This is not always the case. If there are a large supply of workers then many will be willing to work for non-union employers.
In many cases, unions increase the value of labor by constricting the supply of labor. Unions can often be difficult to join. If there is a overabundance of labor, then the union has little negotiating power.
You could also just not buy one of those awful things. I have never seen a legitimate use for it that wasn't misplaced adolescent tech fantasies (omg I can tell big brother to make coffee and my keurig starts up!). But maybe my line of business has made me excessively paranoid / niche
I would like to make an edit: functionality for those with disabilities is a huge use-case I did not consider. Thank you for your insightful comments
I like to be able to play music, ask simple questions, etc. without pulling out my phone. I don't understand why those aren't "legitimate" use cases. Maybe you don't like the tradeoff you're making in using such a device, but if I'm fine with it, how are my uses cases not legitimate?
Yeah, I got one for Christmas a couple of years ago; thought it would be really gimmicky, but I find it's actually quite a lot nicer to use than my phone or other devices for the following:
* Turning on/off lights
* Changing the thermostat set temp
* Asking about the weather forecast
* Add items to a shopping list
* Playing music
If you can't imagine a voice interface being appreciably better than a phone interface for these things, I recommend withholding judgment until you've tried it.
Also, to be very clear (since some people have a knack for arguing points I never made), I'm explicitly not saying that the current hot-mic implementation is technically necessary or ideal, nor that these conveniences justify the privacy tradeoff.
It's also worth noting that you don't always have to do it with voice either. If I'm on the couch with my phone, I might use it to update my shopping list, whereas if I'm in the kitchen cooking, I'll use voice. Similarly, if I just want random music, I will say "play music", but if I want a specific album, I might use my phone, especially if it has a complicated name that I don't remember.
Obviously not every action is easier or more optimal by voice, but having the option is great.
Apologies if this comes across as too "get off my lawn", but I come from a time when to look something up, you had to haul yourself to the library; open one of dozens of drawers filled with index cards; find the card your looking for, which directed you to a stack in the library; find the book on the stack; and finally find the page in the book by consulting an index. It's a lost art. Then, you would have to go to an actual person and engage with them in order to take the book home with you, giving you time-limited access to the information. That's if you're lucky enough that the book existed at your library. If it was checked out or had to be ordered, it might take weeks for you to get access to that information.
Many people today grew up with cellphones in their cribs. They have no idea what information starvation is like. The experience of receiving information you've been waiting for for weeks or months is exhilarating.
Anyway, when you take the library experience versus the experience of pulling up information from a cellphone the improvement is astronomical. From cellphone to voice assistant, the improvement seems very marginal.
Cell phones even represented a distinct advantage over desktops and laptops in that they were always there on your person. Cell phones opened up the possibility to look up information anywhere. With voice assistants it seems the only advantage you gain over cell phones in that you don't have to use your fingers. That doesn't seem very life changing by comparison, unless you don't have fingers, in which case I will admit your life would be vastly improved.
But the downside is that you're connecting a always-on microphone access to mega-corporations who are looking to monetize your existence. For those of us who grew up without the internet or cell phones the trade-off just makes zero sense. We're willing to use cell phones because they open up new worlds of information access. But voice assistants just seems to create more problems than they solve.
I too grew up in the time of card catalogs. And I learned a lot from reading through the other encyclopedia entries as I flipped the pages looking for the page with the info.
Yes, you're right, the voice interface is not the astronomical leap that the cellphone was. But why is that your cutoff line?
My voice assistants offer a lot of benefit to me. Especially with kids, I don't always have a free hand to pull out the cell phone. When my daughter was an infant, it was super convenient to ask it to play soft music as she was falling asleep without having to put her down. Now it's super nice to be able to set multiple timers as I cook with just my voice, instead of trying to fumble with multiple timers on my phone or stove.
I'm not paranoid to think that they are recording everything, because I understand that there would be no ROI for the company to do so with the storage and bandwidth that would be required. And therefore there really isn't much tradeoff at all. Google is already recording every search I do -- does it matter if I use my phone or my Google Home?
