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.
If you wanted a distro where everything is set up for you OOTB, not requiring tinkering, you should not have installed Arch mate.
It’s very strange that you’ve made a post about bugs but chose not to list any of the bugs.
Like, how can we make a recommendation if we don’t know what types of issues you’re running into? What type of hardware you have? What expectations you have?
It just kind of screams of disgruntled user syndrome. These are community lead projects so, yes, they’ll have bugs. But if people never say what they are or what issues they had with what they used, the best the rest of us can do is just guess!
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Mint it pretty easy. I use it on an MSI Creator (I got it for free). 22 just dropped and its better than ever.
For most people, using Linux is not a buggy experience. So no, people aren’t gaslighting you. Normally, you grab a modern release like the latest Fedora or Ubuntu and you can get a live desktop up in seconds booting from a USB stick.
Esoteric hardware can be a problem if particular driver haven’t been developed yet. That tends to hit laptops harder than desktops, but it’s much less of an issue than it used to be.
People are asking for specifics because they don’t share your experience and so can’t fill in the blanks.
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My experience has been quite the opposite: Windows is the one that’s constant problems for me, with no obvious way to fix and if I were to follow the common advice on the Internet I’d be reinstalling it more than I use it.
Linux has been very reliable for me. Sometimes I look at my uptime and I’m like, maybe I should reboot soon.
They’re always some initial problems just like Windows but usually once it’s all fixed up it stays that way. My install is 13 years old and still going strong.
Same for me, all the support I had for Windows was “reinstall” or “have you checked the latest version of ‘x’ driver?”. Now I can actually solve my problems or maybe someone knows how to, there’s a big community with real access to debugging tools that may be able to help.
I won’t deny that some people are annoying and don’t help at all, but you can always move to the next community or just change distros. I distrohopped using VMs because I couldn’t risk losing work in my laptop and then chose one (openSUSE Tumbleweed) which has its own problems, but I now can understand why something happens (or not).
Also, some problems that I’ve encountered are only problems for me, some people would not even care about them, but I do and that gave me the tools to help other people when they need it (mostly friends from my career trying Linux).
OK, I’m gonna make this simple, since it seems like no one has tried to do that for you. There’s only 3 points
- Do not expect to buy hardware and THEN use linux
- When choosing a linux distro, do not choose one that requires you to compile anything
- Your killer problem - battery life - is 100% a hardware support problem
Breaking it down…
- Do not expect to buy hardware and THEN use linux Technically no operating system actually works this way. The problem is that every single hardware vendor works with Microsoft to ensure it works on Windows before they release it. You cannot just buy hardware and then later decide to use Linux. You must always check for linux compatibility, and often distro compatability, before buying your hardware.
The reason for this is that every single piece of hardware needs a driver and not every single piece of hardware has a driver in Linux, and not every driver properly works with the hardware it was built for.
So step 1 is always review your preferred distro for support for your target hardware and don’t just wing it. There’s a lot of shitty broken hardware that Linux devs haven’t built workarounds for and only work in Windows because there’s money to create driver workarounds.
This isn’t that strange in the world of hardware, it’s just something MS managed to prevent everyone from dealing with through it’s monopoly power and Apple prevented everyone from dealing with it by only allowing OSX on it’s hardware and controlling all the updates. In any other world, you don’t just buy random components for your car, or buy electronics without worrying about EU vs US outlets or buy power supplies for electronics without researching voltage, amperage, and polarity. It’s just a thing you have to do.
- When choosing a linux distro, do not choose one that requires you to compile anything
If you want a “just works” experience, then you do not want to be doing it. The forum link you posted is bonkers. There is no way someone with your level of experience should be bisecting anything. You fell into a hole, asked for a way out, and that forum gave you a shovel.
You want to stick with distros that are ready to go: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, openSuse, Fedora. My personal opinion is every beginner should start with Mint, but everyone’s got opinions.
- Your killer problem - battery life - is 100% a hardware support problem.
Whatever components you’re running don’t have whatever driver maturity is needed for power management. That could be a lot of things, and there’s no fix unless you want to become a volunteer device driver developer, which is like asking if you want you to become a volunteer suspension bridge repairperson. It’s not a real option for you. That means you’re stuck waiting for someone else to write support for whatever hardware you have. Bringing me back to point #1, do not just attempt to put linux on any old hardware - you must research compatibility as part of your purchasing process.
I’ve been running linux for decades. In the beginning, it was a nightmare. I had to debug it every week, sometimes multiple times each week. Nearly every problem was something I caused trying to fix some other problem. Nearly every problem I was trying to fix was ultimately just a lack of out-of-the-box hardware support and hardware auto-configuration. Fast-forward to 2007, I bought my first thinkpad. I researched linux support and bought one that I knew worked with Debian. Worked first time, no tweaking. Fucking beautiful.
Except some features of the laptop didn’t work. I needed to manually configure the pointer device.
But then, I bought my second thinkpad in 2010. Everything worked, and all the config was through graphical settings tools. Amazing.
