So finally, the problem with personal experience is it's just that. Vast numbers of people use linux everyday without issues. And...apparently, numbers of people use macos everyday (and wifi doesn't cut out every two hours??? after my experience it's hard to believe but idk, people on the internet say it's true, right)
... but that's the only problem with it. And it's perfectly consistent, both the problem and the fix, so fairly easy to live with. It doesn't do any number of little weird things I used to tolerate without thinking much of it, in my Win + Linux years (I was fairly late to the Mac train).
Some models have definitely been complete duds, though, that's absolutely true. Frankly it annoys me that even when they fuck up, everyone else is so far behind that I don't realistically have options to switch to that won't amount to cutting off my nose to spite my face. As happened when I tried to cheap out and switch back to Linux this time. Yet again. :-/
I doubt it. In your first post, you said you have a work losing crash once a year on your Mac. Sounds like a problem to me. (That’s never happened to me once on my Linux or Windows desktops.)
You also had to build another machine just so you can play games and try out Linux. That you can’t just play games under macOS sounds like a problem too.
I’m also sure that you’ve had problems just like everybody else has had with Macs, from updates that break software and services that you’ve installed. My Macs have been broken numerous times by this bullshit whereas my Linux and Windows machines just keep trucking along like they’re supposed to.
I didn't write that. Quoting myself:
> I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that.
I was being conservative in my claims but did not write that I see a crash a year. I'm pretty sure I could count the total crashes I've seen in macOS/OSX on a half-dozen machines (work and personal) in ~10 years I've been using it, on one hand without using all the fingers. Three, maybe? Two? It's extremely uncommon. I don't remember when the last time was. It's 100% for-sure under once a year.
Meanwhile, how... have you never, ever had that happen on a Linux or Windows desktop? X has never crashed? Windows has never crashed? How long have you been using them? I'd say I've had hundreds of crashes of the OS or of the GUI desktop system (may as well be the same thing, on a desktop machine) in ~26 years of using Windows and ~21 years of Linux, across perhaps 40 desktops and laptops, personal and work-provided. Granted they're way less common now on Windows than they used to be, especially pre-WinXP (about the same on Linux as they've always been, though).
> You also had to build another machine just so you can play games and try out Linux. That you can’t just play games under macOS sounds like a problem too.
I didn't need to do it to try out Linux. I was trying to cheap out and use the same machine for gaming and for work, ideally without dual-booting, so Windows wasn't an option (for the work part, that is). I should have just bitten the bullet and shelled out for another Mac to begin with, but I thought I'd give Linux (yet) another shot. I was a mostly-Linux user for most desktop/laptop/workstation purposes (except gaming) for most of the 2000-2010 decade, so it's not unfamiliar territory for me.
> I’m also sure that you’ve had problems just like everybody else has had with Macs, from updates that break software and services that you’ve installed. My Macs have been broken numerous times by this bullshit whereas my Linux and Windows machines just keep trucking along like they’re supposed to.
I've had to run a trivially-googlable one-off command to fix homebrew permissions a couple times after OS upgrades. I think it broke badly on an update, requiring more intervention, exactly once, years ago. But the system was still fine, only Homebrew had trouble, and in the worst case it's really easy to just blow it (homebrew, that is) away and start over (which IIRC I've never had to resort to, though).
Dropping 32-bit support sucked. Macs were finally kinda, sorta, almost usable as gaming machines. Not everything was available, but the library had grown large enough that there was tons to play. All wiped out at once. Oh well, all my Macs have always had embedded graphics so I couldn't play anything fancier than Kerbal Space Program or Minecraft or most Unity-engine games, anyway, so it's not like I wasn't still going to need a separate box for that if I really wanted to scratch the PC gaming itch.
Macs do have problems (ugh, those first-gen butterfly keyboards...) but I've yet to see them be bad enough that I wouldn't still be making things a lot harder on myself by going back to Linux for work of any sort, and if I'm just gaming on something it may as well run Windows (which is unsuitable for any work I do or want to do, for a ton of reasons).
Why on earth would anyone want to purchase another computer for the sake of using an OS that they already have been soured on, especially when they could just spin up a VM? That's just being wasteful regardless of how expensive it is (computers also occupy space, energy, and time).
