I never dual boot. It's a PITA with UEFI or not and has been since the dawn of time. It's Linux -or- Windows. UEFI is not a problem though - people need to stop badmouthing something they really don't understand.
I settled on using Windows as a host OS[1] and use Linux on VMs because to be fair, Windows power management, suspend/resume and hibernate and driver support is miles better i.e. it actually works more than once. Oh and they really don't fuck up the kernel every 2 minutes like on Ubuntu and don't throw out buggy shit like Apple do.
I used a 2011 MBP for the last 6 months or so however (with virtualbox) and I had to go back to an older and slower T400 as it was more reliable as well.
So virtualbox on windows 7 it is. And it works really well. I'm pretty happy and I'm a picky as they come when it comes to hardware and software.
On my desktop (a Dell T3500 with piles of RAM), it's 8.1 with Hyper-V with Linux in it as that works pretty damn well too.
Is suspect the problem here is users rather than hardware and vendors.
I've reached a similar conclusion but have wildly different experiences.
I've never had issues setting up dual boot. It works fine and I can read/write NTFS if needed from Linux or just rely on Dropbox for simple stuff. The problem is it is too inconvenient to reboot so I usually just run Win 7 from a VM inside Linux. I also had a number of issues with Windows being glitchy (this persisted on three different Thinkpads with Windows 7 and, back in the day, Windows XP) and a pain to maintain, which is why I use Linux as my primary desktop OS.
I also don't have a problem with power management and suspend on Linux, though I know it probably isn't as good as Windows. I don't use hibernate so I'm not sure if it is awful. For my next PC upgrade I'm not getting a laptop, however, since I hardly ever travel with it...
I like OSX fine enough, too, but I rely on a lot of Linux tools so I have no real reason to have an OSX machine.
It would probably be better to say OSX provides nothing I need outside of Linux but adds a few restrictions (choice of hardware, desktop behavior, etc).
If I were forced to use OSX or someone gave me an OSX machine I think I would get along fine and be productive, though. I can actually get along fine in Windows, too, but it is somewhat frustrating and slower for me to get things done.
You could ask "What Linux tools that you use can you not get for Windows?" too, since Windows has Cygwin, Mingw, etc., but it doesn't change that doing a lot of things on Windows or OS X is a lot more painful than on Linux, especially as it relates to development, debugging, etc.
It's exactly the same the other way around for e.g. audio and video editing on OS X vs. other platforms.
Interestingly video was where Linux worked for me when iTunes failed miserably. I was trying to import videos taken on my Panasonic Lumix and I simply couldn't import them using iTunes (I tried various options including trying to repair them but iTunes simply didn't see them). Granted this is not the entire OSX and only iTunes but considering the user is supposed to do all interfacing with their iPhone/iPod using iTunes, it was quite disappointing. Upon a whim, I tried to open them using Handbrake on Opensuse 12.2 and basically saved them back and that fixed whatever was wrong with them. iTunes could see and import them (though it is possible that Handbrake is available for OSX as well).
I have different machines running different linux distros, so I'm familiar with all the popular package managers (apt-get, yum, pacman), and I must say, Homebrew is really my favorite.
If homebrew is your favorite then you are probably a person who also loves to run Gentoo. For me, I moved away from gentoo in ~2005 because it just wasn't practical to be compiling everything from source all the time.
Binary packages are a wonderful thing and a package manager that doesn't support them out of the box isn't a usable solution for the things I do.
I tried Homebrew on OS X, but it didn't meet my needs. I'm not a fan of having to compile a new version of GCC from source every time I want to install a new library.
Homebrew also doesn't manage OS X itself, which is something I really prefer about apt-get.
The benefit of apt-get source is being able to read the correct version of the source code of any part of the operating system to debug a problem, not necessarily building from source.
> Oh and they really don't fuck up the kernel every 2 minutes like on Ubuntu and don't throw out buggy shit like Apple do.
It seems my experience with computers has been radically different from yours.
The only kernel I've ever had problems with is the NT kernel, and one of the reasons I stick with Apple portables is that they're generally the least buggy devices I can find.
