So I tried Linux and it didn't go too well

[Miska]

With Linux I know I can modify pretty much any part of the OS in any way I like. With Windows that is not possible...

 

But my biggest pain has been recently Win 10 and it's lovely ways of screwing itself up. One of my factory shipped Win 10 installations (on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop) corrupted it's registry so badly that it couldn't load keyboard driver or most other drivers either. I managed to rescue some files by attaching touch-screen monitor and using on-screen keyboard. That was quickly replaced with Linux.

 

One Windows 10 installation on a NUC cannot shutdown. It is first telling it will shutdown, but then just returns to login prompt without actually shutting down. Well, one thing it cannot resist is pulling the power plug, so now shutdown is done what way.

 

Another Windows 10 installation cannot install latest feature update, it just gives magical hexadecimal error code and tells that some files are missing. Otherwise it functions fine. Called Microsoft support and they attempted to install the update for half a day with all kinds of tools over remote connection without succeeding. Windows extended self checks didn't find anything wrong. Then they told they'll escalate it to some higher level support staff, but I never heard back form them.

 

 

Not even getting started with software development. Today I spent entire day fighting with bugs and idiosyncrasies of CoreAudio (macOS). Not to even mention some other extra fun that Xcode 10 brings.

 

[Miska]

For example making something like my bootable images, out of Windows or macOS, is just not feasible.

 

But overall, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, etc are nowadays fairly easy to install. Intel GPUs work pretty much out of the box and installing Nvidia's drivers is not very hard either (forget the nouveau driver). But selecting hardware for Linux is some amount of effort and some laptops are just hopeless. I'm avoiding AMD GPUs these days. Some manufacturers have computers where they officially support Linux and even ship with Linux pre-installed.

 

I forgot to tell about my AMD-based mini-laptop with Windows 10 and Fedora 29 dual boot. After some update Windows 10 became unusable. Mouse pointer moves for one second, then freezes for one second, moves for one second, freezes for one second... Drives me mad. Booting same machine to Fedora 29 and everything works completely fine... Guess which OS I end up booting?

 

[Miska]

2 hours ago, Em2016 said:

No Debian in that list? ?

 

 

Debian is not as sleek to install, but otherwise there's nothing wrong with it! I didn't list it because it doesn't fall into "easiest to install list". If you need a reliable Linux that can run on wide variety of hardware, including all sorts of ARM platforms, Debian is good. It also allows nicely minimal installs, just like Fedora too.

 

It is among the easiest things to put on a CuBox-i though.