I’m on Debian and that kind of stuff basically doesn’t happen. For the first couple weeks I broke stuff every once in a while because I didn’t know how Linux worked, but it’s basically been smooth sailing on all my computers for about six months.
Contrast with the Windows 10 on the same laptop which just the other day decided it doesn’t want to play anymore. I guess I ran an update the last time I touched it (like a month ago) and now it won’t boot. Debian boots perfectly. Even in safe mode, I can’t boot into Windows and Automatic Startup repair refuses to work even using both the recovery USB and installation media. Probably going to have to reinstall Windows from scratch.
I still need that Windows partition for two reasons:
(1). I need Windows because my audio interface uses a proprietary driver only available on Windows. It simply does not perform as quickly on Linux. It’s for real-time audio recording and production, so I need absolutely every clock cycle I can possibly spare. For that reason, a VM is out of the question for this particular application. On Linux with JACK, it uses JACK’s default USB audio driver, which is really good but not as fast as the custom driver ostensibly using FocusRite’s hidden features. It’s not Linux’s fault, it’s FocusRite’s for not supporting Linux and mine for “backing the wrong horse” about ten years ago when I bought it. To my knowledge, Linux pro audio was simply nowhere near as developed as it is now. It is only this exact piece of hardware, which I currently cannot afford to replace, that requires me to keep any copies of Windows alive. Other than for similar reasons where users are trapped, Windows sucks as an audio production operating system, whereas Linux with JACK is great.
(2). I need the Windows partition as it is because there is some old but important work there that I need to finish. I wasn’t very organized about where I saved my work, i.e. things are all over the place. Eventually, I have to spend several hours moving the project files and effects off the drive. Since these projects were recorded on Windows, I will probably have to move all my Windows-exclusive effects to Linux. Yabridge actually does an excellent job for this, but it’s not painless.
I’m currently in grad school for engineering, so I won’t have time to bring over my project files until at least the summer. But even then, all the compatibility layers are starting to add up on Linux. The projects I want to work on were nearly maxing out the CPU and RAM on Windows. Really, I need a hardware upgrade, but I can’t afford that for a long time.
Well that is understandable and highly unfortunate. I hope you‘ll find a solution for the driver at some point. There are awesome people that can reverse engineer stuff but its still a lot of work.
I once deployed a small service in 2016. It was a sort of configurable API, that other companies could post information to. Every company’s information came in a different json structure, but I built the thing to be able to accept a new structure, with new configuration data (no new coding needed for new formats).
Then in 2019, I was interviewing for a job and they asked me to talk about something I’d built that was reliable and I was able to report that this little service, running in docker compose, had been up continually for the last two years with zero errors.
My Fedora Kinoite box is fucking effortless, it updates in the background just needs a reboot from time to time. I have scripted updating the containers that host my home services, I run the script from time to time and it pulls a new container image and recreates the container, updates the systemd services to match the new container ids.
Last time I tried Windows (with Windows 10), I actually struggled properly installing my graphics drivers. IDK what the issue even was, but after trying unsuccessfully for a while I just wiped the Windows partition and stuck with Linux.
Yeah, with Windows I just pray it won’t break, cause if it does I might as well reinstall. And of course installing Windows, installing drivers and updating the system takes hours. How they made it that slow is beyond me.
I was struggling to get an OS installed on my cousin’s dell at one point. This machine came with that Intel Optane…shit with a spinning rust hard drive, I was replacing it with a straight-up NVMe SSD. Windows would get well into the install process, and then bomb out with an error that was something like 0x123a039f34798cd76eb1 UNDEFINED ERROR. This of course was in the Windows installer, which isn’t a functioning desktop environment, so I had to type that manually into my laptop to google it, and got very few results.
I tried Linux Mint, and it apparently had the same problem. It said something like “BIOS Storage config error. Unable to mount file system. It may be that such and such setting is incorrect in the BIOS. See this page for further details.” The last sentence was a hyperlink to a wiki that discussed the problem, which opened in Firefox because this installer runs in a live environment, AND IT HAD A QR CODE LINK IN THE ERROR MESSAGE to the same page so you could easily copy the link to an external device. Y’all that was a white glove concierge deep tissue massage of an error message.
One time, when I tried to install the Windows installation tool on a stick, an error said something like (German) “Aus irgendeinem Grund konnte die Installation nicht abgeschlossen werden”. “Aus irgendeinem Grund” literally translates to “for some reason”.
Mine stopped asking me whether I’m hacking or not after I showed her a few images from her phone on my laptop. She doesn’t know I copied those when she gave me her phone once.
I learned another thing today lol been using yay on several devices and I’ve always used flags exactly as I would with pacman. Just another reason I’m sold that yay rocks!
This can for sure be me when setting stuff up. I’m currently playing around with self-hosting some stuff on my local network, you wouldn’t believe the amount of tabs I have open on my desktop, plus on my phone, plus on the laptop I’m using as a server.
This definitely isn’t me on a day to day basis though. For the most part, unless I’m actively tinkering, Linux just works.
On the headache-inducing side of things though, I’m currently trying to figure out why I can’t run Wordpress over Docker on my laptop. It quickly uses up all resources and even then spits out a “error connecting to database” message when I try to access it.
I use arch and as long as you don’t have a buttfuck of unnecessary daemons and aur packages (which can be said for any distro imo), it’s as simple as sudo pacman -Syu
Until you’re one of the unlucky ones whose PC gets bricked by an update. Happened to me twice. I agree, it’s wayyyy more chill than people give it credit for, but let’s not pretend using it as a daily driver doesn’t come with its risks ^^
I just turn on my computer and it works, sometimes I have to answer a couple questions zypper asks me when updates do weird things and cause dependency issues but that’s not difficult
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