I’ve had Windows installations that chugged along for 10 years with only regular software updates. It does get slow and bloated over time, but it keeps working without any maintenance or fixing.
Meanwhile I can’t find a Linux distribution that doesn’t self-destruct in about 6 months of regular desktop use. Every time some software update corrupts GRUB, breaks X/Wayland, or something else that unexpectedly makes my computer unusable and requires me to spend hours fixing it or in some cases giving up and installing a different distro.
Let me know when a desktop Linux distro is as reliable as my 10 year old Windows install please.
My 10+ year arch installation is certainly more reliable than my prior windows installation that would randomly decide that the registry is borked and won’t boot at all, for no apparent reason.
I feel like this thread has a lot of windows users that only look at windows with rose tinted glasses. Windows has had just as many major issues as any linux distro I’ve used.
Must have had bad luck! I mean I’ve fixed many a Windows computer in my time so I know it’s not perfect, but I guess my expertise helps me avoid a lot of the pitfalls of Windows by not loading up all kinds of dodgy software.
Linux though will break when you do everything right, and that’s what gets me every time.
Must have had bad luck! I mean I’ve fixed many a Linux computer in my time so I know it’s not perfect, but I guess my expertise helps me avoid a lot of the pitfalls of Linux by generally reading the fucking manual and understanding what I’m doing.
Windows though will break and also install bullshit updates and reset your settings when you do everything right, and that’s what gets me every time.
I think part of that perception is a general confusion of OS releases and distros, specially if comparing with windows.
I think that is only the case of the 10+ years of a windows install because it is the same windows version. Windows until I think “recently” didn’t even have OS upgrade, I know that now people can upgrade from win10 to win11 (and maybe that was also the case for win8) but even that is because MS wants to force a new version on people and there is a lot of complaints of the upgrade breaking the OS .
On Linux a lot of distros do try to upgrade to a new version and it a very complicated problem. Some distros support this better than others.
But if you are saying that you have like a win7 install rock solid for 10 years, the equivalent is a Linux distro with LTS support centOS, and these distros are rock solid and different than windows it will not get slow over time.
I’ve had problems with just regular package upgrades. Also to be fair, Windows does have service packs which can add significant new OS features without updating to a whole other version, so it’s not like Windows XP/Vista/7/10/11 stay the exact same from when you install them.
Plus the irony is that a lot of the features in this meme have to do with Wayland, and I can’t find many LTS releases that even use it? It’ll take years before these features are included in releases that aren’t bleeding edge and will still require a whole OS reinstall to actually get them.
I can’t comment on the regular package upgrades without more info, if it is like OS base packages or like end user apps. In any case there has being problems with major versions with changes and stuff but if it is not a rolling release distro that is very rare.
In any case I don’t agree thad service packs are the same as OS version upgrades, and if it was recently win10/11 had some very bad updates that broke people workflows and features.
I don’t know if there is any LTS distro with Wayland by default. I don’t use LTS distro nor Wayland (nothing against it, I just didn’t have a need for it so far so my lazy ass will not update). But Wayland rollout has being a disaster in any case. That is completely valid. The only thing I will say is that I don’t think that there was any distro that changed to Wayland as a normal update, was always during a version change and as such, of course, doing an upgrade with this major change probably broke a lot of people workflows. The Nvidia situation in the Wayland matter also didn’t help at all.
@Breve@_carmin this is because distros use autogenerated grub configs, and using rootfs for grub.
Whan maintaining grub manually on separate or EFI partition, nothing breaks. You only need edit grub config every kernel update. For x11,wayland, etc only solution is some source-based system (gentoo for example) where you decide what to build and what to update. In other cases expect unwanted breakage becauseyou cannot stop binary distro from bringing unwanted changes
I mean I’ve worked IT for decades so I know how to do this stuff, but I also don’t want to do it after 8 hours of being paid to do it at work and all I want is to pull up a game to play on my free time without any more effort.
Linux is only free if your time is free. I also would never recommend Linux to anyone who isn’t an IT professional. 🤷
@Breve i prefer spending couple hours to configure (and half-a-day to rebuild packages) to update my home linux system every half-a-year than using windows. And it seems, there is no windows alternative for non-IT-professionals now because every distro is broken. I still may recommend linux mint as windows alternative, but not sure it really will be better that windows because it’s ubuntu based and will catch all ubuntu bugs.
Also, most binary distros build mesa with nouveau enabled, which breaks it. It links lingbm to glappi, which causes dependency hell. Also it adds some slow nouveau call to winsys implementation even if you do not have nvidia, shich causes big slowdown. And linked-in nouveau code in libgallium increases memory footprint This only should be used when you relly use nouveau, but most people replace it with binary blob or not using nvidia at all…
@Zwiebel yes :(
Or use some automatic kernel update scripts.
For me, it’s better if i update kernel/grub manually, than do some automatic update and find system not booting anymore. But most users prefer automatic update, which sometimes may fail on some systems
I’ve had Windows installations that chugged along for 10 years with only regular software updates. It does get slow and bloated over time, but it keeps working without any maintenance or fixing.
