every trackpad in existence that isn't from apple. From the glass surface, to non-linear scrolling of screen lines per trackpad distance traveled, to inertial scrolling, to two finger swipe for back and forward, to pinch and twist to adjust Preview'ed files. It goes on...

Beyond the trackpad, the battery life is iffy and wake from suspend still somehow doesn't work perfectly every time are my only complaints. Of course it took a few weeks of getting things configured to how I like it, but I feel set now. I also only really browse the internet and watch movies. I don't code or do strenuous video, image, or audio editing. Oh, and the audio is terrible compared to apple laptops, which again Apple somehow is incredible at.

The big issue for me is privacy and ownership of my hardware. I will put up with all these small issues to truly own my computer. Most don't care, which is sad, but it's a common discussion point here which I won't get into.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 5 years ago

1. I hate the application distribution model. Repos are basically the same as walled gardens, only maintained largely by unpaid volunteers who occasionally introduce their own bugs. You can't have two versions of the same application unless the packages have been specifically set up to allow it (Python 2 vs 3), you can't install applications to alternate disks, and there's no such thing as a portable application. There's also of course a dozen different package formats and hundreds of different repos. If what you want isn't in your distro's repo you can hope for an AppImage, but they're not "the way it is done" in Linux land so it's pretty unlikely. There might be a Snap or Flatpak but they have basically all the same limitations as the other package manager/repo models as well as a few extra ones for good measure. So then you're stuck compiling from source, which requires setting up a build environment which is probably finicky and sometimes requires installing yet more packages that are not in the repo. It is more or less impossible to have some software on a stable release while having other software on the bleeding edge.

2. The community is condescending, arrogant, and extremely pushy. If you have a problem and it is not in the set of problems they're used to, they will be mad at you for not conforming to how they do things. They will often unhelpfully tell you to use a different distro, which of course has its own problems. When none of their unhelpful solutions are good enough, they will blame you for not changing your use case. They will hate on people using alternative OSs, but when told why people chose those OSs instead they become extremely defensive.

3. Everything else. There's a lot of little things that add up. A modern Linux desktop has a lot of moving interconnected parts that are mostly developed by completely different groups with completely different goals, almost none of whom write good documentation. Every application has a completely different configuration file format. Pretty much everything in GUI land is at least a little jank, as though it is just a poorly coupled frontend to running commands on the terminal... which it probably is. There's a lot of hardware that technically works, but is flaky as hell with the existing driver and there's no indication that'll be the case until you run into a bunch of problems. The system's default response to running out of memory is to start randomly killing programs to free some up, and for some reason the community doesn't think this is completely insane.

I will say that Linux is usually pretty good for building appliances, and it makes a decent server because server is a subset of appliance. But as a desktop it is a complete garbage fire as far as I'm concerned.

filchermcurr3• 5 years ago

I've seen a lot of #2 in this thread, even. A lot of really snippy remarks about it being 'your fault for using unsupported hardware'. Which is a weird statement to make, I think. If the OS allows the installation and claims to have drivers available, it seems like that hardware is supported...

I would certainly not blame the user when it doesn't work correctly.

AndrewDucker• 5 years ago

Windows just works for me.

(And part of my job is writing GUI apps internal usage.)

jlokier• 5 years ago

I used to use Linux as my full-time desktop from 1994 to 2013.

I've developed all sorts of things. I've built 3d games engines and EDA software that ran on Linux desktops. Even when developing for Windows or (in the earlier days) DOS, I cross-compiled them on Linux. So I have plenty of experience with it.

I 2013 I bought a MacBook Pro, having held out a long time, vaguely in line with the GNU boycott of all things Apple. A big life event led to me deciding to try something new outside my traditional comfort zone, and I went to a database conference where it seemed the entire audience had an MBP. I'd read that the hardware was great. So I bought one.

I've been pretty happy with it ever since.

However the first thing I did was install VMware Fusion, so I could still have a Linux desktop. In fact I copied my previous machine's entire installation over, to run in the VM. It worked very well and still does.

The MBP four-finger swipe between desktops works really well for this: I could switch between Mac and Linux desktops as if they were equal status peers on the machine. It's about as good an experience as running Linux natively. I know, having used Linux desktops for 19 years prior to that.

Performance of filesystem access won't be as good, but I tend to use Linux servers for intensive work including compilations.

Naturally, I tried booting Linux directly on the MBP. It's the cool thing to do, and I've done it with every previous laptop I owned.

Then I did some battery measuerments, and found (to my surprise at first) that Linux drained the battery noticably faster than MacOS running Linux in VMware. So I stuck with VMware, and got used to MacOS desktop gestures on the Mac side, and the lovely four-finger swipe between desktops. I had wanted to try something new anyway, so that cemented my exposure to MacOS.

Around the same time, Ubuntu's desktop experience went downhill. The out of the box Ubuntu desktop is nothing like the rich desktop I was using from GNOME in previous years and through numerous XFree86 configurations before that. I couldn't be bothered installing an "alternative" desktop any more. Most of my deep development work was run on servers anyway, or in terminal windows.

The weird scroll control that appeared in Ubuntu desktop was especially offputting. I'd found it difficult to use even on my previous laptop.

Even now, where I still have Ubuntu installed in a VM, the Ubuntu desktop experience still seems rather odd. I have to click some dots and type "terminal" to get a terminal window up, while I'm presented with a bunch of apps I'm not interested in, does not encourage me to spend more time with it when I have alternatives. There's a "frequently used apps" tab, but Terminal doesn't appear in it despite it being by far the most frequently used app. The collection of interesting desktop controls I remember from older desktops seems to be absent: The default is quite minimal. Obviously I know I can pin the terminal, reconfigure everything if I put in the time, switch to an alternative desktop, or code things myself if I'm really keen. What I'm saying is the out of the box experience isn't a great start, and since I have MacOS available as a peer which is very featureful from the start, it's just easier to swipe and use that.

There are some things I'll definitely use with the Linux desktop: Inkscape in particular, and for OpenGL tests. But mostly I use my Linux VM via SSH from iTerm now. Same way I access my servers.

For a few years, this resulted in my preferring to access Emacs running in Linux over SSH from a Mac terminal, compared with using the GUI to access the same Emacs on the Linux desktop. The Mac side terminal was just a better experience than the Linux GUI, especially as by then I was using Firefox etc on the Mac side. GUI Emacs is much better, though, for scrolling and copying. So eventually I got a good version of that running on the Mac side as well, and when I use Emacs on the Linux side, that's now emacsclient calling the Mac side Emacs to edit Linux files.

ido• 5 years ago

can't compile to ios from linux.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

I use all them 3 equally. I have Windows as my main host operating system, but I spend so much time in virtual machines that it doesn't matter anymore. Why I don't have Linux as main hosting, knowing VMWare is just as good on Linux too? Probably games, the only ones who aren't running in virtual machines.

jsjohnst• 5 years ago

I ran Linux as my daily driver OS from 1995 to 2004. I learned a lot along the way, but I was always fixing something, vs you know, actually working. I ran FreeBSD as my daily driver in 2005 and part of 2006. To me, it was more thought out, consistent and documented vs a random mishmash of components like Linux at the time. The problem with both is that a number of apps I needed didn’t run in either and the open source alternatives sucked in comparison. In 2006 I switched full time to MacOS and have not regretted it. I’ll give some reasons that are in addition to what I’ve seen mentioned so far:

- HDPI displays work fantastic and have for a long time

- hardware is generally well supported of all types. Installing a printer is trivial and doesn’t mean adding a metric ton of crapware like on Windows of past.

- I get a close enough Unix environment that I feel at home in the terminal. Maybe it’s my prior background with *BSD (Free and Open BSD) that helped so I wasn’t as attached to GNU flags on commands, so YMMV.

- app ecosystem exists for almost everything I need natively. The few examples that don’t (SolidWorks and some FPGA toolchains) are trivial to run in a VM (they also don’t run on Linux natively either).

- Several apps available only on MacOS are best in class (at least for my needs, but generally considered great anyway by all)

- I could buy the latest Apple machines (which is best in class in my opinion, at least for the things I care about) and it always worked out of the box with my OS of choice. If you agree that Apple hardware is great, but prefer Linux, you will consistently be a third class citizen hoping somebody is able to write a say graphics driver for the M1 while you sit using older inferior hardware. Yes, you can get decent hardware that has official manufacturer support for Linux, but it’s inferior to Apple hardware in ways I care about (Trackpad as one obvious example).

thedevelopnik• 5 years ago

Yeah it’s apps for me. I live my life by my Omnifocus setup. They have a browser-based “companion” that I can and have used occasionally but it’s not the same.

