Asklemmy

It's always something that doesn't work and I can't get working. Right now (I dual boot) it's my 4G modern in my laptop that I don't seem to understand how to activate the GPS receiver in. Even if I got it to work I wouldn't know since I have no idea on how GPS is supposed to work on Ubuntu...

Because in my experience Linux hasn’t been consistently reliable in the long term.

My computer is a tool. I need it to just work, not cause me work. I’ve tried many distros and sooner or later something random stopped working, causing me to stop what I was doing and troubleshoot the problem.

Like the time I installed Mint on my desktop and my GPU fan ran full throttle all the time. Or that time when OpenVPN stopped working from one boot up to the next. Or those times when a fresh install hung up and failed fully boot.

Contrast that with the thousands? tens of thousands? of days when Windows just started without incident, got out of my way and let me work or game or whatever.

Is Windows bloated and slow? Yes. Is it constantly spying on me? Yes. Is it annoying in dozens of little ways that Linux isn’t? Yes. But it is consistently reliable and Linux isn’t.

I’m not a Windows fan boy, and I’d love to be able to use a linux desktop on the reg but every time I forget my previous disappointment long enough to try again, I am once again disappointed.

One thing has been working well for me. I have a Raspberry Pi with Raspian running Pi Hole, MiniDLNA and a couple of other things. It’s been as solid and reliable as I could ask.

Screen size problems. My PC is setup as gaming/HTPC for the living room.

Constantly having to fight with it reverting from the 1080 I set, to native 4k. Pretty jarring when you’re popping out of a game and expecting a different res.

Other than that my daughter plays Minecraft with her friends and needed windows for that because I’m not purchasing the game a third time.

My laptop's trackpad doesn't work in linux and I keep losing my mouse.

These are my list of changes. I still don't use it full-time but I use it outside working hours. I use Ubuntu 23.04 and I dual boot with windows 11:

Install gnome extensions and “dash to panel”

Install Chrome from google site (.deb package)

Same for Steam

Install mangohud sudo apt install mangohud Source: https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud#debian-ubuntu

Disable Intel Bluetooth device so the realtek one is the only one. (Now there is a new option to also disable Intel Wifi adapter in the same word~ document).

Change default display for “Lockscreen”

Change the local time ( timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock enabled RTC in local time.

For Ryujinx I added this “vm.max_map_count=524288” to /etc/sysctl.conf because it was saying it fixes a crash with TOTK

Disk Performance (System hanging with encryption on the SSD): Disabled the ‘no-read-workqueue" and "no-write-workqueue" sudo gedit /etc/crypttab Added "discard" "no-read-workqueue" and "no-write-workqueue" at the end of the string.Looks like this: dm_crypt-0 UUID=4170cddc-59a8-4f4e-afdb-125f70004fef none luks,discard,no-read-workqueue,no-write-workqueue sudo update-initramfs -u -k all sudo reboot

Enable OC en AMD card (Source: https://linuxgamingcentral.com/posts/increase-power-on-amd-gpus/) sudo gedit /etc/default/grub Somewhere in that file should be a GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line, followed by a pair of quotation marks. In my case it looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" We add amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff at the end. Example: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff" Sudo update-grub

Install codec bluetooth AAC for Pixel Buds (codec is lighter than SBC-XQ)

Be sure that bluetooth dongle MPOW is on USB2 and no USB3 which causes interferences (at least in Linux I can suffer it, but not in Windows).

Do the tutorial to make BT devices to work with “Dual Boot” between Ubuntu and W11 without needing to re-pair them everytime (for dualsense and pixelbuds).

Enable AMD ROCM (used to run apps like SDXL).

Gaming

Got a long one. I've gone back and forth a few times (I've landed on a dual-boot Windows 10 and Arch setup, maining Arch) (btw) and my biggest takeaway is this:

Mainstream Linux distros, like Mint, do have admittedly very polished basic experiences. The problem is, though, is that it breaks down as soon as you introduce it to unique use-cases or hardware features.

Linux, specifically stable distros like Mint, are already ready for mainstream use for people who use it for basic stuff like email, web browsing, desktop social media like Facebook, and so on. It's also very usable for gaming, as we saw with Steam Deck, but still has issues primarily with adoption.

But if you have for example, a 2-in-1 laptop or a VR setup, things break down very quick. I had to configure my 2-in-1 manually and not everything works still, and VR is a joke if you don't have a Vive or Index, and even that's iffy. SteamVR is still extremely buggy and missing features.

Linux is, by design, configurable and open. This is both its greatest strength and weakness, because it allows users to set up their systems how they want, but only if they know how to. A truly "user-friendly" distro is simply not possible if you retain the configurability, which Valve knows, and is why SteamOS is locked down the way it is. This model is growing in popularity but it's not quite here yet.

At the end of the day, I still use it despite these shortcomings because I feel it's important. I should be able to look at the code and know what my machine is doing, and trust that it respects my rights and freedoms. This is why Linux, and maybe BSD, have to win. But for now, I still have a drive with Windows 10 because it's just simply not a full experience yet, and that's okay. For now