I've been using GNU/Linux as my only OS for years, and honestly, I have never had any issues with it; of course I may have other use cases than you, I don't play video games or anything - but when working on a project, that for instance relies on gstreamer, it's better to use Linux natively. VM's have always been a pain for me, they're slow, IO issues, and you'd waste more battery having to run a VM anyway, so the trade off doesn't make sense. Also, how could you say the problem is from users? Why should installing another OS be so difficult? You should give GNU/Linux another try, and try fixing your kernel panics rather than giving up and switching to windows.
One issue though is that people consistently try Linux on a computer built for Windows and say "what the hell, it doesn't work out of the box flawlessly, fuck this".
If you really want to try Linux, you need to buy a computer designed to run it, or at least vet your hardware before a purchase. I haven't bought a computer with a Windows license attached in over a decade because that isn't buying a Linux capable machine - its buying a Windows machine you might be able to run Linux on.
My most recent system was a build I made last year and I vetted every part for LInux support (and boy, did it take a while to verify Asus z87 motherboards had a working EFI that could boot a linux kernel, albeit they have a busted EFI shell and can only have one EFI boot table entry).
Why should I vet my system before buying it? I've seen Linux advertised as "it runs on everything" plenty of times, and for well over a decade. It's rare to see someone who evangelizes Linux to say that hardware support on Linux is inadequate for a non-technical user to just make the switch.
If that is indeed the case I think it would be tremendously important to fix that.
Meh :/ I started with the techrights link, and first looked at the 3rd link, "Installing GNU/Linux is Still Hard Due to UEFI" to learn, and the source article it was based on actually had the writer saying there was no problem at all with uefi+secure boot on, his linux just installed and worked fine on his new laptop. The other two february links weren't much better, at worst an already fixed bug, that did not originate at Microsoft... The FSF link seems more technically accurate as far as I can tell as a non-linux, non-uefi user, but most of their problems are hypothetical and not so much practical problems for now.
Are there better sources to read up on this, or is the controversy a bit over blown?
It isn't UEFI, it is peripheral manufacturers who hate Linux for whatever reason. Broadcom, Creative, Nvidia, and others all have legacies of horrible device support in the kernel.
You can't blame Linus for that. If a company doesn't want to push what is often only a few hundred lines of C to make their devices work under Linux, thats their right. But you can't blame the ecosystem for the companies choices not to support it. It is like buying Nexus 7 and bitching about how Windows doesn't run on it.
All my computers run UEFI if possible, and all of them run Linux.
I have no problems with UEFI whatsoever; in fact, I think it's a nice improvement to the dated BIOS technology. The Microsoft thing called "Secure Boot" might pose a problem, but I never activate that anyway.
People need to stop confounding UEFI with Secure Boot.
There is a distinction here - Linux, the kernel, runs on pretty much every CPU in the universe. If it is presented with any CPU and chipset ever made, it can run on that.
Your PCI devices, your USB devices, etc are not guaranteed to have Linux drivers for that hardware. And if the producers of said hardware don't release driver documentation or support a Linux driver directly, you can't blame the Linux community for not being magicians that can force private companies to bend to their will.
Hell, Broadcom - one of the worst FOSS companies, in the same class as Nvidia for the longest time - is finally producing scant upstream NIC drivers. They support a tiny fraction of their product range, and they have another 2 proprietary drivers on top of those for Linux and those don't work either, but the situation is improving.
But that is all you can do. There is no "sit down and code" answer for undocumented motherboards, bad EFI implementations, and a 15 button mouse with a 50MB proprietary driver on Windows. Well, the latter actually you can just wireshark the usb bus and get all the signaling for the buttons, but that is a lot of work to do what the company itself could have done in minutes (publish the opcode manual they obviously have on the thing).
There are very few laptops that don't come with Windows or OSX preinstalled. They are out there (like Chromebooks) but there's not a huge selection of them, and you have to hunt to find them.
Depends where you are. Last summer I ordered a laptop from Germany and there was plenty of choice, at least Lenovo and Acer machines were widely available without Windows (variably shipping with FreeDOS, or a console-only Linux env).