Airmail is the other big one.

There’s just nothing that supports Linux and iOS hah, and I want to keep similar workflows across them.

And I actually ran PopOS as a daily driver for about 6 months during the pandemic, I’ve tried!

dagw• 5 years ago

For my work computer the main simple reason is that IT doesn't support it. Beyond that, I write a fair amount of software that will be run on windows machines and windows only software so I'd need a second machine to test on either way. And finally, Windows 10 pretty much just works these days and honestly gives me less day to day trouble than my Linux machine does. With WSL2 and Docker the difference in developer experience between Windows and Linux is smaller that it's ever been.

chapskl• 5 years ago

For me it's just Linux support on M1. I already run Ubuntu on my beefy desktop and Arch on my old Thinkpad. Honestly I find both Windows and Mac so awfully buggy these days that there's no reason left to not just move to Linux if I can.

Windows is an absolute no go for me because I can't be bothered turning off the dozens of spying and tracking options anymore. This is despite using WSL for several months and actually enjoying my dev experience.

I don't want to use MacOS either; I got this laptop just for the value of the M1 but at least MacOS doesn't *feel* like the huge spyware/adware that Windows is.

edly• 5 years ago

I would say Linux works well for...70% of end user computing. Browsing the web, watching videos, reading the news, and playing low-intensity games. The newer your PC is or the more specialized work you have to do, gaming being a good example, the more tweaks you have to do.

Windows, unfortunately, just works. Games I play work fine, streaming doesn't require a workaround, and I don't have to hunt down a guide to tweak something that I wouldn't normally have to.

RegW• 5 years ago

Because company laptop comes with Windows 10, company policy dictates "Don't touch" and Friday afternoons are to be wasted by a scheduled virus scan.

On my own laptop I use Linux Mint Cinnamon. Installed when Windows 10 got stuck in a loop installing an update that wouldn't work. I don't miss much.

reacharavindh2• 5 years ago

Three reasons.

1. Cohesiveness - there are many things Linux does excellently if done independently. But, when you want a cohesive experience to achieve a good user experience, it falls flat in its face.

Examples:

Have an excellent file system? Check. ZFS, ext4 and plenty more. May I expect a simple equivalent of a GUI file explorer in the class of Windows Explorer or Finder? Nope. There is not even thumbnail previews if images in the default views. Sure, there will be some commenter that will prove me wrong by saying “if you choose this district and combine it with this particular program I found and follow on GitHub, and simply run this command, it will all obviously work”. But, that only proves my point. I don’t have the time or the interest to do that. I applaud Linux for its powers in the server ecosystem, and use a cohesive yet restrictive Mac or Windows for the Desktop.

2. Battery life. Of course there is “laptop projects” and a plethora of scripts I can run to make Linux consume less power on a laptop, but the default option will just be poor in comparison with Mac and Windows because of their focus. Linux being powerful is actually at odds with the goal here.

3. Reliability around on/off/on/off/suspend operations like that of a laptop. I expect my Mac to wake up instantly and allow me to pick up work from wherever I left it. I reboot on my terms about once every couple of weeks when I am off work and relaxing. With Linux, it may work, but also not. Updates of packages break each other more often taking my productive time to fix things back in place. That anxiety is simply not worth it IMO.

In my opinion, being a good DesktopOS needs a authoritative and opinionated ecosystem so as to achieve that cohesion at least at the base system level. Unfortunately Linux does not target that. There have been attempts at it from PopOS, ElementaryOS etc, but they haven’t hit the mark yet as they too lose their focus quickly and try to do it all, and add yet another option in an already fragmented toolset. Example: ElementaryOS brought Vala as a language to write apps. Of course their apps are good, but the rest of the apps needed dont look or behave like the ones they made :-(

On my “hobby” workstation, I use Linux and enjoy it because I don’t have the anxiety about losing it at critical times. I simply have my /home backed up throughly and don’t care if the OS gets borked. I can always reinstall and bring my /home. Can’t live with such a setup on work PC.

fsflover4• 5 years ago

3. Reliability around on/off/on/off/suspend operations like that of a laptop.

This is definitely caused by unsupported hardware. I'm using Linux for many years, suspend works 100% of the time on my Librem 15 and Lenovo.

garbagecoder5• 5 years ago

So?

reacharavindh2• 5 years ago

Yes, I was sure there were few combinations of Linux Distro + Hardware manufacturer + Model number that would work fine 100% of the time for sleep issues. Now, would that combination also have decent battery life, decent display etc, Now, I will have to find the hours to go hunt for these details and reviews. You get my point... The ecosystem is simply not mature.

xtracto2• 5 years ago

I run Linux Mint on my home pc that I built. However when I started a new job this year I chose a MacBook pro because I know all the time needed to fiddle with linux to make things work:

- Flaky multimonitor setup (it's always this or that, in the case of my PC apparently connecting 1 monitor to the Nvidia card and 1 monitor to the integrated GPU is not possible... I didn't want to deal with the laptop version of that).

- Android Studio: Setting up the environment for android studio was a pain. Adb sometimes works , sometime doesnt.

- Bluetooth audio: I use the Galaxy Buds pro. They sometimes work and sometimes doesn't work in my linux PC. I need them for hangouts.

- Tidal client with Master reproduction isnt available in Linux (pet peeve of mine).

So in general when I was making the decision between Mac or Linux, I decided for Mac because I didn't want to spend any time tinkering for things to work (I didn't consider Windows as to me it feels as a toy OS. And I have it on my pc for the very rare occasion when I want to play something I can't play on linux).

mattbrewsbytes• 5 years ago

My OS is part of my toolset that I want to work and not have to tinker with to get functioning. The Apple hardware and OS are the best I've used from the perspective of I want it to just work and it doesn't get in my way with a huge amount of annoyances.

I used to use Windows and it had so many annoyances and differences when doing work that deploys to Linux. Using Linux as an end user had many more annoyances and things that just didn't function or required a lot of effort to get working just right (wifi and trackpad are the big offenders that I recall).

To answer the question specifically - the end user experience for Linux needs to surpass Apple's for me to switch. I don't see that ever happening, tbh.

Taking a step back - I don't see myself as a fanboy, this is purely from the perspective of I've already paid my dues doing IT desktop/laptop support earlier in my career and just want it to work.

lexa1979• 5 years ago

VR Games - After years of DOS, then windows 9x, XP, 7, I switched to Xubuntu in 2012. The first 2 years were made of learning and experiencing, then I worked and played with my computer without ever thinking of switching back to Microsoft. I switched my whole family, dad, sisters, uncle and so on, on Xubuntu over the years, everyone is happy with it, it just works for them. ...Then came the Quest 2 in my cousin's home. I tried it. I wanted it. I bought it. ...And I reinstalled Windows on my main computer.

thorin• 5 years ago

Linux is fine from a technical perspective, running servers and managing processes and data. I've used it frequently since the 90s.

When I last used an IDE in Linux 10+ years ago it wasn't a great experience. 99% of end users in a business environment are on windows 10, so it makes sense that I am too. The others on Apple I'd guess, not Linux.

xtracto2• 5 years ago

The one user desktop thing that I find funny Linux does out of the box but Osx and windows dont have is the ability to pin a window to be "always on top" there was a separate unofficial app on Mac that did that (afloat) but Apple managed to make it not work with their updates.

Its 2021 and I cant pin a window always on top? Crazy

garbagecoder5• 5 years ago

Is this some sort of “no u” about thumbnails in the file picker?

drcongo• 5 years ago

I'm on a Mac, reproducing the value adds on here would mean running more than just a Linux desktop, I'd also need a server somewhere running all sorts of things to give me what I get from iCloud, which I would then need to maintain, not just for me but for family members. All in all, switching to Linux would be a massive drain on what little free time I have in life, with little to no benefits (YMMV).

jzellis• 5 years ago

I'm weird because I have a couple of older MacBooks, but my primary OS, even for web dev, is iPadOS. I use Textastic as my primary IDE for Node/JS/HTML and Blink to log into my remote servers and my Raspberry Pi.

For me, as someone who does a lot of music and recording, Mac was always the 800 lb gorilla - Windows could never touch Mac in terms of giving OS priority to the audio layer, etc. Linux I don't even bother with, because I have zero desire to dick with Jack/ALSA to just get stuff down. Also, I use Ableton Live as my main desktop music environment and nothing even comes close on Linux.

