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Re:Video Pros Moving from Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs by smcl on Friday February 24, 2017 @04:41AM (#13722293)
I agree with you except for "Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time". This depends on what you mean by "rock-stable" but things begin to get really annoying really quickly once you move on from relatively simple tasks. Even basic stuff like getting good battery life on laptops, or waking up from sleep/suspend/hibernate, using >1 monitors can be flakey or unpredictable. If they've worked fine for you then congrats, but when they don't it can be infuriating.

This is not to disparage the kernel developers, package maintainers or the distributions themselves - there's a lot of people doing excellent work without being compensated at all. However let's not kid ourselves - linux can still be tough.

Re:Video Pros Moving from Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs by dsacco on Friday February 24, 2017 @08:10AM (#13723290)
I run Ubuntu 14.04 as my daily driver on a custom-built PC. I agree with you that Linux is not necessarily rock solid, but I would instead suggest that the compelling difference these days is that it can be if you put in the work. In years past, that wasn't even the case.

Unless you buy something from System76 or do very meticulous research on hardware support and build your own, Linux is not going to be seamless out of the box. But the real highlight is that it can be seamless at all these days.

My PC has four GPUs, 128GB of RAM and a deca-core CPU. I have four monitors, a bluetooth mouse, and I almost never turn it off. Instead, it automatically suspends. When I'm away from home I can ssh into my computer if needed. I have daily backups that are essentially seamless.

Now, it was difficult to get to this place. I would say that Linux is, and has for a long time been, rock solid if you're not using a GUI. In my opinion, the single greatest impediment to "Linux on the desktop" is xorg, which is terrible (to put it mildly). Nouveau is absolutely crap, especially since Nvidia puts out its own drivers. But my point here is that after a few days of careful installation and setup work, I have had a seamless desktop experience for something like eight months.

What needs to happen for Linux is a software company that takes something like Debian, fork it and dramatically bring it up to wider compatibility with modern hardware across the market. In some sense that's Ubuntu, and it shows in how easy my daily experience has been.

Re:Video Pros Moving from Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs by Baeocystin on Friday February 24, 2017 @04:54AM (#13722357)
Well, let me rephrase- Linux is as stable as you want it to be. If you want an ideal linux laptop experience, you need to do the research and get a model made with linux in mind. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice.

That being said, I only use Linux for server-side work, and I can easily say that it is every bit as stable as any other server OS I've used, and has been for a very long time. There are plenty of weedy areas to play in if you want to, of course. But if your goal is It Just Works, you can do that, too. Perhaps most importantly, you can do it easily, with just a little foresight during the spec stage of planning your project.