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 @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 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."
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
.debformat, 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
.debpackages 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"