Try to play games, learn how to set up wine/proton, discover that none of your games work because you have an old GPU driver, discover that you can’t update it because any time you install a newer driver it hard-locks the system and reboots it in super low-res mode with no driver at all, also your sound dies randomly for no reason that you can discover and trawling reddit for 4 hours comes up with lots of solutions, half of which don’t work and the other half don’t even apply, get frustrated, disable dual-boot and go back to windows.
That’s how my last experience with linux (admittedly that was PopOS not Mint, but) went ~6 months ago. I’m currently building up my frustration-tolerance to give it another try at some point probably with main-line Ubuntu because at least then when I go hunting for solutions to obscure problems the suggested solutions are for that distro. I’m honestly not sure what the difference between Ubuntu and Mint is tho.
This was my experience with it too. Until I realized that the issue everything boils down to is having an old gfx. In particular an old nvidia gfx that has old, closed source driver compatibility only and can’t initialize vulkan. I’ve still stuck to it, it’s arch running on my desktop, because I’ll upgrade hw components eventually. 12 years with a gtx 670 has been quite enough.
I’ve installed fedora workstation 41 on a decommissioned work laptop last week, a 2021 model with an 5700U, and everything just works out of the box. Some obscure game that I’ve been trying to play on my desktop, not even platinum rated on protondb, launched on first attempt without any shenanigans using heroic launcher.
Nvidia, especially older models, are probably just simply not the way to go for gaming on linux.
That sucks. My GPU is only a couple years old though, it’s an RTX3070, and I tried using both open and closed source drivers to no avail. The one driver I finally found that worked, for whatever reason, was the v555 (still several versions back from current) server-version closed driver, but I still couldn’t play games.
I moved to Linux on my gaming rid (this last time around, as I’ve had it as dual boot on and off since the 90s, but this time I moved to it for good after confirming that gaming works way better in it than ever before) when I had a GTX1050 Ti, and I had no problems 1
Updated it to an RTX3050 and still no problems 2
Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front, plus I’m sticking with X and staying the hell away from Wayland on NVIDIA hardware since there are a lot more problems for NVIDIA hardware with Wayland than X.
Currently on driver 565.77
I reckon a lot of people with NVIDIA driver problems in Linux are trying to run it with Wayland rather than X or going for the Open Source drivers rather than the binary ones.
1 Actually I do have a single problem: when graphics mode starts, often all I get is a black screen and I have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again to solve it. I guess it’s something to do with the HDMI side of things.
2 I have exactly the same problem with the new graphics board.
Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front,
That wasn’t my experience at all with 22.04 LTS. It did have an nvidia driver already installed, but as previously mentioned It was old and I had to try probably 15 different drivers (each, again, requiring a hard system lock, reboot, and tinkering to attempt to use). I wasn’t running Wayland, when the choice came up I went and did some investigation and found out that Wayland wasn’t fully supported and I didn’t want to mess with that, I wanted reliable.
I’ve had similar issues with Arch Linux for years. The front panel outright refuses to work on Linux, even after modifying a whole bunch of things.
Your average person is more likely to get frustrated that stuff is broken/doesn’t work, and switch back rather than having to alter module configuration files and things like that to fix it.
That’s fine but people here are trying to convince everyone that Linux is a 1 for 1 replacement of Windows or MacOS and as someone who has a lot of experience with Linux and uses it (and enjoys using it) for work/coding/development, that’s simply a lie.
Yeah I couldn’t even do that at times. Firefox on both gnome and kde would just close tabs or windows randomly for no reason I could ever discover, plus the sound issue meant audio would just die in the middle of a video and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle back and forth between headset and speakers 5-6 times every couple minutes. I refuse to use Chrome, but I never got around to trying other browsers besides Firefox.
Try to play games, learn how to set up wine/proton, discover that none of your games work because you have an old GPU driver, discover that you can’t update it because any time you install a newer driver it hard-locks the system and reboots it in super low-res mode with no driver at all, also your sound dies randomly for no reason that you can discover and trawling reddit for 4 hours comes up with lots of solutions, half of which don’t work and the other half don’t even apply, get frustrated, disable dual-boot and go back to windows.
