Comment by Zardoz84
Comment by Zardoz84 a day ago
Except Linux
Comment by Zardoz84 a day ago
Except Linux
Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.
Linux is very much "pick your poison"
Run Debian Stable and it basically doesn't happen - only updates are actual security ones.
Run any rolling distro and you basically accept "with newest version comes the newest bugs"
And there is a whole bunch of distros between those extremes ,depending on how new you need your software to be (that being said, Debian Testing hits nice mix between "new enough" and "someone actually tested stuff before publishing").
Not only that, but compared to Windows 10, any Linux distro has objectively more bugs. Things like bluetooth not working, GPU-related failures, update issues, all the classics. While the current status of Linux is amazing, I still cannot recommend it to a non-tech person because I know something will fail at some point and then it's going to be my problem.
Windows has tons of problem, but you don’t see them. That is, you see the problems, but attribute them to bad hardware. It works like this:
Headset does not work on Linux: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from Linux!”
Headset does not work on Windows: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from these headphones!”
(Re-post from 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32541772>)
YMMV, I have 2 headsets I've never been able to make working reliably under windows 10 and 11. Cheap stuff, but they are are flawless under linux and with my phone on android. Not to say there are no issue on Linux, but these days it's way better than 15 years ago.
Use better distros. I haven’t had a broken workstation since 2014 or so.
Which is that Linux desktop distro that never has issues?
A recent HN submission has 300 comments, many talking about the stability about various distributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095585
I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.
I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.
IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.
In my case it is Fedora, only problem I had in 10 years was an nvidia driver issue after one uodate on a pro laptop I didn't choose. The only thing I had to do was reboot to the previous kernel and use that n-1 kernel for a few days until the next kernel update.
All my personal computers using intel and amd graphic cards have been faultless using same distro for the last decade.
Nothing beats the stale, pragmatic platitude of Slackware.
My desktop Debian was installed in 2008. I just upgraded it every major release. I am running on Testing so I had some very minor issues (mostly related to proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but even that got better), but at same time my NAS ran on Stable and it was problem-free.
To be fair, Linux has always been like this, breaking things with updates. Linux was ahead of commercial companies, but they caught up with it.