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 @[email protected] 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.
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.
^ This, Debian just works and gets out of your way. But no one seems to recommend it.
Yeah because if you have new hardware you’re shit out of luck
I’m on AM5 with a 6800 and would have a newer card if the cost wasn’t so high. I run Sid for fun but I can run stable with backports and flatpaks
Misinformation. Debian 13 is brand new. Backports supports new hardware as needed.
You’re trying to tell us Debian will always have the latest kernel and packages needed to support new hardware, and there’s no disadvantage in this domain by using Debian? (Sid aside)
Yeah, kernel gets patches even on stable Debian, plus at most it will be a year or so old
https://nerdburglars.net/question/getting-rx-9060-9070-gpus-working-on-debian-bookworm/
The internet is littered with posts of people trying to get new stuff working on Debian. Bookworm was the latest Debian release at time of posting. It does not support this six month old GPU
I usually start a desktop on Mint since it’s got at least some new drivers and a few more tools with Cinnamon desktop.
If the hardware is finicky or there’s odd devices a distro doesn’t handle, I often just try a different distro instead of driver hacking. It’s a very big hammer, but I’d rather have things work with the distro configs instead of maintaining it myself.
Servers? Debian.
Desktops? Mint (prettier Debian out of the box)
Otherwise? Use what works with the least effort.
Not really a friendly distro for non tech-savy people, so it’s complicated to recommend it online to strangers.
I get it that’s the impression and maybe i have used it for so long so i might have a blind spot but what makes it complicated? Its got a gui installer, a live cd. Other than the not having cutting edge software what makes it complicated?
This.
In my experience, once you have the potential hardware compatibility issue fixed, it’s smooth sailing and simply a matter of getting used to the different tools on Linux!
Yeah. I also appreciate the ability to actually fix most problems. I probably ran into fewer problems on windows, but when I did, the problems were beyond repair.
I get what your trying to say, and the analogy works between Windows and Mac, just a different GUI and keyboard commands. Linux is like wearing someone else’s shoes and learning to run in them. It’s similar, but not the same.
Literally every day something breaks. I’m at a point I have things working enough that I’m scared of experimenting because it’s so fragile.
I hear your frustration and understand what you’re concerned about.
Ask yourself this.
Is the thing that I’ve discovered is broken today something that I’ve fixed before?
If you use the package manager that comes with your distribution and don’t install random software from the Internet, and don’t follow unverified procedures written by anyone with a keyboard, then the answer is almost certainly “no”.
I say this with the benefit of knowing what’s good practice and what isn’t. I can tell you that if you come at this with a “Microsoft Windows” approach, you’re likely to spend weeks, if not months in purgatory. It’s no different from migrating between MacOS and Windows, or vice-versa. You need to remember that just because Linux looks similar, it’s a different beast and is so by design.
I’d strongly recommend that you start using the machine with ONLY the packages available through the Ubuntu package manager. If you run into strife, you can ask for support. If you go outside that and you break something, you get to keep both parts – and truth be told – that’s true with any other operating system, just that the lines are not as blurred.
In Linux world many of the distributions can cross pollenate applications and solutions, but that requires experience that new users don’t (yet) have.
One way to deal with the “jump” is to keep your “old” Windows (or MacOS) machine around while you get comfortable with the lay of the land.
The thing that most people switching to Linux have forgotten is that this requires experience. You cannot expect to just jump into a new Operating System and take all your old habits with you. Think for example about the differences between iOS and Android, a world of difference.
So, keep at it. This frustration will pass.
Make sure you backup your /home directory regularly. That way if you ever blow something up and are left on your own, you can blow away the drive and start again, restore from your /home backup.
Meanwhile, keep asking questions.
Good luck.
That’s great advice, thank you. If I just copy my home directory I can replace it if things go south? What about other distros?
What I do most of the time is have the /home directory on a different partition. If you really do need to reinstall, it is just a matter of selecting the existing home partition when reinstalling it (do not forget to uncheck the “format partition” checkbox 😅).
Reinstalls or running other distro’s is a piece of cake this way.
My experience with amd / radeon has not been that great over the years. The open source amdgpu driver is basic at best. If you have a modern intel gfx chipset that is way easier…
Pretty much the same.
Word of warning. Your /home directory contains your documents, but it also contains configuration files. If the packages you’re installing have different versions, you might discover that the config file for a different version doesn’t work on the version that’s installed. This isn’t universally the case, some applications are smart about this, others less so. You can find many of them as “hidden” “dot” files.
You can find all of them like this:
find /home -type f -name '.*'Explanation:
find- the find command/home- the place to start looking-type f- find files only-name '.*'- find things only starting with a ‘.’
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
if you wanna read up a bit more on that
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.
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
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.
This is pretty much my take, almost exactly.
I don’t game so don’t have to worry about powerful GPUs et cetera.
Starting with the right hardware just makes everything easy.
I’ve also been using debian stable since forever. Avoiding jumping across to the latest shiny new OS has just made everything boring and predictable and maintainable.
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.
This
I go out of my way to look for Linux-libre compatible hardware and everything “just works.” Sure it’s not a gaming rig but I don’t expect it to be. Expecting some random “Linux” to be a drop in replacement for Windows is going to disappoint.
SAMETIME, a mostly apple comedy/news channel has a really good three video series of trying Linux as an absolute beginner. He tries asahi linux back when it was in very early development and of course most things just didn’t work. He then tried ubuntu which ended up with heaps of errors and he had a pretty bad experience still. Then he tried linux mint and ended up being pretty happy with it. this is him trying mint
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
In my first day of using linux I was trying to mount my 2nd hard drive and I mounted it to / which lead to me having to reinstall because i didnt know what i did or how to fix it and my computer was no longer turning on.
