The indoctrination of windows is extreme. Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.
And yet… linux is hard, and users decry RTFM as “not growing the userbase”
The indoctrination of windows is extreme. Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.
And yet… linux is hard, and users decry RTFM as “not growing the userbase”
I’m probably gonna get hated on for this but here’s my story:
About 3 weeks ago I bought a new gaming laptop with no OS with the intention of installing Linux myself and ditching Windows.
I’d read a lot online about how Linux was now competitive with Windows as Linux emulators could run Windows games with a 10-15% boost in performance. I read that it was all a case of finding the right distro and that Linux is much more user friendly and compatible now. So I did a little research, made myself a ventoy boot USB with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Pop, Garuda and Fedora to see which one I liked best.
None of them worked properly. All of them had weird little quirks. Some I could live with, some were completely infuriating. So l did a little tinkering as I was determined not to give in. None of the distros detected my hardware properly, and so I went away found forums with similar issues and I fixed most of them. However, no matter what I tried I could not get the laptop speakers to work. No problem, I thought, I’ll be either using headphones or BT to my soundbar (as that worked fine). So having given up on the speaker issue, I downloaded some games. In all of the distros they ran like shit. Sound bugs, laggy game play, some wouldn’t play at all. Again, I tried tinkering with the settings, using a different version of proton, different sound drivers, different graphics settings, different commands and programs which might solve the issues. No. Each different distro threw up different issues which I spent hours and researching and experimenting. I tried a few more distros and found new issues which needed more research and more experimenting.
Over the three weeks or so I was trying I became irritable and depressed. I’d spent a lot of money on the laptop and I was unable to use it because no matter what I tried, even with relatively low resource hungry games, they did not run well at all, and even linux itself seemed slow and unresponsive in comparison to what I was used to.
So after hours and hours of climbing the walls and snapping at my wife and neglecting my kid, I downloaded Windows. And everything just works. There are bespoke programs for my graphics card and everything in my steam library runs beautifully with very minimal tinkering. So now I have a dual boot system, windows for games only and Linux for everything else.
I hate that I’m still enthralled to Windows, but seriously, Linux is just not ready for mass adoption. If something doesn’t work on Windows , it’s usually a case of just downloading the correct driver and Windows normally knows which one you need. If something doesn’t work on Linux it’s a slog through paragraphs of text which all assume some basic knowledge of coding or Linux’s file system or some other jargon, or watching endless YouTube videos and then still getting nowhere. As a working husband and father I just do not have the time to put into it.
Tl;Dr - Windows is much easier than Linux. That’s why everyone uses Windows.
You sound like a Windows power user and of course linux will be harder because you are not used to it.
I had a simmilar first months until I was used to linux. Now I find many things much more convinient in Linux.
And yes there is hardware that works in windows but not in linux like there is hardware that wont work in macos. But over time you will only buy stuff that is compatible and you wont think about it anymore.
Thats why I recommend dual booting at the start because sometimes you need to get shit done without trying to learn the new way and so you don’t get burnt out. But if you keep at it you will start to use windows less and less.
Oof. Sorry you had such a bad experience.
Pro tip for others: It takes time for volunteers to reverse engineer new proprietary laptop hardware.
If the laptop manufacturers aren’t advertising Linux support, it’s up to the community to play guess and check, to figure out what the proprietary drivers do.
You might get lucky and pick the same exact model as a passionate reverse engineer. Or you might not.
With old stuff, your odds are much better that someone has figured it out for you.
For new hardware, it’s still essential to pick a vendor that chooses to write and release Linux drivers.
This will get better when truly open hardware platforms gain popularity.
Yeh, I’d come to that conclusion myself. The laptop I bought was a 2023 lenovo legion 9i which is have discovered is not a particularly popular model but shares a lot of it’s DNA with the far more popular 7i. So I figured most of the software and fixes would be cross-compatible. Turns out that I was wrong. I’m not giving up hope yet, and I’m not gonna get rid of the laptop anytime soon. Maybe they’ll be a new kernal that come out which fix the issues I’ve been having.