My personal experience is that simply typing my query into a search engine or pressing the spotify logo to start my music requires less effort or fuss than attempting to figure out how I'm supposed to word my desire for the benevolent overseer to do what I want.
IE, using voice commands is a downgrade IMO. Voice commands are not directly discoverable, and there's a lot more magic boxes.
> attempting to figure out how I'm supposed to word my desire for the benevolent overseer to do what I want
I have yet to find a use case for modern voice control that required more than a passing thought about how to word things. Even my technologically illiterate parents can use these devices with relative ease, especially compared to smart phone and desktop computer UIs. Have you actually tried out these devices or are you just assuming they're as bad as they were 20 years ago?
I thought there'd be more problems with voice commands, but the Echo's not bad at it. I have to repeat maybe one thing a week, but "Echo, [room] lights on/off/dim to 50%" always works, as does "play X". I don't find myself having to structure a command in any particular way.
I do find using voice commands a downgrade when it comes to interaction speed. I find it incredibly annoying to talk to alexa as it doesn't seem to match my dialog speed. Then, I find myself standing their waiting for it to shut up thinking, 'I could have done this faster myself'
Also, an interaction I had last week:
add x to my shopping list.
ok, I will add x to my shopping list, anything else?
. . .
But I can't add a list, add pears, apples, and oatmeal to my shopping list.
So If I have raw chicken on my hands and want to add shit to my list, it takes so god damn long that I want to punch the fucking thing.
I don't have an echo but there was a post on HN[0] not long ago that linked to an article[1] about how Alexa is able to add multiple items to your shopping list at once, and how it understands what is what. So in theory you shouldn't be running in to the problem you're describing. Not every time at least.
I'm sort of on the boundary there. I didn't have a cell phone until I moved away from home for school. I had occasional access to dial up Internet as a kid, but I still remember plenty of afternoons spent at the library.
Rarely do I need to answer a simplistic question in line with "what's the time now".
Its rather some deeper info that first few lines of wikipedia article covers, sometimes more. Is your use case valid? For sure for you. But it wouldn't be enough for me, not for the price, upfront and hidden, not for the creepiness it potentially brings. The real time and energy saved for me would be tiny - but that's me. I can still do a bit of 'work' myself.
This reminds me of my recent trip to Aconcagua, highest peak in South (both) America. One US lady had this electric air mattress inflater, and she ran off the charge. She was bragging how smart is she for having such appliances. Rest of the group just smiled and inflated our mattress ourselves, even in 6000m high camp. If you can't do 10 full lungs blows yourself and spend that 1 minute preparing mattress, you shouldn't be up there, by huge margin.
I have four. I like being able to ask a question while I'm still typing away. I like being able to turn on my TV and change the volume without having to find a remote control that is always somehow somewhere it shouldn't be. I like being able to turn off every light in the house and the iron by just saying "alexa, turn off everything" as I head out the door. My son loves being able to turn off the lights in his room and start a playlist to help him go to sleep with "alexa, good night". I love being able to start any playlist from anywhere in the house without touching any buttons, or turning the lights on or off when my hands are full without putting things down. Or asking for the time. Or when the next bus leaves the nearest bus stop.
Any one of those things are just a tiny little convenience, but it adds up, and while I bought one just to see what they'd be like not expecting to use it that much, I now use them dozens of times a day.
I'm probably biased because I lived my early childhood behind the Iron Curtain but I can't for the life of me understand why someone would buy these. The cost-benefit is just not there.
the cost is there :D just no benefits, like most 'products' today... i can't imagine 1 unit being sold to anyone but some addicted person who needs to have all-the-new-things regardless of their use.
I agree that your phone can delegate the same voice commands to your smart devices or do Q&A, but some of these devices are also decent speakers to stream music casually (eg. $75 Echo).
My phone is in my pocket, which signficantly degrades the audio quality of any recordings. Same reason I have a cover over my laptop camera, but not over my phone camera.
