Think of your workstation running Ubuntu Studio as new shoes that need running in.

I’ve been using Debian Linux as my primary desktop for over 25 years. The amount of downtime I experience is negligible. When I look at the sheer volume of MacOS updates requiring a reboot, or the absurd number of “fixes” pushed by Microsoft, I’m very content.

I’ve always found that there’s generally a new way to do things in Linux, but I rarely have issues. I have an Acer Nitro laptop with a Ryzen integrated AMD graphics and then an Nvidia 3060, and I had to look up how to install the drivers, which was rpmfusion, click, click, done. Instead of the usual launcher for games, it’s either Steam or Lutris. The only real bitch of a thing was some school stuff. Like, gnomes boxes handles all my virtualization, but school demanded VMware Workstation, which was legitimately a pain on Fedora. Likewise, Microsoft Teams. But web Office was fine, Libre locally… I get hella better frame rates on MHW in Linux than Windows. I didn’t pick the machine for its Linux compatibility, it just worked.

Kind of out of my depth here, but what machine are you running it on?

You’re conflating a bunch of things that aren’t Linux issues here.

1. You didn’t have the proper setup for Nvidia to start with. Shouldn’t be a problem in the future.
2. If Vivaldi had screen flickering, that’s on their software, and almost guaranteed to be an issue with their hardware acceleration.
3. Librewolf is probably the same problem as above. Try disabling hardware acceleration.

I felt exactly the same thing before actually trying mint. It’s the only distro that just works for me. A true daily driver.

I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.

Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.

Honestly the modern Linux experience is largely easy to start these days, but there are pitfalls and traps.

A little more than a year ago I was a complete Linux nooby, but I researched and asked questions before jumping in. Then I jumped in (my first distro was endeavour). I asked questions, read forums, tinkered, then broke my shit.

Then I distro hopped between the popular ones (mint, buntu, etc.) before finally settling on Cachy. There were pains along the way but for my use cases the main learning hurdles were learning the compatibility layers and FOSS software alternatives.

I implore you to tread the beaten path, on a tried and tested distro with an active community. Think about your use case, and which flavor of Linux distro better supports your intentions.

It takes a while to get settled.

You have traded a perception of convenience for security, privacy and freedom.

Many people bounce back and forth for a bit, dont feel bad if you get fatigued and go back for a few. However, once you start using Linux, you’ll start to see the truth about windows. You’ll be back, even if you leave for a few.

Be patient, you’ll learn the ropes and soon it will be second nature.

Also, your logs will tell you much. Uploading a log to an ai makes troubleshooting much easier.

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.

What you are experiencing is called a learning curve. Don't let it get you angry, learn from it. NVIDIA is known to be problematic for Linux users (I have had my share of issues with my 2080 Ti) but once it is setup it is problem free. Librewolf is known to be one of the chunkier options, but 3gb really isn't that much for modern systems (especially if you have 16 or 32gb of memory). I would personally take Librewolf's privacy features over closed-source Vivaldi any day. Linux overall is much more efficient than Windows and I would bet that your system idle memory usage with nothing open is lower than it was with Windows.

You’re not dumb and we don’t have a flawless experience… but me and my son aren’t nearly having as much trouble as you. Maybe you’re unlucky with hardware support. For some it does “pretty much” works. I’m genuinely glad you’re sticking to it some more and I hope you continue learning and that your experience gets smoother.

Dude I’d be lying if I said I never had issues, and so would anyone else who uses nux as a daily driver. Let’s be real though, if you have never had an issue with Windows you are part of a blessed minority. Windows works fairly well most of the time, agreed, but so does my current distro.

I’m sure you’re aware that nvidia has it’s own issues, but from what I’ve read that is improving steadily. A big part of being on nux is the freedom, the stability and the security - seems like that is what attracted you in the first place. I think the early days of switching are definitely the hardest. As you have experienced, it can be downright fiddly. It’s also largely unfamiliar, and you spend hours googling and trying to find solutions. The upside is that eventually you will solve most of these problems, or they will be solved in an update. You also gain a deeper knowledge of your OS and your machine in the process, and an appreciation of how very complex and beautiful it all is. It’s a fair but at times frustrating trade.

Keep at it, things will work out eventually. Distro hopping can be fun and you may find something that works beautifully with your configuration, or you might not. Hope it goes well for you friend.

Nvidia, Nvidia did this.

I run Kubuntu and it isn’t that bad, but it’s definitely less reliable than Windows. Often KDE seems to completely crash, requiring a force restart of my system. I also have a bunch of monitors that turn off via a smart plug when I leave the house, and it sometimes doesn’t like that.

I’ve been running Linux for two years but I do find it’s not as easy to use as Windows still, but it’s not worlds apart like it once was. However I didn’t have the experience you had, mine was pretty smooth. I spent some time working quirks out but nothing was breaking, it was just tweak isn’t it to the way I want it. Maybe try hopping to a different distro if you’re having bad luck with that one. I was on Fedora and it’s pretty solid now.

Hello again, I remember you from another post I commented on lol.

