[Cort3z]

I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code and play games, not maintain the intricacies of a running computer.

For a server there is no better choice than Linux, but for my desktop/laptop, I find other alternatives better. Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro», if so let me know, but until Linux is as low maintenance as windows or macos, it will be for those with an interest in doing that maintenance.

I realize I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. It is perfect, but flawed.

[vyskocilm]

> I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this.

I think it was Jorge Castro, the creator of Universal Blue, who called it the sysadmin culture. Most Linux distros are made by sysadmins for sysadmins, and you're expected to change and configure your system. I was a sysadmin myself for a long time. I used Slackware; switched from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6; tweaked CFLAGS on Gentoo; replaced SysV init with systemd; used PipeWire from the earliest versions - you name it, I did it.

Nowadays I use https://aeondesktop.github.io/ - an immutable system with Btrfs snapshots. Everything is installed from Flathub. The major roadblock is that much of the Linux world expects you to modify the system one way or another, so your mileage may vary. I replaced my printer because I did not wanted to install binary blobs from HP/Samsung.

> Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro»

I’d look at immutable or image-based offerings, which aims at low or no maintenance: Aeon Desktop, Universal Blue, Endless OS. There are reviews on sites like LWN.net

[foepys]

I don't know what you are doing but I have my Arch Linux running since about 2013. I needed to intervene a few times, I think 4 times in total but the base installation in from 2013, now nearly 13 years ago.

[conor-]

I share the same sentiment. I've had the same Arch install running since ~2016 and have been using Arch since about 2013 and the number of times I've needed to chroot from a live image is under 10 and were mostly related to systemd breaking things during an update which is pretty much entirely no longer an issue these days.

Compared to Windows-land where nuking and reinstalling the entire OS is a routine maintenance task, checking arch news to see if there's any manual intervention and running `pacman -Syu` is all I really ever think about.

[user_7832]

I think this is a very interesting observation, because my experience has been fairly opposite. Disclaimer, I've grown up with windows.

Yet I've never had to reinstall windows on any of my devices ever. I've never had things behave in unusual or unpredictable ways.

Meanwhile, a highly suggested utility (on reddit, SE/SO, and even a few distro forums) for touchpad gestures borked my gnome setup. (Uninstalling it, as you might have guessed from my story and tone, did diddly squat.)

Just today I manually flushed my dnf packages (or clear them? Not sure of the terminology.) In the past, I had to debug manually because apparently the default timeout for Fedora was causing timeout issues with a few 100ms internet latency. That was a fun rabit hole "why can't I install an app that's only available via dnf install" "Oh, because Fedora assumes you have good internet. But don't worry if you have Ubuntu, because that doesn't have these issues!".

...I've never even been made aware what download timeouts windows has. As it should be for a user.

I could go on and on. My windows partition goes nearly months without sleep, typically only rebooting if I run out of battery or want to install an update. Linux... doesn't have hibernate yet. Fortunately it doesn't matter! ...Because some odd memory leak (and gpu driver stuff perhaps?) forces me to shut down ever so often. Oh well.

[conor-]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that Linux doesn't have hibernate - there's both userspace systemd-hibernate bindings and also the kernel swsusp which both work equally well (although you may need to make sure you have a large enough swap partition for it to function)

Also the other issues you're describing do sound frustrating but I think it's a byproduct of an entirely different culture. Exposing user-configurable timeouts and you being made aware of it during troubleshooting is something that enables you to deeply understand your system and how it's configured. In Windows, even if there is defaults for things like that it likely is not exposed to the user or configurable at all. If the default settings are bad you're just stuck with it and you aren't expected or intended to modify anything to better suit your needs.

My experience with Arch is mostly due to having been a fairly proficient Linux user prior to switching over and being very comfortable reading the wiki or bbs and tinkering to find solutions to things. A lot of the prior experiences I had with Debian or other "friendly" distros kind of put me through the ringer too and I've found that having the rolling release with Arch fits my preferred workflow much better than something like Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora or the other "batteries included" distros.

[versteegen]

That's pretty good, I'm jealous! The last time I reinstalled my OS (Slackware) from scratch was 2009, but I run into serious problems every couple of years when upgrading it to 'Slackware64-current' pre-release, because Slackware's package manager doesn't track dependencies and you can just install stuff in the wrong order: I usually don't upgrade the whole OS at once... just have to fix any .so link errors (I've got a script to pull old libraries from btrfs snapshots). I've even ended up without a working libc more than once! When you can't run any program it sure is useful that you can upgrade everything aside from the kernel without rebooting!

[bjackman]

I'm not trying to "challenge" your experience, it's your experience. But mine is completely different so I'll offer it for anyone who might be reading along...

I've been using Linux at work and at home every day for 15 years and I think in that whole time I've only ever had to reinstall the OS due to system issues once.