But iOS is actually better than MacOS for music, in my opinion. The ecosystem for synths is insane, the touch interface lends itself perfectly to making music, and the apps are a lot cheaper.

Honestly, OS hardly matters anymore for 70% of what most people, even nerds, do for productivity. VS Code runs on everything, most of the business crap is in the browser now, and you can watch and listen to streaming media on anything. If you're a gamer you need a Windows box, if you're a multimedia person you need a Mac, but if not you can use Mint or Elementary or whatever or even a Chromebook as your daily driver and not really notice any significant difference.

(I don't care about desktop environments because I run 99% of my apps full-screen and always have. If I need to have a console open I'll work on my Mac and have my iPad running a mosh or ssh shell, or vice versa.)

I mean, of course, all this goes out the window if you're writing compiled stuff that targets specific platforms, but me, I just do Node and frontend JS and HTML for money, man. I can do that on literally anything. I just use MacOS and iOS because I've got MacBooks and a 12" iPad Pro that weighs nothing that I can pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to and use for hours at a cafe or in a park without needing a power outlet.

hammyhavoc10• 5 years ago

Bitwig has native Linux support. Reaper trumps both Bitwig and Ableton Live.

kaba04• 5 years ago

The new pipewire looks very promising for audio processing, and it has stubs for Jack and pulseaudio. You may check it out from time to time as latency-wise it may be better than what mac’s offer.

WelcomeShorty• 5 years ago

In short: dependency hell.

Whatever distro I used it is the same at one point in time: In order to run X-n, you need Y-n-1 but Y-n+1 is installed and needed by Z.

Next: sleep mode and or the not recovering from it.

Linux is GREAT for tinkering, love it on my single purpose Raspis, love a dedicated VM/Laptop with Kali. But I will never again switch away from my macOS that just works for the job I need to get done.

CarelessExpert5• 5 years ago

What distro were you running? It's pretty rare to encounter this on Debian or Ubuntu unless you're running an unstable release and are encountering package breakage...

kaba04• 5 years ago

NixOS (and guix) is the only OS (not just linux distro) that solves dependency hell hands down. Seriously. Windows and mac just pushes the problem around/can mandate certain versions due to their size.

soco• 5 years ago

I have a guests laptop running Mint, every upgrade means wiping everything off because there's no human way to do otherwise. My Windows laptop has seen upgrades in-place since Windows 7. And then while on Windows the updates happen in the background (from time to time asking for a reboot) on Mint I have to start them by hand, using one of the three update managers (still no idea what's what) and every time they throw also some errors, usually about outdated update sites/links but not only.

lostmsu6• 5 years ago

Visual Studio is still the best IDE for me (IntelliJ gets close, but debugger is still lacking).

Updates in Windows do not break graphics mode.

I wrote a custom tiling WM for Windows, and can't find Linux replacement (predefined layouts, tabs, multimonitor support, free-float allowed, also widgets).

A few years ago Ubuntu still had problems with multiple displays on Nvidia driver.

Recent: me & my friend do deep learning. I am on Windows and he is on Ubuntu. When I run an experiment, OS is responsive. When he does, DE slows down to a crawl. Looks like OS does not schedule GPU.

iamcreasy• 5 years ago

I have heard about it before about debugger but I've only used Intellj. Can you please elaborate on what I am missing out?

josephferano2• 5 years ago

What's this custom tiling VM? Do you have it up on GitHub?

lostmsu6• 5 years ago

It is listed in the profile. I am currently considering making it open source, but not there yet.

taylodl2• 5 years ago

A DAW (digital audio workstation) I can work with. There are DAWs available for Linux, and one, Reaper, is quite popular and even used in professional studios. Which is great, but it doesn't fit my work flow. If I were a Pro Tools, Ableton, or Cubase user (extremely popular DAWs) I would still be stuck: they only run on Windows or Mac OS. So I'm pretty much stuck on Mac OS (I use Logic Pro).

The additional problem I have with contemplating using Linux as my daily driver is hardware support. I like laptops with long battery life that I can get 8-10 years usage. System 76 has some systems that look interesting but I have to run their Pop! OS to ensure compatibility - which removes one of the reasons I'd want to use Linux as my daily driver: I want to pick my own distro.

In the end I'm fine with using Linux on the server and using Mac OS as my daily driver. It's been working very well.

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

Check out Bitwig Studio: https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2021/08/24/1800

I got hold of an 8-track license giveaway and have been having quite some fun with it, as it feels like a better thought out Ableton (I’m a Logic guy, but appreciate trying out new things).

taylodl2• 5 years ago

Finally got to try Bitwig. I like how it approaches things and it seems to be extremely powerful but it was one fatal flaw: it has severe lag when recording tracking guitar, which is my primary use case. It's bad enough I can't use it. At first I thought maybe it was my rig - so I tried with Logic just to be sure everything was all right and it tracked perfectly. Bitwig seems geared more for midi/keyboards. Since my interest has been piqued I want to play around with that this week. Thanks!

fakecrusade• 5 years ago

apple dedicate its existence to building beautiful things and user experience, it makes painful work much more bearable, at the end of the day I'm just another consumer that wants to enjoy things without thinking about how to build this from source or fix that dependency, plus it's beautiful to look at

navjack27• 5 years ago

DirectX12. I do tons of personal work in UE4 and UE5. I haven't tried Linux in a bit and I haven't looked up how easy or compatible proton and other things are with those types of workloads. So I'm in Windows world. But each of my computers are for a purpose. The OS used fills that purpose. My 4k TV computer is an M1 Mac mini. That computer can also handle image optimization and video transcoding quite well without a fan ever turning on. I also watch twitch and YouTube on that along with local media. So my windows 11 desktop is for work in graphics. My Mac is for consumption. I'm not really sure where a Linux would fit in. My Android phone is for communication and authentication... I guess if I could have Linux run Windows 11 bare metal and it be the host to other os's that might be cool. But that would also just be complicating things.

syntaxstic• 5 years ago

I switched back to Windows 10 at home. I was a linux user for many years, but because I have a full time IT job, I decided that fixing my linux issues became a huge pain in the ass.

maxxk• 5 years ago

I moved around a bit. I started using Gentoo around 2008, then migrated to macOS on hackintosh in 2010, macOS on MacBook in 2015, NixOS on MacBook in 2017, NixOS on ThinkPad in 2019 and, most recently, back to macOS on M1 MacBook (just this week, actually).

Last month I did rage quit GNU/Linux because of iwlwifi bug [1]. It was moderately bad until the middle of July (fortunately it didn't occur under the load, like in videoconferences), but after another kernel update I got the same behavior as in comment 269 there: connection dropping every minute. Then I found out about new hackintosh intel wifi drivers, tried installing it on my Thinkpad and was surprised how smoothly everything worked.

[1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709

Of course, there are another annoying points besides the WiFi bug. macOS sets pretty high bar for GUI convenience:

- consistent cmd-shortcuts - I tried reproducing it with some luck using custom xkeyboard-config file

- MathUnicode.keylayout - tried reproducing with XCompose, with recent sway it was rather close experience

- consistent clipboard support - with Wayland it became much worse, e.g. between Firefox and LibreOffice

- not having to hold a dozen of terminal windows open because I don't remember from which window did I open this program so it won't be killed with terminal - I know about "disown", but I tend to forget to use it

- Preview, Spotlight

- as others already said, Apple devices have the best touchpad including OS support, and great hardware in general

- WiFi connection speed after wakeup

- for me - less ability to tinker around and more focus on actual work :)

I sincerely tried to use only a free software, to spread a word in my close community, to find alternatives, to scratch my own itches a bit (probably not so much as I should), but I believe now my watch is ended. I'm back to macOS as long as the current hardware will be enough for me.

All that said, NixOS is a fantastic distribution which I still use on my servers and still would recommend to any advanced Linux user, and Nix is an excellent package manager. A lot of my project environments didn't require any changes from Linux to macOS at M1. Also, I'd like to mention great software projects which I used a lot: sway display manager; astroid email client with notmuch indexer, lieer for gmail sync and mbsync for other providers; howl - minimalist GUI text editor; alacritty terminal.

Leftium2• 5 years ago

I have a laptop that dual-boots into Linux Mint. I haven't logged into the Linux side for ages.