I've made several audio recordings with my phone in my pocket. Unless you're very consistent with the pocket and placement of your phone, that isn't a significant mitigation.
Huh. I came to the opposite conclusion - growing up in Eastern Europe, "they're always listening" is the default position for me, so one more listening device is no big deal.
Do you have kids? I have three small ones, and they are just starting to desire technology. From my perspective, letting them control music (which they want, and I want them to have) is much better using a Google Home device than giving them access to my phone or tablet.
If you don't have kids, you have no idea how loud and aggressively they will scream when they want something, and especially when these devices are visible to them (if you "need" to respond to a text message, etc).
Yes, it is a devil's bargain. Yes, I'm sure some families are able to, through sheer force of will, completely restrict access to technology. In my family, we are acknowledging we have lost the battle to prevent them from using technology and are seeking solutions that help them manage their desires and create healthy boundaries. I guess we can all argue over what is "healthy" and "normal."
Things like Google Home and Family Link (all from Google) do allow us to control access in a way that I prefer.
So, this "hack" is really exciting because I do care that my two year old already knows Google as a brand.
I'm open to hearing suggestions and have even attempted to build my own open source alternatives, but using voice is a modality that is preferable for so many reasons, and I don't see alternatives that won't be worse.
I have two kids, 9 and 11, and neither of them are screaming and yelling about what music to play. If they want to listen to music, they know to go to the rumpus room and pick out a vinyl.
It's not a devil's bargain, you have lost the ability to bargain. It's a common theme with parents these days.
There is nothing magical about technology, it's just an application of age-old parenting principles. And there's nothing particularly harmful about technology either, there should be no grand battle: you define the limits and the children should stick to them and respect you as a parent. This is true for all things children want to do, from screaming and playing indoors to accessing communal devices to getting their own devices when you, as a parent determine they should.
You are wrong. With kids, you are dealing with micro bargaining every moment. It's what kids do to learn.
Do you have kids, or did you read this somewhere?
What age old parenting techniques are you talking about? The ones older people reminisce about when they lament how bad young people are today? Do you have a source backing up the efficacy of those "proven" techniques?
An aggressive screaming kid needs a timeout at the very least, followed by a progressive loss of privileges (toys) until the tantrum subsides. A few cycles is enough to amend even the most recalcitrant.
I'm shocked: Why does your two year old need to know Google as a brand? How or why is this valuable to you? Do you expect Google to exist forever? Its entire revenue model is built on ads. Companies with more robust revenue streams have gone bankrupt in shorter timeframes.
Are you sure that gets what you want? Our desires for my kids might be different. Sounds like you think kids should be punished until they learn who is the boss. I'm not sure you have read all the literature on the effectiveness of that strategy.
I never said I want my two year old to know the Google brand. She hears her older siblings saying it. It is just what is so with her. But guess what? I'm willing to wager my kids aren't the only ones who learned things from their siblings that their parents don't want them to know about, at least at that moment. My kids are not playing with Barbies and I'm pretty sure body image issues with girls are much worse than exposure to Daniel Tiger.
Sorry, my apologies. I misread your post read to mean that you were happy/excited to have your kid understand Google as a brand (i.e. valuable).
As for parenting, we may just agree to disagree. I concur with your assessment that siblings will definitely teach more than parents. That's to be expected. We just would never reward bad behaviour with acquiescence. But to each his own. Our seven-year old has wide latitude when it comes to choices and actions, but he also realizes that the consequences of those actions are not in his control. We gave him his own iPad at the age of 3 and access to his own real spending money in Grade 1. He gets to decide what to spend it on. At the same time, we've made it clear to him that poor impulse control and bad behaviour will never get him what he wants. He negotiates everything, including daily bedtime or routine tasks, and we're perfectly fine with that. It seems to align well with his personality, and builds some valuable life skills.
I actually think we agree on more than we disagree.
