I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.
It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.
I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.
Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.
But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.
Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.
I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.
I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
I agree with the people who say you should go back to Windows.
Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way.
Different operating systems work differently. There are several projects to get (GNU/)Linux to work more like Windows, but if your goal is to be like Windows, you won’t get any better than, well, Windows. I, like most Linux users, think the way Windows does things is terrible, and I’m on Linux precisely because of the differences with proprietary OSes like Windows. But if the differences are a negative for you, I suggest you use the OS that works the way you like it.
Your problems likely can be diagnosed and troubleshooted if you have the patience—some bugs I was experiencing took me like 6 years to diagnose what the problem was—but fixing your bugs will not change the fact that (GNU/)Linux is intended to work differently from Windows, i.e. it’s not a bug. So it sounds like it won’t solve the underlying problem.
I’ll echo what someone else said in another comment and ask why you chose to switch to Linux in the first place. Out of curiosity? In which case, it sounds like your curiosity has been satisfied and you’ve discovered that Linux does not meet your personal requirements. But I think the reasons why most people switch, ie privacy and customisability, and more generally what comes with free software ie the freedom to do whatever you like with your system, are reasons which motivate people to either overcome learning curves (to learn the better way to use your computer, the way you are supposed to use GNU/Linux distros) or to dedicate the time and effort to troubleshooting problems with their system. If you don’t have those motivations, you probably want to just go back to Windows.
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Yeah, laptops with dedi nvidia cards were always pain with Linux, at least my experience was always terrible (there is no feature parity to windows, especially energy saving stuff), though for me I am in the position where I would rather have Linux with my configs (which translates into: I’ve spent a lot of time on tweaking and fixing stuff over the time) then windows, so a nvidia gpu in a laptop is no-go in the first place.
Linux requires time investment, not everyone is comfortable to dig in. The fragmented nature of Linux (multiple Desktop Environments, graphical libraries, heck even low-level stuff: va-api/vdpau, …) lends itself into it so there is no sugar-coating it.
If you can’t or don’t want to fix it then win is the way but I would hope one day you will give Linux another chance - the community is there, so there is a high chance it will be better the next year and the one after that, and so on.
I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either.
NVIDIA dedicated card
This may be related, because a while ago, when I installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, exactly the same issue happened. PC was waking up, but GPU wasn’t.
You’ve moved over to another operating system and you’re expecting it to work like your previous one. That’s stupid.
Windows, Mac, BSD, VMS, Unix etc. all work their own way. Expecting them to work how you want them to is arrogant.
Before you moved you might have read up on the differences and how things work. That would be sensible.
Nobody here has any time for this nonsense. Which is why you are being down voted.
Your arguments aren’t really addressing the points that OP made, though. They aren’t saying they expected everything to work just like Windows, they are saying they expected everything to just work. Any system that requires tinkering for basic stable functionality should be considered experimental and not ready for production.
If you disagree you are falling prey to dogmatic OS fundamentalism. Acknowledging insufficiencies helps improve Linux, while rejecting such criticism prolongs the amount of time the majority of people write it off as unusable as a desktop operating system.
