Comment by hansonkd

8 hours ago

I love Linux and use it for everything except my desktop for 20+ years now. Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing. Last time (6mo ago) it was my sound card. Small little annoyances that steal hours of productivity. LTS was going good until I wanted to update to the next LTS then the can of worms gets opened. It’s fantastic when it’s fresh and everything works and you can blow it away easily and reinstall. I’ve never found upgrading packages to be reliable long term without eventually having to do some manually recovery or reinstall OS

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hansonkd

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newsoftheday  8 hours ago

> Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing.

On Ubuntu starting in 2006 and Kubuntu the last several years, what you're describing doesn't and hasn't happened to me.

When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on:

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux
    Fedora
    SuSE
    Debian (yes, even Debian but it was with the unsupported drivers and the issue was in a WiFi driver)

But it has not happened on Ubuntu or Kubuntu since I started using them in 2006. We use desktop Linux on several machines here and have for a long time, from Dell to HP to Lenovo.

  • hansonkd  8 hours ago

    Yup, tried ubuntu. Probably gotten over a hundred of their free CDs in the mail over the year to give out. Milage may vary based on exact hardware. It works until it doesn't is the story. Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority. So many combinations of motherboards, graphics cards, wifi cards, sound cards, etc. I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.

    I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.

    • newsoftheday  8 hours ago

      > It works until it doesn't is the story.

      No, that's not my story nor is it the story of the vast majority of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users.

      > Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority.

      That's a false statement, too many of us out here using Desktop Linux to try and make such a claim in 2026 (or even 20 years ago for that matter).

      > I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.

      Tens of thousands of us developers in IBM used Desktop Linux on Thinkpads and later Lenovos for your statement to not ring true with me.

      > I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.

      Those statements do not represent a truthful reality the majority of Desktop Linux users experience. This isn't 1996 in a random Linux IRC channel.

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