Layman's escapades with Linux for personal use
tl;dr After 2 grueling days of mucking about I finally have KDE + Wayland + Nvidia working on Debian 13 (Trixie).
I started with Ubuntu 24. It just works, right? To its credit, it does. I didn't need to do anything to have it work out of the box. Nvidia was magically installed (even with secure boot enabled).
Gnome woes
But then Gnome would rename and re-encode images I dragged/dropped to "Dropped Image.png" from Firefox. Wouldn't even do that in Chromium. Can't tell if it's a bug, or "what's the use-case" scenario, but this behavior is a deal-breaker.
Not Kubuntu
Why not Kubuntu then? It doesn't do the same magic that Ubuntu does when it comes to Nvidia.
OpenSUSE almost
Latest and greatest whilst being supposedly stable. It took a while to get used to YaST and "patterns", but it was easy to install Nvidia drivers (zypper inr). But, naturally, there was an issue. I was able to boot, but into a very tiny resolution (on Wayland). After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that I was booting into my "integrated" GPU (on the CPU). Don't know why. Eventually I ran into prime-select boot nvidia and it worked. But then Steam (flatpak) wouldn't launch a game (loaded for a sec, then stopped). I was tired.
Debian & Nvidia driver woes
I always liked Debian. I use 12 at work for development and as a container base image. Seeing that 13 (Trixie) is on the horizon, I decided to give it a go for personal use. Surely the packages it ships with have been written in the last decade.
I followed their docs for Nvidia drivers. But I couldn't boot (no login screen) after installing. Apparently there's a bug with the driver and my GPU (3080) that Nvidia isn't going to fix. So I went and used Nvidia's installer instead to get the latest version. It worked without a hitch. The next kernel update will be interesting I imagine.
Final thoughts
Honestly, Linux feels like it's always a decade away for things to be stable enough to not require any tinkering for your average layman. I'm not the kind of person to muck with custom configs/etc.
I want things as vanilla as possible because I know it's a matter of when it breaks, not if.
Ubuntu feels the closest to the "it just works" experience IMO. I would've stuck with it if not for Gnome.
Try Fedora 42 next. It was very much an it-just-worked experience for me, although I don't have an nvidia GPU. I had similar success with Mint before that.
I tend to run either Fedora or Mint (Cinnamon version) most of the times these days because they seem to me to be the most practically-minded, low-trouble options that are least likely to send me down some rabbit hole trying to get something working, and I don’t feel a need to disable anything under them. I might try the Cinnamon spin of Fedora in place of Mint next time though because I like Fedora’s more up to date (but not cutting edge) packages.
Other distros can work fine too but have packages that are too old, suffer from various papercuts, or expect a level of tweaking/tinkering or manual administration that I don’t necessarily always having the patience for.
I heard good things about it and I did give it a try. But I'll be honest, I have a bias against it. It feels "corporate" to me, even though that's nonsense. To be fair, Nvidia installed without issues and Wayland worked. I think I had audio crackling with Bluetooth and a wireless controller, but I didn't explore beyond that.
That's a good thing in most cases. Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is the most stable consumer-oriented distro I've used as a result, Ubuntu aside. I'm surprised you didn't find Ubuntu to be more commercial than Fedora since Canonical is perpetually trying to find new ways to monetise Ubuntu, whereas Fedora is and always has been entirely free.
I've switched to Fedora KDE a year and a half ago after having run Xubuntu since about 2013. I've only found it "corporate" in the sense of being fairly vanilla (not unlike Debian, really). But that's a good thing from my perspective. I want my OS to be boring and unsurprising.
Ubuntu was the one that felt much more corporate to me, in the sense of inflicting their decisions (e.g., snaps) and making me feel like I'd be swimming against the current to try to have things more my way. Kind of a Microsoft/Apple/Google vibe in that sense.
The one downside was, yeah, Nvidia driver setup was a bit trickier at first.
This is relevant to Linux distros of course but seemingly also forgotten by the major commercial OSes. Why iteratively refine your way to perfection when you can put your engineering resources into glossy unneeded changes that look good on a PowerPoint slide? Windows in particular has been bad about this.
