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."
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.
I've been using Linux seriously for almost a year now. I felt the same way as OP back in the beginning. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that it's not so much that the OS is tricksier than macOS, it's that I did all my stumbling around OS X when I got my first Mac back in 07, and now I know it pretty well. Sure, macOS has better guardrails, but it's still worlds away from Windows.
Learning curves are real but Linux is way easier to screw up than MacOS. I farted around for a couple days last week getting my Nvidia card to work (switching from AMD). It was not trivial. macOS truly does “just work” unless you’re setting up a hackintosh. That said, the reason I like Linux is because it’s your machine and you cans get it to do pretty much anything you want, whereas MacOS has many limitations. Those limitations aren’t that relevant to most users though, hence the popularity.
Linux is way easier to screw up because it gives you full freedom to do whatever you want. It is like riding a bicycle as opposed to sitting in a bus. Of course you can do a wheelie and fall, but would you rather be able to do a wheelie or sit in a generic seat.
If you buy a PC with hardware tailored(like macos) for Linux it will be absolutely flawless. Not really a fair comparison.