I'm not sure we have the same experience on Mac. Everything I ever plugged in there works, from Arduino to Androids to USB sound cards, DVBT/SDR tuners, webcams, or USB ethernet adapters, even my little USB scanner. I migght have had problems with Wifi, but it was usually the same in linux with the ndiswrapper dance. I even plugged a Social Security card reader (Frenchman here) in there and it was detected correctly as a serial adapter.

Oddly, the number one "I can't believe this doesn't just work category" is printers.

It is frustrating that I can just start printing from my ubuntu machine, but have to figure out how to get the right drivers for my other machines.

As a standard caveat, I don't actually use that many devices on my network. So, YMMV. A lot.

Anecdotal support: after Vista broke printing for half of the world's terrible cheap inkjets, I spent nearly a decade using terrible cheap inkjets I picked up for next to nothing on craigslist. They almost universally had Linux drivers, and when the ink ran out I would get another one.

To contrast, IME, CUPS is a pain. Absolutely awful. Printing Just Works everywhere except Linux.

And I'm using an EPSON printer, too.

I'm pretty sure if you are ever at a point where you know the name of a service implementation, it likely forced you to use it in anger.

Which is to say, I had forgotten printing was with CUPS since it has been a long time since I had to mess with it. Hate to hear it went so poorly for you.

Funnily, macOS uses CUPS internally, iirc.

Here is a guy also being terribly disappointed with Linux about CUPS to the point that he said he will stop using it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0chgyL7u4Qs

For me personally, I would rather buy a new printer, the freedom of being able to change the software to run the way I want it is worth so much more.

Every time a friend of mine updates his Mac's operating system, a piece of his music equipment stops working.

Same on Windows. A device is quite unusual if it doesn't fit into the existing USB device classes. The only drivers I've needed to install are video drivers, and even then it's only to fully use that shiny Nvidia chip to its fullest. I didn't spend $500 to only push 2D.

> Most things Just Work now.

I would definitely agree this is true compared to "before". I remember fooling with Linux in the late 90s and getting graphics to work at a native resolution to my monitor and sound was a big accomplishment. In comparison to now, where out of the box on my slightly aged thinkpad I could use my touchstick, touchpad (with two finger scroll!), volume/brightness/media keys, etc.

However, I think the goal "just works" is not necessarily the right one, at least not for Linux. It "just works" is kind of like a two way street, the computer won't throw you any curve balls as long as you don't throw it any curve balls, either. Toying with Linux on the desktop for the last few months, I've seen a lot of "it just works" type solutions which become a complete disaster when things break -- and things _always_ break -- because figuring out how it works, what went wrong, and how to fix it is not intuitive. Trying out KDE Neon, I had my screen just go black on login. Booting into the terminal and clearing the cache fixed it, but then later it happened again. I don't like the culture of copy-and-paste witchcraft, if something breaks, I want to know why it broke, and what steps I can take to deal with it.

Trying to make things automatic often means making things complex -- you have to include the baggage to cover every possibility and the logic to identify what's happening. Making things easy often means making things inflexible -- you remove what's not necessary from the main use case. Instead, I'd like to see a focus on goals like simple, direct, and transparent, so it's attainable for someone to observe and learn to understand how their system works and to work with it to accomplish their goals.

I believe the problem is that you can either get something that works, or you get something that is very open to tweaking. Systems that are very open to tweaking and changing things around just don't work as smoothly and easily as systems that "just work". And I think that's the reason why so many people are put off using desktops that aren't Windows or macOS.

My computer is a tool, which I happen to use to develop software and do some schoolwork on. I didn't get my computer for the sake of examining how the operating system works or for the sake of changing around things in config files and changing my DE, I got it for the sake of actually using it as a tool to do other things.

So I got this laptop and installed Fedora on it, almost a year ago now. Not once has anything in the OS spontaneously broken, even after two OS upgrades, never have I been forced to go into config files and muck around, no tweaking necessary, using this computer is a breeze. I've never been happier using a computer, because at last I'm using a setup which is stable, never breaks on its own, and which I also know is safe, FOSS, and not full of NSA backdoors or whatever.

The thing is, Windows and macOS separately worked to expose a consistent model/metaphor of how your computer works for users to learn and understand. This model is an abstraction (and thus leaks), but they had a lot of time, money, and smart people to take a crack at it and it works pretty OK. Also, the model they've built is visual which has some benefits like discoverability -- for example, I learned about computers growing up essentially by clicking every button and seeing what what happened.

It's hard to really do that in Linux. It's functional because so many people can contribute all those little pieces, but that comes at a cost of consistency and often complexity. There are a lot of opaque moving parts in a Linux system, and I don't think that's a good thing. When I decided to use Linux on a personal computer, I tried a lot of different ones until I decided to use Void Linux. runit was a big part of that -- all the init systems I've touched over the years, nothing was as immediately simple and obvious to use or observe as runit.