RedHat/Fedora are assertive about homegrown tech themselves, but there seems to be a difference in underlying philosophy that makes the things that RedHat/Fedora are pushing much more widely adopted. Most things Ubuntu tries to push are strongly rejected by the community, even the good bits (their proprietary driver manager thing for example is legitimately good and should spread beyond Ubuntu and derivatives like Mint and Pop).
That's a bit it a falsehood. It is written by RedHat. Which was acquired by IBM in 2019 but still operates semi independently. I am not going to deny that IBM left its mark on how RedHat operates. There is tyr whole restriction on sourcr code for redhat which ended for example.
But the notion that IBM wrote fedora and it is therefore feels corporate doesn't seem right to me. Even more so as in the OS itself there haven't been tangible shifts pointing in that direction.
Which might change as well, but that would be in the future not now.
Yeah, not denying that. I am just commenting on you being able to tell based on how Fedora works. Because that simply isn't the case (yet).
I'm 50/50 on recommending Fedora here...but only because @winterstillness noted wanting "as vanilla as possible".
While, yes, Fedora will have some pretty fresh drivers and fresh software in general...there is the issue of the additional repos that need to be added...because of Fedora's stance on not including non-free stuff by defauly, etc. Its not a tech issue, and more of a matter of principles. Is it the end of the world, to have a user add those repos after the installation? Absolutely not. In fact, i run Fedora (KDE spin) as my daily driver..so i'm speaking as a superfan of Fedora!
But, as a superfan, i'm not going to disagree with folks who might consider Fedora not-so-much-vanilla out of the box for some types of users.
Now, Linux Mint might be a better option from a "vanilla" perspective...maybe...of course, i caveat this recommendation with my own experience that i haven't used Mint in several years. I stopped using Mint years ago, because Fedora made better sense for me. However, my partner is about to start using Mint because it makes better sense for them. In my partner's case, they just want a vanilla-like linux experience so they can move away from windows 10.
I'm sure there are other vanilla-like distros beyond Linux Mint too.
I would recommend trying any of these distros via live USB/CD...and see how they feel, see how they work with the nividia card....and then take plunge. As long as all data is properly backed up, the beauty of linux is that you can nuke and pave it later, and simply try a different distro.
I'll clarify what I meant by my ambiguous use of "vanilla". I'm not a purist when it comes to OSS/free/etc. I don't think adding repos is "non-vanilla" provided they're part of the official/supported/documented way of doing things. To me, non-vanilla means I tinker with configs that aren't documented via "if you want this to work, then this is what you need to do" written out by the maintainers of said distribution. When troubleshooting issues there were so many "just install these packages, add this config, and run these commands" answers. My feeling is the moment you stray from "the golden path" is when you'll be stuck scratching your head when an update inevitably breaks your configs.
For example, Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia. Sure, this is very unfriendly to a non-technical person, but I trust this is absolutely necessary for things to work.
Thanks for that clarification! :-)
Now thinking on it, and plus what you clarified, i defer to suggestions made by @lou here: https://tildes.net/~comp/1of9/laymans_escapades_with_linux_for_personal_use#comment-frpw
You also mentioned usage of Debian...and i always felt like Debian is a best fit for folks who either like to tinker, or who are perfectly happy with minimalism...this is of course only my opinion.
I know you hesitated about popOS because its Gnome...but similar to Ubuntu, i think System76 (the maintainers of popOS) adjust their Gnome different enough from "Regular" Gnome, and in a way that (in my opinion) makes Gnome far more palatable...i say that having a heavy bias in favor of KDE Plasma and feeling that "regular" Gnome is too constraining. But, again the choice of a DE is such a specific and/or personal choice. I only highlight popOs in case that their flavor of Gnome is to your liking.
Back to the suggestions, i like what @lou noted...maybe give some of those distros a try? Whichever distro you end up choosing, would be great to read about your update - including why you chose it! :-) Thanks!
I'll happily stick with Debian 13 until something happens forcing me off. My biggest take away is I should look at AMD next time I'm shopping for a GPU (~2-3 years' time) and avoid ~80% of the problems I've run into. I've been conditioned by Windows to assume hardware will just werk.
