I’ve installed Linux on at least 20 laptops & desktops in the past decade, many for first-time users. I generally go with Mint or ElementaryOS for newbies. I can’t remember ever having a compatibility issue. I’m sure they still happen sometimes, but when people talk about it they act like it’s still 2005.
They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.
If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.
Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!
That was true in 2000. The situation had improved a lot by, like, 2005, but it was still pretty rough. You were still likely to have to drop to a console at some point even in 2010.
These days there’s 20 distributions that are easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows, and you don’t even have to know ls to use it.
They’ve given me too many headaches…
I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn’t.
Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven’t done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to ‘get’ it yet.
Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain–and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.
So obviously something had to be done…I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play–not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!
That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.
Problem…solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.
Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!