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.”
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
Regarding the specific issues mentioned: Nvidia support is subpar on Linux. There’s many distros that are specifically designed to handle all the graphics support for gaming and Ubuntu isn’t one of them.
Little bit of lore here: When I first started using Linux Nvidia support was better than ATI because they actually bothered to maintain a proprietary Linux driver. There were open source drivers for both but they weren’t performant. The proprietary ATI driver existed but it was maintained by one dude and required a goat sacrifice to install correctly. Since then, however, maybe after AMD bought ATI, they started investing in the open source driver. After that the open source driver just works and competes with the proprietary Nvidia driver. After that I’ve been brand loyal to AMD.
LibreWolf chewing up 3.2Gb is regrettably just normal for a modern browser. Firefox and Chrome will do this too. I’d be genuinely impressed though if Vivaldi has avoided that.
I had to tweak things often in Windows too. Windows pushed a broken update around December 2023 (or 2022, don’t remember) and when I restored from a system image Windows itself made it broke everything worse. Windows isn’t perfectly stable. There’s currently a bug corrupting people’s disks.
I think a huge part of it is that you’re more used to the types of issues you ran into on Windows and knew how to solve them easily enough that they didn’t cause headaches.
Could be. I’m getting the hang of it but the first bit was literally “this doesn’t work”, found a fix, which made something else not work, etc. Drive permissions were a big hassle, I’ve got things going but it’s been a huge learning curve.
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.
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 a bit of a flawed approach, at least if we’re talking about the average user. The average user doesn’t want nor shouldn’t need to have a deep understanding of the OS. If you’re a dev or interested in it, sure, it’s good to know, but asking the average person to have to constantly tinker with their OS is like asking people to diagnose their own illnesses. Sure, it would be nice if you knew medicine and why you were sick and how to cure it, but it doesn’t make sense to expect everyone to do it. Most people don’t care, and have better things to do in their life.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this premise.
There are lots of things you can get by in life without knowledge of. If you don’t know how vaccines work, you can go right on through your life and argue that you have better things to do… until we reach a critical mass of people who are willfully ignorant and the next thing you know we have a head of health and human services who thinks eating random dead animals is a safe way to boost your immune system making decisions.
Large-scale, pervasive ignorance of things that are actually critical and consequential to the functioning of society is not without consequence. It’s a free world and people are free to take the view that they don’t care. They’re also free to completely forgo and not use technology. But both using it in your daily life AND deciding it isn’t important to know any basic knowledge about how it works? I’m not concerning myself with those people - I don’t understand OR respect their decision.
I am very understanding of “it’s too difficult, make it easier”. I am NOT understanding or accommodating of “I don’t think I should have to do it at all.”
Edit: Furthermore, we wouldn’t even be HAVING this conversation if those people really believed that produced good enough results. Most operating systems are ALREADY built with that philosophy. If Windows and other operating systems that are built based around the philosophy that you don’t need to understand anything and the OS should do everything for you was working so well, why are people looking at Linux in the first place? It’s pretty clear that that philosophy is not producing satisfactory results anymore. I would argue it CAN’T produce satisfactory results. You either want control and freedom, and the responsibility and extra work that comes along with that, or you don’t. There’s no free ride that gets you both.
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.
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.
Ubuntu Studio? Why?
I’m a freelance voice actor and musician. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to do what I need to do and Ubuntu Studio seemed safest as it’s “designed” for this stuff.
It is designed for that stuff, but it’s not designed for Linux novices. Any distro can do that kind of stuff. Ubuntu Studio makes choices that are only intended for that kind of stuff. Pipewire is almost as good as JACK in that regard. The only difference is Pipewire has slightly higher latency. Ubuntu Studio also has a very slim desktop environment and a real-time optimized kernel that are specifically to reduce latency in audio and video processing. Unless you need real-time audio and video processing with extremely low latency (like you’re streaming and using tens of audio/video sources), I would highly recommend trying out another distro. Ubuntu Studio is a very good distro, but it is not user friendly. I would say you have to be quite familiar with Linux to have a good time with Ubuntu Studio.
Since you’re using your machine for other things besides content creation, a general purpose OS should be what you’re aiming for. I’d recommend either Mint or Fedora.
Good to hear someone say it’s a good distro. I’m totally fine learning as I go, just didn’t realize how different they can be. Kinda thought it was Arch for the pros and everything else was accessible easily. I’m loving learning it, and happy to hear I picked a bit of a harder one to start, it’s how I learn best. I was just frustrated.
Unfortunately the only audio I’ve been able to get to work right for my use case is Alsa, I can’t route anything through my mic interfaces with Pipewire or JACK.
I’m getting the hang of it, but it doesn’t help that my PC is also my media server so that was another layer to figure out. It’s been a journey.
Check out Helvum for routing audio through Pipewire. It’s a patchbay that just lets you drag and drop the wires to connect things. I use Carla, personally, which lets you also add things like compressors and sidechains, but Carla is a lot heavier, so Helvum is a good place to start.
Also, anything that works for JACK should work for Pipewire, because Pipewire implements a JACK compatible audio server.
Technically, ALSA is always running and controlling the hardware directly, but it can only accept one audio stream, so you put an audio server in front of it to allow multiple streams. It used to be just JACK for professional stuff and Pulseaudio for consumer stuff. Then Pipewire came along as the best of both worlds. It uses Wireplumber to manage the session (connect things automatically), and implements a JACK compatible server and a Pulse compatible server so everything can connect to it.
Why not? Genuinely asking.
Ubuntu Studio is for professional creators who know quite a bit about Linux. It chooses systems (like JACK) that are really exceptionally good at content creation, but don’t Just Work™️. It is the exact opposite of what I would recommend to a Linux noob, and I’m not surprised at all that OP has had constant issues with it. It is not made for people like OP.
I have nothing against Ubuntu Studio as a distro. It is made for a certain group of people, and OP is not in that group. That’s why I’m wondering why OP chose it. Who directed OP to dip their toes into Linux with a distro like Ubuntu Studio?
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).
Oh Gods, I learned the hard way to never roll back a package unless you really know what you’re doing. And I learned that lesson way back in 2013 or 2014, when I’d only been using Linux for a year or two full-time. Now I’m on a rolling distro and have everything as purely the latest version, and if I come across some weird thing that involves rolling back a package to an older version, I will simply not do that and will look for other solutions instead. Sometimes it’s as simple as creating a symlink so that when a program looks for libWhatever2.1.5 it gets quietly redirected to libWhatever2.6.0