So a few things:

1. Linux didn’t “just work” for me when I switched over. I actually started my Linux journey with Arch like an idiot lol. Imagine the problems I had, pretty much nothing worked out of the box. I eventually got everything working after about 2 weeks of constant troubleshooting in the arch wiki, Linux forums, Reddit, and YouTube videos.

Then a few months later I accidentally blew up my whole system with some command I ran without understanding what I did, broke everything, couldn’t even boot into my OS anymore. I decided to distro hop a few times to see what worked best for me. Arch is great if you are a power user, but at the time I wasn’t, so it was a terrible choice for me.

I bounced between a few different distros and settled on Nobara, which is based on Fedora but with a ton of kernel-level patches for better gaming performance. And it came with lots of gaming related software already installed.

1. I actually had as many or more issues with Windows leading up to trying Linux. Windows has always been pretty buggy for me, just bad luck I guess. On average I have way more issues with Windows than Linux, and the Linux issues I can usually solve, but the Windows issues generally I just had to end up dealing with because there was no good solution.

2. I remember when I posted to you the other week that the most important thing for Linux distros was if it worked for you, and if you liked using it. Seems like so far you’ve answered that question with Ubuntu Studio in the negative. It’s not been working well for you, and you’re getting frustrated using it. That’s fine, the beauty of Linux is there are a ton of other options, and you aren’t stuck with just having to deal with a specific distro.

Some people will swear by a specific distro. They’ve used it for 10+ years on 15 different computers and never had a single major problem. Great for them, that doesn’t mean you will or won’t, try several, find your home distro and stick with it.

For me, there is one distro I would recommend for new Linux users more than any other, Linux Mint. It is based on Ubuntu, so you’ve already got a bit of experience with that under the hood. It comes with a easy GUI utility for installing NVidia drivers, so you don’t have to manually install additional repos and drivers via the terminal. Their Cinnamon desktop isn’t the prettiest or most modern looking desktop, it doesn’t have a ton of customizability either, but it’s rock stable. I’ve never had a single major crash or lock up with the Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s simple, intuitive, and stable.

Part of starting the Linux journey is trying different options. Some users get lucky their first time and land on the perfect distro that they use for years, but most don’t. Most try a handful of distros before settling on their favorite. You probably wouldn’t go to a shoe store, try on the first pair you see and then buy them right? You browse the selection, find a few that look nice and seem comfy, try them on, walk around in them, pose a bit, then pick your favorite.

And like I said before, as you build up your Linux skills, the issues will become easier and easier to solve. Problems that took me hours to troubleshoot and solve when I was new take 5 minutes to fix now. Things that I had to watch hours of videos and read dozens of forum posts to understand are just “common sense” to me now. You’ll get there, just keep an open mind and hold on, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

If you need/want additional help, DM me and I will do my best to help out. For Linux Mint if you decide to try it, don’t worry about the various alternative versions they have. Just go with their standard download, Linux Mint, Ubuntu edition, with the Cinnamon desktop.

Do you guys just have flawless experiences or what?

When I was new to linux I had many issues but the longer I used it the less problems I had. I think its a combination of new users not understanding the different parts of linux and not understanding the linux way of doing things. That leads to a lot of tweaking which can cause more issues than it solves.

Now that i’ve been on linux for 4 years everything works as expected and this is after changing distros a few times. my systems are pretty much untouched in terms of root folder tweaks or anything. I would say to keep trying linux since its not ‘boat life’ constant maintenance over the long term.

I like your boat analogy. It does take more work to keep it running in top condition, and when it’s firing on all cylinders it will run circles around windows. Also, people that don’t have one and talk shit are just jelly.

If it makes you feel any better, I say the same thing about windows when I’m forced to use it.

It isn’t just a different operating system, it’s also a different workflow and set of habits.

Stick with it, it will reward you.

.

The issue is you installed Ubuntu with an RTX 3060 and you intend to game, heh.

You need a distro optimized for gaming on Nvidia out of the box, and Ubuntu Studio is not it. Not unless you want to DIY overhaul the whole system and maintain it forever.

You need Bazzite, probably. Or CachyOS.

You could fix Ubuntu temporarily, eventually, but it will always be like a boat once you start configuring stuff yourself. But use a gaming distro, and gaming fixes and setups come down the pipe for you.

TBH I have made this mistake more than once. Now I run don’t a distro that focuses on this and have never looked back.

Try latest stable Debian (13 Trixie) with Chromium or Firefox - I have no issues personally, though I’m not dealing with an Nvidia graphics card thankfully

You didn’t mention which version of Ubuntu Studio you’re running. Is it 24.04 LTS by any chance?

My initial thought is that you are probably running Wayland, and that your version of Ubuntu has KDE Plasma 5 instead of 6 and/or outdated Nvidia drivers that don’t work super well with Wayland.

A quick search shows that this is all default on Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS, which is the first version you’ll find at ubuntustudio.org. :(

Ubuntu 25.04 (non-LTS) has Plasma 6, which is a very important upgrade if you are using Wayland, especially with Nvidia GPUs.