I like the Linux command line, but I get what I need via Git Bash for Windows. Also there's Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Windows generally has better compatibility with hardware with less fuss. Especially on laptops. My friend tried to use Linux-only for a while, but he said trying to video conference just sucked. Sure, there might be some programs that work, but often the client dictates the video conference platform, and he simply couldn't do anything but tell clients he couldn't video conference. So he switched to Mac, which is like Linux with better multimedia support.

Finally, I'm just more used to Windows. And I personally don't have a big incentive to switch.

There are two Linux things I wish I could have on Windows:

- Proper X-Mouse

- Tiling windows manager

CarelessExpert5• 5 years ago

My friend tried to use Linux-only for a while, but he said trying to video conference just sucked.

As an FYI, for folks reading this, I spend at least half of every day in video conferences and this is largely a non-issue these days. The vast majority of platforms have web-based clients that work great, and many have native clients that are quite good as well. The biggest issue is probably screensharing on Wayland, which can be fiddly to get working and is subject to client issues, so stick with Xorg if you can.

In terms of hardware, I just end up buying gear designed to work with Linux rather than trying to make Linux work on a random piece of equipment. That means typically Dell or Lenovo, though newcomers like Framework are also prioritizing Linux support.

If you're using just random gear, older is better, as Linux support comes eventually but it often lags.

Edit:

By the way, I have to say, I've appreciated a lot of the comments in this thread. While I don't myself have the deep affection for the mac trackpad, and so can't really comment on that experience, everything else in this comment thread absolutely rings true to me.

And I say that as a person using Linux as a daily driver!

Leftium2• 5 years ago

Yes, this was a couple years ago; good to know Linux has better video conference support, now.

I use ThinkPads, so I probably could use Linux if I wanted to. But other people might not want to prioritize their OS choice over their hardware choice.

And this is probably really niche, but I forgot to mention anything in Korea like online banking/shopping required Active-X for secure transactions. I think this is getting better now, but a few years ago you couldn't even use a Mac or the Chrome browser on Windows.

ASalazarMX4• 5 years ago

I solved that with a Virtualbox'ed Windows 10 where I install all the stuff required by my company (Forticlient, Zoom, etc.) that can't be safely installed in Linux. No issues so far.

ericbarrett• 5 years ago

Accessibility. I started becoming farsighted when I closed in on 40. I need bigger fonts and more aggressive UI scaling on a 4K monitor to be able to operate without squinting or headaches. Linux distros have come a long way in the last 5 years, but there are still many apps and window managers that ignore these settings.

Engineering-MD• 5 years ago

I would like to, but just always put off by various small things. I like the UIs available in linux and the free and open software. But often there is a difficulty, a nag, an issue to solve. And things don’t fit together, it’s lack synergy between its components. Hardware support is another difficulty- track pads like others said.

Tbh, I am looking to upgrade my laptop, and was thinking of going pure linux, but all these things are making me reconsider. I don’t want to buy a nice piece of hardware and then struggle to use it because of software compatibility. Yes I know there are Linux only systems with dedicated hardware, but tbh the hardware (system76 etc) isn’t as good as other options (that I can tell), and it locks me to linux. And yes, there are linux/windows laptops like x1 and xps, but I don’t want to buy Lenovo and I’ve had bad experiences with dell. So, I’ll probably end up going Apple and donating to some linux alternative to help forgive my sin of giving in.

ASalazarMX4• 5 years ago

I learned that you gotta pick a boring Linux distro as your main OS. For me it's Kubuntu LTS. Sure, I've had small glitches like bluetooth headphone issues or flaky double screen support, but once you solve them, you're set for 5 years. At my age, I'll upgrade my main OS maybe 10-15 times at most.

I used to eagerly try the six-month releases, but I can't devote time to beta test anymore. Give me a boring, non-bleeding edge Linux, I can work with that.

madamelic• 5 years ago

I think that's the big point here.

Too many people think Linux and think some complicated OS where you are handed a barebones OS and you have to assemble the rest. You can absolutely do that but you really shouldn't unless you know why you are doing that.

Ubuntu LTS works great. I've been running off it for over a decade (god. just realized that.) and it's almost always been plug-and-play. The days of having to constantly fiddle with drivers is over. I made the jump back when node development on Windows required fiddling but node on Linux did not. `sudo apt install build-essential` and I was basically ready to go.

The few times where I had to fiddle with Ubuntu were pretty painless. The nice thing about using a really common OS where some tinkering skill is expected is you can search for anything and someone has almost definitely written out exact steps on how to solve it.

If you get a problem with Windows: good luck, because the technical support for Windows is taking it to Geek Squad / re-installing the OS entirely. I'll admit I am being a little facetious on this.

plouc• 5 years ago

This is it. I came to the same conclusion and my experience with Linux (in my case, plain Ubuntu) is painless!

marviio• 5 years ago

When I ran Linux full time this was true for most desktops but not for laptops. There was always some hardware component (wifi, trackpad, webcam, sound, sleep/wake, GPU, USB) that needed the bleeding edge kernel. I remember always eagerly waiting for the next beta of Fedora. Is it better now?

kiliancs• 5 years ago

I feel comfortable with any of the three major OSs. Currently my daily driver is macOS, though I do most of my dev work on a remote Linux machine.

I wouldn't switch from macOS to Linux because my previous experience is that Linux won't work well or be unstable (with updates) on some hardware—in my case, a laptop. I have been reading that the situation has improve, but honestly I don't want to risk it. In general, even in purely software land, updates haven't always been smooth.

Even if all these issues were resolved, I'd need additional motivation to go through the effort of switching.

sam0x173• 5 years ago

I do, so this post is moot.

chudi• 5 years ago

Yes ! I use it like for the last 10 years, with steam and their proton compatibility layer the games that I play works great.

zthrowaway• 5 years ago

Because I like my audio to work in meetings.

xboxnolifes2• 5 years ago

1. Video games. Easily the biggest one. I don't want to have to potentially jump through hoops or be completely unable to play a game by chance every time I download a new game.

2. The subtle issues from various audio devices, mice, printers, GPU driver support, etc. Or just driver/hardware support in general.

3. Learning the equivalent (or worse) software for the various little things that need to get done like picture editing, video editing, editing doc/docx files, etc.

4. Attempting to fix issues leading to multi-page long support involving installing new software, editing configs, running cryptic commands, etc. (Not that Windows is much better, since most big issues seem to lead me to the suggestion of a fresh install. and there have been some issues caused by updates that I haven't been able to fix to this day.)

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

I got Proton running quite nicely on my Lenovo (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400), but I agree with all your points (see my other comments in this thread).

milesvp• 5 years ago

I second this. I had a dualboot system for a long time. Between steam proton, and lutris, I havn’t needed to boot into windows for a game in over 2 years. That said, I’m super flexible, and if a game doesn’t work and I can’t find an acceptable fix I’ll get a refund from steam.

I also kind of like trying to get games working, it’s one of the reasons I got into computers initially. Getting games to work on dos was not for the faint of heart.

karmakaze2• 5 years ago

I've heard that Starcraft 2 plays perfectly on Linux. Here's some instructions (I haven't tried myself):

[0] https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-starcraft-2-on-ubuntu...

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

I guess that people interested in gaming will want to play more than a single, decade-old, game.

tpoacher• 5 years ago

I know this will probably come across as trolling to most in your place, but I'm effectively in the same position as you, largely for the same list (yes including games), except in the reverse direction in terms of OS.

xboxnolifes2• 5 years ago

I can understand being in the opposite position for everything (I have plenty of complaints about Windows issues), except for the games. What games do you play that are inconvenient or impossible to play on Windows but not Linux? If I had to guess, it would be emulated games, but that's the best guess I can give.

teitoklien• 5 years ago

3> equivalent or worse software

1. Krita is very good for picture editing And id say more user friendly than photoshop 2. For video editing, Davinci Resolve is often more reputable and popular in studios than Adobe premiere 3. Editing docs tho , ye kinda sucks but you can use wine to run office suite , libreoffice exists but i get your point on that one

The rest are either equivalent or superior for almost every usecase scenario tho.

wayneftw3• 5 years ago

You're not wrong, but here's what I do because I think it's worth doing:

1. I keep a separate Windows machine for games. I never liked playing games and doing personal stuff on my workstations anyway.

2. For my workstations, I buy older refurbished towers, upgrade the RAM and SSD and everything just works. I've actually had more hardware issues on my Macs, with incompatible mice and keyboards, never on Linux. Example of one of my workstations - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FBSW5G6

Luckily for web/mobile dev, I don't need a dedicated GPU but my old Acer E5-575 laptop has a dedicated nVidia card and Manjaro has no problem running on that. There was one small flag that I had to enable to stop screen tearing.

