Linux

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nvidia, Nvidia did this.

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 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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'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.

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.

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...

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.

Ubuntu Studio? Why?

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

It's different flaws.

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.