alt Hacker NewsI've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
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In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
Current Intel chips get 20h of regular laptop usage. For real: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-empire-strikes-back-with...
The upciming Intel and Qualcomm CPUs are even better. They really caught up with Apple.
> Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable.
What distro? It's niche enough of a use case. Have you considered releasing the code?
I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
I have been using desktop Linux for about the same amount of time and the way I see it now, even on the occasion where I have to troubleshoot something weird (which has maybe been one or two times in the past few years), it doesn't sound any different from the issues people are having with Windows and Mac these days—and at least I can fix it!