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

> That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives.

I love Linux. I'm a Linux desktop user but I can 100% say my experience is degraded compared to mac and windows users. Not just in apps that are there but in small things like sometimes it changes which mic is being used without telling me.

Driver support is also a thing.

I have my GUI crash on me on a semi regular basis.

And that is on Ubuntu which is a commerical product. And probably the best funded desktop linux there is.

Simply put, it is not stable.



As a user of Linux on my daily driver I recently received a machine with windows 10 for a work project. I've been using it about 50% of the time for the past 2 months and I'm missing Linux big time. It's slower on better hardware, it does seemingly unpredictable things, software crashes more often and the driver situation is still a problem contrary to what everyone has told me. There's countless design choices that make my workflows harder as well.

I also have a Mac mini, and my wife has a MacBook pro. They are better but stability has never been an issue with my Linux desktop experience. I've been using it since 2005 or so. It used to offer far less software and a worse user experience but was always very stable.

Arch BTW.


> I have my GUI crash on me on a semi regular basis

That's true for me at 16.04 or below. I don't really remember encountering one on 18.04 or 20.04 though. May share your use case?


Same here. As of 18.04LTS Ubuntu has been more stable than Windows 7 ever was for me.


20.04 on a Dell XPS.

Possible causing factors, java, spotify, or slack.


I get that argument, but depending on what is being discussed, it might miss the point. If it is "end user experience", then I agree that lack of driver support or software matters. However, if we are comparing operating systems, what they do, and how they do it, I find Linux to be so far ahead of both Windows and MacOS (and I've used all three) that it shouldn't even be much of a question. The limiting factor is, in my experience, only software and driver availability.

"Well, that's kinda a big and important thing to ignore" I hear you say. And, I agree. But, it's also not an inadequacy of Linux itself.

I've had this discussion quite a few times, so to distill it down, "OS A is better than OS B" tend to touch on the following:

- Software availability is better (not a limitation of the OS, but I hear you)

- Privacy is better (while, for example MacOS, not being aware that every single executed executable is being logged and transmitted unencrypted)

- User experience is better (while not having given latest gnome a try, which aside from subjective preference is really well done, and in my subjective experience, much more intuitive than apple's approach, as well as windows' "here's two ways to do the same thing")

- ̶A̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶m̶i̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶ hardware is better. For Apple hardware, this was sort of true up until around 2010. Since then, you get so much less value I'm amazed they can still pull it off.

I see MacOS and Windows going more and more in the direction of a "mobile OS" which less freedom and more telemetry. I see the growing collection of open source hardware as humanity's effort to build something for everyone. Imagine how sad the world would be if Linux or OSS didn't exist.


linux mint somewhat improves ubuntu for the desktop, and fixes many of the little things.




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

Search: