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”.
What you say is especially true for laptops, those have the highest chance of having weird non-standard components that give a lot of problems on Linux.
Much easier on desktops, especially if you build your own, you get to choose which components go into it.
Nvidia is shit on laptops but it’s fine on desktops.
I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years, always had Nvidia on my self-built desktops, my experience has always been flawless, I just have to install proprietary drivers.
My experience with laptops has been hit and miss, until I learned to buy laptops “full Intel only”, on those everything works out of the box.
A good tip is to search the Amazon reviews before you get a laptop for “Linux”. Even if you don’t buy it there, you’ll often find one or two Linux users saying how well everything worked, or didn’t.