3. I hardly had to learn anything new since I'm a minimalist and most of my software carried over. Thunderbird is there. VS Code is there. Instead of Paint.net I use a fork called Pinta, (but it is slightly lower quality than Paint.net but luckily again as a full stack guy, I don't have to do much with it). Plenty of options to edit doc/docx like Libre office, Google docs or Office 365... but this is not something I really ever have to do. The only thing I've never done on Linux really is video editing, but that was never great on Windows either - the best video editing experience I've had was on my iPad.

4. I've been using Linux since around RedHat 3 or 4 and I didn't switch to a Linux desktop until about 3 years ago, because I've always had problems keeping a Linux desktop running... until I switched to a rolling release. With Manjaro, I have had zero issues getting all the most recent software versions that I want. In the past, with Ubuntu, I'd have to add so many third party repos that eventually an update from one of them would make my machine unbootable. Never happened once with Manjaro. One time an update broke some fonts, but I downgraded the package and locked it from receiving updates until the problem was fixed.

Honestly, I have to do non-trivial setup for any desktop OS that I run because I'm a picky minimalist.

Anyway, the best part of switching to a Linux desktop for me was the speed and ease of using things like Docker and all the other CLI stuff that I normally do on my servers. Doing things with Node.js/npm/yarn is super fast compared to Windows. There is no split-brain between my development environment and the server because it's the same OS.

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

For me, it’s the lack of polish and full corporate productivity suite.

There are _zero_ effective replacements for a multitude of things I need, although I would be perfectly happy with a fully standard implementation of Remote Desktop (and no, Remmina still lacks the authentication and virtual desktop workspace support I need). Edge and Teams betas are coming close to providing around half of what I need, but not all there yet (I work at Microsoft).

I am, however, pretty happy with Linux for personal use and development work - I even bought a new laptop exclusively for it: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400

I am running Elementary on it, which is (by far) the best distro for my needs (and habits): https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/16/1200

However, all my personal stuff (mail, photos, music) still lives on a Mac, and I don’t see that changing as for “civilians” (as a friend puts it), the lack of even half-baked e-mail and calendaring, let alone the kind of creature comforts you get from the Mac App Store (and the Windows one) make Linux a no-go unless they just want to browse Facebook and read webmail.

(Again, Elementary comes closest and flatpacks are _nearly_ there, but the core apps aren’t ready yet.)

qorrect3• 5 years ago

make Linux a no-go unless they just want to browse Facebook and read webmail.

This a joke my man ? Are you seriously saying Linux is only good for browsing the internet ?

(I work at Microsoft)

There it is.

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

I am also an old VAXer, been through the Slackware dozens-of-floppies ritual, and have been primarily on a Mac for nearly twenty years.

Your characterization of who I am and why I use what I use is woefully incomplete :)

garbagecoder5• 5 years ago

Nice ad hominem. In reality there is all kinds of productive work that you simply cannot do on Linux or at least not outside of some joke programs like Gimp. Developing on Linux is nice

sigg3• 5 years ago

Just a tip: Dwservice is a great tool for remote control, and it can run as a service or as a one-off!

krut-patel• 5 years ago

(I work at Microsoft).

Just in case you didn't know, since the SolarWinds debacle from last year, Microsoft has completely blocked authorisation for corpnet and other tools on anything other than enrolled devices. And since they only support managed devices on Windows/MacOS, using Linux for day job is a no go. Last I checked, circa Jan, I couldn't use Teams/Office on a web browser in Linux (of course, this might have changed in the meantime).

rcarmo8• 5 years ago

Yes, I know. I keep my work machines separate (always have, by personal policy), so I never had to deal with that. But the auth limitations and general feature gaps have always prevented me from even thinking about trying, and are more representative than specific policies.

spikej• 5 years ago

Lack of proper remote desktop and a subpar experience with substitutes is what does it for me. My home network is full of Windows machines, and it's simply easier to be on the same ecosystem.

I have a Linux VM for dev work where Windows won't do (certain Ruby gems for example)

qorrect3• 5 years ago

ITT: A bunch of god damn consumers y'all make me sick.

fsn4dN69ey• 5 years ago

I have, for years now. Coming from a former all Windows (and a couple years on an MBP) user, it's perfectly fine. I have a dual boot, so whenever I need windows, I can use it, but it's becoming less and less frequent. Nowadays it's usually only for games.

Reading through this thread though, I'm baffled by some of these issues. I have been using the latest Ubuntu release for the past several years, on a variety of machines (T440s, 2 self-built desktops, a Lenovo Legion) and haven't experienced any problems to the degree others have mentioned. Out of the box support across Intel, AMD cpus, no graphics issues, nothing with scaling or extra monitors, never, on any machine. I did notice one problem when I updated to Ubuntu 20 about six months ago that my left Gsync monitor was acting weird, but I just disabled gsync and it runs perfectly fine. That's it in the past 5 years of using Linux as daily driver.

I work as a software engineer full time so maybe I just don't notice "issues"? As the old saying goes, it works fine on my machine(s).

ppetty• 5 years ago

I really want to try Linux more & like it more. In early 2020, I wiped a 2012 Mac mini that had a nice quad core processor with 16 GB of RAM & an SSD; and then installed Linux Mint. It was great & worked well with the display (a Dell 27”) and Apple’s Magic Trackpad & bluetooth keyboard. But there was some work needed to get the trackpad behaving exactly as it did on Mac & as close as it got, I still saw frustrating results in some app’s scrolling.

I’ve previously tried different versions of Ubuntu on the same machine, and eventually wiped everything again favor of Cinnamon. Cinnamon was great. I’ve also tried Elementary — very macOS like; along with a few other I can’t remember.

But as you can probably tell, not very scientifically researched. And I’ve never felt compelled to learn a whole lot about exactly what separates the variations of Linux I’ve tried. For example, I know some are KDE based, and some are Gnome based. My criteria was simple, install OS, configure, install apps, configure, install more apps, configure … and so on.

Honestly, I’d still be using Cinnamon, but when the M1 MacBook Air came out, Apple offered $180 for an almost 9 year old Mac mini. It was like they new somehow, that they might be losing me. I’m not that locked in on App Store purchases, and always recommend trying to avoid apps that aren’t widely available on both macOS & some Linux distributions. (I still love Joplin for notes, for example.)

Where Apple has me locked in is my phone, with handoff and all the other tight integrations. So if I were building a Linux distribution, that would be a high priority: build an ecosystem. Maybe that’s an SDK that allows for data syncing from Desktop to Phone (for everything, consistently: email, password manager, bookmarks, etc). But when you do that, integrate with macOS (and Windows) too. Build a Safari Extension so I can get to my bookmarks on my Linux machine, my Mac & my iPhone (mobile Safari does Extensions), for example.

Tools to analyze hardware & software to then help determine what distribution would work best would be awesome, too. Imagine a Migration Assistant for Linux that you install on a Mac that tells you what Linux distributions are a good fit for your peripherals & installed apps … along with suggestions to resolve some known issues.

There are a lot of barriers, and I’m sure most of them have been dealt with over & over again. Why do I have to re-solve some of the issues? That friction, if reduced, would probably make more people try. I started on my Mac mini because the latest release available was old & some newer software that did run was very slow. Linux Mint & Cinnamon are really straight forward, have big communities and plenty of resources for help; and either of those made that old Mac mini feel very fast again.

garbagecoder5• 5 years ago

Because the desktop experience is bad and I can get everything I need from the CLI in WSL on Windows or from the terminal in MacOS. And I try not to be a martyr for politics in my choice of tools. If all else was roughly equal, I would prefer FOSS, but it's not and the sooner the FOSS community realizes a license isn't a feature the sooner we will have that world.

hammyhavoc10• 5 years ago

By your logic, food being vegan or halal isn't a "feature".

To someone who cares about privacy and freedom, a license is most definitely a feature.

