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.”
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.
Bazzite is, for all intents and purposes, what SteamOS on desktop will be. It was designed as a souped-up SteamOS for the deck, and then added support for other handhelds and desktops as well.
Edit: I should say as well, if you have an NVIDIA card then you should definitely look at Bazzite, as it’s likely that early releases of SteamOS desktop are going to be AMD-only as the Steam Deck and Legion Go S are, and I doubt Valve will ship support for NVIDIA until the open drivers are as solid as AMD.