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I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

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Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#151

Post by veidr »

steve1977 wrote: post #150
veidr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month. So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still…

> macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random macOS maybe as long as you're only using Apple hardware. As soon as you use 3rd party peripherals, you're in for very interesting bugs that are not getting confirmed by Apple and suddenly disappear again with a macOS update (if you're lucky).

yeah — i have my kids on Macs, bc I'm lazy, but just the ones with only two USB ports and nothing else — otherwise never-ending, unresolvable nightmare unless it's just some Apple thing you're plugging in

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#152

Post by riomccloud »

My situation is somewhat similar. I always try to migrate from Windows 10 to Linux, but (probably) thanks to my NVIDIA card (GTX 1050) I experience huge mouse cursor and DE animation lags, specially with KDE and Wayland. In Linux Mint this issue happens less, but still does, and that bothers me.

On the other hand, Debian Xfce on my old Acer laptop with a i3-370M runs superb - Windows feels like a downgrade there.

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#153

Post by veidr »

mrb wrote: post #149
veidr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month. So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still…

TBH your problem sounds like a hardware issue. Maybe the PC's new location is warmer due to a more enclosed space, triggering more unrecoverable hardware faults.

I agree it sounds like that, but (having that same thought) I kept the temp in the living room 20℃ or less for a week but nah

My best guess at this point is the 2025 LG TVs have some different HDMI ARC something something compared to the 2019 it was plugged into before.

But also my point is that there's no way a human with 3 kids and job could ever know... it either starts working or I get a PlayStation or a different PC or whatever.

Or just tell my kids, "Hey, Death Stranding works on your Mac now, so shut the fuck up until you finish that whole game." ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#154

Post by meltyness »

firebot wrote: post #118

I think the web page delayed loading is often server-side these days trying to detect bots. Especially with a dynamic IP.... You'll generally be fine after that first detection flags you as human. Also this seems to affect firefox moreso than some other browsers, but that's subjective. Also, if you're familiar with sysinternals suite for Windows there's a Linux equivalent to all the tools with nice GUIs. So you shoul…

I would speculate myself instead the more likely thing is related to:

- dns cache configuration

- wlan power saving which is kind of aggressive since Linux has had some power management issues

It's really why I go for a minimal distro, debian with xfce. There's not many components, they're not "tuned", and I can just kinda research any issues myself and find what works. Usually there's some pretty big gaps (missing a whole component, wildly malfunctioning, high resource utilization) and then it's easy to figure out. There's not much code, or really hard scripts to understand. Just maybe enable debug on the service. Learn where the developers put diagnostics (about:support is a godsend). You get to architect your hardware's success and get a rock-solid system. But yeah, if it's weird it might be weird for a while, haha.

For my setup I think the last few lessons were like:

- use gamescope for X11 Wine/Proton (huge.)

- Firefox profile reset to fix hardware decoding (followed some good guides and some bad guides)

- to make changes use the same git tag as your distro so the deps are easily in-reach.

My favorite new discovery for debian in particular is their extensive functional docs. https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/

absolutely adore this.

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#155

Post by nickjj »

I moved to Linux from Windows 6 months ago.

Here are some minor things that always went sour on Windows:

    Webcam's settings would always get reset semi-randomly
    The date from the clock would frequently disappear
    Mic's volume would often get lowered
Other than that, with Windows 10 Pro it was super solid on 12 year old hardware. Never crashed, all games I could play were fine and I did heavy Docker based development, highly leveraging WSL 2. Also recorded tons of videos (screencasts with a webcam).

Switched to native Linux. Had a rough start but it improved after going down a few rabbit holes.

My GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) didn't play nice with Wayland. The official NVIDIA drivers have big problems allocating system memory when GPU memory is filled causing apps to crash constantly[0]. Games were lagging and stuttering. My whole machine would pause for 5-10 seconds and then unpause, a few times a day.

Ended up having to modify a udev setting on my SSD to enable max_performance for its power management and the machine never paused again.

Switched to an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU and all of the GPU related problems went away, and the games I played stopped stuttering and lagging.

Now it's quite stable but there's still 3 problems. I've gone down pretty deep rabbit holes for each one but didn't resolve them.

If I'm downloading a file with Firefox and I start a Docker container that involves configuring a Docker network, my file download will get interrupted. Not 100% of the time but pretty close to it. I tried a million settings individually and nothing has stopped this behavior.

If pretty heavy I/O or network traffic is happening while recording a video with OBS, sometimes my webcam's audio will get desync'd from the the video, making my lips move a half second after the video happens. Tried a ton of different PipeWire settings here, couldn't find out a resolution.

If I'm on a video call in a browser with Firefox (Google Meet, Zoom, Discord, etc.), usually after about 45-60 minutes folks will say my audio is getting really choppy and I have to reload the browser for it to get fixed. I tried a ton of things other than switching browsers and it made no effect.

Nothing in the journalctl logs for any of the above 3 issues are present.

I'm not posting this expecting someone to fix it, but I can relate with the OP in that Windows "just works".

I don't mind going down these rabbit holes if I find a resolution and when it's working, it's a much better environment for me than Windows without question.

I'm not switching back to Windows but there is certainly an expectation that there could be issues. This is the sole reason why I wouldn't recommend Linux to all of my technical friends, unless they are die hard into tech and fully understand what they're getting into.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi...

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#156

Post by oreally »

cryo32 wrote: post #4

Yeah same but I'm out of options. I don't like Linux on the desktop but I like Windows' privacy stance and use-hostile behaviour less. My Mac isn't much better. What I really hate is being forced into this corner. Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bl…

Get Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT to tide you over. It's intended for stable systems and removes a lot of the bloat.

https://massgrave.dev/faq

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#158

Post by dxxvi »

So, the complaint is that Linux (Fedora + KDE Plasma) is unstable after a week of usage and daily update? I'm not sure about Fedora as I'm using Arch (also with KDE Plasma on wayland). Everything is very stable for me. I `paru -Syu` whenever I remember or when VS Code shows at the lower corner that there's a new version.

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#159

Post by isityettime »

hnarn wrote: post #105

Maybe if the ”Linux-curious” would stop using distros like Omarchy and other riced up Arch derivatives and instead try something like vanilla Debian or Fedora, they could spend more time using Linux and less time whining about how unstable ”Linux” is because you don’t understand what a rolling distro is.

It's not about rolling release vs. stable release. It's about Arch's "KISS" design focusing on simplicity for implementers rather than for users, which results in brittle, under-engineered tools. NixOS unstable, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Debian Sid are all more stable than Arch.

It's a cult of false simplicity (like most cults of simplicity).

Re: I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

#160

Post by panflute »

Bizarre PoV from my perspective. The failure of modern computing is Apple UI drivel and Ubuntu is particularly bad since it has that silly settings UI. May LLMs free us of Jobs and the need to know where to click and how to describe our computing experience like a mall we are lost in.
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