Do you guys have higher tolerance to buggy bs? Are you all gaslighting people to get higher adoption? Does it just work? If so… How??
I’ve tried about every distro in multiple different laptops/desktops, amd gpus, basically every possible idea and there’s always weird ass bugs and issues and a ton of involuntary learning involved.
edit. Any chances you guys could suggest me one setup that “just works” no ifs and no buts? Or does it not exist in the Linux world?
edit2. Since people are asking for specifics I’m going to pick one random distro I’ve tried recently and list the issues I’ve had:
- On Arch fresh install with archinstall, everything default pmuch:
Immediately greeted with this. thread discussing it here.
I could live with that though, kinda…
Gnome apps in Arch are taking multiple seconds to open/tab back into and freezing, no idea how to debug it.
Could also live with it…
The killer one is that the battery life just sucks badly. about 15W idling with tlp, for comparison Debian with tlp gives me sub 5Watts. But again, Debian comes with a whole different set of issues.
I’ve only listed the one I’ve tried most recently, but the experience is similar with all distros I’ve tried.
You are not used to dealing with bugs, it seems. I would say Linux Desktop users are generally always fiddling around. It also depends on your specific hardware setup.
I personally have a few annoying bugs on my machine but I rather deal with them than dealing with windows
I have been using Linux for nearly a decade and I’m too scared to try Arch. It’s not for beginners.
Depends on what you’re beginning.
The risk of forgetting some critical part of the install is mostly mitigated by arch-install. Arch is one of the easiest to “learn the ecosystem” since all packages are delivered to you as the author wrote them, so your first time through is a chore, but afterwards you can pretty easily replicate what you land on.
There’s a lot more decisions made for you in other distros, ultimately I found it frustrating to work backwards trying to understand what those were the more polished they came.
It is however; the absolute last place I’d point someone who didn’t want to or did not have the time, no matter how good the arch wiki is: it doesn’t read itself.
Thereare Linux servers running that haven’t had reboots in years.
I’ve got 6.5 years before I finally locked myself out and had to reboot it, which was entirely my fault.
My desktop goes without a reboot for 40-50 days.
Genuinely curious, how do they update? My server (ubuntu) yells at me every time I ssh in to reboot “as soon as possible” because “livepatch has fixed vulnerabilities”. So if you don’t reboot, you don’t get kernel updates, and your server becomes vulnerable?
mint cinnamon. your experience sounds a lot like mine whenever i try any other distro. mint is the best.
I’ve tried it, currently getting screen artifacts unless i follow these instructions which only bring more questions up for me. Because on mint I’m not using that kernel, it shouldn’t be happening but yet here we are. Weird bugs.
Plus, on anything debian related flatpaks take about 5 seconds to open every time. And I have no clue how to debug that.
Honestly, it just works or not works as much as other operating systems. I’ve just come to like its way of working or not working more than others. I get it. When something doesn’t work the symptoms usually let me know where to look for a fix.
By now this comes down to experience and the ability to read and understand error messages.
When I watch people online in videos messing up with Linux it usually seems to be due to them not reading correctly and ignoring vital information, skipping stuff or trying to alter some process in a misguided way. See Linus Sebastian entering “yes, do as I say” without realising that the system is trying to keep him from making a fatal mistake.
If you want an out of the box distro that just works and has that old-school flavour, maybe look into Mint.
If you want something a bit more modern, then pop_os! is something of a Linux darling
Ubuntu probably has the widest community support. Although it does seem to have some issues
I’m not clear on what your bugs are, but if it’s like, you run a command in the terminal and a bunch of scary sounding messages come up, that’s normal. That’s just how it likes to be
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen used it, then I’d say Linux is probably worth another shot. It’s come a long way, and it only gets better with age
I’m running Pop on a desktop and I’ve really enjoyed getting used to what it offers
For me, the bugs that I usually encounter in linux are way less annoying than the ones I had on Windows
This, and no foced anything. I curse more abou the work machine than my Privat Manjaro, but i also have the distro hopping and breaking through.
Point is once the system runs, it runs.
The “immutable” type of distros could be worth a shot. They don’t let you break the system and if anything does break, you can undo it with a reboot, so they tend to be pretty stable. My family runs a few flavors of Universal Blue, which are based on Fedora and hasn’t broken for them, but I don’t know the exact hardware. I’ve been running NixOS (also immutable) on a Framework 16 since the laptop came out, I can’t count a single hardware issue I encountered. However, NixOS does come with a steep learning curve, so it’s hard to recommend, and it also has trouble running software that hasn’t been already packaged for it.
if you’re unfamiliar with Linux and do not want to deal with a lot of troubleshooting you shouldn’t use arch. You chose a distro that comes with a very minimal configuration, which makes it your job to get a lot of it working. It’s also a rolling release, apps will update more often and with less testing, meaning you’re likely to experience bugs.
On the other hand if you stick with it youll learn a lot more about how Linux works.
That’s true, but you can still learn from a distro that’s easier to use out of the box. Then, if you’d like to learn more, you can switch to a more bare-bones option. OP doesn’t seem to be interested in learning to configure a distro himself.
What OP is doing is trying to learn how to drive a car on a busy highway with an instructor on the phone. It’s not going to be pretty.
Any chances you guys could suggest me one setup that “just works” no ifs and no buts? Or does it not exist in the Linux world?
You’ve given so little insight into your experience
My most recent hardware has been fine
- My framework 13 amd has worked perfectly with Fedora Kinoite.
- My Minisforum UM780XTX has been a great Steam console with Bazzite
- My desktop is a gigabyte x570 board with a ryzen 3700X and a 5700XT GPU, has been solid for years, running Fedora KDE and then Kinoite.
- My workstation at work is a HP 845 G11 and it works fine, also running Fedora Kinoite
In the past I’ve had thinkpads (an X1 carbon and a T485), also good choices
Over my 12 years of using Linux as my daily for work and home (and about 13 years of fiddling with it on and off before that), avoid realtek hardware, avoid nvidia gpus, avoid switchable graphics, avoid strange OEM feature devices. Check hardware for compatibility before you buy it. Stick to mainstream distros, not niche 1 man community distros. I’ve moved to immutable/atomic distros because they are harder to tinker with outside of user space, as historically tinkering is what got me into trouble, now I do that in a container away from my base OS.
I havent tried atomic distros yet, but they just seem painful to use. Getting different applications to interact with each other just seems difficult in them.
there is some change of workflow, but its not difficult. The benefits outweigh the changes or any perceived draw back IMHO
similarly, for me:
my desktop was a bit buggy when I was doing bleeding-edge wayland/nvidia stuff on Arch. I switched to an AMD GPU, and haven’t had issues since. I’ve since distro-hopped to Nobara, then Bazzite, then NixOS, all with no issues.
My Framework 13 laptop was good on Manjaro with no bugs and now is good on NixOS.
My 2013 Macbook Air is also bug-free on NixOS.
PEBKAC
Or maybe you’re just shit at using computers and should go back to a notebook and pen?
If you wanted a distro where everything is set up for you OOTB, not requiring tinkering, you should not have installed Arch mate.
You need quite a bit of fiddling to get everything set up, and then it just works
