This isn’t really meant to be a hate post or “linux sucks” kind of thing, in fact I like Linux (EndeavourOS being my distro of choice). This post is more about the little things that nobody really talks about when comparing OS’s, but then you face them and they can be a dealbreaker or a pain in the neck.

This weekend I decided to try running CachyOS in my gaming desktop. For quick context, my desktop is dedicated to gaming, everything else I do on my laptop. The desktop is plugged to a 1080p 60hz monitor and a 4k 120hz TV (hz relevant for later), uses sunshine for streaming, and also Virtual Desktop for my meta quest.

So, I grab the USB and plug it into the PC. Turn it on and here comes the first issue: the background image appears and nothing else.

Well, my first suspicion due to a similar issue I had with ubuntu a decade ago, must be the Nvidia GPU causing issues. Without investigating further, I restarted the PC and used the legacy mode. The resolution was extremely low in my monitor, but it was manageable. Installed the thing and restarted.

Once the PC is back on, the login screen appears. I input the pass, enter and…. Exact same issue. Background image, no UI whatsoever.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time here, investigating the error. Checking the drivers, etc.

But long story short: the actual problem was that my monitor was the second screen, the TV was the primary. The desktop was outputting to both screens. The UI was on the TV.

I curse myself for not remembering that this may have been it, but in my defense:
1- the terminal commands that appear when turning on the OS appeared in my monitor
2- the legacy mode worked on my monitor
3- on windows, the OS is smart enough to figure out which screen is turned on, so I was used to it automatically outputting to the correct screen

Well, once I fixed that, here came the second (small) issue:
Scaling is broken.

Windows used to have this problem but nowadays, when you change screen Windows does a good job scaling things, despite some issues with some apps. At the very least, you won’t get blurry windows.

On KDE… Yeah. Blurry all around. I don’t have a habit of swapping screens mid session, so I could live with it.

Then came the third issue:
KDE is limited by the lower highest possible framerate in both screens. Meaning, on my TV, I was stuck with the 60hz because of my monitor

From what I found out, this is not exclusive to KDE and seems to be a problem with Nvidia. Regardless, for me it was a dealbreaker. In my case, Windows can use the respective framerate of each screen, while Linux can’t.

As I said, this is where I threw the towel and went back to windows. Which is really a pity because I really don’t like where Windows 11 is going, but it’s something I can live with as long it doesn’t get in the way between me and gaming.

Meanwhile Linux, because of these little things, introduced more issues than rewards for my use case, thus why I can’t jump to it on my desktop.

Following this guide (linuxtechi) and got Mint Cinnamon 22.2 (Zara) - yes the iso is verified, created bootable USB with Etcher, and after the screen where I input user details and password, well along the install process, got a fatal error (screenshot) :
Unable to install GRUB in /dev/sda
Executing 'grub-install/dev/sda' failed
This is a fatal error
Here is a screenshot of the GParted, fdisk, df, lsblk and what re-running the install now looks like.

Restarting (after pulling out USB) , instead of going to Windows 10, goes to a black screen that says

This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a bootable floppy and press any key to try again ...
Turn it off, back on with USB, at least I can still boot from there into USB-space mint for now.

I'm guessing this has something to do with some peculiar hardware/BIOS settings than the fault of Mint. Worth mentioning that this is a refurbished 2013 HP box (order excerpt) , with a windows 10 digital key license, and that upon every fresh boot up (first time ever to now) it shows a black-background screen that says

The preboot authentication application cannot be found.
Press any key to attempt boot without authenticating.
so it's very possible something is bork'd from the get go or else it has some very unorthodox settings to begin with.

Can confirm running Mint off the USB is fine. The screencaps are sent from Firefox within, and I'm super happy with how clean everything is. Just not sure what to do now. If it's complicated, I can try sending the box back for refund and try again with another brand new box. But now I'm shy about trying dual boot on my regular desktop.

Questions after looking around for help:

1. am I booting from UEFI or Legacy? I don't know -- how do I check ?
2. Fatal error installation hard stop: is there a way to access a log of what happened ?
3. How do I boot back into Windows 10 for now ? use GParted to delete all the "new" partitions and try booting again?

