Comment by audunw
4 months ago
That argument doesn’t sound very convincing to me. How would I know an avoiding Ubuntu is reasonable? That still seems to be the go-to distro for many people I know that like to use Linux but aren’t Linux experts. How do I know which hardware is natively supported?
With Windows 10/11 I’ve never had any problems, either with pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smooth as well.
My experience with Linux as an OS has been fairly good for many years, regardless of the distro. It’s the applications that could be an issue. Feels like it’s only very recently (post Steam deck in particular) that gaming seems to be viable at all. And it’s hard to beat the MS Office package for work. I recently got the idea to have two user accounts on my home computer where I have an account dedicated to working from home, logged into my office 365 account from work.. and it was honestly amazing how suddenly everything was just perfectly synced between my work and home computer.
If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.
If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare offer either free or low-cost options to address that.
Windows update is enormously painful compared to Linux. There can be no argument of this fact.
> This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.
Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps.
I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to restart your computer!” is not a particularly good reason to damn it.
Windows update is agony compared to apt/yum.
A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot.
Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?).
Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.
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> Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly
to the point that I know people that still turn their computers off when they are not using them.
Let's get this out of the way first: "the five 9's" is not a requirement for personal computers. That argument therefore is invalid.
But even then, Microsoft is testing "Hot Patching" windows installation so critical updates install without requiring a reboot [1].
When that comes out, I wonder where the goalposts will be?
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...
What are you doing on a desktop computer that can only be off for five minutes a year?
A laptop is even dumber to complain about, because they're (suppose to be) suspended every time you close them.
That would be a firing offense at my company. Company files stay on company hardware. Personal files stay on personal hardware, and never should the two meet.
I would never work at your company. I use my own tools, thank you.
My personal vim config on a company laptop? No problem whatsoever, neither for me, nor the company.
A bittorrent client without preauthorization with IT and security? It's basically asking to get fired.
My vacation photos on a company laptop? Tricky - not a huge deal but not recommended. Better upload them to your cloud backup quickly.
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You're own tools are your own personal files?
Interesting. How do your vacation pictures help you do your job?
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Are you required to maintain PCI compliance? Do you touch customer personal info?
That may be sensible if you want or need stronger security and isolation.
However, many companies do support BYOD, especially on mobile where it's a pain to carry two phones around.
There is some support for this. For example, Apple supports dual Apple IDs and separate encrypted volumes for personal and corporate data. Microsoft apps (Outlook) also have some support for separating personal and corporate data.
The benefits of BYOD can include lower equipment costs, lower friction, and potentially higher employee happiness and productivity.
Mobile is a totally different story, to me. The security model allows them to be compartmentalized in the way a desktop never could be.
> How do I know which hardware is natively supported?
You buy preinstalled. Works for me.
Yeah preinstalled. And I never had issues with Ubuntu breaking in ways like arch or gentoo. Breaking includes trying to install some new thing or uograde and having random other stuff have to be googled.