(I ran an Ubuntu system update on my laptop while on low battery, and it died. The APT database was irrevocably fucked afterwards. I'm not even sure it's fair to blame the OS for this, it was a dumb thing for me to do. I would also not be at all surprised if it's possible to fuck up a Windows installation in a similar manner).

Nowadays I run NixOS and yes that requires quite regular attention. But I've also used Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian extensively and all of them are just completely stable all the time.

(Only exception I can think of: Ubuntu used to have issues with /boot getting full which was a PITA).

[vladms]

You mention the "right distro" but you did not mention what have you tried or with what you had problems with.

From my experience, some examples: for gentoo you are much more than a janitor - you must be everything all the time; for redhat based - you can get a major headache with some version upgrades; for arch (currently using, same install from 7 years) - update monthly and I had very few and minor issues

[Cort3z]

Most problems in most distros are solvable with enough knowhow and enough research time. That time investment is not always worth it in a commercial context. It is a fairly known amount of time to reinstall a distro and get back up and running, and an unknown amount of time to fix an exotic Linux problem.

Many seem to be interested in knowing my distro. I’m not interested in throwing shade on a distro in particular, but it is one of the bigger and well known ones.

[jollyllama]

When I use Windows, I feel like a product, not a consumer. There's always macOS.

[horsawlarway]

Which is shockingly bad in its own way. For having a tightly integrated hardware stack, Apple sure has managed to trash their desktop OS. Reminds me a lot of Windows in the xp => vista stage.

My read is they don't really give a shit about it anymore because the revenue comes from mobile/tablets. Same reason Microsoft is comfortable trashing windows... the revenue is coming from O365 & Azure now. The OS is a loss leader to sell those, and it definitely feels like it these days.

Once a company eats from the fruit of the "ads" tree... they tend to degrade into "awful" from the user side, because the user stops being the primary customer - the conflict of interest there is unavoidable.

Apple is tucking in... https://ads.apple.com/

[jollyllama]

"It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?"

[Gareth321]

I 100% agree. This is why Windows and later macOS and iOS became so popular. It really just worked. Basic things like being able to double click a file to install it. Linux is technically capable of this, but so few devs actually support it. The last time I installed Ubuntu I couldn’t change the mouse acceleration without using the CLI to install some extra tools. Just bonkers. And the “solution” was “oh just uninstall your entire OS and try this other distro which is way better!”

[binkHN]

> once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons.

I don't know what distribution you're using, but something sounds very broken if you need to do this.

[kombine]

I've been using Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop and desktop respectively. Both are going around a year, and I haven't had major issues with them.

[symbogra]

Looking at the logs I installed Fedora 35 on this laptop over 4 years ago when I got it and have upgraded through to 43 with no serious issues aside from some mDNS configuration that I had to fix.

[anttiharju]

re: on feeling like a janitor

I tried running various Linux distros on my desktop some years ago and definitely agree on the crap-out experience and having to reinstall. Eventually settled on macOS and it's been okay.

The game changer for me has been Nix. It works on macOS. I have had coworkers use it on Ubuntu. I am soon planning to switch to NixOS.

People complain about the syntax but honestly AI gets you around that. You will still do janitorial work, but you mostly only need to do it once.

[rounce]

  {
    nix.gc = {
      automatic = true;
      dates = "weekly";          
      options = "--delete-older-than 30d";
    };
  }

[anttiharju]

that is neat indeed. With "only once" I mean figuring out the desired config

[jimbob45]

I agree that it’s not quite grandma-safe but I’d like to know which distros you’re using that can’t even last a year.

[sgc]

I had my 80 year old mom on Linux Mint for 15 years, from about 62-78, and she didn't even know it. She tried to show me her Windows with exactly one problem 15 years in, and I was present with the Mint boot screen. Problem at that point was her laptop, not Mint. Grandmas tend to do very simple things, and the OS can just chug along forever without problems.

[Edman274]

Okay, people say this. Could you please, and this is not a rhetorical device, it's a sincere question: how do you keep the browser updated without updating the operating system? Or if you are updating the os, doesn't that change the user interface? And if the user interface is changing, doesn't that confuse your grandmother? I installed Ubuntu for my mom and after four years Firefox was out of date, and the website for banking she'd use would have checks where logging in was only possible if the one if the user agent was recent enough. One can fake that, but I didn't want to. But updating Firefox meant updating Ubuntu, which means that every single icon and every single menu position changes, and I didn't want to have to teach her where everything was again. How do you avoid this?

[sgc]

I haven't dealt with this for her in a few years, but basically:

Pin all their apps in favorites and they will persist through updates. Updates don't overwrite desktop shortcuts either (although like other os, a couple might be added that need to be removed). This might be more difficult in gnome, I wouldn't know since I am firmly in the kde camp.