Totally align with not giving in to screaming and yelling, and I'm consistent (or at least aware) about that, but when my youngest is sick and just went down for a nap, well...
Those are good points you make and I'll hope to recall those techniques with my just turned six year old. As you say, building valuable life skills.
Some may see smart devices as part of a greater cultural movement, in which corporations entice individuals to trade privacy for convenience
Someone who thinks these things are a gimmick, and a harmful gimmick at that, is right to express an opinion about the value these devices add. The same way I'd encourage a friend to quit chain smoking tobacco cigarettes, and not visit his house with my family if it were full of secondhand smoke.
Peer pressure is the main reason I quit smoking. So yes-- if not every time, then at least regularly and consistently. When technology starts to look like a recreational drug, treat it like a recreational drug.
Why is this downvoted? Peer pressure is by and large the best way to curb thoughts and actions that are harmful to individuals and society. The current echo chamber on the net filled with alternative/radical theories is the outcome of insufficient peer pressure. Nutbars always existed in real-life too, society was just better at keeping them from doing too much harm.
Those of us who are nutbars hate society for forcing us to conform. Given that a lot of us are more tech-savvy than society, we love that we tend to be able to work around its restrictions.
I think it's dangerous to conflate freedom of speech with moral relativism. Freedom to speak does not suddenly make morally wrong actions right. Ex: murder, slavery, forcible confinement, poor treatment of women and children, and so on.
I realize we are quibbling the definition of "nutbar", but my line is drawn at the extreme end, not the moderate end. It's one thing to advocate Haskell as the perfect language for building an OS (crazy talk, but I support it) and quite another to advocate violent uprising against minorities in society (a la StormFront). I hope we can agree that there's a distinction at play here.
It's somewhat poignant that you say "adolescent" because I know a number of octogenarians and nonagenarians for whom these are indispensable. I won't buy one at this phase in my life, but there will come a point in most people's lives where having an omnipresent corporation listening in will become a net positive.
I would of course prefer dear friends listening in, but who knows what life will bring.
Never seen a single use case? How about a kitchen assistant, especially with dirty hands, or a task doer for the elderly or otherwise mobility disabled. It’s a generic time saver, and time=money for most people.
I mostly agree with you but there is a legitimate use.
Imagine if you couldn't use your hands or interact with technology due to a disability - these devices would make the world so much easier to interact with.
Anyone who grew up watching Star Trek has probably dreamt at some point of being able to simply say "Computer" and then send a voice command. We just didn't expect the tech to become popularized by advertising/retail companies.
My dad just had some major health issues, and has a much harder time getting around the house. He finds these things pretty useful to save him some trips around the house.
For one, Amazon doesn't make smartphones, and I trust them the least.
In the iOS ecosystem, Siri can be set up to only listen in response to a button-press (don't remember which is default), and the watch only listens on wrist-raise. Those at least creates some physical barrier to passive listening, even if it requires a certain degree of trust in the devices.
> In the iOS ecosystem, Siri can be set up to only listen in response to a button-press
Sure, that's assuming you trust Apple (if you don't, then you might imagine that those settings don't actually do what they say they do). If you trust them, then you're fine. If you're in Google's ecosystem, and you trust Google, then you're fine. Ditto for Amazon. But the point here is that people don't trust these entities.
And then somehow target a smart home speaker, while simultaneously carrying around an always-on, always-connected, geo-located, potential listening device in their pocket, all day long.
I'm privacy conscious and bought a couple of minis. I don't use the mics but I thought I had a legitimate use case without one. It's falling short and I'm looking around for replacement devices.
I flipped the hardware mic switch off on it, to try to make it a dumb wifi speaker instead of a "smart" one. Then I built a software alarm clock that forces me to leave the room after I wake up in order to turn it off.