Different strokes for different folks.

sircastor3• 5 years ago

You made their point though. Food being Vegan or Halal does not matter to people who don’t care about that. You don’t need to sell to people who already buy in. The software has to stand on its own merits against the competition. A FOSS license is very very rarely going to be the thing that pushes a user to drop Photoshop for GIMP

MikusR2• 5 years ago

Because I can't scroll a webpage without screen tearing.

temporallobe• 5 years ago

I used to be an avid Linux Mint user and would constantly promote it to friends and colleagues, but no longer. I still really like Mint and Ubuntu in general and is far better than the Windows spyware/unstoppable forced updates nightmare, but it makes an impractical daily OS for me and I have switched to macOS. The primary reason is for music/audio production for which I have invested a significant amount of money and time for Logic and the entire Universal Audio ecosystem using Luna as the DAW. I am well-aware of the Linux alternatives, but I am unwilling to make a switch right now and there simply is no equivalent to Luna on any OS or platform.

Another issue I had with Linux desktop distros is with software compatibility and inconsistency of available binaries among the them. I got really sick of trying to build libraries from source just install simple apps or libs. I do enough of that in my day job.

I am not hating in Linux though. There a great many advantages and for simple use cases it’s more than adequate. I even had my teenage daughter use Mint for a while until I broke down and had to get her a Macbook when she started university (there were some specific system requirements that their software had, and it wasn’t compatible with *nix).

t0bia_s• 5 years ago

Adobe.

MiddleEndian• 5 years ago

I used Linux as my primary OS for awhile, and Mac OS for a long time before that, but I switched to Windows 10 a few years ago.

It's got the Adobe Suite for graphics and video stuff, and WSL for Linux development in a way that's better than MacOS ever reached in that category. The window management is really good nowadays. I'm also writing some software that will target Windows (and also Linux). Great touch screen support on top of that, the Surface Book has a great design (although very limited internal hardware, so I won't be getting another lol)

Plus I like Notepad++ better than any other graphical text editor I've used, and Ditto is my favorite clipboard manager by far.

I think a lot of this could be replicated or improved upon in Linux (and maybe having a secondary Windows box to target stuff to be released for Windows), but the Adobe suite and touch support are the two things that would be too much to miss. Also, audio on laptops has also proven to be an issue with Linux in the past.

Microsoft does seem to be actively hostile in pushing irritants on the user, but they can be disabled, and Apple is similarly hostile nowadays, so I am not inclined to switch back to MacOS.

dhruvkar• 5 years ago

I've been on Ubuntu/PopOS! for the last ~5 years and the biggest reasons I think about switching back to macOS is printer and scanner support.

I have a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner and two Brother printers. Although I got the Fujitsu scanner to work, it didn't have all the software goodies (auto-straighten, OCR etc.). It works out of the box on mac. I cannot get my color printer to work with my Lenovo Thinkpad PopOS machine, and the black and white Brother printer works, but is..... fiddly.

If I also had to edit images/video regularly, I'd switch back to macOS.

YaBa• 5 years ago

I always had a dual boot system until Windows 7 became EOL. Now Linux is my primary OS and couldn't be happier. Still use Win7 in VM because the lack of support of some special software I work with. For everything else, Linux is the right way.

Ologn• 5 years ago

My company assigned me Macbook with a VPN to do programming work. If it were up to me I'd use Linux. I can still get to that BSDish MacOS Unix.

I have an Ubuntu desktop and laptop for my personal work.

smorgusofborg• 5 years ago

I only use Linux on PCs but I would consider my phone to be primary so my accidental daily OS is Android or Lineage.

To switch away from anything based on Android, I really just need calling/modem, Firefox and Signal.

phendrenad27• 5 years ago

It's simple: Linux offers me nothing over the OS that ships with my PC or Mac.

Installing another OS takes a small amount of effort, so Linux needs to at least provide enough value-add for me to bother. It does not.

dpl2• 5 years ago

Several reasons really. No matter how stupid it sounds, but one of them - there's no normal e-mail client.

_Anima_• 5 years ago

Care to define what you mean by "normal client"?

dpl2• 5 years ago

The one that can properly work w/ SSO and integrate email/calendar with several email service providers (Google/Microsoft 365/Exchange)

acmdas• 5 years ago

Debian's been my workstation OS for many years. I mainly use Emacs, the shell and a browser so familiar and stable is all I ask of the OS. I'm on 10 now, will probably update to 11 shortly.

I have a Win10 installation on a drive on a second workstation should I ever need to run a commercial, Win-only app, but it mainly just gets started every few months to catch-up on updates. I'm fond of my 2011 MacBook Pro (the hardware) and have become less and less impressed with the OS and apps as time as gone by (and as I made the mistake of installing updates). It's the only machine that I allow the camera on, so it's the go-to for Zoom.

gusfoo• 5 years ago

Ask HN: Why don’t you use Linux as your daily driver OS?

Because, like it or not (I don't) DX11 outperforms OpenGL on my target hardware.

But on the plus-side, VS is incredibly comfy.

caeril2• 5 years ago

I'm not a Mac user (anymore) but I often ask myself this, as well. MacOS is buggy as hell, the UI sucks, and a stock Ubuntu or Fedora installation is much, much, much more usable, particularly for development tasks.

From what I've been able to gather, there are two reasons:

1. Vidya (this is somewhat valid)

2. Status signaling (but you'll never get them to admit it)

That's it, full stop. You either need to play Fortnite, or your status needs to be affirmed by others. There's a small minority who pretend that LibreOffice can't open MS Office docs, but considering 99% of corporate Mac users use G Suite in the browser for docs anyway, this is a ludicrous complaint.

Just accept that they care about their public image, or like to play vidya, and move on.

garbagecoder5• 5 years ago

As if Linux users don’t care about their image.

alexitosrv• 5 years ago

A bit late to the question, but for me is mostly my cloud workloads definitively means I am more platform agnostic, and I am inclined to use the least resistance path for (high quality) videocalls and that means to be able to easily connect audio/video devices. From College I used to be a evangelizer of the goodies of linux, but nowadays I am too tired to fight that battle.

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

I am stuck with my M1 MacBook Pro because it is so fast and has all of my dev tools installed and working. (I know that Linux and BSD is starting to work on M1).

I love my heavy System 76 laptop with a GPU but the UI is not quite there for me. It is too heavy to travel with but good for at-home deep learning work because for the GPU.

A possible sweet spot for you to look at: Chromebook's because the UI is pretty good and the Linux container support is pretty good. I just bought a super cheap, super portable Lenovo Duet that is surprisingly useful. However, the cheap price entails slower performance and the USB-C port will not drive a hires external monitor. Something twice as expensive with better performance and better external monitor support might meet your needs.

midrus• 5 years ago

Because I have work to do

cestith2• 5 years ago

I use Linux as my primary OS on some systems. My work laptop is a Mac and is specified by the company. I use it mainly to connect to Linux VMs and work within the VMs. My main gaming desktop is Windows because the selection of games is so good and Proton is great but not a perfect replacement. I'm more likely to buy a game that's available on at least two OSes, though. That's normally Windows and either macOS or Linux if it's two. Games that support Mac and Linux but not Windows are rare. My non-game computing at home is almost entirely Linux, with some Mac, DOS, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, TI/99-4a, Tandy CoCo, Apple II, a single Pi that runs RiscOS instead of Linux, some old DEC machines, and various Z80 machines thrown in.

pengo• 5 years ago

But I do. I use only Linux on all my computers except a dedicated Mac Mini used for music production.

m4xm4n• 5 years ago

I've used Linux for a long time. Though primarily on servers these days, I've occasionally used it as my main desktop OS, and always end up going back to macOS because of three things:

1. battery life on laptops. Linux tends not to Power Management well on most laptops. Whether this is a hardware/ACPI thing, a device driver thing, or an overall ecosystem thing, I'm not sure. But it's noticeably worse than when running Windows or macOS.

2. as others have no doubt mentioned, trackpad. Apple's trackpad hardware and macOS's trackpad gesture support is so good, it's really hard to not have it. I can emulate some of it on my XPS 13 running Ubuntu w/ some additional agent thing that runs in the background, but it's only 85% there and not as smooth an experience.

3. desktop environment stability & consistency. this is _much_ less a problem than it was say 10 or 15 years ago as GNOME has gotten quite good and Flatpak/Snap/etc. are decent at containing various GUIs and their disparate dependencies, but there's still a lack of good integration with DEs across ecosystem tools generally. But also Electron has also sort of leveled the playing field a bit, so many desktop apps behave the same across platforms (for better or worse)

I would've said slow package/kernel updates, but there are enough solutions to this now, that it's not as much of a problem (Ubuntu HWE, Nix, Linuxbrew, or using ArchLinux)

astromd2• 5 years ago

For me it’s because I do creative work and need Final Cut, Logic Pro, the Adobe suite of apps, etc. and those tools just don’t run on Linux.