To stay as up to date as possible, use the mozilla apt repo:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...

[Edman274]

In my experience, the Mozilla apt repo would still have dependencies on system libraries that can only be installed by updating the operating system to another LTS. Like, the Mozilla Firefox package depends on libssl, which depends on another package and that other package can only be updated by updating the operating system, which typically drastically changes the look and feel of system menus and things that are not easily gleaned by looking at a screenshot of an empty desktop. Maybe this isn't true of KDE and the interface remains stable across to update cycles. Thank you for the suggestion.

[linuxftw]

What? I have been using Linux daily for almost 20 years. I have typically only installed the OS fresh once each time. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a decade. I can't remember having to re-install a distro unless I was switching distros. My current system was installed in 2019, Fedora 30. Over a dozen painless upgrades, the last several of which have had Steam flatpak installed with no breakages.

Fully open source drivers using AMD video cards. It just works (minus the early x11/wayland debacle, I had to switch back to x11 for a while).

[energy123]

LLMs have made it so much easier thankfully. The janitorial overhead was a nightmare pre-2024.

[Cort3z]

Shameless self promotion, but I 80% vibe- coded a pip package for interfacing with LLMs right from the terminal. ‘pip install lask’. It has helped me a lot since it works from the terminal regardless of what the graphics drivers are doing.

[einpoklum]

> it craps out for various reasons.

What does that even mean though? Under what circumstances? In what way?

> working professionally on Linux for many years.

Not enough to say which distribution... or do you mean you do kernel development work?

[Cort3z]

I’m not trying to cast shade on a distribution in particular. I’m using one of the big ones. If you have not had any of these problems, great!

[ruszki]

> janitor

Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything.

- Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it.

- Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention.

- Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Waking up my laptop with a new monitor plugged in is a gamble.

- Energy efficiency was bad with hybrid graphics, but since I had to turn it off, I don't even try to optimize it since.

- It was a pain to make my laptop speakers work. A lot of searching, and applying random fixes until one worked (in reality two fixes together).

- My main bluetooth headset has a feature to mute itself, or stop the music when it's not on my head. Guess which is the only device which I have that have a problem with this? The funny thing is, that it's a random even again. The sound comes back about 10% of the time fully. In another 10% of the time, the sound from some apps comes back, in others doesn't. In the other 80%, I had to reconnect it.

- Don't even talk about printers. It's a gamble, again. Some printers worked at some point in time, some simply don't work, and never will, because nobody cares about them anymore enough.

- Game performance is simply worse than on Windows. First of all, it wasn't trivial to force some games to use my GPU when I had hybrid graphics. The internet is full with outdated information. But even after that, my FPS is consistently worse. I heard some others who have the opposite experience. But this tells me again, that the whole thing is a gamble. Probably it's also a gamble on the game.

- When I press the power off button to put it to sleep, or initiate a normal shutdown, I need to force shutdown the whole laptop. Sometimes I get a notification that text editor is preventing shutdown, and whether I want to force quit it, but it doesn't matter which I clicked, and the "it will be force quit in 60 seconds if I don't select something" is a lie, the whole X framework is killed after a few seconds, and the laptop remains powered on, with the lie "the computer will be shutdown now" in terminal. This happens even when I don't get notification about that something would prevent power off. The shutdown initiation from the OS menu is working, and closing the lid put it to sleep.

And this is my current laptop. I simply couldn't use my previous one with Linux, because some stupid problem with the video card, which I couldn't solve in months. Even installation was a challenge.

I've used Linux in the past 25 years from time to time. It's getting better, but still a long way. You need some janitorial work also with Windows, especially nowadays, but it's still way better experience to click on "leave me alone" once a month, than this constant tinkering, and daily annoyance. I want to build things, not fix things which should just work.

[robhlt]

Desktop/Laptop Linux is improving pretty fast, but by using an LTS distro like Debian you miss out on a lot of that.

I had to run Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop for a while and encountered similar monitor switching and bluetooth issues. Eventually I figured out I could get the latest version of most desktop packages from the KDE Neon repos since they were also based on 22.04 at the time.

Running the latest KDE Plasma desktop with the latest mesa and pipewire made a huge difference. Monitor switching now works every time, all the bluetooth features worked, battery life improved, and Firefox stopped crashing when using webgl.

I'm not saying it'll fix all your problems, but most of these problems are being actively worked on and I think its worth trying a distro that actually keeps up with the pace of that work.

[sgc]

I recently installed Debian instead of Ubuntu on my laptop. Although I recognize many of your problems as "you need to know the right way to configure that or it's super annoying" - which sucks but is not impossible to overcome -, I also find that Debian is much more bug filled as a laptop OS than Ubuntu. I was actually extremely surprised by this. I didn't think Ubuntu was doing much of anything.