Just a guess. If I’m right, you have a few choices:

1. Upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.04 (non-LTS). It has newer stuff like Plasma 6 that fixes a LOT of problems like this.

2. Switch to X11 instead of Wayland. This will likely introduce a new set of problems though. X11 has no future.

3. Switch to a different DE than KDE. I am not sure what is best in this situation.

4. Install the latest Nvidia drivers manually instead of getting them from the Ubuntu repo.

Option 1 is by far the simplest choice.

The Linux desktop is in a big transitional phase these past few years, as more distros default to Wayland even before a lot of their packages are updated to fully support it. It’s a terrible time to be stuck with outdated “LTS” distros. This is why I hopped away from Debian 12 (13 is out now so yay, but it was a year too late for me).

Some distros are more fragile than others. Stuff like not having the Nvidia drivers installed by default (I'm assuming for the llvmpipe issue) are sometimes discussed in installation guides. IDK if Ubuntu has one since I don't use it.

Blink-based browsers (like Vivaldi, Chromium, etc.) IMO kind of suck on Linux (or at least Wayland). It's probably worse with Nvidia cards since Nvidia is still sometimes flaky on Wayland.

The LibreWolf issue is maybe not an issue at all. I'm assuming you mean RAM, and if so, browsers just like to eat as much memory as they're allowed to eat. If you open up something else and it needs the memory, LibreWolf will likely let go of some of it. There are probably some knobs you can dial in LibreWolf (or Linux kernel settings) if it's really an issue for some reason.

I only really have issues when I'm trying to set something up that's not already configured by the distro (or if I'm doing something particularly weird).

Flawless? No, it’ll never be flawless. But if something happens, i will know where, why, and how to fix it. That’s the strength of it

I’ve installed Debian Linux on over 50 devices by now. A vanilla configuration with GNOME works pretty much out of the box for me on a high-end desktop with a modern NVIDIA graphics card.

I’d say the biggest part of the learning curve is figuring out which apps are good and suitable for what you’re trying to do. Just like with Windows and macOS and Android and iOS, there’s only a handful of viable options among an overwhelming sea of poor ones.

There are many wrong ways to install NVIDIA on any given Linux distro and architecture, and only one functional way. As others here are saying, that’s on NVIDIA, not you or Linux.

General advice: whenever possible, strongly prefer your distro’s standard package manager to install things over any other method. With Ubuntu, I believe that’s either apt or snap.

Also: if you find yourself poking around in some obscure system internals while troubleshooting an issue, you probably took a wrong turn somewhere.

.

We’ve all been there. It’s super frustrating but once you’ve attained enough experience with a Linux OS you come to appreciate it and the problems either become less impactful or disappear as you learn to anticipate your actions causing said issues and adjust your behavior accordingly.

I’ve been a Windows user for multitudes longer than I’ve been a Linux user. It took me a few years to become a fairly advanced user of Linux. When I occasionally have to use Windows for work I still struggle to troubleshoot anything and am constantly frustrated knowing a task I’m doing could be many times simpler if I was on Linux.

OP’s experience with Linux:

<img alt="" src="https://i.imgur.com/idSuDZy.gif">

For real though, sorry it’s stressful at times, Jack. I have issues all the time, but the thing is, I’ve been doing it for so long now I know where most relevant system files are and how to drop to CLI and edit them to fix whatever I broke. It’s still tedious at times, but I feel much more in control than I used to when Windows would go tits up.

The best thing I ever did was use Nvidia prime offloading to move everything to my integrated GPU and have only select GPU intensive applications (like games, video editing) interact with Nvidia.

Never had to deal with weird graphics bugs after that.

I had a lot of problems with mint. Difficult fir a new user like me. Had to reinstall once i noticed i did not set a su/sudo password so could not do anything :(

Perhaps a more minimalist setup? There was a post recently about one that uses zero RAM and zero CPU. That might not suit your use case though.

I’ve never had a flawless experience with any computer, regardless of manufacturer, architecture, or OS. They all have different quirks. Over time, you get used to the quirks of the OS you’re using, and so switching to a different OS feels weird.

Nah, my Linux journey has been far from flawless. I troubleshoot stuff on Linux as much or more than I did on Windows.

For me, yes, everything just works. Fedora 42 gnome. Arch just worked as well. Nvidia 4090. Heavy flatpak user. I’ve had issues with mint and Debian distros being too far behind. My son runs Ubuntu today though - again no issues. And with a video card.

My vote is something is up with your install. Try another distro - maybe one of the gaming focused ones. Or just plain fedora workstation.

When installing distributions generally regarded as user-friendly on hardware that’s well-supported, I usually do have pretty low-fuss experiences. It’s usually no more trouble than installing Windows, though the average Windows user has never actually done that.

When installing Arch Linux ARM on an old Chromebook and trying to make tablet mode and rotation play well with various lightweight window managers, I did not, in fact have a flawless experience. Once I tried Gnome on it, the experience became much smoother, but that’s a little heavyweight on a 4gb machine.