I’m a stereotype, my first bounce off of Linux was getting stuck in vim flailing around and overwriting some critical config file before powering off and coming back to a terminal prompt.
Not having a second device to search for answers, I just went back to Windows.
After 4 years on linux I have no idea how to exit vim and just spam control zx until vim is killed.
It’s a very neat system.
It’s a lot like switching to Linux, it’s weird and doesn’t feel intuitive until you’ve been using it for a few months when you start wondering how you ever lived without it.
Come to the dark side: https://www.vim-hero.com/lessons/intro-to-modes
did windows just work? It didn’t for me
Most people are so used to the windows bullshit that they don’t even recognise it anymore, Linux (especially fedora) has been much more stable for me.
Also, the problem is always nvidia
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t remember the last time I had a problem with windows. I had some issues getting a media server set up that ended up being the router my ISP gave me, I had an issue with the 11 “upgrade” that ended up being a BIOS setting. But the last time I had an issue that was actually Windows related was on a previous computer, and my desktop is damn near geriatric.
Fair enough, although I don’t really remember having an issue with linux either, atleast for the last couple of years. Apart from getting my nvidia gpu to work properly on my laptop, but that’s jank on windows aswell. Not everyone has issues on either, but I use windows at work and fedora at home and I notice way more jank on windows personally
Good stuff. As much as I hate Microsoft and everything they do, if you’re enjoying a stable system, and don’t mind the injected Spyware and ramsonware that comes with windows by default, enjoy.
Not everyone has to like Linux.
What ransomware?
Leave your data synchronizing with their cloud, pass the limit, miss 1 payment and see how that goes for you when you try to get your data. Good luck.
I have tried twice getting a notice of failed payment due to change of banks and therefore change of credit card. But then I gave it the new card’s details and everything was good. However, I don’t remember if I was passed some doomsday deadline or not.
Not saying it’s not an issue and I would consider it bad business for Microsoft to delete users data without proper notifications and a long enough time frame to fix any payment issues. However, deleting data online is not ransomware - if Microsoft deletes the data, then they have nothing to hold ransom.
I may be extra paranoid, but I’m almost certain that, even if they delete it from your folders (I don’t think they do, at least not Right away), they still keep it for maintaining a profile of each person. As for the ransomware, yeah, if you don’t pay them, you’re likely to lose access. That’s the definition of ransom, no?
I had windows issues this morning, trying to set the aeay message expiry in teams. When I click the date … no problem, when I click time there is a long scroll list of times, when I go to move mouse over a time it closes the time picker window because it thinks I have moused off of it. I tried various mouse methods and acrolling. Had to resort to keyboard only to move and select.
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.
Nvidia, Nvidia did this.
You’re conflating a bunch of things that aren’t Linux issues here.
- You didn’t have the proper setup for Nvidia to start with. Shouldn’t be a problem in the future.
- If Vivaldi had screen flickering, that’s on their software, and almost guaranteed to be an issue with their hardware acceleration.
- Librewolf is probably the same problem as above. Try disabling hardware acceleration.
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.
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.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.
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
Wintoes
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.
Still new with Linux as my regular desktop at home, after ditching Windows (kind of), I’m amazed by the level of things I can try to go into a try to make stuff work, that does not do as I want to. But also, annoyed about the level of things that sometimes needs to get tweaked and thinking “why the hell do I need to make these changes” like super fast scrolling in Firefox for whatever reason.
Windows have more or less “just worked” for me for the last 30 years (not remembering anything too critical, always better than every Linux attempt until recently). But I also didn’t treat Windows in a way that I had to reinstall it every 6 months (whatever that causes that). What have gotten me over the tipping point with Windows is all the push for me to subscribe to extra things (OneDrive), use Microsoft things (like Bing, even though I used to use it over Google), Edge trying to trick you into using Edge and copy your stuff from Chrome, and changing defaults to Microsoft apps.
At work I changed to a Mac. I was actually surprise at how many graphics issues I have noticed and other weird minor bugs. The biggest issue here is the keyboard layout when you remote into Windows servers and some modifier keys are mapped differently combined with non-English keyboard layout.
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.
Anything that you are currently using in Ubuntu Studio you can also get in any other distro.
Having said that, if you feel comfortable with Ubuntu Studio, just stick to it, learn to troubleshoot it’s issues, and you’ll be just fine.
That’s one of the beauties of the Linux world, choice!
Yeah, now that I’m getting used to it I’m probably gonna test some others on my laptop. Ubuntu seems finicky with my hardware. I REALLY don’t want to start over though, I’ve spent a lot of time this week setting things up and starting from scratch with another distro seems like a pain in the ass and a risk if I can’t get things (audio recording) to work right.
you might be able to try a live version of a distro to see how your hardware functions before taking the plunge
I don’t think they have a studio focused flavor, but check out https://garudalinux.org/editions. Coming from windows this has been the easiest transition and great to learn on
Yeah, I get it. I’m a tinkerer, so I enjoy checking what’s new out there, which leads me to distro hop every 3 to 6 months (only to end up right back on Fedora or Bazzite 😜), plus o don’t have a drop of art in my blood, so my use cases are pretty common.
If I was in your shoes, I’d probably just stay there until I’m comfortable with the software I need for what I do, and once I am, then I’d look into other distros that can run the same software flawlessly and try some until I find what I want.
You’re on the right path. Enjoy freedom.
