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”.

  • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
    2·
    4 days ago

    That’s great advice, thank you. If I just copy my home directory I can replace it if things go south? What about other distros?

    • cpo@beehaw.org
      1·
      17 hours ago

      What I do most of the time is have the /home directory on a different partition. If you really do need to reinstall, it is just a matter of selecting the existing home partition when reinstalling it (do not forget to uncheck the “format partition” checkbox 😅).

      Reinstalls or running other distro’s is a piece of cake this way.

      My experience with amd / radeon has not been that great over the years. The open source amdgpu driver is basic at best. If you have a modern intel gfx chipset that is way easier…

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
      7·
      4 days ago

      Pretty much the same.

      Word of warning. Your /home directory contains your documents, but it also contains configuration files. If the packages you’re installing have different versions, you might discover that the config file for a different version doesn’t work on the version that’s installed. This isn’t universally the case, some applications are smart about this, others less so. You can find many of them as “hidden” “dot” files.

      You can find all of them like this: find /home -type f -name '.*'

      Explanation:

      • find - the find command
      • /home - the place to start looking
      • -type f - find files only
      • -name '.*' - find things only starting with a ‘.’