Edit: gave up . It's now a Mint box. Goodbye Windows you can kiss my dust

Background: I started daily driving Linux (specifically Mint) several months ago and for the most part it's been great. Some weird hiccups occasionally but nothing I can't handle/deal with. When doing my research to set the system up for the first time, I decided to go with 30GB for the / partition and ~220GB for the /home partition (the other half of the drive is for Windows 11 and the various essential tiny partitions). For a while this seemed to be fine, but lately I've been starting to get warnings when performing software updates via the Update Manager that the / partition is running out of space. I think it peaked at maybe 90-95% full a few weeks ago, at which point I started doing some research and cleaning up a bit (apt autoremove, deleting old logs and kernels, etc). I was able to claw back ~4GB and kick the can down the road, but now the warnings have returned and I'd like to handle this properly. I'm working from the assumption that I simply made the / partition too small and intend to double it by giving it some of the Windows space.

My question: How do I know if this is expected or if I've been doing something wrong? Is 30GB indeed too small on modern Mint, or should that have been enough? I know it partially depends on what all I actually do with the computer, but I really don't have very many applications installed (aside from defaults of course) and only four of them are Flatpaks, which I read tend to be larger. If it helps, the Disk Usage Analyzer reports that within /, /usr is taking up 13.2GB (55%), /var accounts for 9.1GB (38%), /opt is 1GB (4%), and everything else is <1% each.

Thanks in advance!

Pretty much what the title says - I'm building out a smallish compute cluster and hoping to set up some centralised storage that won't be a bottleneck, but I'm very much not a networking specialist. Most of the load will be random reads from compute nodes pulling in the bits of various datasets they need to work on.

Is it plausible to throw a 100GbE ConnectX-5 card and 256GB RAM into a consumer AM5 machine, format everything in ZFS, and set up a network share with KSMBD? My understanding is that I want to ensure everything's using mirroring rather than worrying about RAIDZ parity if I'm optimising for speed, which is fine, and I know that I'll only get full throughput as far as things can be cached in RAM - but is it reasonable to expect ZFS ARC to do that caching for me? Dare I hope that the SMB driver will just work if I drop it in there between the filesystem and the NIC? Or have I crossed the line into enterprisey-enough requirements that it's going to be an uphill battle to get this working anywhere near line speed?

How is Linux these days for everyday desktop use? I'm looking to reformat soon and I'm kind of sick of all the junk the comes alone with Windows.

I've used Linux briefly, back in the early 2000's but..not at all since really. I'm also learning web dev so I thought it could be fun to use to get used to it.

Do you use it for everyday use?

If your unfamiliar with Linux, how difficult is it to get things "done" on it?

Do most modern apps work these days?

As someone that's been using Windows for most of their life, do you think it's difficult to pick up and get running?

Do games work?

Edit I'm going to test out mint tonight on a thumb drive, thanks everyone!

So I am attempting to swap phones, but because I am trying to use a pixel 9 xl and it was not previously on my network, I have to wait 40 days to unlock it so I can install GrapheneOS.
I saw on Monday that suddenly there were a lot of photos dated from last Sunday on the phone's default "Photo" app. I have been keeping things to a minimum: I haven't logged into anything Google, and I've only installed F-Droid apps. Also, I had some issues with my desktop and did a clean reinstall 2 weeks ago.

But still disturbingly, my ENTIRE ~/Picture directory (and subdirectories) from my PC were loaded onto my phone.

Now, I'd like to clarify, I do have a few Google accounts, but I have them logged into my desktop with containers on Firefox (particularly, I use one for a current hobby type situation that I have to use, and the other is a 20+ account that I've moved away from, but I still want to monitor).

I want to find out why anything from my PC ended up on this somewhat secluded phone. I have not attached it via USB, and while I have been attempting to limit my connections, I do need to access some of my rl/PC stuff on the phone. But I haven't logged into a google account on it, yet, all my photos showed up on it. I have not plugged it into the computer since I tried putting GrapheneOS on it, which failed due to it not being unlocked (PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG HERE, BECAUSE I STILL HAVE TO WAIT 2 WEEKS!), yet all these pictures that I would have never expected ended up on this phone.

And I just was looking around my ~/ directory, and I saw a directory titled .nuget... I checked pacman (I'm on Arch, so that's my package manager), and it's not installed, but I deleted it because it had a lot of sketch files that ... okay, so I deleted the directory and honestly I don't have it anymore to state what exactly was in it. But I'm really tired and it triggered issues, and I looked and I see that nuget is not installed... so okay, I'm just gonna end this here because I do need to go to bed.

But, would anyone be able to provide any assistance/advice/suggestions on how the heck my phone magically obtained my Linux desktop Picture files?