Well guess what. I bought a new thinkpad a few years ago. I really wanted a Ryzen. But Lenovo only had the first gen available for sale, the second gen was sold out. I saw the support was perfect for the second gen, but not perfect for the first gen. I bought it anyway.
Wouldn’t you know it. The motherboard has hardware bugs that the drivers just don’t handle gracefully. There’s a fight between Lenovo and the driver developers over it. It never gets fully resolved. However, the battery life problem gets resolved. Now I have 2 bugs:
- sometimes I have to plug and unplug my external camera into the USB multiple times because the mobo can’t negotiate the connection properly.
- Sometimes the laptop fails to return from suspend and I have to reboot it.
Both of these suck, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. I could post on a forum and spend literal weeks trying literally everything everyone tells me, but I know what the problem is - hardware/driver support. I could volunteer to become a driver developer, or to work with a driver developer and give them absolutely everything in detail so they can maybe find the time to fix it, but the reality is, I bought unsupported hardware and this is the consequence. Had I bought the second gen ryzen thinkpad, I would not have these issues.
So don’t try to force your way through this sorta shit and then assume everyone else is going through the same thing. Only buy hardware with components you know are going to work, only use distros that are simple to install and operate. And don’t try to solve problems that are caused by failing to adhere to rules 1 and 2.
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I hope and pray OP will read your comment 🤞🙏 Thanks for the write up !
But Lenovo only had the first gen available for sale,
can you share which model that is?
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.
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.
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.
Youll learn how to use it not how it works
Maybe Linux just isn’t for you, and that’s okay. Go use Windows or Mac and enjoy your “just works” setup and lack of involuntary learning.
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My motto is “macOS/iOS on desktop/phone,” Linux on everything else. I’m a programmer by day but I don’t want to fight for all the features I take for granted in Apple’s walled garden.
Haters might hate, and I still love watching Linux development but I’m more into server/CLI stuff on Linux than I am trying to make Gnome/KDE/Wayland as seamless as macOS.
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.
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.
TL:DR Buy a pre-installed laptop of your liking, be it windows, Mac or even Linux-based.
I guess non tech users would go into a store and buy a laptop with Windows or MacOS pre-installed. You boot it up, go through some questions and boom you are ready to go.
It appears that you are expecting that same experience with a DIY installation of an unsupported OS on some random hardware. You cannot expect it to be so smooth.
So what I really suggest is that you get a laptop that is designed with Linux in mind from scratch.
Go to tuxedocomputers.com or system76.com and just buy a preconfigured Linux based Laptop. It will work out of the box. Problems solved. Easy peasy.
I have a system 76 and I love it
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.
Your question is a bit like asking ‘why do you guys all have a perfect spouse while I only get to live with that stupid creature?’.
Obviously, you would be wrong in considering both your and our own relationships like that.
As far as Linux goes, nope, we’re not more tolerant to BS or gaslighting anyone. That said, maybe you’re the one gaslighting here (yourself, at least) if you’re saying there is such a as a perfect OS?
My Linux machines (Debian/Xfce and Mint/Cinnamon, if that really matters) both have issues. Exactly like, what not-a-surprise, my Mac and my iOS devices have. They’re different issues, but they’re issues.
I don’t know, say, I can’t run Affinity Designer on Linux like I easily can run it on my Mac (‘what a shitty OS that Linux is!’). But then I also cannot change all text size on the screen as easily on the Mac as I can do it on Linux (‘what a shitty OS that macOS is!’). Or have a Windows laptop with as good a battery life as a M Mac (what a shitty… you get the idea).
The only serious question to ask should be: which issues are deal breakers for you, and which are not?
It’s a relatively simple checklist to do. Then, it’s a matter of asking a few questions around to confirm there is no solution available. Problem solved, you will know for sure if you can use Linux or if you cannot. No drama, no existential crisis. And, as a nice bonus, no need to question anyone else intelligence and/or honesty, not even your own.
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?
‘Could you suggest a Mac that will just works? Or does it not exist in the Apple (or Windows) world?’ You can’t? And, no, you can’t, don’t believe the marketing. Because if you could Apple would certainly not need to spend the fortune it is spending on customer support and warranty repairs, and the repairman/right to repair advocate Louis Rossman would never have become the influencer he is. Macs and iPhone too have issues.
Well, neither can we help you find the perfect setup for Linux that is guarantee to work without issue ;)
edit: typos
There’s occasionally something buggy, but the last time I ran Windows there were a lot of bugs too. They’re just abstracted away, which Linux DEs don’t do at all.
For me, it’s about choosing the bugs that bug me less. If Windows is working better for you, just run Windows. Internet points are not worth much.
Mint is meant for “just works” setups especially for folks new to Linux. Never had an issue.
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.
Thereare Linux servers running that haven’t had reboots in years.
My desktop goes without a reboot for 40-50 days.
I’ve got 6.5 years before I finally locked myself out and had to reboot it, which was entirely my fault.
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?
Not all servers are running on the public internet.