from Cattypat@lemmy.blahaj.zone to linux@lemmy.ml on 24 Aug 05:07
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/30786096
I’ve tried switching to Linux from Windows 10 twice now. The first time went wonderfully (on Mint) until I found out that secure boot was stuck in the enabled mode and I had to completely reinstall my bios. This was absolutely necessary as everything was unbelievably slow, especially gaming (on a decent laptop). I understand this is totally my fault as almost every Linux guide says to make sure secure boot is disabled. After fighting with that for literal days, I finally reinstalled Linux mint. WiFi was suddenly completely nonfunctional, no networks were detected, and none of the proposed solutions I saw online worked. I have very little experience with Linux and other complicated tech nerd stuff besides that which comes with tinkering with computers occasionally. I do however have a great deal of patience and stubbornness. I spent maybe a week or 2 just working on this first attempt at making Mint work, until I ran out of patience. After coming back to it a month or 2 later, I decided to try Pop!_OS. Once again, it went incredibly at the start. Because I fixed the secure boot situation, I could now game better than I ever could when I had windows installed. Very few compatibility issues showed up that I couldn’t conquer. Suddenly, I try playing Enter the Gungeon after having already played it a couple of times. Nothing out of the ordinary, I had done this before. Suddenly the entire computer freezes and I can still hear just fine. I restart my computer and… no sound. Nothing from any possible source, not Discord, not Firefox, not even the media I have downloaded. I look up the problem, I see several people have had it before, and only a couple ever got a solution. I try EVERY proposed solution on any forum with even similar issues, and still nothing. I have been fighting with my computer for 3 or 4 hours now. I’ve heard Linux praised for feeling like it is your computer that is subject to your will. I’d disagree right now, because it feels like there are spirits in my laptop trying to intentionally fuck me over every time I start enjoying the Linux experience. Does it get better? Am I crazy? Am I haunted? How is this anyone’s ideal experience?
threaded - newest
Are you dual booting?
That sounds horrible 😞
Does it get better? Not particularly, no. It doesn’t get any easier to bear, you’ll never get used to it, you just stop caring so much. it won’t hurt as hard because you just don’t let it, not anymore. And its horrible, it sounds selfish. But there’s never going to be a time where you won’t wake up with their face fresh in your thoughts, you just won’t care, you can’t keep caring. you got work in two hours and you have to keep moving, you can’t let it slow you down, you can’t stop going. the world didn’t stop going, nobody did, everything’s as usual, you can’t stop.
oh fuck this is the linux comm
We still here for you though. After all linux is love, linux is live. We’re definetly not a cult. Just give it a try. Linux Mint is super beginner friendly, trust me. Just once, you’ll feel better afterwards.
Jokes aside, learning or doing something new (can be, but doesnt have to be linux) won’t make anything better, but maybe make the drudgery of everyday more bearable, imo.
Also even though I hate it, talking about stuff that is on your mind with people irl is like super important and can be really cathartic.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/125082b3-46ec-4208-84cf-8c53ffe0a421.jpeg">
That sounds rough
If you don’t mind sharing, what is your hardware setup? Maybe someone can recommend a distro that’s more likely to work out of the box with your computer. While I haven’t tried it myself, Bazzite might be better for you if it can get you gaming without having to do too much additional work:
bazzite.gg
That sounds like a pretty cursed occurrence. As you get more familiar with the structure of your operating system, I’ve found diagnosing and fixing weird issues gets a lot easier. You also get a better sense of what component is responsible for what and what commands let you investigate.
I think it’s reasonable to say that weird issues don’t stop though. At least for me. I always had tons of weird occurrences on windows too. What feels different about Linux is that I try and figure them out because it’s possible I can. Where on windows I would just accept that x was broken.
For a random question in case it’s the same no audio bug I encountered recently: Do you happen to play audio via HDMI? And does any audio sink (speakers, etc…) show up in sound settings?
Also do you happen to be using an nvidia gpu (and if so, is it a laptop with an Intel CPU as well?). That freezing issue used to happen to me all the time with some games and it was entirely due to nvidia’s Linux driver bugs.
Hmmm. My experience has been different. I don't get regressions very often - once I get it working, it stays working unless I do someþing to break it. Except CUPS. CUPS is cursed and will fail by itself for no obvious reason.
Þat's not to say everything new works flawlessly. And my wife's Linux laptop has several regressions, but I blame most of þat on The Fucking Dell Dock, since (a) most issues are resolved by power cycling þe dock, and (b) Windows also had issues wiþ þe dock.
As a side bitch: fuck Dell. At one point my wife had a company provided Dell laptop, running Windows, connected to a company provided Dell dock, connected to two company provided Dell monitors, and she would regularly lose monitors between disconnects/connects. I have never encountered an ecosystem of devices from one company which worked so poorly together. Þat said, þe dock and monitors work far more reliably wiþ a different Dell laptop running Linux, but þere are still occasional issues.
Sounds like a hardware problem.
Maybe your computer has hardware problems that manifest at random times as software problems. I personally got a Beelink mini PC for $160 (16 GB of ram), and it worked perfectly with Linux first time, no issues thereafter.
Have you tried anything from System76 troubleshooting?
Audio Troubleshooting
It does get better, but… it’s kinda like river rafting.
