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."
You didn't mention which version of Ubuntu Studio you're running. Is it 24.04 LTS by any chance?
My initial thought is that you are probably running Wayland, and that your version of Ubuntu has KDE Plasma 5 instead of 6 and/or outdated Nvidia drivers that don't work super well with Wayland.
A quick search shows that this is all default on Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS, which is the first version you'll find at ubuntustudio.org. :(
Ubuntu 25.04 (non-LTS) has Plasma 6, which is a very important upgrade if you are using Wayland, especially with Nvidia GPUs.
Just a guess. If I'm right, you have a few choices:
Upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.04 (non-LTS). It has newer stuff like Plasma 6 that fixes a LOT of problems like this.
Switch to X11 instead of Wayland. This will likely introduce a new set of problems though. X11 has no future.
Switch to a different DE than KDE. I am not sure what is best in this situation.
Install the latest Nvidia drivers manually instead of getting them from the Ubuntu repo.
Option 1 is by far the simplest choice.
The Linux desktop is in a big transitional phase these past few years, as more distros default to Wayland even before a lot of their packages are updated to fully support it. It's a terrible time to be stuck with outdated "LTS" distros. This is why I hopped away from Debian 12 (13 is out now so yay, but it was a year too late for me).
OK, you're right on the money haha. I am on 24.04 (though not sure about LTS) and have been running Wayland, not X11, and it was the first version on the site. Big question is am I wiping everything to update? That seems silly but I'm super cautious now and don't remember when I installed 24.04 if there was an option to do the ol' Windows "update and keep everything" option. Do I just make another USB install and I can update while keeping settings or is this a full restart?
On further investigation, it looks like you'd need to do an in-between upgrade to 24.10 before going to 25.04. I didn't realize that before. It's been a long time since I upgraded an Ubuntu system.
Here is the relevant documentation you'd need for upgrades:
From 24.04 to 24.10: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OracularUpgrades/#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_24.10
And then basically the same thing again to go from 24.10 to 25.04: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PluckyUpgrades#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_25.04
In case you're not familiar with Ubuntu's naming and update conventions, I'll explain briefly, because it's confusing for beginners: Each release has a name and number. The names loop through the alphabet in the format "Adjective Animal", and the numbers are the release date in format "year.month", with new releases every six months, in April and October. Then there are the "Long Term Support" (LTS) releases that are released every two years, matching the April "xx.04" main releases. You're currently on "Noble Numbat" (24.04), which is followed by "Oracular Oriole" (24.10) and "Plucky Puffin" (25.04). Totally intuitive, right?! -_-
OR you could back up your stuff and install a clean 25.04. I'm not sure if the installer has an option to retain an existing home folder. Again, it's been a long time since I used Ubuntu specifically. Perhaps someone with more recent experience can chime in.
I just installed and ran update-manager and it says there's an upgrade to 25.04, no mention of 24.10. I'm assuming this should be ok?
Edit: I'm an idiot with too much Linux on the brain. I have Studio installed on my laptop as well. I'm gonna jump straight to 25.04 on there and test. Thanks.
Cool. I could well be wrong about the double-step requirement. It sure sounds that way, but the Upgrade Notes page is very old so maybe it's easier now? Keep us posted!
Good thing I tested, going from 24.04 to 25.04 completely borked my laptop. Currently reinstalling 24.04 and gonna see if I can go to 24.10. Can't seem to find a way so far, only option I have is 25.04.
Well that sucks. You might be able to try "The Debian Way" mentioned here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upgrades#The_Debian_way_of_upgrading
(Ubuntu is derived from Debian, which is why "the Debian way" works.)
The gist is to replace all instances of "noble" with "oracular" in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, then run some commands to do the distro upgrade.
I might give that a go. I'm throwing Bazzite on it right now to test it out. I really don't want to start from scratch again with my main PC but if Bazzite does what I need I might be better off. I'm guessing since it's based on Fedora backing up my home directory probably won't work but I'll look onto it if I go that route.
I'm on Bazzite now. It certainly made my life easier as far as GPU drivers go.
However, be aware that it comes with its own learning curve. It's an "immutable" distro, and it has like half a dozen different ways to install software. You can't use
dnflike you would on regular Fedora. The idea is to get apps from Flatpak, or use Distrobox, or use Homebrew — all things that run on top of the base OS so you can use a monolithic "immutable" OS image. There are pros and cons to this approach.Once I familiarized myself with Distrobox (BoxBuddy makes this a lot easier) and using Flatseal to grant Flatpak apps direct access to the folders they need to operate (like my music library on an external drive, in the case of my music player), it's been pretty smooth sailing. But I do miss just being able to run
sudo apt install <whatever>.Awesome thanks. I'm still trying to get the iso on a usb haha. Ventoy didn't work for me, nor Etcher or Startup. Getting the live iso now to see if that'll work.. Always something!