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.

did windows just work? It didn't for me

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.

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.

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.

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.

you tried one distro and it's not working out, just go and try another one. i had to try a few before i found that mint works the best for me. it has some very minor flaws but it's been smoother than wintoes

I know I'm very late to the party and any comment in a thread with 200+ posts is like yelling at the void.

BUT

My experience with Windows has hardly been "it just works". In fact it has been a history of decades of tinkering and messing around with it to try and get it to do what I want.

The only difference is that Windows obscures everything, so when something breaks it does so quietly. Meaning you might not notice... Or. More likely. It'll just crash out and you don't even have an error code to google.

This isn't to say that Linux isn't a balancing act of constant maintenance. It is. Just... The Windows experience was never "better" for me from that angle. And... On some level, I enjoy all the tinkering. I think all Linux folks do.

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.

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 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.

Ubuntu Studio? Why?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Constant maintenance no.

Currently I have some issues with the Nvidia driver acting up. So I am getting good at purging it and reinstalling it. Maybe once a month.

Under Ubuntu desktop.

My server I have very little issues. For mye Proxmox environments I have a small issue after restart it doesn’t properly month a NFS share. If I don’t do mount -a.

My laptop I have a constant issue that hibernating don’t work with encryption out of the box. So I have to turn if off or connected it to power. I think there have been mad some progress but I haven’t reinstalled Ubuntu for 2 years.

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.

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...

i'd recommend trying things out first. You are still in the beginning phrase, so try different distros. When you do, look for stuff like

• forum support. Is it popular ? Ubuntu Studio may not be as popular as vanilla Ubuntu and even when theyre from the same family, you can expect minor differences.

• i know this is not Windows. But say your OS is corrupted, how fast and easy it is for you to reinstall?

Example: Pop OS has a dedicated partition to reinstall the OS right in the grub menu - you dont need a separate USB drive for this. On the other hand, Archlinux requires you to mount the partitions correctly (yout home, root....etc), then you can go and fix your systems.

• do you like how the package manager work? I dont like Ubuntu because it has these different sources that can get convoluted. Arch's AUR can be very messy. Fedora for me is the way because I like DNF. Plus, its syntax is easy to remember.