Coming from Windows, Linux can and does often feel like you’ve spent your whole life trapped in a box. Suddenly “that thing that’s always annoyed you” is something you can turn off, replace, or improve with very little effort. I remember for example that when I switched back in 2000 I was blown away by a checkbox in the KDE PDF viewer. You could, in the basic settings, with no special hackery required, simply uncheck the box labelled
Respect Adobe DRM. Suddenly, my computer was actually mine.Using Linux these days is still just as amazing. You go from an OS that spies on you, pushes ads into your eyeballs, and has some of the worst design patterns ever, to a literal bazaar of Free options. It’s different for everyone, and that’s sort of the point: Linux is “Free” in all senses of the word, as you can make your machine do whatever you want.
It takes some time to get there though, and a lot of it is hardware unfortunately. A lot of the machines out there are built exclusively for Windows and the companies that make these things hide a lot of their inadequacies in their (proprietary) Windows drivers. So, when you try to use not-Windows, you end up using drivers written by people who had to reverse engineer or just do some guesswork to get that hardware working. This arrangement works very well for both Microsoft and these budget hardware vendors because it provides lock-in for the former, and a steady market for the latter.
The reality is that if you want to make the switch to Linux, you’re more likely to have a hard time if your hardware choices fall in this camp. For example, some times it’s just easier to buy a €12 USB WiFi or Bluetooth adapter that you know works with Linux than it is to rely on the chip that came with your laptop. It’s better now than it once was, but Nvidia cards, the occasional webcam, and a few WiFi devices have presented as problems for me in the last few years.
My advice is to embrace that “patience and stubbornness” and temper it with an honest pricing of your time vs. the cost of replacing the problematic hardware. When buying new stuff, look up its Linux support online before buying anything. You’ll save yourself a lot of pain.
In cases when you really want to dig in and understand/fix your problem (because it’s Linux, you’re allowed to understand and fix things on your computer!) then I recommend looking at the Arch Wiki and even using Arch Linux since (a) that’s the basis for most of the information there, and (b) Arch tends to favour “bleeding edge” stuff, so you’re more able to install the latest version of things that may well support your hardware.
I know it’s probably not the answer you were hoping for, but if you stick it out, I promise it’s worth it. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now and I’m never going back. Windows makes me so inexplicably angry with it’s constant nagging, spying, and inadequacies, I just can’t do it.
This is I believe, very typical. If you just want to get in the car and go from point A to B, your only choice is Microsoft. The car will spy on you, force you to do things like visit the dealership to get the light to go off, break and require you to go to the dealership and of course buy a new one when you don’t want to.
To avoid this, you can buy a Linux car and do anything you want to…as long as you are a mechanic or are willing to become one.
it… is not typical at all? where did you get that from.
Maybe having issues as bad as sound completely being broken isn’t typical but some kind of issues that you need to tweak yourself are normal. More so than on windows, I think. Sure, a power user who is privacy conscious definitely needs to tweak windows a whole lot to get it to a state they are comfortable with. But if all you want to do is browse Facebook and YouTube, windows is absolutely way more hands off. Even if Linux is getting there.
yes, that’s almost every os.
To answer the main title question: it definitely can get better, especially if you’re using common hardware with maintainers working to improve the code to handle them.
I’m one of the people with a mostly smooth Linux experience on my devices (I have similar values to other nerdy programmers and naturally purchase more similar or popular computers/parts, and I haven’t really had brand new bleeding-edge computer parts, so that might give me better odds at a smoother experience), no weird audio/WiFi/GPU issues that you often see here. The only issues I have are so inconsequential they’re not worth mentioning. And I’ve used the two OSs you’ve used.
Yeah same here.
My biggest two problems are: my audio interface of my desktop PC doesn’t power cycle correctly when the PC enters sleep, resulting in me having to re-plug the device after sleep. No command or kernel param I tried fixed this issue. Issue persist across different distros (Pop, Nobara, Arch) And on my media laptop KDE likes to skip to the beginning of the video a short while after pauaing for some reason. It happens in haruna and in Firefox, but only when I have the Firefox KDE integration plugin installed. It used to work fine on vanilla arch, this only started once I installed cachy to try it out. Currently downloading tumbleweed to see if it works there.
A small price to pay IMO.
In my limited experience, there are basically two flavors of Linux:
As I’ve gotten busier, my preference for stable distros like Debian has grown. I think there’s also a lot of value in trying for due diligence the first time you install a distro. It’s much simpler to take the time and do it correctly than to try and fix it afterwards. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get everything set up correctly, but it’s worth it long term.
As for the broken wifi thing, I had this happen to me on a recent mint install earlier this year. The solution was to plug in a ethernet cable and update, then wifi worked again and forever since.
I used Windows growing up, switched to Linux in highschool on my personal machines, and was forced to use Mac for nearly 10 years at work. In my experience, they all have problems, and the worst part is always early on. After you’ve used them for a while and have gotten familiar/comfortable, the problems get easier to deal with, and switching back (or on to something new) becomes more daunting/uncomfortable than dealing with what you have. So in that sense, yes, it will get easier.
Also, as hardware ages, you often see better support (though laptops can be tricky, as they are not standardized).
Keep in mind, when you use Windows or Mac, you’re using a machine built for that OS and (presumably) supported by the manufacturer for that OS (especially with custom drivers). If you give Linux the same advantage (buy a machine with Linux pre-installed, or with Linux “officially supported”), you’re much more likely to have a similar, stable experience.
Also, I’ve had better stability with stock Ubuntu than its derivatives (Pop!_OS and Mint). It might be worth trying an upstream distro, to see if you have better stability.