It’s been a week. Ubuntu Studio, and every day it’s something. I swear Linux is the OS version of owning a boat, it’s constant maintenance. Am I dumb, or doing something wrong?
After many issues, today I thought I had shit figured out, then played a game for the first time. All good, but the intro had some artifacts. I got curious, I have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and thought that was weird. Looked it up, turns out Linux was using lvmpipe. Found a fix. Now it’s using my card, no more clipping, great!. But now my screen flickers. Narrowed it down to Vivaldi browser. Had to uninstall, which sucks and took a long time to figure out. Now I’m on Librewolf which I liked on windows but it’s a cpu hungry bitch on Linux (eating 3.2g of memory as I type this). Every goddamned time I fix something, it breaks something else.
This is just one of many, every day, issues.
I’m tired. I want to love Linux. I really do, but what the hell? Windows just worked.
I’ve resigned myself to “the boat life” but is there a better way? Am I missing something and it doesn’t have to be this hard, or is this what Linux is? If that’s just like this I’m still sticking cause fuck Microsoft but you guys talk like Linux should be everyone’s first choice. I’d never recommend Linux to anyone I know, it doesn’t “just work”.
EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who blew up my post, I didn’t expect this many responses, this much advice, or this much kindness. You’re all goddamned gems!
To paraphrase my username’s namesake, because of @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone and his apt gif (also, Mr. Flickerman, when I record I often shout about Clem Fandango)…
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall GNU/LINUX OS grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that: “Have ya paid your dues, Jack?” “Yessir, the check is in the mail.”
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It’s been a week. Ubuntu Studio
There is your problem. I wouldn’t recommend a Canonical distro to anyone. Try Mint or Debian 13 if you absolutely need to stay in the Debian sphere. Otherwise, give Fedora a try. EndeavorOS is also friendly to Nvidia GPUs, but be careful when using AUR.
Ubuntu Studio? Why?
I just use linux mint and don’t have issues
For me the experience is not flawless, but it’s not problematic either. For instance, I have never encountered random flickering just because a wrong program was open. In your case if you’re using Nvidia as a GPU and are using Wayland as a display compositor that might be explaining some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be if you are in an Xorg session.
And the fact that you have to be potentially aware of these things is one of the annoying aspects of using Linux.
Regarding the specific issues mentioned: Nvidia support is subpar on Linux. There’s many distros that are specifically designed to handle all the graphics support for gaming and Ubuntu isn’t one of them.
Little bit of lore here: When I first started using Linux Nvidia support was better than ATI because they actually bothered to maintain a proprietary Linux driver. There were open source drivers for both but they weren’t performant. The proprietary ATI driver existed but it was maintained by one dude and required a goat sacrifice to install correctly. Since then, however, maybe after AMD bought ATI, they started investing in the open source driver. After that the open source driver just works and competes with the proprietary Nvidia driver. After that I’ve been brand loyal to AMD.
LibreWolf chewing up 3.2Gb is regrettably just normal for a modern browser. Firefox and Chrome will do this too. I’d be genuinely impressed though if Vivaldi has avoided that.
I began writing this comment with the intention of answering your question, but it actually ended up mainly being me venting myself.
Obviously no, it’s never been a flawless experience, but a few months back I decided I wanted to try gaming so I put an nvidia card in my pc and reinstalled linux to start fresh. All of the examples you’ve given sound like the sort of problems I’ve had since then, but never in the ten years before when I was using intel integrated graphics. I was aware going in that nvidia is massively more problematic than AMD, but this card was a spare from someone I know.
Obviously there are games I can run well now that were unrealistic before, but there are also a couple 2D games with SNES-quality graphics that I’ve tried which spike my CPU to 100% and lag like crap in spite of working perfectly before I installed the card. I’ve had two experiences where a game suddenly has issues immediately after an update to the nvidia-utils package. I’m not new to linux, but I am new to gaming on it and I’ve kind of given up on troubleshooting this stuff in favor of “maybe there will be an update tomorrow that fixes this”.