Saved a tidy sum compared to shopping locally. Just pay attention to KB layout.
I've been using linux as my desktop OS for more that 8 years. It has ups and downs but there is no comparison in user experience to windows and thats why I have it changed.
That being said, drivers in linux are mostly painful, for instance I've spent several days and nights fighting with this ridiculous bluetooth stack and I'm still nowhere to go. It is not only linux fault because they are doing wonderful job but hardware manufacturers just don't give a shit. Almost every piece of hardware out there has 'Compatible with Windows XP,Vista,7,8!' and that's it...
I also find dual boot painful. On my old machine I switched main OS several times (back and forth from Windows to Linux). I couldn't dual-boot because it just wouldn't be fun. There's no real way to share data properly between the two OSes, I wouldn't have the exact same set of available apps, etc.
Now I have a MacBook with OS X. It combines the things I want from Windows and Linux, so I have no need to change OS. If I really need Linux or Windows for something, hardware virtualisation makes things easy.
That helps but invariably you want to use both OS's at the same time. It sucks to have to reboot every time you want to shift data about. Much easier to have both machines running at the same time. VM's also have tools for the guest to share clipboards.
Generalization that Windows has better "power management, suspend/resume and hibernate and driver support" is grossly wrong. Noob friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu provide excellent support of all the points you mention.
They really don't. Suspend doesn't always wake up all devices, different kernel releases break hibernate completely. Also Ubuntu just disabled hibernate for a vast chunk of time. It's never worked properly. And don't get me started on all the playing around you have to do with powertop to get usable battery life.
And that is Ubuntu (12.04 LTS) noob friendly edition on standard Intel Centrino hardware.
Well! Growing popularity of Linux based consumer products and entry of Steam, GOG, Cryengine, etc. on traditional Linux systems must be an indicator of something. Let's leave at that.
> suspend/resume and hibernate and driver support is miles better
While it is not apple to apple reason, this part is why I actually moved away from Windows -- yes, resume and hibernate (mostly) works on Windows, but with a great pain of waiting forever for that process to complete.
I have an SSD. Windows resume from hibernate in about 8 seconds. Complete cold start takes 12 seconds (less than OSX). That's windows 7. On windows 8.1 it's even faster.
Well, I don't have SSD, but same machine Linux was a way better experience (at least for what I had) -- and then there was this culprit of it taking forever to scan datastore.edb, too after recovery.
No. I run windows as a desktop. I wouldn't run any Unix derivative as a desktop - they've all been horrible to me (that includes OSX). Server-side though, it wins a lot of the time.
windows as a desktop? you reminded me of that torture :) all installers and updaters popping out in front of you, taskbar icons filling up for no reason, quickly degrading file system/launch performance, no package management, no workspace or tiling window managers, no sane ruby, python dev environments.. i gave up dual boot long time ago, and erase completely any remnants of windows. when i need windows (seldom), i open it on aws.
No installers and updaters popping up for me (other than the usual windows update one just like OSX/Ubuntu), tray has 6 icons in it (less than my Mac's bar at the top right), the install is 2 years old - no degradation, package manager - nope never I mean we don't use MSI's and MSU packages at all, alt-tab?, ruby I agree with, python is nice on windows (.chm help)...
I can't open windows on AWS when someone digs up my Internet connection...
I settled on using Windows as a host OS[1] and use Linux on VMs because to be fair, Windows power management, suspend/resume and hibernate and driver support is miles better i.e. it actually works more than once. Oh and they really don't fuck up the kernel every 2 minutes like on Ubuntu and don't throw out buggy shit like Apple do.
I used a 2011 MBP for the last 6 months or so however (with virtualbox) and I had to go back to an older and slower T400 as it was more reliable as well.
So virtualbox on windows 7 it is. And it works really well. I'm pretty happy and I'm a picky as they come when it comes to hardware and software.
On my desktop (a Dell T3500 with piles of RAM), it's 8.1 with Hyper-V with Linux in it as that works pretty damn well too.
Is suspect the problem here is users rather than hardware and vendors.
[1] On my Lenovo T400.