Meanwhile I can’t find a Linux distribution that doesn’t self-destruct in about 6 months of regular desktop use. Every time some software update corrupts GRUB, breaks X/Wayland, or something else that unexpectedly makes my computer unusable and requires me to spend hours fixing it or in some cases giving up and installing a different distro.
Let me know when a desktop Linux distro is as reliable as my 10 year old Windows install please.
My 10+ year arch installation is certainly more reliable than my prior windows installation that would randomly decide that the registry is borked and won’t boot at all, for no apparent reason.
Or the windows updates that outright deleted the entirety of the users files… Again… https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-deleting-peoples-files-again/
I feel like this thread has a lot of windows users that only look at windows with rose tinted glasses. Windows has had just as many major issues as any linux distro I’ve used.
Must have had bad luck! I mean I’ve fixed many a Windows computer in my time so I know it’s not perfect, but I guess my expertise helps me avoid a lot of the pitfalls of Windows by not loading up all kinds of dodgy software.
Linux though will break when you do everything right, and that’s what gets me every time.
Must have had bad luck! I mean I’ve fixed many a Linux computer in my time so I know it’s not perfect, but I guess my expertise helps me avoid a lot of the pitfalls of Linux by generally reading the fucking manual and understanding what I’m doing.
Windows though will break and also install bullshit updates and reset your settings when you do everything right, and that’s what gets me every time.
I think part of that perception is a general confusion of OS releases and distros, specially if comparing with windows.
I think that is only the case of the 10+ years of a windows install because it is the same windows version. Windows until I think “recently” didn’t even have OS upgrade, I know that now people can upgrade from win10 to win11 (and maybe that was also the case for win8) but even that is because MS wants to force a new version on people and there is a lot of complaints of the upgrade breaking the OS .
On Linux a lot of distros do try to upgrade to a new version and it a very complicated problem. Some distros support this better than others.
But if you are saying that you have like a win7 install rock solid for 10 years, the equivalent is a Linux distro with LTS support centOS, and these distros are rock solid and different than windows it will not get slow over time.
I’ve had problems with just regular package upgrades. Also to be fair, Windows does have service packs which can add significant new OS features without updating to a whole other version, so it’s not like Windows XP/Vista/7/10/11 stay the exact same from when you install them.
Plus the irony is that a lot of the features in this meme have to do with Wayland, and I can’t find many LTS releases that even use it? It’ll take years before these features are included in releases that aren’t bleeding edge and will still require a whole OS reinstall to actually get them.
I can’t comment on the regular package upgrades without more info, if it is like OS base packages or like end user apps. In any case there has being problems with major versions with changes and stuff but if it is not a rolling release distro that is very rare.
In any case I don’t agree thad service packs are the same as OS version upgrades, and if it was recently win10/11 had some very bad updates that broke people workflows and features.
I don’t know if there is any LTS distro with Wayland by default. I don’t use LTS distro nor Wayland (nothing against it, I just didn’t have a need for it so far so my lazy ass will not update). But Wayland rollout has being a disaster in any case. That is completely valid. The only thing I will say is that I don’t think that there was any distro that changed to Wayland as a normal update, was always during a version change and as such, of course, doing an upgrade with this major change probably broke a lot of people workflows. The Nvidia situation in the Wayland matter also didn’t help at all.
@Breve @_carmin this is because distros use autogenerated grub configs, and using rootfs for grub.
Whan maintaining grub manually on separate or EFI partition, nothing breaks. You only need edit grub config every kernel update. For x11,wayland, etc only solution is some source-based system (gentoo for example) where you decide what to build and what to update. In other cases expect unwanted breakage becauseyou cannot stop binary distro from bringing unwanted changes
I mean I’ve worked IT for decades so I know how to do this stuff, but I also don’t want to do it after 8 hours of being paid to do it at work and all I want is to pull up a game to play on my free time without any more effort.
Linux is only free if your time is free. I also would never recommend Linux to anyone who isn’t an IT professional. 🤷
@Breve i prefer spending couple hours to configure (and half-a-day to rebuild packages) to update my home linux system every half-a-year than using windows. And it seems, there is no windows alternative for non-IT-professionals now because every distro is broken. I still may recommend linux mint as windows alternative, but not sure it really will be better that windows because it’s ubuntu based and will catch all ubuntu bugs.
Also, most binary distros build mesa with nouveau enabled, which breaks it. It links lingbm to glappi, which causes dependency hell. Also it adds some slow nouveau call to winsys implementation even if you do not have nvidia, shich causes big slowdown. And linked-in nouveau code in libgallium increases memory footprint This only should be used when you relly use nouveau, but most people replace it with binary blob or not using nvidia at all…
So instead of touching grub twice a year I can now touch it twice a month instead?
@Zwiebel yes :(
Or use some automatic kernel update scripts.
For me, it’s better if i update kernel/grub manually, than do some automatic update and find system not booting anymore. But most users prefer automatic update, which sometimes may fail on some systems
Did you try immutable distros?