My experience has been very different. While I’m competent on Linux from the server world, I haven’t run a desktop Linux in decades, and never seriously. Until I switched a few months ago, choosing CachyOS. Honestly, almost everything just worked. Games, music, video, browsing, office. Even Ms teams for work. The only fiddly bit was getting the VPN for work to connect, and remote desktop works but isn’t equal in quality/feel. But that’s just a slight inconvenience that isn’t even bad enough for me to start looking into it.

One game (a demo) I couldn’t get to run, and I know it should work and just doesn’t on my system. Haven’t bothered digging into this either, I have plenty of other unplayed games. Another game I play frequently (online/multiplayer) gave me some lag issues early on, I tried a few settings and it’s fine now.

Absolutely nothing of my experience would I describe as a struggle. Frankly most of the time I forget I’m not on Windows. I just use my PC. Sometimes I want to check some windows specific setting, open the “not start menu” and then realize “right, this isn’t Windows”.

I don’t know if it’s of any solace, Linux used to be a much more… ahem… “involved” experience a decade or two ago. This was more-or-less the norm:

<img alt="xkcd" src="https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Fcautionary.png">

I can’t really say what the newcomer experience is nowadays, but I can say for sure that even in the worst-case (as it was in the times when I started using it), after a couple months of furious issue-fixing and trying new things, you will eventually settle on a setup that works for you. Some people actually get addicted to all the problem-solving and start looking for more issues to fix; some start distrohopping to find a “more perfect setup”, getting their fix of issue-fixing in the process. If you’re not one of them, congrats, at that point you can (mostly) just continue using it, until you need to update your hardware, then process may or may not be repeated depending on your luck. If you really hate fixing issues twice, you can look in the direction of declarative distros like NixOS or Guix, but I will warn you that the two-three months of furious hacking is still very much a thing here, but after that you’re set more or less for life.

Nope, but they have extremely short memories. They spent 2 hours yesterday tinkering with 4 issues. But when you ask them, their system has been solid for months.

Linux is very much a boat. Or more accurately the same engine used in 50 different boats all with their own quirks.

It stopped happening to me when I bought hardware supported by Linux. Intel or AMD GPU, a Thinkpad laptop, Atheros wifi, all the stuff that people recommend.

You compare a machine that a vendor has prepared for windows to you preparing the pc for linux. It sounds like you did the setup. Alternatively, you could’ve paid someone to do that job for you. You could’ve bought a framework laptop with linux. It would work out of the box without any issues. And if there is one, you can blame framework.

Because I had issues with the distros I was using, I distro jumped. If the distro is perfect, there is little reason to jump. Ever since jumping onto fedora silverblue I don’t do anything with the OS anymore. It just works. I mainly install flatpaks. Did you try a live usb with some distros before deciding upon ubuntu studio? You chose one niche distro and to me it sounds like you judge about all distros.

A distro is just a package manager and a set of settings and apps pre selected by someone. If those settings don’t work out for you, it might be the wrong distro.

Don’t worry, it’s not boat life. I barely ever touch the system and am just using my programs. Settling might take a while, especially if everything is new I guess

Not flawless, but also not catastrophic.

It seems like the problems I encounter lessen (or lessen in difficulty to troubleshoot) as I use arch linux more and more.

If you use amd hardware, then I guess you’ll have a good time with the distros. Most “user friendly” distros should work out of the box. Try switching to something other than debian based.

With the nvidia open kernel modules, it has been rather hassle free for me.

Also remember to check the arch wiki. It’s a great resource.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: it starts with hardware.

It’s sad to say but a flawless Linux experience out of the box often comes from picking the right hardware first. Chose vendors who actively support Linux. AMD/Intel CPUs, APUs and/or GPUs. Intel WiFi card. Everything else should work ootb except most fingerprint sensors. Avoid laptops with dGPUs. Avoid nVidia. Hardware support comes from hardware vendors, the days of janky community drivers have been over for almost 2 decades. When it’s time for you to replace your hardware, do your homework first and/or buy from companies who sell Linux machines (Framework, Tuxedo, Slimbook, Starlabs, System76, some Dells, some Lenovos, etc). You can still buy from random companies but there won’t be any guarantees.

Then, the choice of distro in kinda important but not that much. In my 20+ years of actively using and working with Linux, both in the desktop and server space, I’ve always found Ubuntu and its derivatives kind of janky. I’m a lifelong Debian user, but my best experience on modern hardware have been Fedora on my main laptop and its atomic derivative Bazzite on my gaming rig. Bazzite also comes with a nVidia-specific image for those who can’t/wont replace their GPU.

Nowadays to limit interactions between system and user-facing applications, I tend to install most things from Flathub. It might not help with hardware issues, but it helps with stability.

The problem with Linux is that most distributions suck for beginners. People recommend Debian/Ubuntu because they’re stable but that just means they don’t get updated, not that they won’t break. The obvious solution is to use Arch, which has the latest version of software and therefore does not break on new hardware. But that sucks too because Arch’s goal is not that your setup works either, it’s that you have the latest versions of software installed no matter the cost. OK, so I guess Fedora will be good because it’s somewhere in the middle. Fedora is better but their non-free codec stuff is not great for noobs either.

