[miroz]

I did this when Vista came out. I said fuck it and installed Ubuntu, I had enough of Microsoft bullshit. Then Ubuntu upgraded and moved all window icons to the left side and rearranged them awkwardly. On the next update, they upgraded the sound subsystem and I was without sound until I bought my next PC. Another update came and computer went to sleep when watching movies, so I had to move the mouse every minute to fix it. I said fuck it and installed Windows 7. There's no escape.

[nicbou]

I had a similar experience. MacOS was the answer. For me, the moat around MacOS is so large that I refuse to consider any other laptop brand.

This has been the most frictionless operating system I've used to date. It's not perfect, but it's good enough to make other options undesirable.

[marricks]

Same here. Mac has had some poor choices (Touch Bar, less ports) but at least the decisions aren’t quite that huge in terms of the OS? Not to mention Apple makes money off devices so you don’t have shitty decisions like ads in search and weird preinstalled apps.

[mixmastamyk]

May want to rethink:

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

[zamadatix]

The upside to Linux is when one of these kinds of changes happen you have the freedom to modify or swap out components to your liking.

The downside to Linux is nobody actually wants to constantly modify or maintain components to their liking and nobody can agree what a good liking is so nobody likes the way somebody else does it.

[IshKebab]

Yeah and you can only do that if you have student-level free time. I used Linux as a student. I could keep it mostly working. Now I have a job and children and I like my laptop to last longer than 2 hours and connect to WiFi reliably.

[noobermin]

My computer is has been on the wifi for the last 5 days it's been on?

[IshKebab]

Good for you. I'm not saying that WiFi etc. never work on Linux. Just that they often don't work, have annoying bugs or require complicated workarounds.

[noobermin]

Every time people who literally installed linux 10 years ago and think their experience from 10 years ago still scales to today comment on these posts, I'm honestly tired of it. I don't use ubuntu (I use elementary os) and I don't have weird update issues.

These replies are so tired. Every OS has issues. I bought a macbook and it was the most flakey thing ever. It literally froze up on me while doing a presentation at a national conference, and this with a bunch of nerds here at HN extoling how "macos is like unix but it just works!" Bullshit.

[zx14]

Same can be said about people commenting about how shit Vista was and assuming W10 must be the same. Clueless morons on both sides. Who cares about your crappy distro or your W10 Pro?

[miroz]

I'm not calling out Linux or Ubuntu here. I'm disappointed with all OS's, except with Mac OS which I didn't try. I can continue the story. After returning to Windows 7 which was great, guess what, Windows 8. I skipped this version, had just a customized 8.1 which was tolerable. Tried Debian, but I couldn't live with such a limited distro where my browser can't upgrade itself. Got Windows 10 which works fine, modified with Classic Shell because I can't stand new (not so new anymore) start menu. Ubuntu is in VM for some Python work but I still don't dig the UX there. Mint is probably closest to good UX I can find because it doesn't try to force me to use my PC as a mobile device.

[kylemuir]

I've been using Linux Mint for years now and really enjoy it. It looks good, works with most things out of the box and I've had minimal issues with it.

It's a bloated distro since it tries to cater to most set ups and ships with drivers, etc that you might not need which will annoy the purists but for me the compatibility and things just working is more valuable.

I only use it on a desktop PC so YMMV.

These days I only use Windows for work as that's what my company uses and for games that don't work with Proton.

[meibo]

On Mint, automatic updates started failing for me recently with an obscure error because the /boot partition had too many old kernels. I doubt my parents could have figured out that one.

[kylemuir]

I'm not suggesting it's a good fit for everyone or non-techies but I do think it would work well for the average HN reader

[handrous]

My most recent attempt, last year, ended when xorg and Wayland both crashed, reliably, at least once per day, on two different distros (Fedora, Ubuntu) when just using the desktop normally—not even running games or anything like that. Nope. Not accepting that shit in the year 2021. 2000-me would have been like, OK, cool, Windows does that too. Not anymore.

... and that's just for my screwing-around desktop machine. Work goes on macOS. I wish I had other decent options, but it's the only game in town. No time or patience for messing with my OS, these days.

[lucian1900]

For better or worse, the escape is macOS.