There’s reason for optimism, everyone is saying the situation is steadily improving because nvidia has been much more cooperative in the past couple years. It’s not realistic to say you won’t find annoyances regardless, but it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of your struggles are a direct result of decades of one company’s deliberate decision to ignore pleas to stop making life as hard as they possibly can on software developers trying to support their hardware.
I have been using Linux for a long time and it’s only been in the post chrome os era that I’ve really seen updates and maintenance begin to turn the corner.
A lot of Linux users will tell you their system is perfect but it kinda reminds me of that documentary where all these inventors came to show off their sex robots at a sex robot convention. Its obvious how absurd it is when you’re on the outside looking in at a bunch of people who are like “I know she’s rough lookin’ but just check out this feature”.
ChromeOS was really a first class experience on third rate garbage hardware. It did however really spark the potential for a new paradigm that projects like ChimeraOS, universalBlue, vanillaOS, blendOS, and even steamOS are tackling.
Ubuntu is a bit “dated” in its design. (For lack of a better description even though they keep trying to re-invent the wheel). There is a reason why everyone is rushing to make Linux usable now and that’s namely because it’s become valves chosen desktop platform moving forward. Immutable/atomic distributions are set to fix the problems the average user deals with when it comes to Linux.
I’m actually using bazzite-dx with Nvidia and gnome right now. Its been an overall success with some kinks due to the average jank you get with Nvidia drivers. For instance, Bambu studio flatpak was busted for a week but I just checked tonight and it looks like it’s been fixed.
Its ok to be frustrated about this. You’re not alone.There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Yes, I have a near flawless experience with Linux, but it was years in the making. One thing people don’t realize when they switch over is the amount of time you’ve spent in dealing with similar issues on Windows, but you did it so long ago and so often they’re second nature to you, so you don’t perceive them as problems. But when you start from scratch on Linux they’re daunting problems because they force you to learn new stuff.
The same will happen to Linux over time, some stuff you’ll fix once and forever, others you’ll learn to work around and be okay with it. For me nowadays whenever I have to use Windows for something more than simple stuff it’s death by a thousand cuts, because I haven’t used windows in so long that my muscle memory for those caveats and weirdness (that I didn’t even noticed before switching) is completely gone.
As for the specific things, you’re using an Nvidia card, which is known for not playing nice with Linux, you haven’t mentioned drivers but you have two options here, open source and very poorly performative Nouveau driver or the proprietary and doesn’t play nice with other stuff Nvidia one. Both are bad, but probably you want the Nvidia one.
Also I don’t know how Ubuntu studio is, but I would recommend you try other distros, maybe Mint or I’ve heard wonderful stuff for Bazzite. Any way you can have your
/homebe in a different partition so you don’t lose your data when switching over and trying stuff, eventually you might find something that clicks for you, and it’s smooth sailing from then on. Good luck.The premise of the question is that it’s somehow supposed to be a flawless experience.
Nothing is flawless. Linux has a learning curve. Everything does.
The advantage to Linux is, if you learned Linux 15 years ago, then got stranded on a desert island, got rescued, and installed a new distro today, you can still count on more or less everything working exactly as you expect it to - maybe a bit smoother.
With Windows, who knows? It’s death from a thousand tiny cuts every other day to avoid a deeper, persistent, and meaningful understanding of your system. The time you spend learning how to do things in Linux isn’t WASTED. That knowledge will never STOP being useful. It’s best not to look at it as an annoyance so much as an INVESTMENT.
You might like bazzite. I think it auto installs everything and has the discover store for installing flatpacks. Bazzite is based on steam os and is KDE on top of fedora. Its annoying to install software outside of flatpack, so im graduating to debian this weekend, but its a good first distro imo.
Linux is annoying to learn. Debian supposedly is a much more simple version of linux without the immutable FS, which i like. You have to install your software yourself however. Bazzite is good if you want a minimal hassle install but not much customizability outside of the flatpack system.
Linux is worth it if you can get your head around it. I have been using it for a few years and im sort of figuring it out finally and I will mever gocback to windows again. The one thing that temps me to use windows again is the ease of installing software, like adb and java and stuff.