I think the best recommendation is Pop! OS because it has none of the above issues. You will still have outdated software but at least not outdated drivers. Just use the defaults, don’t change the desktop environment etc. If you install third party software in the .deb format, expect breakage when you eventually upgrade to a new release. Try to use flathub for that. Be aware that software on Flathub is user-submitted and may contain a virus. Check that it’s verified by a trusted source, not just some random person’s github website.

Then there is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which I guess is pretty good too but it’s hard to recommend to noobs because it’s sort of esoteric and because you cannot install .deb packages from the internet on it. Finally there are the atomic distros which have the same issues but at least they should break less likely. If you only need software from flathub and what’s available in the app store, they’re fine.

idk why I wrote this but yes most distros don’t “just work”

No more or less flawless than windows, Android, or the iOS stuff.

It’s different flaws.

Flawless? Is anything really. I guess you could say Linux is an aquired taste. You get used to the maintenance aspect of it. I use Arch because I’m used to it and because it has great documentation. I have a NVIDIA GPU because I was told they work fine under Wayland now. Apparently people saying that only use their computer for games because I have graphical glitches in several apps and certain video codecs won’t play now. So, you will make mistakes along the way. Although I think I’m having a better time with Linux + NVIDIA than my sister is with Windows + NVIDIA rn lol. Arch really is a better experience but it’s not the best to start with. For that, I’d recommend Debian. Feel free to reach out if you have any specific questions, I’ll see if I can be of any help. I’ve been doing this for a while because I’m a stubborn bastard who got tired of Windows reverting changes I made after every update.

you just need to learn linux, same as you did windows. things work differently, and it can be frustrating until you figure out how things work.

and just like windows, once you figure out your drivers and software and stuff, you will fly past it whenever you are setting up your linux box.

I had used linux mint as my default OS for years, which is said to be the “easiest distro”. Still there was a ton of maintenance. Every week one thing or the other didn’t work properly.

Even a debian server I own, which is completely barebones, without even a graphic interface. Last week I had to manually fix the sources file because trixie update messed it up. A couple of months ago I have a very bad issue with the root partition filling up of old kernel images because I didn’t run autoremove frequen enough.

So you are not alone. It does feel like owning a boat.

It’s the same on windows Android iOS.. Stuff happens the beauty of Linux is your always learning.. it will help if you want to get a devops job.. will help you with stability.. will help you brag to your friends.. you will learn more about your computer what’s good bad whatever.. takes time. almost everyone was born using windows.. it’s a learning process..

In the end it will all come together and make sense.. choose a distro you like and stick with it

On Windows, it was Superfetch.
Whenever I was unable to load something, whenever copying took too long, whenever the system was being too hot, it was Superfetch.
Then I tried multiple ways to first stop it then disable it and realise it came back up later on.
Then it was always Windows Update.

Now, at least I am not fighting my OS.

I have had a flicker or 2, a few times. Need to change my monitor.
But the AMD GPU (and its driver) seems fine for now.

I don’t have a flawless experience.
I just got to choose which flaws I am willing to keep.

Oh btw, I chose my motherboard based on Linux reviews.

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.

I don't know. FWIW, once you get it tuned, þe maintenance drops sharply. Þere are a lot of caveats, þough.

You're on Ubuntu, which I would normally say should be un-boat-like once you work out þe kinks, except þat Ubuntu has been doing þings like pushing Snap and Wayland, which introduce variables and can cause whole new issues for some people.

Þis is why many of us steer new users towards distros like Mint, which tend to stick wiþ more tried-and-true technology stacks. It's hard to beat a Debian-derived distribution which excludes Snaps and Flatpacks, and ships with Xorg and some GTK3/2 desktop, like xfce or cinnamon. It won't be þe most sexy, but you'll probably get a more "just works" experience.

My first month on Linux was rough but with my husband’s help and experience; we soon found an experience that was quite satisfying and we have stuck with it since.

Experiment and try to fail to find what makes you happy

Honestly, after tens of years of personal computing, there should be easier/more robust ways to run software and move windows around.

Bootstrapping and initcpio are workarounds for inadequate hardware imo.

I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.

Each Distro is effectively a different OS, so depending on what you run you will have a different experience.

I started out on OpenSUSE because a CAD software for work only was supported on RedHat or SUSE. NVidia hosts a repo specifically for OpenSUSE so I added that and it figured out the driver. So all those nVidia complaints I read about just never happened for me. No tearing or flickering.

My wife’s old laptop couldn’t run W10 so we put Linux on it. Every Debian based distro I tried would crash on install, or hardware error during boot. But Fedora or OpenSUSE worked fine (warned of error but worked around it). Eventually moved her machine to NixOS, and its been stable for years.

Just because a distro gives you pain, dont give up if you still enjoy the idea of Linux, there are so many distros that one will work better for your needs

I’ve tried a few different distributions and yeah, it varies.

It seems logical to get Ubuntu Studio for audio, but in my personal opinion it’s kinda bloated. I’ve tried most of the included software at some point and decided that I’m not going to use it.