I disagree, at least for laptops. Desktops are mostly fine with Linux. Laptops... even certified ones, they suck. While battery life is decent, sleep and hibernate support has random issues, and external monitor support is awful. Try using a 4k external monitor when your internal display is not 4k, or viceversa. When the external monitor gets recognized at all (and its relative position is not forgotten).

"It just works" isnt that accurate. Personally speaking, I recently upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04 ubuntu on my desktop only to have it stuck in some strange errors. 16.04 network manager is also quite a nuisance. On some networks it only provides a few http calls and drops everything else.

I still exclusively use linux os on all my computers because I am do ised to it now. Perhaps just ubuntu is poor quality nowadays (at least with 16.04) but linux desktop still has some ways to go

> Linux as a desktop has come a long way. Most things Just Work now.

I said that in 2006.

But now (about a decade of using Linux on the desktop down) I don't believe it was true then, nor will it ever be.

What are the things you consider broken?

The last thing that happened before I gave up (around 2010) was purchasing a laptop with entirely open source drivers (ie, low end hardware I wouldn't have otherwise purchased), and compositing still didn't work on an external monitor.

You'll probably say that's fixed now. I'm sure it is. I'm also sure it's been replaced by something else - I recall someone on HN saying one of Dell Linux laptops (ie, which are actually sold with Ubuntu) still has driver issues.

I switched to OS X for few years and now use a Surface Book mainly for shell reasons.

I reckon the Dell laptop you're referring to is the old XPS 'Developer Edition'. I used one at work and it was ok, didn't have any driver issues from memory, but they no longer sell them to the public with Ubuntu. It was the same as a regular XPS but with Ubuntu 14.04 pre-installed.

I don't believe they offer Ubuntu as an option with the current generation of XPS's, it dropped off the list of supported OS's. It's a shame really because it was nice to have a premium laptop, with Linux, and with on-site manufacturer support.

What I recall was someone on HN saying the 11 inch Ubuntu model wasn't actually that Ubuntu compatible and to buy the 13 inch instead. But I can't remember was the specific HW was.

Compositing as a concept has always been an abusive hack sold by way of excessive eyecandy.

Its basically the DEs way of endrunning the X11 efforts because CADT.

It's been a couple years, but it used to be my hobby (after a Linux user told me their Linux laptop "just worked") to reach over and hit the mute button on their keyboard, which rarely worked.

Not sure if that trick is still effective. But the Linux definition of "everything works" is a little different than the Mac or Windows definition. It's more like, "everything a CLI-using geeky developer cares about works."

> It's more like, "everything a CLI-using geeky developer cares about works."

Totally. Which is cool sometimes.

Everything "just works" in the sense that Linux is written in a Turing complete language and at the end of the day we are just moving memory between registers.

I agree on the hardware side. However, more times than not I have to fight with the video playback tearing or dropping frames. I've had least amount of problems with ElementaryOS, but that distro has stability problems that counteract the better video playback.

Most things on osx/macOS "Just Work". I still use Linux, and have been a linux desktop user for 15 (ish) years, and to this day I still don't even have any hopes of installing any distribution and having one of the following not being an issue:

- Multiple monitors

- Printers / cups

- Suspend / hibernate

- Mounting USB sticks / drives.

- Breaking my system during an upgrade (I've mostly had this issue in deb/rpm systems though, and gentoo, but not so much in arch). You say "run a yum/apt/pacman/whatever update, everything is good to roll"... I'm not sure if you actually believe this.

I use Fedora, basically as it comes out of the box, with only a couple of Gnome shell extensions to make it nicer. My computer is a ThinkPad X230.

- I've never tried external monitors, so I can't say anything either way about that one.

- Printers/CUPS: always worked flawlessly (except for one single HP printer that just wouldn't). Autodiscovered network printers, USB printers, network printers have all "just worked" without an issue. I don't print that much though.

- Suspend/hibernate: I always suspend my laptop when I don't use it. That has worked flawlessly every time without any power management issues, sleep/wakeup issues or anything to complain about. I haven't tried hibernating though.

- Mounting USB sticks/drives: Never had a single issue relating to this. Every single time has worked flawlessly, exactly the same way: plug in USB, open it in the file manager, do things, eject, unplug USB. With both FAT32, NTFS and ext4 file systems, on USB drives, external hard drives, and SD cards.

- I've done two OS upgrades on this (Fedora 23 -> 24 -> 25) the normal upgrade way. Not a single thing broke in either of the upgrades. Both times the upgrade went literally like: start the OS upgrade, reboot to install upgrade, reboot after upgrade is finished, continue using computer without any problems. (By the way, Fedora 24 was the one that made Wayland good for use as daily driver for me, and 25 was where they made it the default.)

I realize that my comment is the definition of anecdotal evidence, and I understand that there are laptops with less fortunate hardware (Nvidia, some WiFi cards, some CPUs, etc.). But what I've realized during this year is that if they have a laptop with good hardware, then the common computer user can just install Fedora on their computer and get the same experience that I had, and that means Fedora is indeed in a very good place among the various desktop operating systems on offer today.

Im right there with you, been on the Ubuntu and Debian train since 2004. Still not giving up though :)