This is much less a Linux problem and much more a communuty one. We really need a semi-centralized place to get recent linux info and a nice guide on linux specific knowlage for beginners, but then people will cry needing to learn what wayland/x11 and such are will turn people away. Whoever was telling you windows games 10-15% faster were fucking dumbasses, I have zero problem running any game I want on my machine but the preformace has been exactly the same as windows (which I still consider a win for linux)
The next big problem is people going “We don’t need gaming distros” when those gaming distros are made to solve this exact problem. If you haven’t already try out Bazzite or Nobara and it might “just work” (no promises tho). But a distro like Mint/Pop/Debian are going to have a lot of missing drivers/package updates for the latest hardware, Fedora needs relatively a lot of post-install tinkering to get things working since they only ship opensource packages by default, Garuda is not ment for beginners and uses a more unstable kernal for preformance, but you still need to tinker with drivers. Bazzite and Nobara are the two big distros that aim to “just work” out of the box and even re-package some software with the latest fixes. And incase you don’t like the look of them, you can install whatever theme over KDE Plasma you want
Ofc I get if your tired of hearing “just install this distro instead” but a lot of advice is coming from others who also don’t actually know whats going on under the surface, and sometimes your hardware just isn’t supportes (not a linux issue but a manufacturer one). And if your at the point where using windows for gaming works and thats enough for you, nothin wrong with just using windows
I have similar experiences. I converted my surface laptop to linux and overall I’m happy that I did, but games that ran fine on windows now are unplayable because I can’t get it to work properly, neither with wine, unbottled nor proton.
I still have a W10 gaming pc and I planned on converting it to linux with pop os being the frontrunner, but I will keep it on dual boot with the fallback scenario of just going with W11. Linux is not and might never be ready for mass adoption because it is simply too reliant on volunteers, forums and self-troubleshooting for that.
Microsoft and Apple provide OS’es that are thoroughly tested and validated with firmware and drivers that are specifically written for them by people whose job it is to do that. It might not always be perfect, but it usually does what it needs to do right away.
Oh interesting! What model surface do you have? I have a surface pro which I was considering converting (before the above nightmare) but have read that MS have made it super difficult for anything later than a 7 and I have an 8.
It’s quite easy actually. Just google linux surface and you will find the project website where they list all surface models and potential issues with installation guidelines. I have a pro 8. The only thing not working are the cameras as nobody has figured out the drivers yet.
Edit: Project GitHub page https://github.com/linux-surface/
To be fair, you most likely have nvidia in your PC.
As I see it, the distos you tried ether have a gui to install those proprietary drivers, but are on old kernel or no GUI to install them, but a recent kernel.
Installing nvidia drivers on endeavourOS is very simple and you always get the newest fixes after writing “yay” into console.
Installing apps is as easy as “yay [desired app]” and then choose out of the list. (Just don’t take the “-git” versions but the “-bin” versions 🤭)
After that, install steam out of multilib and make sure to pick the right vulkan package (based on GPU driver in use)
All this nvidia stuff is so complicated on Linux, because nvidia is not caring enough about Linux yet.
Only way to fix that is adoption.
I installed mint, opened the driver manager, picked the latest NVIDIA driver and it just worked. No idea what everybody is talking about …
Granted I’m on an old 1080ti, so maybe that’s it …
It is just to get newer versions of the proprietary drivers faster, and to have a more similar environment as developers. (Like if a feature of the driver is dependent on a new API just added to nearly most recent kernel)
Kernel updates can bring better support for different hardware which as well can influence how well the GPU drivers work, like, improving them.
😇but nice to hear that it works on your machine well 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻
Even Nvidia drivers have come a long way recently. I used to always have a windows setup and used it more than Linux whenever I was off work, but this year I was finally confident enough on Linux to ditch it. I have Nvidia gpus on all my PCs, with both Intel and AMD cpus, and they are all working perfectly fine with multiple 4k screens.
So far there were only two games I was unable to play on Linux - Demoncrawl and Inzoi. And the second is filled with reports saying it works ootb for other Linux users, so if I had tried to tinker I could probably get it to work. (I haven’t had to tinker with anything else tho).
