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."
Each Distro is effectively a different OS, so depending on what you run you will have a different experience.
I started out on OpenSUSE because a CAD software for work only was supported on RedHat or SUSE. NVidia hosts a repo specifically for OpenSUSE so I added that and it figured out the driver. So all those nVidia complaints I read about just never happened for me. No tearing or flickering.
My wife's old laptop couldn't run W10 so we put Linux on it. Every Debian based distro I tried would crash on install, or hardware error during boot. But Fedora or OpenSUSE worked fine (warned of error but worked around it). Eventually moved her machine to NixOS, and its been stable for years.
Just because a distro gives you pain, dont give up if you still enjoy the idea of Linux, there are so many distros that one will work better for your needs