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."
My experience has been very different. While I'm competent on Linux from the server world, I haven't run a desktop Linux in decades, and never seriously. Until I switched a few months ago, choosing CachyOS. Honestly, almost everything just worked. Games, music, video, browsing, office. Even Ms teams for work. The only fiddly bit was getting the VPN for work to connect, and remote desktop works but isn't equal in quality/feel. But that's just a slight inconvenience that isn't even bad enough for me to start looking into it.
One game (a demo) I couldn't get to run, and I know it should work and just doesn't on my system. Haven't bothered digging into this either, I have plenty of other unplayed games. Another game I play frequently (online/multiplayer) gave me some lag issues early on, I tried a few settings and it's fine now.
Absolutely nothing of my experience would I describe as a struggle. Frankly most of the time I forget I'm not on Windows. I just use my PC. Sometimes I want to check some windows specific setting, open the "not start menu" and then realize "right, this isn't Windows".