For me, it's very important for my alarm clock to be both effective, and to always work. The alarm clock runs as a remote task and connects directly to the mini, telling it to play an MP3 from the local network (by IP because the mini ignores DHCP DNS server). If I hit the mini touch controls to turn it off, the software starts playing a different MP3 a second later. If I try to unplug the cable from the device, duct tape stops me. Thoughtful wrapping of the cable around a solid furniture post prevents any yanking from being effective at tearing it out of the wall. If one mini is down (fairly rare but possible point of failure), the other one is attempted.
So, it's fairly impossible for me to just turn it off without waking up and giving it a bit more thought. I have to leave the room and tap a button on a touch screen (ubuntu in kiosk mode reaching web app on local network).
The unfortunately fatal flaw is that after months of effective use, I recently discovered that my highly available alarm clock was not actually highly available. It breaks when the internet is out. I could not connect over local network. There's always the possibility that something else was a factor, but I reproduced it a couple of times intentionally.
It also concerns me that the mini doesn't require authentication. Anyone on the local network can directly reach the device and do the same thing. A script meant as an alarm clock could turn into a device of psychological torment in someone elses hands. This lack of authentication, and the ability to auto-discover the speakers, is probably something they consider a 'feature'. I don't like seeing Chrome waste system resources in its attempt to scan my local network on the off chance that Google's speakers are there. And I don't want it to reach out to those speakers when it does find them. But it does it anyway.
In the end, with the microphone disregarded, it's a cheap wifi speaker. I won't count Chrome's bad behavior against it, but its software could be improved by offering (any) secure connection options. The lack of internet as a single point of failure dooms any kind of gadgetry with a reliability requirement from using it. It can't be considered reliable enough for serious tasks like waking you up for work or a flight unless they fix the software to work in a local-network-only mode. But, it is cheap, and, well, mostly available, which is often good enough for to-hand use cases.
Speculation: Is the lack of mini's heartbeat phoning home Google's own way of determining network reliability across wide geographic areas (eg, the lack of data in an aggregate area)? But they probably know this already from the wide spread of Android devices. Or do they maybe just not want their device to work unless it can reach back to them?
If you have a storage unit why are you sleeping on the streets ? Or am I misreading?
I wish you the best of luck. I am friends with several published literary personalities and I can tell you it is not easy and took a lot longer than three years.
You are 'not allowed' to sleep in the storage unit, even though it is open 24 Hours. The guards keep tabs on who is in and out. And even if one could, I would still choose to sleep outside. I tell myself: "I'm just Urban Camping .."
Thanks for the wishes. I don't doubt it may take longer than three years. But I've been @ it for 10+ already & have written / self-published what I believe is a great novel (like everyone;) But am without marketing. (What I need's discovery)
And if nothing happens, I'll just self-publish over and again
For twenty years I made and sold LSD across the East Coast. I spent my youth and perhaps most of my sanity doing it. For the longest time I lived by only one rule: Are you kind? Now I can pretty much do whatever the fuck I want. It's great, but not for everyone.
Oh wow. Do you have an academic background in chemistry? I've heard stories of chem phD students synthesizing in their labs at night. I've considered synthing for the challenge and for personal use, but haven't built up the chutzpah to start.
Those are not stories, that's the industry. Right now most of it is based out of Waterloo with some in upstate NY but honestly the Canadians are wild - check out https://lysergi.com/ they are selling lsd pro drugs on the clear net!
The legal jargon on one of their pages is reminiscent of things I'd see in online pharma websites that sell viagra pills, modafinil, and the like. I'm not sure how the legalese holds up in court though, but trying to pass off as a research company is one vector of approach to try pass off as legit, I suppose.
Interestingly, a lot of these pharma websites are based in Canada. Maybe there's a law I don't know about? Regardless, if I were being incredibly paranoid, a website like this on the clearnet suggests honeypot to me, even though it's most likely not. But still... on the clear net, and I'm assuming chemicals are made in house? Other drug sites buy from India/Mumbai/Sri Lanka/Thailand and ship to their destinations.
I'm impressed that they have access to NMR and LCMS stuff too - or at least they say they do. Shits expensive to buy and maintain. No doubt they are probably operating in an academic chemistry lab.... though I don't blame them. A PhD stipend isn't exactly investment banker status, nor is research funding increasing.
