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by outime 2221 days ago
Until you upgrade the kernel and your wifi stops working. Or the desktop stops loading and you have to spend time going through logs and googling what's broken this time. Or when you plug it to a secondary screen and it freezes. This happened when I was a desktop Linux user and this still happens (less frequently nowadays though). I'm mainly talking about Ubuntu which is supposed to be beginner-friendly and not some obscure distro.

When I was younger I was very happy to deal with these issues because I learned a lot and probably made me the professional I am nowadays. Over time however I realized much of this knowledge doesn't contribute to my day-to-day work anymore and it's just an annoyance - I now want to turn on my laptop and work right away.

3 comments

If you want to run linux, buy from a manufacturer with decent linux support. In my experience, all my dell laptops worked seamlessly with linux. No driver hackery required. WiFi never stopped working. However, HP seemed to have very poor support for linux, and you need to install drivers for WiFi manually, which need to be recompiled on each kernel upgrade.
That never happened to me on Ubuntu. Fedora, on the other hand...
objectively speaking, Debian is perhaps the most stable mainstream os in the world. if you want stable give it a try!