I'm very curious about what the Pop OS folks cook up.
Cool! :thumbsup:
Yeah, i have heard the same...and/or at any rate the nvidia driver support while leagues better than it has ever been, still remains an issue, while AMD has had and continues to have strong support for linux. I'm sure you know of course that Windows gets the support they need from nvidia and other vendors (for many non-tech reasons), and hence it manifests as hardware just working. :-)
Yeah, me too! As i noted in my previous comments, i'm very much a Fedora fan, plus i tend to heavily favor KDE....But with the work that System 76 did for Cosmic DE, its really impressive! I took it for a spin (via live usb), and i could legit see a future where the KDE usage for me/my scenarios becomes less...and i could in the future have a DE choice of 50/50 between KDE and Cosmic...not that i'm anyone important, but i was that impressed with cosmic that i'm quite beginning to get swayed! :-) I hope they keep improving it as it gets closer and closer to formal launch (out of alpha, beta versions).
I don't think you fit the definition of a "layman" here :P
Anyway, these days I don't want anything fancy from a Linux install. In my experience the Desktop Environment is often more important than the distro. But some distros are better with some Desktop Environments. I prefer boring DEs. I used XFCE for a long time. My very weak laptop is running Lubuntu (LXQT), which is light and super fast. My not as weak laptop is running MX LInux (XFCE). It is totally fine. My desktop is running Mint in dual boot (Cinnamon). They are all totally fine. Cinnamon doesn't let me set how many lines the scroll wheel on my mouse moves, which is weird for a flagship DE. EDIT: You can do it through the terminal because of course you can, but that should be available in the UI. Other than that it is perfectly fine. Using Mint I don't have to go out of my way to avoid Snaps, which is nice.
Boring is good.
I wouldn't recommend Debian if all you want is for everything to work out of the box so you can do your thing. But MX Linux is basically Debian for the masses. It is, again, perfectly fine. So are Ubuntu and Linux Mint. popOS is often recommended, I guess it is a good distro but I never used it myself.
In my experience Fedora is "easy but not really", it gives me a vibe that it is not really on the same level of the others I mentioned. It is like "easy for IT people", which I am not.
Mint, Ubuntu, MX and popOS are all consumer-oriented distros that are supposed to work out of the box without technical knowledge. MX Linux repos do require manual intervention sometimes, often on a fresh install I'll have to copy and paste some commands into the terminal to fix the repos.
True, I'm more technical oriented and the level of dedication to figuring things out is because of that. At the time I didn't know what someone meant by "just troubleshoot with journalctl". This was a lot of answers, and technically they aren't wrong. But the expectation is for you to already know how to do it, or go to the docs and read+learn how to do it. No one responded with a ELI5 "go to the tty on the stuck boot screen by pressing alt+f1/f2/f3, sign in using your credentials, run journalctl as sudo and make sure you pass these params to filter to error so you're not sifting 1,000 lines of irrelevant info". This is how I found the line that had some Nvidia error which I had to research and linked to some Nvidia driver bug.
I'm in the same boat of "nothing fancy". I just want to continue with my personal life without having to hop distros every couple of months. I don't care about the latest versions of things. I just want my hardware to work.
All that said, with Linux you must technically oriented and expect to read and learn pieces of a greater puzzle to figure out a problem with no expectation there's a solution.
Although the ones I recommend to you in the last paragraph are really not supposed to require you to know anything, it is true that occassionaly you many need to enter commands into a terminal. I do believe that the likelyhood of that happening is lower with those (MX Linux is great but it may be a bit of an exception here...). That said, it is unlikely that will have to learn much, as usually you will find a solution that you will simply copy and paste. Preferably from a reputable source.
Debian is not a great choice for you because there is an expectation that you'll be a little more technical, yes.
All my suggestions would be perfectly fine, but popOS is supposed to be better in regards to NVIDIA graphics. I never used it myself, but that's what people say.
Ubuntu has several flavors you can choose besides GNOME or KDE. But there's nothing wrong with KDE (Kubuntu). It's a great DE.
