Ever since the famous middle finger salute to nVidia anybody who buys their graphics cards to use with Linux hopefully know what they're doing. Linux doesn't support them at all, and nVidia only kind of supports Linux.

If I got random disconnects for my webcam in OSX I wouldn't bother with it, I'd just buy a better supported webcam. Maybe that's just me, but I appreciate the people who tirelessly tinker to get support going. Just make sure you send those changes upstream to whatever distro you are using.

As long as nobody tells non-technical people to patch their kernels, we're all good. Any modern Linux desktop from one of the major distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, ChromeOS) is the most low maintenance computer you can find, but with that level of tinkering you'd soon find yourself on your own.

> I don't know why, but Ubuntu still manages to make installing updates a 50/50 chance of breaking the NVIDIA GPU drivers, which then means I have to reinstall them in 800x600 where the "Software Updater" window doesn't fit on screen anymore.

I cannot dismiss your experience. I think you are telling the truth.

But I was introduced to Ubuntu by a (mildly) enthusiastic 50 years old electrical engineer back in 2006, so I know it used to work for some ordinary people even back then.

I really don't know some HN-ers manage to break Ubuntu repeatedly while it just works for non technical users, but a qualified guess is a combination of exotic hardware and tinkering (a good thing).

> I really don't know some HN-ers manage to break Ubuntu repeatedly while it just works for non technical users, but a qualified guess is a combination of exotic hardware and tinkering (a good thing).

It's more than that IMO, it's that we don't give up.

Your average non-technical user will just deal with the camera disconnecting occasionally, maybe swear at it once in a while, or (commonly) just not even notice. If you ask them how Ubuntu is, they will say "Yeah, works fine. No viruses!"

Your average HN'er will be bothered every time it disconnects, to the point where they are recompiling a bleeding-edge kernel and breaking 10 other things, but have a working camera that never disconnects. Then we complain here about Ubuntu being broken and terrible :)

On a tangent – I think that it's kind of worrying that Canonical seems to have Ubuntu on the desktop as super-low priority – all I hear about them these days is them trying to market some kind of server product, or their various kinds of managed Kubernetes offerings, which as far as I can tell, go up to $4k/node/year on your own hardware [1] I wonder how much success they are having with this.

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[1] https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/b5f9ae49-Enterprise_Kubernetes_...

I think it's because most of the engineers behind the code that goes into Ubuntu are paid to work on their project for their set of users and usecases. There are very few whose remit is the whole system and overall user experience. That means the small but high impact bugs often don't get fixed. Things like the GPU drivers being uninstalled on an update (because that isn't the problem of either the apt team or the Nvidia team)

Oh, you actually get a graphical interface to fix it?

I always had to fix it in text mode with elinks, it was a complete nightmare and I switched to Nouveau.

Now I have an AMD based laptop and it has it's own problems (briefly had a mac on Intel) - they are all tricky.