I’d rather have a clean simple distro and then just install Reaper for all my audio needs.

That has worked out great on both Mint and Puppy. I don’t know about Ubuntu, because it’s been several years since I tried that.

I did also install a few games on Mint, but nothing like AAA games, because the PC doesn’t have a graphics card. I just play Minecraft and Sauerbraten. No issues with those.

Maybe I’m lucky, or maybe it’s because it’s old hardware or pretty standard laptops, but I’m also not trying much, so I also expect it to work.

Keep it simple. I think that might be the key, because I have seriously not had a single issue with anything, nor have I typed a single line in the terminal.

If I needed a multipurpose PC, I’d probably go with Mint as of now. I’d install one app at a time and figure out what I actual need instead of trying to make everything work at once.

That’s what I’m doing with my DAW right now. One plugin at a time. If something doesn’t behave, then I don’t need it. When I turn on the PC to make music, I don’t want to waste time fixing stuff. I’m totally over trying to fit a square block into a round hole. I’ve already tried that for too many years using Windows.

For me yes, I have a laptop with Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU with hybrid graphics and both can change depending on what I’m doing (on Wayland BTW)

My experience has indeed been flawless but that’s simply because I don’t have many use cases where flaws could appear. I use the Vivaldi and gimp on my t490 and play indie games on my steam deck.

Well, i use the same PC (an old HP 7800 “convertible Minitower”) now since about 2010 with various versions of Debian… in the last 15 years i honestly did not have any problems. But the stuff that i do is also pretty boring:

• Office stuff (started with open office, since about 5 years libreoffice)
• Mail (Claws-Mail… it works)
• Webbrowsing (Firefox)
• Image editing (Gimp)
• Watching videos and stuff with VLC
• 3D rendering with Povray
• Playing various native Linux games

Soooo… perhaps its the old hardware, perhaps its my boring behaviour of not changing anything as long as it works, but here everything works flawlessly for well over a decade.

Your using Ubuntu. Which honestly just loves to randomly shit the bed unless it’s on a server. This has been true for basically it’s entire existence.

Just use Debian or mint if your inlove with apt/Deb. Otherwise seriously switch to literally anything else. Anything is better then God damn Ubuntu.

I get what you’re saying…if that were my experience I’d be jack of it too. I’ve got similar spec and am running Nobara which is pretty much Steam OS for people with Nvidia cards. The only thing. The only thing I got really into the weeds on was setting up Plex. Which wasn’t my first preference but I couldn’t work out hot to get Jellyfin to cast to my old Chromecast. Other than that though I’ve had a great experience that ‘just works’.

In general, yes… I used Ubuntu years ago but for almost 10 years now it’s MX Linux (Debian based), only problem I had was on my brand new PC the wifi card was new and not well supported by the kernel, but with new kernel/driver it improved and now I have 0 problem.

Windows just worked.

Excuse me while I laugh hysterically while remembering the sorts of Windows issues I’ve troubleshot for family or coworkers. The one where the combination of a particular Windows version + a particular MS Office version + document previews being activated would cause Office to crash randomly on operations that had nothing to do with document previews was particularly memorable and difficult to figure out. The various Linux snafus I’ve had to deal with were pretty easy to handle by comparison.

I experience the same thing every time I decide to try KDE on any distro.

Surface Go 1: Had problems with my bluetooth mouse being slow to be detected. Also sometime it’s slow until I connect and disconnect the screen it’s hooked up to. Otherwise works flawlessly.

MacBook Pro 2012: Sometimes I have to reinstall some drivers for the wifi. Otherwise works flawlessly.

Both run Fedora 42. So I’d advise you to not give up and maybe just switch distro👍

Honestly depends on the hardware. I still had an Nvidia card for the first year I used Linux and 90% of my issues stemmed from that…

As for everything else I’ve had a much easier time with Linux than most people I know because I unintentionally bought peripherals that already worked great with Linux before I was even thinking about switching.

A few people I know have tried Linux but ran into issues with their mice or audio equipment that require proprietary drivers or dedicated software to fully function. Most of these are the big name “gamer” brands like Razer.

I had issues with Razers software all the way back on Windows 7 so I swore off buying anymore keyboards or mice that require 3rd party drivers so I never had an issue with them when switching over.

Honestly? Yeah so far. I swapped to Bazzite after getting a new AMD rig in early July. There was a little bit of setup for the first few weeks, but it’s worked perfectly for the whole last month.

I did have many, many issues on my last computer when I was on an Nvidia card though. My impressions are that Linux can be very hardware dependent, and Nvidia is kinda notorious for not supporting their hardware.

Most stuff worked great out of the box for me. I had some quirks with power management, specifically for my wifi card, resulting in bad wifi, but there are so many resources and so many people willing to help out that it was not even a big problem to solve. I haven’t used Ubuntu, I am on arch, but the great thing is, most problems and solutions don’t really care what distro you’re on, so I am no stranger to ubuntu forums when researching something. And as cliché as it is to recommended, the arch wiki is an amazing source of information, so definitely give it a look.