Someone whom I know ordered a sizable quantity of 1P-LSD from them and gave a strip to me. I gotta say it was some of the best "acid" I have ever done, maybe even better since on 1P I'm actually able to fall asleep after 8-10 hours of tripping. With LSD-25 if I dose at noon I'll be up until 8am the next day. Other than that there is no discernible difference.
I'm almost positive they operate out of Waterloo's lab or have significant access to their facilities. Otherwise I'm boggled at how they can make sure pure stuff in such quantities.
Hopefully, the psychedelic legalization initiatives in CO and OR will pass and the US can catch up again ;)
Less so than you might think. I met my share of characters, sure, but most of the time when I wasn't synthing I was either driving through the middle of nowhere or waiting around. I read a lot of books in a lot of motel rooms and taught myself Attic Greek and programming to pass the time. My first language was Perl via the o'reily book and I used to write out the solution code on a legal pad.
It was after I made the amount of money I wanted that things got weird haha
Every time someone mentions not using Linux Desktop because they had a lot of issues, someone like you comes out of the woodwork and pretends that Linux doesn't have issues anymore.
Maybe that's yet another reason people don't switch to Linux: the evangelists are annoying and untrustworthy.
> Every time someone mentions not using Linux Desktop because they had a lot of issues, someone like you comes out of the woodwork and pretends that Linux doesn't have issues anymore.
Did someone call me? Jokes aside, as a person using Linux (95% of the time, for ~15 years or so), I can honestly tell that Linux has its fair share of problems. However, for some time, the problems I experience are not more frequent than Macs that I have or the Windows PCs of my family members.
Is Linux perfect? No way. Did it improve over the years? Yes, tremendously. Also, I can say that advanced desktops like KDE can do very nice things for automation and productivity. I'm currently happy about the state of Linux, but it doesn't mean its perfect or the very very best.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that progress has been made. Sound, unless you need low latency, is pretty much a solved problem now, for one.
But there are a lot of reasons that Linux's particular brand of issues are actually still a deal breaker for people, and refusing to acknowledge that will never attract anyone to the platform.
Just google around a bit, even just on HN, and you'll find dozens of examples. A lot of it comes down to poor drivers, especially for laptops, but much of it is systemic.
I'm reluctant to go into detail about my own personal blockers because every time I do I end up in a multi-page argument with some evangelists who insist that everything I want to do is completely wrong and I should just change my entire workflow to match theirs.
You're right. Laptop support tends to be problematic, and boils down to selection of right hardware "platform" in the beginning. The worst part is, the right platform is not always budget friendly.
I personally found out that professional class hardware (Dell XPS, HP EliteBook, Lenovo ThinkPad) has the best Linux support out there. I have a EliteBook 850G2 at the office, and except the fingerprint reader (which I don't use), everything is working without any problems. Battery life is also great (~7 hours). However, works for me is not a valid excuse, esp. with hardware.
If you want to discuss further, you can reach me via my profile page.
No, it is 2019 and my Linux Netbook still lacks hardware accelerated video decoding and OpenGL 4.0 support, although the card is a DirectX 11 compatible one.
Well yeah, it is of course much better today I believe. But I wouldn't be surprised if you still have to spend hours in trying to configure stuff if you have the wrong hardware.
Misunderstand me right, it's still mostly on laptops I have experienced issues. On a stationary computer you just get a performance drop, at least for most graphics cards.
I think it's great that it has improved so much and I hope it will continue to improve so that sometime in the future I can return to the promised land.
Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.
Try this is an exercise instead pick a random dell. Attempt to install OSX on it. Post about how huge a hassle this was and how the end result was a non functioning brick and OSX still isn't ready.
If you google computer model linux. If the result is 17 pages of results about how it didn't work you may want to try a different model.
Generally how well your machine is supported is a function of how hostile your oem is towards openness, how different from existing hardware your machine is, how common it is, and how much time people have had to add support.