That said I am running Debian Trixie using wayland / kde / cups / nvidia / etc and do not have any of your problems my graphics work, my printers work, my bluetooth works, sleep works. They all required a lot more configuration than the last several versions of Ubuntu had required (which shouldn't be the case if there is better example just right next door), but none are persistent.

[ruszki]

I don’t know why you think that I haven’t tried those configurations in your mind. Are those completely undocumented and cannot be found on the internet or something?

[sgc]

Because having so many unsolvable problems would be an extreme edge case (if you had one, it would be much more likely a bug than a basket full of what you are calling unsolvable problems), and there are a lot of bad setting recommendations out there which make it rather difficult to find the right one for your device. It can take quite a bit of experience and quite a bit of persistence - which is again, as I said, not the way it should be. If you are sure you have exhausted your options, please file bug reports.

[ruszki]

If you check a thread about GrapheneOS, almost everybody praises it, and many even state that everything works. If you look into it however, a ton of things simply don’t work, and they just don’t care. Heck, even in this thread there are people like that. They just flat out state, that “it works perfectly”, then a few sentence later “x, y, z don’t work”. So, how should I know that 25+ years of Linux knowledge, custom kernel and Linux building, and tinkering are less, than those people who are fine with their free drivers which don’t utilize half of their hardware’s features?

[sgc]

I have about the same amount of experience with Linux, more on the tinkering and sysadmin/full stack side than custom building (although of course I have to use custom kernel module loading etc), and I still learn a lot more from research on a specific new-to-me problem than from my bank of knowledge. When it's new to me and Vantablack opaque as is the Linux way, I ask rather than waste my time.

What grinds my gears on Linux even more than that is that is is fundamentally unsafe [1], and you can only approach mitigating it. And nobody really cares. I use it because it's the least bad of the major 3 OSes, and I do want a community that can help. But I don't pretend to love it unreservedly. Perhaps I should move to a BSD, but the ecosystem keeps me here.

And I understand if you are certain there are bugs that will be ignored based on your past experiences, I too would be poorly motivated. I am not trying to convince you that you don't know what you know you know. But you can understand that my first take when reading a comment on the internet, even on HN, is that there is always more annoying-and-almost-impossible-to-discover config work to do.

[1] See https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html and https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-harden...

[0xbadcafebee]

Same here. I recently bought one laptop that I researched to make sure it was supported in Linux, and it had a ton of issues the reviewers didn't mention. So I bought a different laptop with Linux shipped from the factory, and it's better, but still has issues.

[realusername]

I think Bluetooth and printers are broken on pretty much every OS (especially on old devices), I certainly didn't have a better experience on Windows, it's maybe even worse.

[tstrimple]

Linux truly is far better now than it was even a year ago for gaming stuff. The Linux fanboys stating that everything works flawlessly and better than on Windows aren't doing anyone any favors. Steam Compatibility is a useless flag and ProtonDB is full of "Platinum" games that are barely functional. Despite the additional complexity what got Linux to work well for my son is NixOS. He had attempted to run with multiple "Windows replacement" Linux distros and managed to keep getting them broken to one degree or another. The "Nix" way of managing packages really clicked with him for some reason and being able to reboot to a previous derivation if something goes wrong keeps him with a running system.

Generally I'd avoid Linux on laptops altogether. Even hardware explicitly designed for Linux support has tons of other tradeoffs and most manufacturers don't even try. I'd say Linux on the desktop is night and day from Linux on laptops.

[wltr]

I used Arch Linux on my MacBook Pro 13” (2011) and it was almost perfect (one iGPU), some weird sleep issues, plus battery calibration issues: battery often went down to 7% within like 30 minutes, and then it takes a couple of hours to 0%. But if you happened to close it, it will either power off or hibernate (won’t recall). Then a couple of keys would stop working, and I’d just rsync my entire system to a newer (2014) retina MacBook Pro 13” (instead of fixing the keyboard, there’s no point in that). Perhaps, these laptops are very popular for Linux enthusiasts — I think 15” from 2015 is the best Linux laptop you can get for the money — but this laptop is just perfect! Everything works flawlessly, sleep, hibernation, screen, keyboard backlight… ah, I forgot about the web camera, doesn’t, but I never used it really, it’s crap anyway. The battery life is amazing, I’m getting like 8 hours of real work for the new battery, or even longer for very light work. So, I’d say it depends on the hardware quite a lot. Maybe I’m just very experienced now, but I won’t say I am.

[ruszki]

I heard about it for a while now. I look into NixOS, thanks!

[undeveloper]

I personally have had a better experience with printers on linux than windows, but again it's always a gamble. I get it.