NVIDIA

Welp, there’s your problem. I have an NVIDIA card as well and it’s been the source of at least 95% of my Linux headaches.

I’ve tried a few distros and Linux Mint was definitely the most “just works” for me. Make sure you’re using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, regardless of what option you choose. Currently I use SpiralLinux (Debian with a few tweaks) because I really like the BTRFS snapshots and fell in love with KDE during my distro-hopping, but Mint is what I would recommend to the vast majority of people.

I had a lot of problems when I’ve used Ubuntu in the past. To be fair that was 2009 - 2012 and it was a much less mature product. But whether it’s snaps, unity, or Ubuntu One integrations, they always seem to be doing their own thing in a way that’s not particularly helpful.

I’ve had a much more “just works” experience with Fedora and Mint.

It took a lot of learning, for sure, a lot of frustrated googling, but worth it. I wouldn’t choose Ubuntu Studio as my first experience. Ironically my first experience was with Ubuntu, and it was awesome, but that’s back when Ubuntu was good which was like 2008-2012 (my experience evidently is contrary to some here, but it was kind of the breakthrough of strong Linux desktops imo).

OS choice and hardware are a lot of it. I built a desktop in 2019 and it was the best experience I’ve had yet with Linux. Everyone works.

Nvidia 2070s, and ryzen 3800x, 64GB RAM. Even wifi and Bluetooth on the motherboard worked fine out of the box.

I used to have so many quirks once in a while on my last system and it was always to do with an update and an Nvidia driver, I’d have to drop to shell and manually reinstall it, or download a new one with cli browsers and install it lol.

But I persist because I love the idea and the mission.

While I use Windows for work and a steam deck mostly for gaming these days, any time I boot my desktop I’m blown away at how incredibly snappy it is compared to the windows of today.

Like I knew things were getting bad when the windows calculator started showing me a splash screen and needed to “load”, and when the start menu started showing similar quirks. Now we have AI shoved in everywhere and it’s just a gross OS to use.

But, I digress…

I do but im not gaming on my linux setup and im using zorin although I just installed kde. Installed a few other things as I have needed them but for my day to day it was pretty good right out of the box (ok there is no box anymore but I don't know of a new phrase for this). If I was gaming I would likely do a separate gaming distro.

Been running the same Arch installation for a bit over a year. Minor issues here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary for general computer use.

Learning was hard. I’d say it took me a good year before I was really genuinely comfortable with Linux overall, and even then, it was quite a while longer before I felt I could call myself experienced or proficient.

I will say this, switching to AMD was a massive step up in terms of reliability. Also, and this is just my experience, but as someone who also started on Ubuntu, I’ve had far fewer weird obscure issues on Arch than on that, or any other distro I’ve tried. It’s daunting, but it’s so well documented that it’s almost impossible to have an issue with no known fix.

Not flawless, but that’s on me for insisting on a very particular look and workflow that involves lots of manual config editing.

I like Linux, use(d) various flavors of it, and have had experience with / exposure to it for over 20 years. But no, I’ve never had a remotely flawless experience with it on a desktop or laptop environment. Wish I could offer more help or encouragement, but figured I’d at least chime in with some emotional support by affirming that you are not alone in that experience.

I would recommend Linux to technologically adept people (ex: tech professionals, computer science students) and only indirectly to less technically proficient people in the form of suggesting something like a Steam Deck for portable PC gaming to someone who might be interested.

But for an aging parent or my best friend’s kids? No. Sometimes I already feel like I’m a free on-call 24/7 IT support tech for friends and family, and that’s with mostly Windows and Android devices that pretty much just work the way folks expect (even if that way is broken/crumby/irritating/etc).

That’s my overall experience with Ubuntu really. Bene using it for work and everyday there’s some new annoyance

In my first year I had multiple issues with Linux. Mainly because I tried to install stuff that wasn’t meant for my version of the OS but for an older one and I blindly followed the “black market” tutorials how to uninstall and reinstall packages to meet requirements. That corrupted my system and I had to repair it multiple times. Also, I played around with many distros and multibooted them all, destroying my grub once or twice.

Now that I use Ubuntu for a “longer” time, I rarely have issues except hardware specific ones. For example the webcam doesn’t work on my dell laptop because apparently it is not supported right out of the box. But apart from that I have no issues compared to windows (where imho windows 11 is an issue in itself).

No but it is less painful than dealing with microshit slop

All of the long time Linux users have what you perceive as flawless experiences because they already did all the stumbling you did and more. Every operating system has steep learning curves and you will struggle with how it does things when first starting out. I recently had to start using Windows again after exclusively using Linux for years (and Windows 11 no less which I never used before) and there are plenty of times I’ve failed to do simple things I could do on Linux without even thinking.

I got Ubuntu. It gives me weird warning messages on boot. Sometimes they’re red. I just ignore them.

My linux workflow: Try installing with apt. Try installing with snap. Try installing with npm. Try installing with flatpak. Try installing with cargo. Try building with git. Try installing with the shady curl script from stackexchange. If it breaks or refuses to work in the first place try a similar application from a completely different dev.

