NVIDIA

Welp, there’s your problem. I have an NVIDIA card as well and it’s been the source of at least 95% of my Linux headaches.

I’ve tried a few distros and Linux Mint was definitely the most “just works” for me. Make sure you’re using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, regardless of what option you choose. Currently I use SpiralLinux (Debian with a few tweaks) because I really like the BTRFS snapshots and fell in love with KDE during my distro-hopping, but Mint is what I would recommend to the vast majority of people.

Most stuff worked great out of the box for me. I had some quirks with power management, specifically for my wifi card, resulting in bad wifi, but there are so many resources and so many people willing to help out that it was not even a big problem to solve. I haven’t used Ubuntu, I am on arch, but the great thing is, most problems and solutions don’t really care what distro you’re on, so I am no stranger to ubuntu forums when researching something. And as cliché as it is to recommended, the arch wiki is an amazing source of information, so definitely give it a look.

Honestly? Yeah so far. I swapped to Bazzite after getting a new AMD rig in early July. There was a little bit of setup for the first few weeks, but it’s worked perfectly for the whole last month.

I did have many, many issues on my last computer when I was on an Nvidia card though. My impressions are that Linux can be very hardware dependent, and Nvidia is kinda notorious for not supporting their hardware.

I had a lot of problems when I’ve used Ubuntu in the past. To be fair that was 2009 - 2012 and it was a much less mature product. But whether it’s snaps, unity, or Ubuntu One integrations, they always seem to be doing their own thing in a way that’s not particularly helpful.

I’ve had a much more “just works” experience with Fedora and Mint.

Honestly depends on the hardware. I still had an Nvidia card for the first year I used Linux and 90% of my issues stemmed from that…

As for everything else I’ve had a much easier time with Linux than most people I know because I unintentionally bought peripherals that already worked great with Linux before I was even thinking about switching.

A few people I know have tried Linux but ran into issues with their mice or audio equipment that require proprietary drivers or dedicated software to fully function. Most of these are the big name “gamer” brands like Razer.

I had issues with Razers software all the way back on Windows 7 so I swore off buying anymore keyboards or mice that require 3rd party drivers so I never had an issue with them when switching over.

Surface Go 1: Had problems with my bluetooth mouse being slow to be detected. Also sometime it’s slow until I connect and disconnect the screen it’s hooked up to. Otherwise works flawlessly.

MacBook Pro 2012: Sometimes I have to reinstall some drivers for the wifi. Otherwise works flawlessly.

Both run Fedora 42. So I’d advise you to not give up and maybe just switch distro👍

I experience the same thing every time I decide to try KDE on any distro.

My advice would be, only use vanilla/default/official versions of the most popular distros. Ubuntu, not Ubuntu Studio, Fedora, not (I don’t know what variants there are) Fedora. Do not use specialized distros, for example a gaming distro. Do not use 3rd party repos. Do not manually install any packages from anywhere. If you want something and official repos of your official distro cannot do it, just don’t do it. Do not try to find a workaround and make it happen.

After using Linux for a while you’ll become more comfortable with it and you’ll slowly start moving outside the above limitations. The best and worst thing about Linux is that your OS is yours and you can tinker with all of its parts. But you shouldn’t, at the beginning. If you were to tinker with Windows like that, it would also break.

I get what you’re saying…if that were my experience I’d be jack of it too. I’ve got similar spec and am running Nobara which is pretty much Steam OS for people with Nvidia cards. The only thing. The only thing I got really into the weeds on was setting up Plex. Which wasn’t my first preference but I couldn’t work out hot to get Jellyfin to cast to my old Chromecast. Other than that though I’ve had a great experience that ‘just works’.

Your using Ubuntu. Which honestly just loves to randomly shit the bed unless it’s on a server. This has been true for basically it’s entire existence.

Just use Debian or mint if your inlove with apt/Deb. Otherwise seriously switch to literally anything else. Anything is better then God damn Ubuntu.

My experience has indeed been flawless but that’s simply because I don’t have many use cases where flaws could appear. I use the Vivaldi and gimp on my t490 and play indie games on my steam deck.

In general, yes… I used Ubuntu years ago but for almost 10 years now it’s MX Linux (Debian based), only problem I had was on my brand new PC the wifi card was new and not well supported by the kernel, but with new kernel/driver it improved and now I have 0 problem.

Well, i use the same PC (an old HP 7800 “convertible Minitower”) now since about 2010 with various versions of Debian… in the last 15 years i honestly did not have any problems. But the stuff that i do is also pretty boring:

• Office stuff (started with open office, since about 5 years libreoffice)
• Mail (Claws-Mail… it works)
• Webbrowsing (Firefox)
• Image editing (Gimp)
• Watching videos and stuff with VLC
• 3D rendering with Povray
• Playing various native Linux games

Soooo… perhaps its the old hardware, perhaps its my boring behaviour of not changing anything as long as it works, but here everything works flawlessly for well over a decade.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: it starts with hardware.

It’s sad to say but a flawless Linux experience out of the box often comes from picking the right hardware first. Chose vendors who actively support Linux. AMD/Intel CPUs, APUs and/or GPUs. Intel WiFi card. Everything else should work ootb except most fingerprint sensors. Avoid laptops with dGPUs. Avoid nVidia. Hardware support comes from hardware vendors, the days of janky community drivers have been over for almost 2 decades. When it’s time for you to replace your hardware, do your homework first and/or buy from companies who sell Linux machines (Framework, Tuxedo, Slimbook, Starlabs, System76, some Dells, some Lenovos, etc). You can still buy from random companies but there won’t be any guarantees.

Then, the choice of distro in kinda important but not that much. In my 20+ years of actively using and working with Linux, both in the desktop and server space, I’ve always found Ubuntu and its derivatives kind of janky. I’m a lifelong Debian user, but my best experience on modern hardware have been Fedora on my main laptop and its atomic derivative Bazzite on my gaming rig. Bazzite also comes with a nVidia-specific image for those who can’t/wont replace their GPU.

Nowadays to limit interactions between system and user-facing applications, I tend to install most things from Flathub. It might not help with hardware issues, but it helps with stability.

I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.