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.

Thanks, I’ll give it a whirl and see how I get on.

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.

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.

A lenovo legion 9i

Linux is going to cook your own food, then realising that you don’t have half the ingredients, so you either have the choice of going to the shop where all the food is labelled in Swahili, and there’s no pictures of what’s in the packages, and a lot of the people who shop there are kinda stuck up and look down at you for not speaking Swahili, and by the time you’ve gone round the shop three times and asked for help and you’re still not sure what you’ve got in the trolley but you buy it anyway and then you get home and you’ve got some of the stuff for dinner but you’re still missing some essential ingredients OR going to McDonald’s and getting everything on the menu but Ronald follows you home.

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.

I have no idea what this mean is even trying to say, but as someone who is trying to make the switch to Linux, it is a steep learning curve, even for the most “user-friendly” distros.

A lot of the information in forums assumes some sort of basic knowledge of code and processes which aren’t readily available. I’ve asked a few noob questions and while there are some helpful people out there, there are also a fuck load of assholes who seem to think they walked out the womb speaking Ubuntu.

So my message to those people is, if you’re not gonna be helpful, kindly keep your snide comments to yourself.