Every OS sucks. Linux sucks wayyy less tho

If you want to install any apps go with Flatpaks for reliability. Since Ubuntu has snaps, install the snap variant of available. Imo Flatpaks have greatly reduced the number of issues like dependency problems for me.

Have you tried any other distro ? I’d recommend any of the universal blue projects or fedora silverblue as it is relatively maintainance free and just like using windows/macos. If you game just go with Bazzite, otherwise try Aurora/Bluefin. In most cases you won’t even have to use the terminal that much, but if you do they have really nice cli tools too.

If you still want to go the traditional approach - Arch based distros can also be very good, ateast you will be able to find answers on the archwiki and try those solutions. It’s not like Ubuntu is bad, it’s kind of janky sometimes and I kind of liked the conveince of finding all that I need within the archwiki. Arch has fast updates, so things will break once in a while… however my experience has been really good with arch for many years now. if you want to try it then go with either EmdavourOS or CachyOS - both are setup quite well out of the box.

TL;DR - try Flatpaks, try low maintenance distros like Bazzite and use it like you normally do.

No that’s Linux. If you point it out Linux users just yell at you real hard and bully you into submission. That’s how we get the newbies from finding out the truth.

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 /home be 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I just use linux mint and don’t have issues

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?

did windows just work? It didn’t for me

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.

More or less,

Arch gave me some issues on install getting steam games to run on my main graphics card but since fixing then it’s been maintenance free. There were some other issues that resolved with system updates, e.g. HDR on Wayland/KDE but Plasma update fixed it almost a year ago.

I’m running AMD/AMD/ASUS RoG.

My windows dual bout however takes 5min for all the bootup apps to launch and explorer is unstable. Probably because of local account and some policies I’ve been locking AI and metrics down with. Also Office clock to run burns my cpu when at idle and it ignores the manual start setting in services as well as startup-apps menu. It’s just there for work.

Edit given below comments: I am NOT suggesting Arch for a beginner who wants simple and easy. Plenty of more beginner friendly distros will need even less maintenance.

you tried one distro and it’s not working out, just go and try another one. i had to try a few before i found that mint works the best for me. it has some very minor flaws but it’s been smoother than wintoes

I am waiting for SteamOS 3 Desktop to be released, so that I don’t have to worry about this sort of thing, and have support from an 800lb gorilla. When I tried Mint back in January, my games weren’t working right - Lutris, Hero Launcher, ect. Considering the amount of retro and Japanese games I play, having broken GOG installations wasn’t a good start.

For now I am just sticking to Windows 11 IoT, but sooner or latter Microsoft’s issues will be too much. Hopefully, SteamOS will be out by then.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

I don’t dare do hardcore gaming on Linux 'cause I’m lazy. I went and bought a Raspberry Pi at some point and only tried out some distros on it. I had troubles from day 1 where like OP, I could figure out. Right now, I can’t even get Redshift to work on basically a RaspberryPi OS fork and I have no clue why.

Do you guys just have flawless experiences or what? … NVIDIA

Never had a flawless experience with NVIDIA. Hopefully their grift dies and gets replaced with RISC-V or similar open source…

Otherwise my linux machines have been awesome.

Am I missing something and it doesn’t have to be this hard

Nothing was missed. You said in your post that you’re using NVIDIA. No, it doesn’t need to be that hard.

is this what Linux is?

That’s what proprietary tech is. I definitely wouldn’t blame open source projects for the widespread abuse/failure of technology under capitalism.

Not at all, but the benefits are worth it.

It does not “just work” for me and I love it that way. I got bored of using Kubuntu LTS because nothing interesting happened. Now I’m running prerelease versions of everything and get to file (and fix!) bug reports on the reg.

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.

I know I’m very late to the party and any comment in a thread with 200+ posts is like yelling at the void.

BUT

My experience with Windows has hardly been “it just works”. In fact it has been a history of decades of tinkering and messing around with it to try and get it to do what I want.

The only difference is that Windows obscures everything, so when something breaks it does so quietly. Meaning you might not notice… Or. More likely. It’ll just crash out and you don’t even have an error code to google.

This isn’t to say that Linux isn’t a balancing act of constant maintenance. It is. Just… The Windows experience was never “better” for me from that angle. And… On some level, I enjoy all the tinkering. I think all Linux folks do.

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 just worked

This is not how I remember windows

cpu hungry and eating memory? ram? 3gb is lowish for a browser, you must use very few active tabs

Not flawless but on windows I couldn’t find solutions so I gave up and forgot about whateer it was I was trying to do or fix, on linux I fix it and rememeber next time a similar issue occures, I have a flawless experience because I make that flawless day to day experience through the ocasional day each month I fix something. Windows is always just mid, like I’ve had apps refuse to open or work no matter what solution I tried, always had weird issues and crashing, linux I find the source fast or the app crashes/freezes not my whole system, it’s better at preventing that.

Bought a Tuxedo laptop with Linux preinstalled. Literally flawless experience. Zero glitches. Sounds like an exaggeration but my work issued macbook pro has issues here and there.