To you I would personally suggest either Mint (because it has no Snaps) or popOS (it does ship with GNOME though, which you don't like). Mint's flagship DE is Cinnamon, so get that one unless you have a weak machine. These are safe distros.
I remember a very long time ago looking at Pop OPS and seeing a GUI akin to one that Ubuntu provides for "firmware" drivers which lets you install Nvidia drivers. I'm sure it's as user-friendly. The thing that turns me off is it's based on Gnome. Even though they're rolling with their own variant, I'm sure it suffers from the same issues.
I'll stick on Debian 13 for as long as it doesn't commit sudoku after updating with how I installed Nvidia drivers. So far the only annoying bug I discovered is needing to toggle alt+f1/f2/f3 after turning the monitor off/on.
If you solved your issue Debian should keep working fine, yes. Just know that you're using a bit of an "advanced users" distro so its easy-of-use is not reflective of the Linux experience as a whole.
Hah, I totally missed that - that's hilarious.
Try Bluefin, or Aurora (what I use), it's KDE cousin. Based on Fedora, preconfigured with Nvidia drivers, updates automatically daily/weekly depending on version, and should work OOTB. It's a Fedora Atomic image, so you'll need to use brew (included), flatpak, or distrobox, but it's what I switched to April 2024 and I'm not looking back.
It's a different way of doing things but if you don't have to deal with the core OS you're more free to focus on everything else.
Yeah, I will agree that Linux still can be frustrating for anyone that isn't tech-inclined to some extent. There are situations where hardware + Linux will "just work" but it sometimes seems it's one of those luck-of-the-draw situations. When it just works, it just works. When it doesn't, well, there might be a "simple" solution, but it's not so simple if you're not a techie.
It can be an awesome experience ONCE you get everything set up the way you need it, but the road to get there can be bumpy.
I think we've come a long way (and Proton and handhelds and such in the gaming sector are helping push it more too) but I still don't think we're anywhere near where everyday users will consistently have a good time switching to Linux. I do think once it's set up, it can work great for someone. So in an instance, like, where you're a techie but setting up a PC for a family member, Linux can be great, depending on their needs. I do think that the technical hurdles aren't super huge- at least for people that are inclined to mess with tech, even if they don't have all the knowledge, but for the normal user that just wants their Microsoft Word and email and browsing to work and just to use the OS that came with their laptop, I think trying to get them on Linux (without becoming their tech support) is a hard sell. They aren't gaining anything in the process that they actually care about (even if its stuff we deeply care about)
That's why I'll never be a "just use Linux" type of advice-giver. I personally have switched all of my PCs and systems (except my Mac) to Linux and I'll never go back, but I also will never recommend it for everyone as some kind of panacea
Like if I look at my system I could say "well I'm running Kubuntu with my RTX 4070 just fine!"... but that would be disingenuous, because I've made tons of modifications to my system, and graphics driver and config changes and whatnot over the years to solve any problems I had, to get it to today's "leave it alone and it works" state, and I'm a very tech-inclined person. I don't even run KDE anymore (I installed Cinnamon) and because of that I'm scared to even update to a new version of the OS because I know things will break! I'm probably jumping ship eventually to MX Linux + XFCE, but even then, setting my system back up from scratch is such a big task I don't want to do it
I think it’s possible to create a “no fuss”, non-techy-friendly Linux experience, but it’d require a good deal of consideration at each step… you’d need to purpose-select the hardware for best results and then choose a Linux distro that’s very unlikely to break on its own and is resilient to user poking (something immutable but friendly like Fedora Silverblue seems like a good bet). Everything works well out of the box this way and will probably continue to for years to come.
Where problems start creeping in is when you try to toss a random distro on whatever probably not fully Linux friendly hardware the user happens to have. Even stuff that at first glance appears to work can cause problems (weird network and audio chipsets and Nvidia are notorious here) and a lot of distros don’t have particularly good hygiene when it comes to keeping existing installs in good order through updates.
Even then it’s highly dependent on the user’s needs, though. If they can live with web apps and a handful of flatpaks they’ll probably be fine but things start getting sticky as soon as things like WINE enter the picture.
