Chromium blacklists Nouveau

As a Linux user for over 15 years, this is one of the main reasons I am replacing Linux on my next machine, probably with Windows (sigh). Maybe it's just me getting old, but I'm done screwing around with computers to get them to do what they are supposed to do. It's frustrating and embarrassing.

It's not just that some drivers or hardware have obvious problems. It's virtually impossible to get a system where all of the components have vendor-supported open-source drivers, or, when they exist, that a distro supports them out of the box. Many components' drivers only officially support two operating systems. If they don't support your operating system (Linux), then when you have a problem, you're SOL. It's like buying a car that when the transmission blows, you need to hire a mechanical engineer to reverse-engineer it. Better start taking the bus to work, because this could take a while.

Some laptops (about 9 product lines from 3 vendors) make official Linux distro releases available. So you're stuck with a small selection of machines and basically only one distro. Even if that is ok with you, the drivers still won't all be vendor-supported open-source. And on top of that, Linux may have wacky, constantly changing ways of handling the hardware, like hybrid GPU support, or low power mode for Intel wifi chips. Your machine will always be an awkward stepchild.

A limited hardware selection isn't good. Laptops are hard to design. There are always design and procurement tradeoffs, and the less tradeoffs they make, the more expensive it gets. So to get a good experience on a good machine, you need to buy the most expensive one. At that point you might as well buy a Mac.

Finally, there's actual user experience. I've used several distros and environments the past few years, and they all had pitiful user experiences on my laptops. CPU scaling on battery/AC doesn't work out of the box, most of my media keys don't work, hybrid GPU takes a computer science degree to get working properly (with the right combination of drivers and software), echoing the wrong value to a /sys/ entry that had no kernel documentation permanently fixed the cpu fan at top speed, and the latest vanilla kernels with an old kernel config simply won't boot.

I know this isn't everyone's experience, but the only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby.

Not sure if this was just a typo and you meant "laptop", but I imagine most of the problems you're describing could be avoided on a self-built desktop, because you can choose all the hardware for compatibility.

I haven't used Linux seriously in years, but this is how I'm able to make Hackintosh work without constant fiddling, which all logic dictates should be more difficult than Linux.

I hope that this puts pressure on both Nvidia and Ubuntu to have a better default.