That’s how my last experience with linux (admittedly that was PopOS not Mint, but) went ~6 months ago. I’m currently building up my frustration-tolerance to give it another try at some point probably with main-line Ubuntu because at least then when I go hunting for solutions to obscure problems the suggested solutions are for that distro. I’m honestly not sure what the difference between Ubuntu and Mint is tho.
This was my experience with it too. Until I realized that the issue everything boils down to is having an old gfx. In particular an old nvidia gfx that has old, closed source driver compatibility only and can’t initialize vulkan. I’ve still stuck to it, it’s arch running on my desktop, because I’ll upgrade hw components eventually. 12 years with a gtx 670 has been quite enough.
I’ve installed fedora workstation 41 on a decommissioned work laptop last week, a 2021 model with an 5700U, and everything just works out of the box. Some obscure game that I’ve been trying to play on my desktop, not even platinum rated on protondb, launched on first attempt without any shenanigans using heroic launcher.
Nvidia, especially older models, are probably just simply not the way to go for gaming on linux.
That sucks. My GPU is only a couple years old though, it’s an RTX3070, and I tried using both open and closed source drivers to no avail. The one driver I finally found that worked, for whatever reason, was the v555 (still several versions back from current) server-version closed driver, but I still couldn’t play games.
I moved to Linux on my gaming rid (this last time around, as I’ve had it as dual boot on and off since the 90s, but this time I moved to it for good after confirming that gaming works way better in it than ever before) when I had a GTX1050 Ti, and I had no problems 1
Updated it to an RTX3050 and still no problems 2
Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front, plus I’m sticking with X and staying the hell away from Wayland on NVIDIA hardware since there are a lot more problems for NVIDIA hardware with Wayland than X.
Currently on driver 565.77
I reckon a lot of people with NVIDIA driver problems in Linux are trying to run it with Wayland rather than X or going for the Open Source drivers rather than the binary ones.
1 Actually I do have a single problem: when graphics mode starts, often all I get is a black screen and I have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again to solve it. I guess it’s something to do with the HDMI side of things.
2 I have exactly the same problem with the new graphics board.
That wasn’t my experience at all with 22.04 LTS. It did have an nvidia driver already installed, but as previously mentioned It was old and I had to try probably 15 different drivers (each, again, requiring a hard system lock, reboot, and tinkering to attempt to use). I wasn’t running Wayland, when the choice came up I went and did some investigation and found out that Wayland wasn’t fully supported and I didn’t want to mess with that, I wanted reliable.
I’ve had similar issues with Arch Linux for years. The front panel outright refuses to work on Linux, even after modifying a whole bunch of things.
Your average person is more likely to get frustrated that stuff is broken/doesn’t work, and switch back rather than having to alter module configuration files and things like that to fix it.
Dont use freaking Arch if your goal is to get everything to work out of the box?
Fair, though in my experience, Debian and Ubuntu weren’t that much better in that regard.
I just went with Arch, because some of the stuff I wanted to use was much newer on it.
Or, here’s a radical idea, don’t release your freaking distro if not everything works out of the box? :P
Dont buy a project car if you dont want a project. Some people like that shit, but its not for everyone.
That’s fine but people here are trying to convince everyone that Linux is a 1 for 1 replacement of Windows or MacOS and as someone who has a lot of experience with Linux and uses it (and enjoys using it) for work/coding/development, that’s simply a lie.
Yeah fair enough, but also don’t call it a car if it doesn’t drive.
Yeah OP is right if they are just going to surf the web.
Yeah I couldn’t even do that at times. Firefox on both gnome and kde would just close tabs or windows randomly for no reason I could ever discover, plus the sound issue meant audio would just die in the middle of a video and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle back and forth between headset and speakers 5-6 times every couple minutes. I refuse to use Chrome, but I never got around to trying other browsers besides Firefox.