Yeah, and tbh, the "consideration at each step" is typically itself not a non-techie-friendly process, so even then, creating the no fuss experience involves someone with knowledge helping the person out, or that person learning a number of things themselves (either from a vendor or on their own, etc). I just feel like, even all of the actual experience of using it aside, the hurdles to even getting the right hardware/etc (while technically "easy" from our perspective or whatnot) are just going to be too bothersome for most people, specifically unless they're wanting to change to Linux and seeking out the information
And while I want more people to take a far more informed and considered approach to computing, and buying and using products in general, I understand that reality is often far different. I truly hope we can lower these barriers over time and so on, but has been and will continue to be a long process
Absolutely, we’re in agreement. It’s a major hurdle for mass adoption and at odds with with the notion that Linux is super easy/accessible and could become more dominant if “just” more people installed it.
In reality it’s going to take major investments by big players in the PC space that treat Linux as their flagship OS. Think less tiny boutique PC makers and Clevo rebadgers like system76 and more like Valve and its Steam Deck.
I don't get it. Every time I read this kind of user report, the issue seems to be directly related to Nvidia, and every time people blame Linux. Nvidia is infamous for not caring about Linux, yet nobody seems to think that their attitude is related to their products sucking on Linux.
This kind of ties in with the tendency of computer enthusiasts (as well as the larger heavier-internet-using public) to seek out and buy the “best” of any given category regardless of how much they actually need that. AMD doesn’t make high-end GPUs any more and even when they did, generally trailed behind Nvidia in raw performance and so tend to get sidelined by most people buying GPUs for gaming. In the real world the difference isn’t all that great… I think overall I’ve had as good or better experience with my Radeon 6900XT than I have with my RTX 3080Ti, even under Windows.
With laptops a big factor is that several manufacturers just don’t offer AMD GPU variants of their gaming/workstation models, so there’s far fewer AMD GPU laptops out there to buy even if people were interested.
So as a result, you’ve got a huge percentage of the technically-inclined who could make a switch to Linux work running Nvidia GPUs, and given the kind of investments those are these days they’re more inclined to stick with Windows than buy an expensive new GPU in order to make Linux run more smoothly.
I think you meant GPU in the location you said CPU. It threw me for a second when I started wondering what was wrong with Ryzen.
Ahh yes, nice catch. Fixed.
I didn't come into this thinking whether my hardware is supported. We can thank Windows for this mindset; plug and play.
I can definitely relate. I recently made the switch from W11 to Ubuntu and it was a weekend journey to be sure. I started off installing minimal Debian. I figured I would pick components and set things up from scratch. I installed KDE, booted into the desktop environment and things seemed to be working well, but I quickly discovered Debian doesn't have drivers that work with my Nvidia GPU. So I went down the rabbit hole of installing the drivers manually. After troubleshooting a bunch of issues, things were finally working, but benchmark performance was terrible and I couldn't figure out why.
So, I started over with installing Kubuntu instead. This worked fine and things were going well. I had to do some custom config to get the Nvidia drivers working, but at least this time benchmarks were good! However, I would still get occasional weird glitches with the desktop environment (see through windows, icons glitching out on the taskbar, etc). It was annoying enough, that I went back to the drawing board. I finally decided to install regular old Ubuntu and this was the keeper for me. I've found for my use and GPU, Gnome seems to be a lot more stable compared to KDE, but this could be specific to my driver + GPU combination.
I have to agree that Linux still feels frustrating to set up for the layman. Its close to being great, but gets bogged down by issues with display drivers, dealing with package managers. Still, better than it used to be, but definitely not an out-of-the-box experience in my opinion.
Honestly, most of that is just the Nvidea BS. I've been using PopOS with an AMD card and it has been kind of a "just works" experience. The biggest issues have been installing random applications that aren't available through apt or the pop-shop.
Your experience is very similar to mine. I really wanted to stick with Ubuntu because of how easy it was. But the drag/drop issue is a complete deal-breaker. I'm surprised it hasn't been brought up by anyone. I must be the only person to drag/drop images when browsing the web. Or it's a problem specific to my hardware/software.
Give Zorin a spin. While I can't speak to NVIDIA issues, as far as software goes so far it has been completely unfutzed.