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."
Long time Windows user tried switching over to various Linux distros recently but 12 of them couldn't find drivers for my wireless card, ethernet, bluwtooth radio, or GPU. After 80 hours finally got to the point where I could sign in (mint Cinnamon) but it thinks my ethernet is wifi, wifi and bluwtooth don't work, the GPU usage is buggy, only uses 4gb of my 128gb of ram, uses way more CPU then it should and randomly freezes. Oh and it won't recognize my USB 3.0+ ports, only the 2.0 I've spent over 200 hours since trying to debug why to no avail. And none of my games run properly, even with Proton or Wine. They stutter, freeze crash, or spaz out.
There's a lot of people here saying that you just need to learn Linux, but I don't want to have to learn how to write my own hardware drivers thank you very much.
I can get fresh Windows installed, fully functioning with all the software I want in about an hour with full performance. Meanwhile after 300 hours with Linux I've turned a $5000 desktop into the functionality of a $200 chromebook.
I've used some slightly weird hardware but haven't experienced anything of what you described. Across the whole range from the lab server with 3 3090s and 500gb of ram to my $40 Chromebook I got on ebay
Also, most the things people complain about Windows are only in Home or Student. I mostly use Pro or Server and those are super reliable.