Current macs aren't well supported. Supporting all hardware under the sun is a Sisyphean task and ultimately an unimportant one. For Linux to be useful it doesn't have to support all possible machines just a good range of hardware.
I've installed Ubuntu 18.10 on an XPS 13, which everyone tells me is well supported by Linux, Dell even sell it with Ubuntu. It won't come out of sleep. Googling suggests other have this problem.
XPS is a range of models and 13 is a size it doens't uniquely identify the model. Does it have the problem under the lts version that dell presumably ships?
I don't know, I just tried installing the latest Ubuntu. I could go and track the version Dell ships for my laptop, and make sure I never upgrade it, but surely that proves the point that Linux is a pain to run?
Well there's your problem. The companies that make the custom hardware that Apple uses in their laptops refuse to release driver support for Linux for basically the same reasons as the writer of this Tweet. Whether the fault for this is on Apple or the manufacturers is up for debate, but driver compatibility with Apple's laptops and anything but macOS has always been a crapshoot and only became decent for Windows in the last few years.
Note: This is coming from an Apple fan who has been wanting to try out dual booting a Linux distro or one of the BSDs but has watched support tickets get answered with "testing MBP drivers on Linux isn't worth our time" from multiple OEMs.
Installing linux on a Mac is your problem. Macs are notoriously a huge pain when it comes to linux compatibility. Tbh even windows isn't that great on a Mac...I'd just stick to OSX on a mac.
When it came time to replace my old macbook air, I got a dell xps 13 and linux works great on that. All of the hardware works out of the box without having to do anything with drivers.
Macs have good hardware. Or you might also want to dual boot.
Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.
Running Linux on new hardware is usually a bad idea, due to the nature of the process you have to expect at least a year before divers for new hardware have settled into distributions.
Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while.
Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.
THIS is the problem. Windows drivers start working on day 1 and continue working. The breaks are when we went to 32-bit drivers in NT and when we disabled real-time hardware interrupts in Vista.
Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.
On the flipside, while Windows has a greater quantity of drivers available for devices on day 1 of release, Linux tends to have a greater quantity of drivers available for devices at time of install. With Linux, there's no separate step of having to wait for Windows Update to pull the driver, since all the drivers are included alongside the kernel (the exceptions being printer drivers - which aren't developed alongside the kernel - and firmware for wireless NICs if you're going with a strictly-FOSS-only distro).
Meanwhile, I "fondly" remember having to have a USB stick on hand for Windows 7 installs because the default install didn't include wired (let alone wireless) NIC drivers for 90% of the laptops and desktops on which I installed it. Thankfully Windows 10 is better about this (at least on the wired front; wireless drivers are still hit or miss), but still.
> Meanwhile, I "fondly" remember having to have a USB stick on hand for Windows 7 installs because the default install didn't include wired (let alone wireless) NIC drivers for 90% of the laptops and desktops on which I installed it.
I worked in an IT support shop at the time windows 7 was released, and I imaged and installed hundreds of copies of windows 7 over the time I worked there. While you're right about wireless drivers being a crapshoot, I can not remember a single instance of missing wired NIC drivers on install. I'm not doubting that some were missing (there is lots of hardware, lots of manufacturers out there), but it was definitely not as huge a problem. The biggest issue was usually SD card readers and trackpads which required downloading from the manufacturer.
I've done a few linux desktop installs (same job) and the situation was definitely more painful. Issues with sleep/wake, webcams, network drivers (usually wireless), multiple displays were basically guaranteed, and the help process was usually "You're using the wrong hardware", which isn't really helpful.
"I can not remember a single instance of missing wired NIC drivers on install"
Were you pre-installing NIC drivers with your images? That'd be a good reason for the high success rate.
It might also have to do with specific manufacturers/vendors. Most of my installations were on Dells; it's possible HP or Lenovo stuck with chipsets that Windows properly supported out-of-the-box. Linux worked fine in all cases.