That's your choice, I guess. I'm happy :)
> You had a poor experience with MacOS.
No, I've had poor experiences with every OS. The difference is that macOS problems are the worst type of problems that can't or won't be solved because Apple will just pull the rug out from under you at any minute. That and there are just too many things which macOS simply cannot do.
> ...so naturally the OP must either be misrepresenting their experience or "doing something wrong"?
Nope. I said that they're most likely doing something wrong. You added that bit about them misrepresenting their experience.
> Why on earth would anyone want to purchase another computer for the sake of using an OS that they already have been soured on...
Well gee, I thought this was a forum for tech enthusiasts. And didn't the guy say he has like 47 years of Linux and Windows experience combined? Doesn't sound sour to me... Sounds like he kept trying for a reason and that reason is obviously that a Mac couldn't fill his needs this time for a few different reasons.
> especially when they could just spin up a VM?
Perhaps you can read one of the 32 replies that "handrous" wrote in this thread to find out why he didn't use a VM. If you can't think of any reasons why someone might not want to use a VM for their combined gaming and workstation experiment, then I probably can't help you answer your question.
> That's just being wasteful...
Incorrect. That's just being pragmatic. Hey, I hope you enjoy being pissed off and sour with the other guy though. I'll continue being happy and living the easy life with my single OS computers that do what I want them to because I keep things simple.
There is also PCI-Passthrough so you can in fact use a VM for gaming but it's rather cute that you're attempting to paint me as the one who is somehow failing to understand why a particular system might not fulfills their needs.
Also, which "other guy?" Handerous himself? I don't recall him ever expressing being "pissed off and sour" so either you just assumed guilt by association or your reading comprehension is way off.
Also, you literally painted a crash a year as if that's a real problem with MacOS or really any desktop OS. Don't pretend like you're being objective when you are clearly not.
It's great that purchasing multiple devices for each OS suits you. Not everyone is you or agree on what a "simple" scheme is.
Nobody said you or he couldn't use PCI-Passthrough? I honestly don't care what you do - but if and when that doesn't work for you and you come complaining, I'll be glad to share my own experience wherein I don't use such convoluted garbage and my stuff just works.
You yourself claimed he was sour and that you were pissed. Your words, not mine.
A crash a year or every other year is a problem and I'm absolutely, objectively certain of that. Sounds like you have the same problem since you think it's normal. I don't have these problems and I'm betting that's because I keep things very simple. So in my opinion, you're both probably doing something wrong.
> It's great that purchasing multiple devices for each OS suits you. Not everyone is you or agree on what a "simple" scheme is.
It doesn't just suit me, it's empirically better since my machines run for years without crashing. I'm fine with people not agreeing on what's simple because at the end of the day, my stuff is running fine and whatever you guys are doing is not working because you're pissed and he's sour with machines that you can't keep running properly.
I'm not trying to paint anything though. I do enjoy responding to angry frustration with cool, level headed guidance though because I find that it helps those who can be helped. Perhaps that won't work here, so I guess go ahead and get that last word in, I know it's important to some.
Anyway, no hard feelings. Thanks!
Win 10 on the same machine? Zero crashes in about a year. Linux in a VM on the same machine, hosted on Windows? No crashes. So it's probably the video card driver in Linux, not the hardware's fault exactly.
Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine. Probably would have gone Nvidia but I'm aware which one works better on Linux has flipped sharply since Way Back When, the last time I ran Linux on a machine with a discrete video card. Didn't matter, still broken. No clear cause of crashes. Would crash in a game, crash while browsing, crash editing text. Often I've been able to track Xorg crashes to a specific action (playing Flash on the first version of Ubuntu to use PulseAudio, for example) but not this time. Driver is (or was, for the couple months I made a go of it) just absolute shit with this particular card, I guess.
("but that's AMD's driver, not Linux's fault" OK, but that doesn't matter from my perspective, the machine was unusable for either work or gaming with Linux on it, unless, maybe, I crippled the hardware by using an open-source driver)
[EDIT] that it did it in both Xorg and Wayland is another indicator it's likely a driver issue. It's that or bad memory, but Windows and Linux-in-VirtualBox-on-Windows don't crash, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.
