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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Flawless? No. But the bar is very low.
I had to tweak things often in Windows too. Windows pushed a broken update around December 2023 (or 2022, don’t remember) and when I restored from a system image Windows itself made it broke everything worse. Windows isn’t perfectly stable. There’s currently a bug corrupting people’s disks.
I think a huge part of it is that you’re more used to the types of issues you ran into on Windows and knew how to solve them easily enough that they didn’t cause headaches.
Could be. I’m getting the hang of it but the first bit was literally “this doesn’t work”, found a fix, which made something else not work, etc. Drive permissions were a big hassle, I’ve got things going but it’s been a huge learning curve.
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.I’m on AMD, but I do still run into frequent issues. Normally with Ubuntu variations most things just work but not everything.
Linux is created mostly by unpaid volunteers, so it’s gonna have it’s faults. For so many reasons I’m inclined not to use Windows so finding that a feature doesn’t work isn’t a big deal for me.
In short, no. Linux can be adversarial, finicky, and sometimes just plain bullshit. That’s the price of device freedom though. Can’t speak for anyone else, but it does get easier the longer you stick with it though.
My advice would be, only use vanilla/default/official versions of the most popular distros. Ubuntu, not Ubuntu Studio, Fedora, not (I don’t know what variants there are) Fedora. Do not use specialized distros, for example a gaming distro. Do not use 3rd party repos. Do not manually install any packages from anywhere. If you want something and official repos of your official distro cannot do it, just don’t do it. Do not try to find a workaround and make it happen.
After using Linux for a while you’ll become more comfortable with it and you’ll slowly start moving outside the above limitations. The best and worst thing about Linux is that your OS is yours and you can tinker with all of its parts. But you shouldn’t, at the beginning. If you were to tinker with Windows like that, it would also break.
Immutable distros imo help developers with this issue of subvariants a lot. Each immutable distro will have the same behavior, the only difference is hardware interactions. This helps with debugging.
Developers, yes. Beginners, I don’t think so.
Idk, android is basically an immutable linux distro. Seems to work fine for the whole world really
You can mess up android by installing third party apps, using shizuku, or rooting. If there is a distro as strict as vanilla android is for the average user, then you are right. I’m talking no root, no sudo, only official flatpak apps can be installed and only user’s home directory is r/w.
Even for an intermediate user, immutable might be a good choice, but it is extra unneeded complexity for a beginner, according to my experience with those type of distro in the past.
But people are different. Some might feel right at home.
I’ve used Linux for 15 years and absolutely don’t tinker with a system I depend on, completely agree with this advice.
The downside as others have mentioned is that tinker-free support is hardware dependant. But it’s getting better over time.
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.
That’s a bit of a flawed approach, at least if we’re talking about the average user. The average user doesn’t want nor shouldn’t need to have a deep understanding of the OS. If you’re a dev or interested in it, sure, it’s good to know, but asking the average person to have to constantly tinker with their OS is like asking people to diagnose their own illnesses. Sure, it would be nice if you knew medicine and why you were sick and how to cure it, but it doesn’t make sense to expect everyone to do it. Most people don’t care, and have better things to do in their life.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this premise.
There are lots of things you can get by in life without knowledge of. If you don’t know how vaccines work, you can go right on through your life and argue that you have better things to do… until we reach a critical mass of people who are willfully ignorant and the next thing you know we have a head of health and human services who thinks eating random dead animals is a safe way to boost your immune system making decisions.
Large-scale, pervasive ignorance of things that are actually critical and consequential to the functioning of society is not without consequence. It’s a free world and people are free to take the view that they don’t care. They’re also free to completely forgo and not use technology. But both using it in your daily life AND deciding it isn’t important to know any basic knowledge about how it works? I’m not concerning myself with those people - I don’t understand OR respect their decision.
I am very understanding of “it’s too difficult, make it easier”. I am NOT understanding or accommodating of “I don’t think I should have to do it at all.”
Edit: Furthermore, we wouldn’t even be HAVING this conversation if those people really believed that produced good enough results. Most operating systems are ALREADY built with that philosophy. If Windows and other operating systems that are built based around the philosophy that you don’t need to understand anything and the OS should do everything for you was working so well, why are people looking at Linux in the first place? It’s pretty clear that that philosophy is not producing satisfactory results anymore. I would argue it CAN’T produce satisfactory results. You either want control and freedom, and the responsibility and extra work that comes along with that, or you don’t. There’s no free ride that gets you both.
Not at all, but the benefits are worth it.
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.
Yeah, I chose it because it’s built for creatives. I do audio work, voice acting, music, etc and I was scared I wouldn’t be able to do my work. Studio seemed safest.
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’d recommend trying things out first. You are still in the beginning phrase, so try different distros. When you do, look for stuff like
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forum support. Is it popular ? Ubuntu Studio may not be as popular as vanilla Ubuntu and even when theyre from the same family, you can expect minor differences.
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i know this is not Windows. But say your OS is corrupted, how fast and easy it is for you to reinstall?
Example: Pop OS has a dedicated partition to reinstall the OS right in the grub menu - you dont need a separate USB drive for this. On the other hand, Archlinux requires you to mount the partitions correctly (yout home, root…etc), then you can go and fix your systems.
- do you like how the package manager work? I dont like Ubuntu because it has these different sources that can get convoluted. Arch’s AUR can be very messy. Fedora for me is the way because I like DNF. Plus, its syntax is easy to remember.
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I’ve always had issues with it too. You’re not alone. Thanks to Windows 11,I plan to convert my laptop to Linux and I’m hoping since I only use it lightly for a few simple tasks it will be ok. But my desktop daily driver will have to be Windows. Rock and a hard place.
Windows was just the boat you already knew.
Now you have a new (more adaptable) one and don’t know all it’s squeaks and rattles. You’re neither dumb nor is something wrong. You just aren’t familiar with what it needs from you.
Give it some time (a week compared to how long in windows?) and attention and soon you’ll wonder why you ever second guessed it.
Good point, I just needed to vent I think. Honestly after bricking it after day 1 ( I made a user the owner and had no sudo privileges so I was in a login loop), day 2 was a lot easier so I guess I’m learning haha
Constant maintenance no.
Currently I have some issues with the Nvidia driver acting up. So I am getting good at purging it and reinstalling it. Maybe once a month.
Under Ubuntu desktop.
My server I have very little issues. For mye Proxmox environments I have a small issue after restart it doesn’t properly month a NFS share. If I don’t do mount -a.
My laptop I have a constant issue that hibernating don’t work with encryption out of the box. So I have to turn if off or connected it to power. I think there have been mad some progress but I haven’t reinstalled Ubuntu for 2 years.
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 explain some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be an issue 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.