Thanks this is very helpful. I was steering clear of the more terminal heavy distros as tbh I find the terminal a bit daunting as a noob. I’ll give it a go tho.
Don’t know about your hardware. I don’t own a notebook anymore. I read good things about the AUR package optimus-manager-qt for hybrid GPUs (iGPU+dedicated GPUs) but also that it can be a bit tricky.
I exlusively used dedicated Nvidia cards in desktop rigs with Arch & EndeavourOS since 2017 when I switched from Win 10. Additionally exclusively KDE.
Though I had a bit of experience with other distros and desktop environments before my switch I’d wager to say you should give one last try to EndeavourOS, even if you have barely any Linux experience. I mean you had so many failed attempts. One more won’t hurt.
Use EndeavourOS not arch. First, it uses the standard initial graphical system-setup (Calamares), then it comes with some good default settings & tools and finally a welcome screen which features links to additional tools like mirror selection (for faster updates), update shortcuts, package search, docs/wikis/forums or logs.
I’d select KDE in Calamares and I’d install the graphical package manager octopi via “yay octopi” after system installation and activate yay for the AUR in the octopi settings as e.g. optimus-manager-qt (which you should only use with hybrid GPUs) is only available in the AUR. You need to click the alien symbol in octopi to install from the AUR.
The AUR (Arch User Repository) is the repository for packages not available in the main repositories. AUR packages are user contributed where the maintainers write a so called PKGBUILD file which contains the steps to build and install a package from foreign sources (e.g. from a debian DPKG or from github sources). With octopi you can quickly open the PKGBUILD file and look from where the maintainer pulls the parts of the package.
The amount of software available in the AUR is gigantic but it can potentially contain malware (which happened a very few times). But you’ll have a hard time finding users who actually had that happen to them. A good indicator that the package is ok are its number of votes. But if you really want to know you have to check the sources in the PKGBUILD. If they come from github, you could check the github-repo and only it’s stars (votes) if you won’t read the sourcecode.
That all sounds mighty complicated but it isn’t. Just try to install packages from the main repo. Click the alien symbol only when you don’t find something official.
So with octopi and the welcome screen you don’t need to enter any terminal commands for package installation or the system update. I had only a few updates where problems occurred in like 7 years and they were always fixable. The Arch Wiki and the Endeavour forums could always help.
I can’t guarantee you’ll have a better experience than with the other distros and you will meet some bumps or roadblocks for sure. I’m not playing the the most current games and a lot of retro games via Lutris and Heroic. For some of them I had to tinker a bit and try different starters than Steam. Arma, Path of Exile, Sekiro (fitgirl repack), Diablo Immortal were tricky but all the steam games or e.g. Witcher 3 via Heroic run very nice.
On the screen where you login (usually SDDM) you can switch between Wayland and X11. Which are two very different Display managers. Wayland is the replacement for the very old X11. It works way(land) better with AMD GPUs than with Nvidia which are usable though but work much better on X11. Games can be faster on wayland for Nvidia than on X11. But things like missing color management in nvidia-settings make me stay with X11.
Thanks of taking the time to write all this. I’ll certainly give it a go once I’ve worked up the will power to go back down the rabbit hole!
Oh yeah as mentioned in a comment below Nobara based on Fedora could also be a very good distro if you’re out for gaming.
Wait, what brand/model laptop did you get?
A lenovo legion 9i
Well, that sounds like issues with your specific hardware, because that’s definitely not the usual Linux experience.
Tip for next time: find some distro that has up to date kernel. Ubuntu, Mint and Debian are definitely not good if you have very recent hardware, they stay on old kernels for quite a long time. And drivers are in the kernel.
I have to disagree about Windows being easier, but that’s fairly subjective. What’s 100% objective is that it’s definitely not the reason everyone uses Windows, the reason is much simpler: it came with their machine.
Anyway, I recommend Nobara for gaming - it’s basically Fedora, but preconfigured for gaming and general normal use.
Thanks, I’ll give it a whirl and see how I get on.