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Comment by pid-1 | Hacker News Reader

Rant: last weekend I finished building my teenager dream PC - 12 cores cpu, 64GB RAM, RTX 3060 12GB VRAM... GNOME on Ubuntu still managed to crash / hang on a fresh install.

Will try Mint / others, but it's a shame the "gateway distro for new users" is in such sorry state.

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Gnome Ubuntu is the "gateway distro for new users"? I would never ever Recommend that to new users.

Mint, popOS, and a few others for people coming from Windows would be the "gateway distro for new users"

gnome 3 is not for new users, back in the day, gnome 2.4 days maybe that was the case

At this point, the "gateway distro" for new users is running any of those in WSL. There is so much more buy-in if you can someone that they don't have to throw away their laptop and get one with this specific chip selection so that everything works. And if you can tell them that yes, of course, you can run your games at the same time, without fiddling, dual booting, or fear of getting banned for "cheats".

That probably is gateway for curious persons or who really wanna have Linux.

Myself included, and people around me keep using WSL without any slight hint of swapping [back] to Linux Desktop. I even know in person the guy who is on WoA (Windows on Arm) with Surface and WSL - he had enough 5+ years of Gentoo experience.

I've installed WSLg and disabled after ~ 20 minutes - just found nothing to run in GUI mode from Linux. Sure, others may, especially dev guys with JetBrains or whatever IDEs, but I literally couldn't remember anything beyond xeyes and konsole to play around with.

Would be nice to see some stats from Microsoft on WSL auditory/usage.

The other Ubuntu desktops should be fine. I recommend the Xfce one personally, it has everything thats needed of a sane gui and the xfce is not a RAM hog.

However the snap nonsense also means I might have to consider Ubuntu no longer suitable to recommend if they continue down this path.

Same story: 16 core, 64GB ram, 6900xt. And nothing crashes because even when being ridiculous I knew better than use Nvidia on Linux

I'll take "Sentiments from the Linux Community that Actively Drive Users Away" for 300.

Yeah, there's a huge problem in the community where every problem is the user's fault.

Like, using the most popular graphics card provider on Linux shouldn't be some outlandish idea that should be ridiculed.

I think it will change in a few years. There's been a lot of cool stuff added to Linux over the past few years. You can even use peripherals like hardware fan controllers or RGB hubs. With Nvidia open sourcing their drivers I'm hoping that wayland issues get ironed out sooner rather than later

In reality it's more like a sentiment of a certain hardware manufacturer towards the Linux community. The best the community can do is make it known.

Good, too many people are using Linux.

Meanwhile, my Linux partition is rock solid and I cannot for the life of me figure out random hangs and crashes on clean Windows installs.

It is an Nvidia GPU. Honestly, they’re rarely the problem in Linux. Not in practice anyway.

Any hardware diag I try passes. Drivers? Tried both manufacturer and Windows Update. Always ends the same.

The mouse driver BSODed the machine one time. That was a new one.

I’ll stick with a Linux distro for real work, thanks.

Aren't we all using libinput now? I'm shocked the mouse driver BSODs Linux these days.

Linus Torvalds giving the finger to Nvidia should be required reading for all new Linux adventurers.

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for around 3 years now with an nvidia GPU and haven't had any issues. I don't run Wayland for obvious reasons, but otherwise the system is rock solid. I have not had anything resembling the nightmare experience people claim with Linux and nvidia GPUs.

Try Manjaro with KDE.

Manjaro's more stable than Ubuntu (somehow), and KDE is better than GNOME. :D

Almost same config as my deskside. I've got 16 Epyc CPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 2TB of NVMe along with 8TB of ZFS mirror with hot spare. Same GPU. Linux Mint went on w/o problem. I did have to switch from nouveau to nvidia drivers, but that's covered in the driver manager.

Again, everything just works. Even the stupid little USB sound card I plugged in. Been listening to spotify while working on it. Using Zoom on that for my private non-work meetings.

Cinnamon version, 21.1 version of mint. Painless. Even getting zfs up and going. I updated to 2.1.7 at that.

Nvidia with Wayland? That's on you then, man.

Exactly why I only use linux for headless serves. God knows how many totally obvious mistakes would be “on me” if I tried to set up a GUI workstation. Who’s got the time to learn why you can’t use of of the main GPU brands with one of the main GUIs?

Well, you did build your own rig, so some learning is expected, no?

Well it has been known for decades the Nvida is openly hostile to Linux Desktop, and actively tries to prevent development of open source drivers,

Hell Linus has a famous speech where he literally flips of Nvida

Celebrity kernel hackers lobbing attacks at hardware makers in speeches is no way to run a compatibility matrix.

>Celebrity kernel hackers

Wow... that is a take... Linus is a "Celebrity kernel hacker" really?

I could be wrong but it sounds like the poster is making a joke by parodying a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If I ask about this around the office, do you think anyone will have any idea what I'm talking about?

It might be obvious in your social circles, but that doesn't mean it's even remotely common enough to be assumed knowledge for someone trying out linux on the desktop for the first time.

>>If I ask about this around the office

Depends, is this an office is Linux users? If so then i expect yes they would

This is entirely NVIDIA's fault, not Linux's. AMD plays ball.

Hackers. You'll find a few around here.

Forget it, I'll just install windows.

Doing some basic research beforehand seems reasonable to me.

Generally though, that combination is fairly notorious for quite a while now, due to nvidia not playing ball very well.

I recently went through the exercise of setting up two Ryzen PCs. One with an AMD GPU and one with an Nvidia GPU.

Surprisingly, the only issues I had with NVIDIA was that my window manager would not let me start it because I had an NVIDIA GPU. They make you pass a flag along the lines of “yes I am running NVIDIA with Wayland”.

The AMD GPU was a nightmare thanks to a long running bug. I eventually got it working, but it was unexpected. NVIDIA on Linux has improved a lot!

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