So I bought my SP3 in '17 as an old-ass student attempting to graduate. It was amazing as I was able to disable most cloudy things (nothing like today with 365 and the general cloud storage), but still use it as a laptop, and finish up my degree. Since then, I've swapped to Linux and wanted to do it too (did it briefly with Ubuntu, but it was still pretty rudimentary back around '19... no touch screen, not even bloaty, was a bit too small of a UI -- can't remember which DM I used, though I know it wasn't xfce which I prefer when I use a DM, though I use i3 on my desktop).
That being said, it seems like there are great options for the Surfaces now, but for newer options. So I wanted to ping y'all and see... have you used Linux on any Surface, and preferably, would like to know for the older version.

I hear Manjaro has gotten a decent option, as I know they have the PinePhone (which I own one but... I haven't had time to mess around with, sadly). I'm not really looking for the touch screen but as it seems the blutooth is dying on the Surface (possibly unrelated or due to the latest Windows update that has borked so much - I have a firewall that prevents/shuts down a lot of Windows "protections" so I may be the culprit but I prefer to think that if I can't do what I want with what I own, the software is the problem), whatever will make it rejuvenate would be appreciated.

Honestly, it's had an awesome battery life (it can be in standby for a week and lose about 1/3 of the battery), and overall, I feel it's the last best thing Windows ever did. That being said... does anyone have a Surface and would you have recommendations (for any Surface)? If so, why, what distro, and what might you want to share?

Thanks in advance!

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.

In the spirit of all the recent Linux posts, I feel like sharing my thoughts too. I've been using Fedora on my laptop for about ~1.5 years, and I've just began using Arch about 5 days ago. I moved to Arch because of all the Windows 11 shenanigans, and I really enjoyed the workflow of i3 on my laptop - the only thing I was unsure of was gaming. But I decided to take the dive anyway.

I installed Arch using the wiki, and it truly felt awesome being able to choose what exactly you want in your system and what you don't. After following the guide, I installed a tiling manger (hyprland), waybar, and a launcher (wofi). It was much easier than I expected (granted I had experience with Linux), after hearing all the Arch boogeyman stories. Though I did accidentally break my system by foolishly doing a `sudo pacman -Rcns ....'. But my configs were still all there and I just had to install everything back, which did not take long at all.

Everything just worked after installing, except for audio. My audio experience was bad, it was crackling and popping all the time. The Arch wiki didn't really have info on this problem, so I took to other avenues. I found a guide that said to change the 'quantums' for pipewire, to some values that I didn't really understand (nor want to tbh). But that fixed it for the most part!

My next problem was discord not picking up on audio for certain applications at all - I narrowed it down to apps that were using ALSA as the backend. So, some apps like Plexamp and Firefox wouldn't get picked up by discord. I changed the backend of Firefox to ALSA due to a longstanding bug which resets the per-app volume level of Firefox every now and then. Setting the backend to ALSA is a workaround, but I didn't know it'd prevent discord from picking up audio. I can't find a solution except to revert to the normal backend - if anyone knows a fix the tech support would be welcome haha

Also the different backends for audio (pipewire/pulseaudio/alsa) make it confusing at times. To me, this is a big hurdle to overcome before the "year of the linux desktop" ever becomes reality - I've had so many issues, even on my laptop. Other than that, the experience is really quite fantastic, the modularity and customization is nuts. I've had quite a bunch of fun tailoring my experience and creating scripts to make the system do exactly what I want.

I have been planning to make the switch to Linux as a daily driver for a while and have researched many different distros. I have seen a lot of discussion online about Bazzite and other similar distros based on Fedora Atomic. It sounds like it would be more stable, and less likely for you to accidentally break something, but installing software other than Flatpaks requires running it in some kind of container such as Distrobox. Some people say it's annoying, others say it's good since you mess up the container rather than your system.

I have used SteamOS on Steam Deck, and notice that things have "just worked" more than what I have personally seen with "normal" distros on laptops or desktops. For example, I've never really had any issues installing things and running software on SteamOS, but someone I know using Mint has seen seemingly minor things cause massive glitches on their system, or they've run into strange difficulty just installing certain programs like Steam. Would one of these types of distros, especially Bazzite which specifically is trying to be like SteamOS, be closer to that Steam Deck experience?

Has anyone here tried one of these distros and had any thoughts? Anything you loved, or was anything a deal breaker?