Cycl0ps• 5 years ago

Linux has been my daily driver for the past month, let me tell you why it shouldn't be.

20 mins ago I was getting Steam set up. I want to try Protons experimental features on Battlefield 4 to test for any glaring issues before the new game releases. Proton switches over, I go to install, and I'm told I don't have execute permissions on the disk I want to use.

Okay, I did have some issues with that disk initially, I probably messed with a setting that needs changed. Let me check folder permissions. Those looks good, let's check the partition itself. Yup, still a colored rectangle. Everything looks like it always does. I get to Googling and see someone on the AskUbuntu forums mention that my config should look like theirs with, "Show in user interface" checked off for that partition. I'm not using Ubuntu but it seems like a general fix and I didn't see an AskManjaro in the Google results, so I do that and reboot. No joy.

Keep digging at Google, find a Steam forum post about this. user notes that for security the disk would not be able to execute programs by default. Okay, sure, that makes a kind of sense. I follow his instructions and tag the drive as "users, exec, {something I've forgotten and will likely bite me in the ass in a weeks time}". and I go to reboot to make sure everything is on the same page. That's when the problems started.

FATAL ERROR. My first, yippie. After slamming my forehead against the keyboard in the correct pattern I was able to enter my root password and get to work. reading through the one-thousand-and-thirty-five lines of the journal file, I found the error around line 900. To paraphrase: disk don't mount no more. Out of pure luck I remembered that someone in the forums mentioned /etc/fstab, which is the text version of the config I'd been screwing with. I erased everything but "user" in the field I changed before and rebooted and managed to get myself in. The keen eyed among you will have seen that I had spaces in the field the first time I put it in. I think that fucked me.

On boot I licked my finger and stuck it back in the light socket, changing the field again to "user,exec" and mounting. Well praise be to Jesus, Allah, and whatever the hell Tom Cruise got roped into, because not only did the drive actually mount, Steam stopped whining at me and started a download.

I have no idea if the game will work, the download has another hour to go as I write this. Earlier today I saw this post and wanted to talk about how I've enjoyed Linux so far, and I still do! But Linux isn't built for users, it's built for technicians. You don't run Linux, you maintain it. I like this, but that's because I want to learn more about Linux and these miniature trial by fires force me to. If you're the kind of person who just wants something to either work or not, and can't be bothered to deal with an hour of 'maybe', stick with Windows.

nbzso• 5 years ago

I ditched Apple. After 20+ years. There is no way my computer not to be under my control. I compromise by using Windows for the design apps under VM.

Pop!_OS is like a dream. Quick install. Update. Restart. Go. Manjaro and ARCH are perfect for development work.

Last time I felt this satisfaction from using a desktop was long time ago with Snow Leopard. So in summary, use what you like but stop with this "Linux is hard and breaks". Control requires some effort and expertise.

devonbleak• 5 years ago

Mostly having to learn systemd.

Ultimately the same reason I have an iPhone instead of an Android: Windows/MacOS do what I need and at this point I'm more interested in doing that thing I need/want to be doing instead of f'ing with the internals of my OS, figuring out how to merge config file changes from my package manager, and getting it working with the WiFi.

25 years ago that sort of thing was fun. I have no appetite for re-learning it.

filchermcurr3• 5 years ago

It's been decades and I still can't easily adjust the scrolling speed of my mouse. I just did a quick search and everything still says 'oh just use the imwheel package :)' That requires installing the package, figuring out how the configuration file should be set up, figuring out the correct multiplier, and then figuring out how to get imwheel to start when you turn on your computer.

Windows and macOS provide convenient GUI options for these seemingly simple things.

hatchoo• 5 years ago

Power management/Battery life. When I used to just sit in one place with my laptop plugged in it worked well for me (I do everything in the browser and/or VSCode). Unplugged, the battery seems to stretch out more on Windows than on Ubuntu.

(I've always only upgraded to LTS releases)

fhaldridge7• 5 years ago

Because I'm on a macbook and buying a new laptop is currently not on my plan. Maybe in 1-2 years I'll replace it and run linux.

I've tried running linux on it but the cpu temps are too high. This seems to be an issue with the linux kernel and the cpu's used in macook laptops.

nicbou• 5 years ago

MacOS mostly leaves me alone. It works as it should and never bothers me. It's simple and reliable and I never give it attention.

My experience with desktop Linux is that it's always on your mind, like an old motorcycle. You're always fiddling with something, listening for noises, keeping a mental model of its internals in your mind. Keeping it running involves knowing how a carburetor works, and having a few motorcycle forums on quick dial. You want to believe that it's better than an overengineered modern car, but you're always fiddling with it at red lights.

It's fun to mess with old motorcycles, but only when your goal is to mess with old motorcycles. Sometimes you want to Just Drive. That's why they're rarely your daily driver.

MacOS is the trusty sedan I need. Linux is the contraption I take out on the weekends.

cpach• 5 years ago

I use Mac. I like the UI. And I firmly believe that there are great benefits when the hardware is made by the same company that made the OS.

I believe that Apple’s laptops are the best on thr market.

I also enjoy the apps. E.g. 1Password / Preview / Evernote / Skitch / Pingplotter / djay. great And Acorn. Acorn is great and I would really miss it if I switched back to Linux.

I love the fact that people can make a living of writing great apps for the OS I use. I gladly pay for that.

2rsf• 5 years ago

Apple’s laptops are the best on thr market

my sample is very small but that's not my feeling, maybe the high end Macs compared to high end something, but the middle of the line laptops? I don't feel a big change.

Also note that while Microsoft don't manufacturer or design the hardware I suppose they are in very close relationships with Intel and influence the design

pjmlp• 5 years ago

A culture of GUI based tooling and IDEs, with UI/UX workflows as main focus, graphics programming tools, and whole OS Frameworks instead of jigsaws of libraries and fragmented desktop paradigms.

ammmir• 5 years ago

It's not the software availability, it just looks ugly.

There was a short period in the mid-2000's where there was a lot of desktop eye candy (sup KDE) and accelerated window managers like Beryl, but it regressed from there.

Look, nobody wants to be diffing config files when they upgrade random software packages. The lack of UI polish, multiple UI toolkits, questionable UX choices, and user ergonomics are poor. Give me a Linux desktop with a beautiful and consistent UI like we had with Windows 2000 and I'll be the first to use it.

Let's face it. MacOS is the real successor to the UNIX throne, most of the middle class uses it, and everyone else is on Windows.

kaba04• 5 years ago

Knowing that preferences are subjective, both a pure gnome and pure plasma environment will be polished and frankly, good looking. Seriously, do check it out again.

Hell, windows definitely wins the price of “worst overall aesthetics” where not even their own native apps have a uniform look.

lycopodiopsida• 5 years ago

I am on macOS: Mostly software, to be honest, since I don't like laptops (mac mini is my main driver). Devonthink as my software for archiving, scanning documents and OCR, Alfred as a launcher, Hammerspoon for automation. Other that that - I am programming a lot and spend a lot of time in Emacs, so I would be fine for my personal stuff.

But I also assume, that I would spend a lot of time for configuration and I would get a lot of small hardware support problems - wifi, hibernate, bluetooth. Also I would not be able to sync and copy/paste across my other apple devices, use my magic trackpad and airpods and so on.

Honestly, it is a difficult topic - I've used Linux and FreeBSD as my sole desktop system in the past for several years, so that I have a pretty good understanding of what to expect. On one side I do not want to spend time to fiddle with my system anymore, on the other side I have a feeling that the current privacy-violating course at apple will push me to jump the ship.

MonaroVXR• 5 years ago

But I also assume, that I would spend a lot of time for configuration and I would get a lot of small hardware support problems - wifi, hibernate, bluetooth. Also I would not be able to sync and copy/paste across my other apple devices, use my magic trackpad and airpods and so on.

This can be done on Linux too with Gsconnect and KDE connect.

jonathantf2• 5 years ago

I use Windows at work since all of our servers are Windows - at home since I play games, use Adobe software and don't like to tinker with my PC when I'm trying to relax. Windows just works.

Don't like Mac hardware for various reasons, again I want something reliable.

firecall• 5 years ago

The Finder!

Nothing on Windows or Linux guis is as good as macOS’ Finder!

Quick Look and the use of Miller Columns are two features that spring to mind!

I spend most of my life in the terminal, an editor or a browser so can switch pretty easily.

