Linux

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.

I don't dare do hardcore gaming on Linux 'cause I'm lazy. I went and bought a Raspberry Pi at some point and only tried out some distros on it. I had troubles from day 1 where like OP, I could figure out. Right now, I can't even get Redshift to work on basically a RaspberryPi OS fork and I have no clue why.

In short, no. Linux can be adversarial, finicky, and sometimes just plain bullshit. That's the price of device freedom though. Can't speak for anyone else, but it does get easier the longer you stick with it though.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

did windows just work? It didn't for me

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.

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.

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.

I am waiting for SteamOS 3 Desktop to be released, so that I don't have to worry about this sort of thing, and have support from an 800lb gorilla. When I tried Mint back in January, my games weren't working right - Lutris, Hero Launcher, ect. Considering the amount of retro and Japanese games I play, having broken GOG installations wasn't a good start.

For now I am just sticking to Windows 11 IoT, but sooner or latter Microsoft's issues will be too much. Hopefully, SteamOS will be out by then.

For me the experience is not flawless, but it's not problematic either. For instance, I have never encountered random flickering just because a wrong program was open. In your case if you're using Nvidia as a GPU and are using Wayland as a display compositor that might explain some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be an issue in an Xorg session.

And the fact that you have to be potentially aware of these things is one of the annoying aspects of using Linux.

More or less,

Arch gave me some issues on install getting steam games to run on my main graphics card but since fixing then it's been maintenance free. There were some other issues that resolved with system updates, e.g. HDR on Wayland/KDE but Plasma update fixed it almost a year ago.

I'm running AMD/AMD/ASUS RoG.

My windows dual bout however takes 5min for all the bootup apps to launch and explorer is unstable. Probably because of local account and some policies I've been locking AI and metrics down with. Also Office clock to run burns my cpu when at idle and it ignores the manual start setting in services as well as startup-apps menu. It's just there for work.

Edit given below comments: I am NOT suggesting Arch for a beginner who wants simple and easy. Plenty of more beginner friendly distros will need even less maintenance.

I just use linux mint and don't have issues

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 /home be 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.

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.

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.

I’ve been distro hopping a little bit and honestly in my experience, anything based on Ubuntu has been inconsistent at best. Stock Ubuntu (or specifically Kubuntu since I prefer KDE) was the worst but Mint gave me issues too. Meanwhile, Fedora- and Arch-based distros have been perfect. Literally more consistent than MacOS or Windows for me, every single time. Personally I wouldn’t try another Ubuntu-based distro unless it was highly recommended.

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.

Flawless? Fuck no. When have you ever come to expect a flawless experience from any software? I had to deal with so much shit on Windows though, over a very long period of time. I mostly learned to tune it out, but after switching to Linux full time it became obvious what I had just grown to ignore.

Linux isn't flawless, and never will or should try to be. It's just better than the alternatives. You have to spend some time with it and figure out it's quirks, just as you did with Windows but forgot. You need to also not expect it to be Windows. It's a new thing and you have to learn it knowing it's not trying to copy Windows.

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.