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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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.
Still new with Linux as my regular desktop at home, after ditching Windows (kind of), I’m amazed by the level of things I can try to go into a try to make stuff work, that does not do as I want to. But also, annoyed about the level of things that sometimes needs to get tweaked and thinking “why the hell do I need to make these changes” like super fast scrolling in Firefox for whatever reason.
Windows have more or less “just worked” for me for the last 30 years (not remembering anything too critical, always better than every Linux attempt until recently). But I also didn’t treat Windows in a way that I had to reinstall it every 6 months (whatever that causes that). What have gotten me over the tipping point with Windows is all the push for me to subscribe to extra things (OneDrive), use Microsoft things (like Bing, even though I used to use it over Google), Edge trying to trick you into using Edge and copy your stuff from Chrome, and changing defaults to Microsoft apps.
At work I changed to a Mac. I was actually surprise at how many graphics issues I have noticed and other weird minor bugs. The biggest issue here is the keyboard layout when you remote into Windows servers and some modifier keys are mapped differently combined with non-English keyboard layout.
did windows just work? It didn’t for me
Most people are so used to the windows bullshit that they don’t even recognise it anymore, Linux (especially fedora) has been much more stable for me.
Also, the problem is always nvidia
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t remember the last time I had a problem with windows. I had some issues getting a media server set up that ended up being the router my ISP gave me, I had an issue with the 11 “upgrade” that ended up being a BIOS setting. But the last time I had an issue that was actually Windows related was on a previous computer, and my desktop is damn near geriatric.
Fair enough, although I don’t really remember having an issue with linux either, atleast for the last couple of years. Apart from getting my nvidia gpu to work properly on my laptop, but that’s jank on windows aswell. Not everyone has issues on either, but I use windows at work and fedora at home and I notice way more jank on windows personally
Good stuff. As much as I hate Microsoft and everything they do, if you’re enjoying a stable system, and don’t mind the injected Spyware and ramsonware that comes with windows by default, enjoy.
Not everyone has to like Linux.
What ransomware?
Leave your data synchronizing with their cloud, pass the limit, miss 1 payment and see how that goes for you when you try to get your data. Good luck.
I have tried twice getting a notice of failed payment due to change of banks and therefore change of credit card. But then I gave it the new card’s details and everything was good. However, I don’t remember if I was passed some doomsday deadline or not.
Not saying it’s not an issue and I would consider it bad business for Microsoft to delete users data without proper notifications and a long enough time frame to fix any payment issues. However, deleting data online is not ransomware - if Microsoft deletes the data, then they have nothing to hold ransom.
I may be extra paranoid, but I’m almost certain that, even if they delete it from your folders (I don’t think they do, at least not Right away), they still keep it for maintaining a profile of each person. As for the ransomware, yeah, if you don’t pay them, you’re likely to lose access. That’s the definition of ransom, no?
I had windows issues this morning, trying to set the aeay message expiry in teams. When I click the date … no problem, when I click time there is a long scroll list of times, when I go to move mouse over a time it closes the time picker window because it thinks I have moused off of it. I tried various mouse methods and acrolling. Had to resort to keyboard only to move and select.
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.
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
Wintoes
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.
you might be able to try a live version of a distro to see how your hardware functions before taking the plunge
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.
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
windows just worked
This is not how I remember 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
/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.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.
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.
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.
Ubuntu Studio? Why?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