AMD Navi cards have a known issue that causes those crashes[0]. It's believe to be a hardware issue since RMA'ing the card normally fixes the issue, but you're right in that it's something that only the linux driver seems to trigger.
It shouldn’t be that hard to track someone down with that card to see if that’s true.
Not that I think you’re lying, but you seem convinced that it’s the card’s fault while it could be something else.
Also,
> My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.
That conclusion is not supported by anything you’ve written. All you can say is that, based on your limited testing (and many assumptions), the RX 5500 XT linux drivers were unstable at some point last year.
For the record, I’ve been using desktop linux (Kubuntu) for the past 6~7 years with an Nvidia GTX 980 with zero issues whatsoever. I use it for both gaming and work, and never had the system crash on me.
I even upgraded the CPU/Mobo/RAM and GPU (originally had a 970) during that time without any issues. No need to reinstall linux or anything ridiculous like that. It just worked as expected.
And when I eventually decide to upgrade again, I’m extremely confident that I wont have to do a reinstall either, or worry about system stability because in my experience, Linux is very stable and has excellent hardware support.
I'm not a Windows fan at all, but it's gotten far more stable while Linux in my substantial experience hasn't made much progress on stability, in a desktop OS context, specifically, where applications crashing with greater frequency or the windowing system crashing count against a platform, not just blue-screens and kernel panics. Major distros also have a bad habit of backsliding temporarily, but significantly, on stability with upgrades when major subsystems are changed out, in a way and to a degree that Windows and, say, macOS, do not (this is not a claim that those never have issues of this sort, mind you, they're just less frequent, less severe, and less long-lived, typically), and the alternatives are to use slow-changing distros that leave you hunting for sources for modern software to run on them when you need it, or stuck on old kernels without newer hardware support, or rolling distros, which are their own special stability risk.
Meanwhile, most of the progress Linux has made on the desktop in the last 15ish years as far as features is lame, unhelpful-at-best GUI churn (to be fair, macOS and Windows are guilty of plenty of this, though not as much) and stuff that macOS and Windows already did better (very ordinary and basic wifi use not requiring you to learn yet another command line tool for something that's two clicks in a point-n-drool interface on other operating systems, stuff like that). Hell, one feature I'm now very interested in, which is X-Window-style remote applications (as are others, see: remote-Chrome-as-a-service as a business model) is stagnating tech that's on its way out, on Linux, not something the community is running forward with as a differentiator.
If you're so old and your time is oh so important, maybe you should learn to measure twice and cut once, instead of blaming your tools.
[EDIT] If you read quickly, you probably just missed that I related three instances of Linux problems across three of the four x86 machines I've run Linux on at home in the last ~decade, since it stopped being my primary OS for most purposes. Only one's a hardware problem, but the other two are failures at doing extremely basic things like installing its own boot loader or not rendering itself unbootable on a system upgrade. One of those is running Debian, that's true, but I wouldn't try to use that on a machine with a very modern video card, you're right that that'd be a recipe for trouble. The only one that wasn't a bigger pain in my ass than it was worth was a trash-tier Chromebox I installed Void on. That was basically fine. It's consistently good on Raspberry Pis, too, since that hardware has a lot of eyes on it and is very stable over time. Sorry I snapped above, no excuse even when insult is perceived, I've modified it to take that out.
1-2 crashes from both Wayland and Xorg on two very different distros, per day. Unusable for any purpose.
Win10 on the same machine is perfectly stable.
So I'm back to Win10 for gaming and macOS for work. I ran Gentoo on a Thinkpad and later an HP laptop for years, but I just don't have time for this shit anymore. I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that.
I also had to manually intervene with my old Gentoo skillz to get Debian to install on my boring, old (used) home server. It couldn't install Grub, on repeated attempts. All I did was drop into a shell and do exactly what the installer should have been doing, with no changes to config. Worked first try.
Ubuntu on an early home server managed to render itself unbootable after an update. No idea what happened with that but it solidified my mistrust of LVM (who knows, may not have been its fault, but life's getting too short for me to want to find out)
My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.