A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
I love Linux. But I got so exasperated with system updates breaking X-Windows and dropping me into the console with no clue what to do, for some time I intentionally deferred the updates.
I wanted a stable daily driver, so in 2015 I switched from Linux to ChromeOS. Now I'm back to Linux with the Crostini container of ChromeOS and Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi 400.
That's never happened to me in at least ten years (and that's with nVidia gpus). What kind of exotic setup did you run?
I see posts like this all the time, I've had it happen once when I was running PopOS years ago and it was an Nvidia issue. Usually it's older Nvidia cards, I've never had an issue with newer cards
My guess is also choosing the wrong distro and/or the stress of having to reconfigure your digital life.
Most people are coming from being on a PC/Mac for +10 years and so it feels inefficient for the first month or so until you get the hang of things. I legit had a checklist of +20 tweaks to make to my env to make it more to my liking. The joys and frustrations of choosing KDE as my intro DE almost drowned me but I made it to the other side.
Tried years and years ago and gave up. Was lazy, used to work on Windows servers at work and I was an Admin and didn't want to relearn a bunch of similar but different stuff. That was my mistake.
Tried again and some Distros broke stuff for me. Issue was that I did have to pick up another learning curve, so I just got to it.
Learned lots and then picked different Distros for different needs and computers. Daily drivers, I pick only solid, yet lean Distros, little tinkering and they have worked almost flawlessly for years on end. On some other machines, I dump stuff to tinker and learn some more, might break something but nothing is lost. If I break something on those, don't care. Now I run a server for fun with tons Apps for partner and I and all machines are on Linux. My TV runs off a small PC, too. No Google, or Apple, no ads on anything and server costs are dirt cheap. It would cost me hundreds upon hundreds a year to pay for 3rd party services for the same.
There are no shortcuts and in a way I wished I had stuck with it back then. But, I am happy where I am now.
I gave up because sound stopped working every time I rebooted.
Gave up because of hardware issues. Laptops had fan problems with it on, the grub wouldn't install right, a lot of the good distros would show up as black before or after installation. My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot. Most of these computers should work very well with Linux but they never did for me. Back then it was a matter of just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot.
My favorite part about the internet is when someone else somehow has the exact same completely obscure issue that I've had
I've been having this weird issue with wifi where it will just switch itself off (shown in NetworkManager as "no available connections") and not allow me to restart the OS normally. It's like the driver is crashing or something. Hardware isn't the issue, otherwise it would have happened on Windows. Drivers can be an issue, as NVIDIA users know too well. Games can be a bit choppy on Linux if you use ray-tracing, probably due to drivers as well as the intermediary processes for getting games to work like DXVK. This was my experience with Cyberpunk 2077. Game modding can be an issue due to .NET not being fully there yet, especially if you have games that are glitchy and require stability mods for a good experience. (e.g. any Bethesda game that exists.)
The only thing keeping me from full-timing Windows is the fact that Windows 11 just plain sucks. I feel like I have to use it, rather than want to use it. Compared to even a bog-standard KDE setup, the Windows experience is miserable. As for Mac, I have a Hackintosh but Apple really loves to render everything on the GPU side and it's chugging my ol' GPU. Maybe I need to go get an M-series MacBook this year.
there were some kernel issues with numerous WiFi cards prior to linux 6.6.6 (hehe), make sure to update
Because it's not Windows and it's not MacOS. Yes, it's an operating system, but what people are comparing against are their expectations. I dont expect a program that's not written or designed for my particular distribution or operating system to work. Now, in some cases it turns out that it does and sometimes it works better then under Microsoft, but that shouldn't be your expectation. The software that is made for it runs as expected.
Working hardware is usually step one. If your hardware isn't supported then of course you're in for a rough ride.
I loved Linux at work when I had a sysadmin. Shit worked great. At home I started using Linux and despite some driver issues, it was mostly good. Then I started working for myself (so no more sysadmin). Some Linux update totally screwed up my computer and I lost a lot of work. It also became too much work to try and configure the apps that I needed to use for work. Switched to windows and it's been pretty smooth sailing. Still boot up Linux now and again for this or that, but I don't trust it enough as a daily driver for my needs.
I work for a MS shop. I tolerate it because they provide the machine (as they damn well should in any case!)
In my personal world, I’m Linux across the board - couldn’t pay me enough to a) own securing RDP on a win box or b) use IIS.
Is Linux perfect? Nope. Never suggested otherwise. But in the areas that matter to me, it’s far superior.
Definitely haven’t given up, and my main personal machine would have been in the trash heap ages ago if I was still trying to force windows on it.