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”.
Nailed it. I’m really fucking frustrated and needed to vent. I have no regrets, in fact moving my PC to Linux (my work PC so it was a whole panic thing for a day or two) was the last piece to cut ties with big tech and every company who’s CEO was at Trump’s inauguration or has since “bent the knee”. Its been a long, stressful process, the last of which turned out to be the biggest effort. Thanks for the kind words.
Come to the Open Source community for ideology, stay for the better life. It’s a learning curve to get in. After that it’ll open more doors and be much more relaxing to run OSS operating environments than you think.
The real fun is when you’ve been on Linux for a few years and are forced to do some tasks on a Windows machine. It’s amazing how bad the Windows UI and tooling is, but it’s hard to see until you can look with some perspective.
Yeah, I think we’ve all been there.
Just starting a new OS, deep in imposter syndrome, every problem seems to require fixing two other problems and you’re trapped in vim.
It gets easier.
Don’t be afraid of the terminal, it’s the most powerful tool you have. Look for things that you can script, everything you do in a GUI you can script, anything that you do repeatedly should be scripted(and bound to a keyboard shortcut.) LLMs are decent at making simple scripts, but use them to learn how to write scripts, don’t just vibe code everything.
Any tool that you hate probably has 4 other projects which do the same thing, so go look for alternatives if one frustrates you. Awesome Lists are a good place to start: https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software