Alao dont forget to download lutris and install proton GE which has wider support for games(extra visual C redistributables and stuff) windows is basically dying at this point. It kills my storage and constantly is lagging because of the security stuff and file scanning. Many games have a 15% penelty in windows these days compared to emulating in proton on linux. Windows is consitently becoming less backward compatible with each update and is mostly just spyware at this point. Might as well bite the bullet and just dig into linux for a few years until you figure it out.
I’ve been distro hopping a little bit and honestly in my experience, anything based on Ubuntu has been inconsistent at best. Stock Ubuntu (or specifically Kubuntu since I prefer KDE) was the worst but Mint gave me issues too. Meanwhile, Fedora- and Arch-based distros have been perfect. Literally more consistent than MacOS or Windows for me, every single time. Personally I wouldn’t try another Ubuntu-based distro unless it was highly recommended.
Long time Windows user tried switching over to various Linux distros recently but 12 of them couldn’t find drivers for my wireless card, ethernet, bluwtooth radio, or GPU. After 80 hours finally got to the point where I could sign in (mint Cinnamon) but it thinks my ethernet is wifi, wifi and bluwtooth don’t work, the GPU usage is buggy, only uses 4gb of my 128gb of ram, uses way more CPU then it should and randomly freezes. Oh and it won’t recognize my USB 3.0+ ports, only the 2.0 I’ve spent over 200 hours since trying to debug why to no avail. And none of my games run properly, even with Proton or Wine. They stutter, freeze crash, or spaz out.
There’s a lot of people here saying that you just need to learn Linux, but I don’t want to have to learn how to write my own hardware drivers thank you very much.
I can get fresh Windows installed, fully functioning with all the software I want in about an hour with full performance. Meanwhile after 300 hours with Linux I’ve turned a $5000 desktop into the functionality of a $200 chromebook.
I’ve used some slightly weird hardware but haven’t experienced anything of what you described. Across the whole range from the lab server with 3 3090s and 500gb of ram to my $40 Chromebook I got on ebay
Also, most the things people complain about Windows are only in Home or Student. I mostly use Pro or Server and those are super reliable.
Lol no. I’ve been using Linux for 10 years and it’s been a continuous dumpster fire. Constant issues l, especially with Nvidia, across many different machines. Issues with wine, no X11 (or Wayland) after updates, games not starting, etc, etc. Across Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch (and derivatives).
Yet I almost exclusively use Linux nowadays. Why? Because it’s a dumpster fire I can influence. Windows is going to shit, they were taking my PC hostage, installing spyware, ads, forcing updated without my consent. On Linux I have to invest hours to fix shit, on Windows I can get fucked whenever something happens that I don’t want.
With proton advancing, Wayland working somewhat usable even with Nvidia,my threshold was passed. I’d rather fix the fixable Linux issues that cost me time than deal with Windows any longer. But for the layman I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I’m a computer scientist. I can fixodt issues, it’s just a question of time and energy. But that doesn’t go for everyone.
As others have mentioned, an alternative distro ypu can try is Bazzite. It’s an immutable distro, so most of the OS is read-only. The OS gets installed on 2 partitions (so you’ll need roughly double the storage space) but you’ll boot into one while updates get pushed into the dormant one. When the OS reboots, you’ll get the recently patched partition while the older one waits for updates and also serves as a backup, just in case.
There’s also Nobara, which is based on Fedora but with gaming specific addons. I think you’ll be able to easily install nVidia drivers as well. It is also a rolling release distro so you’ll get faster updates which I think is better if you want to game in linux.
Flawless? Fuck no. When have you ever come to expect a flawless experience from any software? I had to deal with so much shit on Windows though, over a very long period of time. I mostly learned to tune it out, but after switching to Linux full time it became obvious what I had just grown to ignore.
Linux isn’t flawless, and never will or should try to be. It’s just better than the alternatives. You have to spend some time with it and figure out it’s quirks, just as you did with Windows but forgot. You need to also not expect it to be Windows. It’s a new thing and you have to learn it knowing it’s not trying to copy Windows.