Id rather use Linux than Windows, but sometimes I want and need to use Photoshop. And Linux isn’t great for that!

I feel like I’m fighting Windows or Linux.

But when I’m back in macOS, I can just get on with things!

sircastor3• 5 years ago

I used Ubuntu LTM as a daily driver at work for about 5 years. Most of the time it was fine, but several times I’ve had Ubuntu totally fail to boot after an update. Kernel issues or some such. This was in a work environment. I don’t know if it was a combination of hardware that the update didn’t like, or a random software package.

Once I could forgive, once a year is unacceptable.

I do have an Apple bias, as I grew up on Macs. I’m competent enough on Linux to use it, but I don’t want to play IT while I'm also trying to do my regular job. When one became available, I switched to a Mac. It’s not a perfect experience, but it is reliable.

stakkur• 5 years ago

Specific applications.

Inability to use it for work.

Lack of a deep selection of polished, well-supported apps.

hakfoo• 5 years ago

I tried to daily-driver Linux back in the early 2000s. It was reasonable for my needs, with a given "dual boot for games or dealing with some propriatery-driver peripherals".

I try some modern distributions, and many of them come very close to working out of the box. Usually nVidia drivers are a modest hassle, but it's arguably still faster to "everything you need installed" than Windows.

But I never really feel comfortable in there.

1. I've never really trusted package management. What we have now is a morass of "some stuff comes from the vendor, some from an external repository, some comes via snaps/flatpaks, some compiled from source. This screams "unmaintainable tangle" later.

2. Modern desktops/config tools give me a very similar vibe. I feel like there are a lot of tools I can run that are likely to clobber (or neuter) the configuration changes made in the modern KDE/GNOME/XFCE graphical tools, with no obvious way to get back. All in all, the experience is much less "I have my finger on the pulse of exactly what my machine is doing" than it used to be. I know I can unbundle a lot of this stuff and run FVWM, but then you need to find replacements for many of the little helper applets that lived in a "desktop environment" dock (an always-on mixer so volume control keys work, for example)

3. A lot of distributions have the "let's be Free-as-in-broken-for-common-use-cases." The vital missing firmware components or drivers, or common codecs. Yeah, I get it. People played fast and loose in 2002 by including x11amp in the distribution. Even if they can't ship the bits in the ISO, they could at least have the non-free repositories enabled by default or some very clear "install-the-bloody-nvidia-drivers.sh" scripts left on your desktop after install.

4. Turnkey Windows games support. I get that if I install Steam, it and Proton are supposed to handle most stuff, but there's still plenty of titles where there's, at the best... conflicting information out there. I also expect that a lot of guidance is distribution and configuration specific, and probably quite brittle.

I guess I'm waiting for Slackware 15, because they were always closest to the ideal in terms of "no package-management or configuration surprises", but on the other hand, I suspect getting from "working desktop" to "playing Guild Wars 2 on monitor 1, while streaming Crunchyroll on monitor 2" would be a lot easier if I was comfortable with something like Ubuntu.

josephferano2• 5 years ago

1.) I don't have a Linux laptop

Given my previous experiences, I am never again running Linux on a laptop that is not meant to be a Linux laptop. I have owned a System76 but now I own a Windows laptop (former died and I had to buy the latter in a pinch). I spend my hard earned money for every component on the computer, so I won't accept that something doesn't work just so I can say Linux is installed. Should I be in the market for a new laptop, I would then consider a System76 or the like. The learning experience of installing Arch was great, but it's just one of those things I'm doing once for educational purposes and never doing again. It's not something I want as a hobby. Next time, as soon as I open my new laptop, I just want to install the software I will be using, not fixing hardware related issues. With my System76, it was the other way around; I installed a windows boot for work and it didn't work as well as the Linux boot. So morally of the story. as obvious as it is to me now, is to run the OS your laptop was supposed to run for the best experience.

2.) I'm jaded from the last time I installed a distro.

I did what all the cool kids were doing, stopped using a mainstream distro, and installed Arch. It's working and it's there. I don't boot it anymore. The amount of work it took to get everything working was non-trivial to say the least. After that certain things broke with updates. Several other things never worked or had its quirks.

2.) The community

After spending so much time installing my last distro, I suddenly realized that the amount of time I was spending on the Linux desktop qualified as it being a hobby. And when I realized that and then took a look at the community, I finally saw it; they're all hobbyist. Linux is their hobby. They like to distro hop and WM hop, rice their configurations, then post on r/Unixporn. So it became clear that it was less about productivity and awesome tooling, which was the original intent, and more about ricing your desktop which obviously Linux is way better at.

4.) I run a different OS now, Emacs

First I tried running Emacs on windows and certain things like Magit were painfully slow. I am now comfortably running Emacs with WSL + X410. Using Emacs as a front end to my OS makes the underlying "backend OS" (I'm making that up now) less important. My reasons for switching to Linux years ago was because I saw this cool thing called i3wm that could let me control my desktop the way I was controlling my vim editor; with my keyboard. However, after my Linux laptop died and I switched to a Windows one in a pinch, I needed to find a replacement to that environment on the Windows side. Naturally started with WSL, then had a fairly productive tmux + fish + vim configuration, and now I'm on Emacs.

Granted, Emacs runs better on my Arch boot compared to WSL + X410. Still, I'm pretty happy with this new setup.

5.) I develop windows software for work

This might be a bit anticlimactic but had I not chosen a job that developers windows software, I'm sure I would probably still be on Linux. Because I need to keep going back to Windows for work, whether a VM or booted, it has forced me to figure out how to get the tooling I loved to use on the Linux side working on the Windows side. This led me to reason 4 and emacs.

I know many of you will suggest to split work and personal, but the circumstances of my work/life make it way more practical to just have everything together, in particular because the usual "work computer" constraints don't apply to me.

-----------------------------

Would I switch back to Linux? To fix the above issues, here's what I would do;

1.) Buy a Linux laptop

System76, Dell Dev edition, Slimbook, Tuxedo, are all good options.

2.) Use a mainstream distro

I just want my OS to work so I can start Emacs

3.) Change jobs (highly unlikely)

4.) Stop listening to the community

pulse7• 5 years ago

If you have a brand new machine you will need to wait until community develops open-source drivers for all new hardware in your machine. Or you will have to check for every component in advance if it is supported by Linux to avoid problems later on...

miguel-muniz2• 5 years ago

1. The games I play do not run on Linux (Call of Duty being a big one)

2. Some software I use does not run on Linux (Clip Studio, Adobe CC)

3. MacOS offers some of the benefits I would get from Linux with a more consistent environment, polished software, and better integration with my other devices

4. Linux is too fragmented, everyone seems to disagree and roll their own solution. This was fine when I had fun tinkering with computers, but now I use computers for leisure and work.

jamescodesthing• 5 years ago

I develop things for iOS devices. So I gotta pay the Apple Tax.

Enjoying my M1 though, and I like the *nixy bits of OSX so it’s an okay compromise.

the__alchemist• 5 years ago

Linux is finicky. I've tried to use and like Linux about every 2 years for the past 2 decades. Generally Ubuntu, and have experimented with Manjaro and Mint.

I invariable find myself up with an obscene number of browser tabs open trying to fix various problems ranging from minor to severe that distill to copy+pasting CLI commands.

Most recently, the experience on a tablet I use primarily for writing involved laggy input, no good drawing software, and experimenting with custom kernels.

I'm suspicious the problem is rooted in 2 areas: design-by-committee, and messy dependency webs.

nokya• 5 years ago

Last time I tried:

1. Poor battery life

2. No Office (and running a VM brings me back to 1.)

3. No hibernate

4. No full disk encryption

5. Trackpad works better with Windows

6. Too many people working on their own distribution and competing against each other instead of merging resources and solve 20 years long issues. (And I guess I will be lynched for writing this :)

alienspaces• 5 years ago

The only reason I have a mac is for work, developing iPhone applications. For home and hobby development I run Ubuntu Linux which satisfies all of my requirements and needs very little attention. I attempt to keep dependencies at a minimum which lowers ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting.

UziTech• 5 years ago

Drivers. Try buying anything that you have to plug into your Linux machine. It is not easy figuring out if it works on your version of Linux. You can read so many reviews on how great it works for this other version of Linux but when you get it there is still a big chance it will not work, or it worked last year than something changed so you have to downgrade or use this software that hasn't been updated on five years.

caviv• 5 years ago

I am using xubuntu and I love it.

Ask HN: Why don’t you use Linux as your daily driver OS?

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