I don't know why, but Ubuntu still manages to make installing updates a 50/50 chance of breaking the NVIDIA GPU drivers, which then means I have to reinstall them in 800x600 where the "Software Updater" window doesn't fit on screen anymore.

Also, getting full USB3 support on Ubuntu is still a struggle. On Windows and Mac, the same USB camera "just works". On Linux, I need to learn how to download the kernel sources, checkout the correct branch, and recompile uvcvideo with different URB parameters, or else I get random disconnects.

And of course, "apt-get source" will produce the source code for the 4.x kernel that Ubuntu 18 had when I installed it, but they since upgraded it to 5.x so "apt source" is now utterly useless.

If I had to summarize my Linux experience:

"Pain only makes you stronger"

Ever since the famous middle finger salute to nVidia anybody who buys their graphics cards to use with Linux hopefully know what they're doing. Linux doesn't support them at all, and nVidia only kind of supports Linux.

If I got random disconnects for my webcam in OSX I wouldn't bother with it, I'd just buy a better supported webcam. Maybe that's just me, but I appreciate the people who tirelessly tinker to get support going. Just make sure you send those changes upstream to whatever distro you are using.

As long as nobody tells non-technical people to patch their kernels, we're all good. Any modern Linux desktop from one of the major distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, ChromeOS) is the most low maintenance computer you can find, but with that level of tinkering you'd soon find yourself on your own.

> I don't know why, but Ubuntu still manages to make installing updates a 50/50 chance of breaking the NVIDIA GPU drivers, which then means I have to reinstall them in 800x600 where the "Software Updater" window doesn't fit on screen anymore.

I cannot dismiss your experience. I think you are telling the truth.

But I was introduced to Ubuntu by a (mildly) enthusiastic 50 years old electrical engineer back in 2006, so I know it used to work for some ordinary people even back then.

I really don't know some HN-ers manage to break Ubuntu repeatedly while it just works for non technical users, but a qualified guess is a combination of exotic hardware and tinkering (a good thing).

> I really don't know some HN-ers manage to break Ubuntu repeatedly while it just works for non technical users, but a qualified guess is a combination of exotic hardware and tinkering (a good thing).

It's more than that IMO, it's that we don't give up.

Your average non-technical user will just deal with the camera disconnecting occasionally, maybe swear at it once in a while, or (commonly) just not even notice. If you ask them how Ubuntu is, they will say "Yeah, works fine. No viruses!"

Your average HN'er will be bothered every time it disconnects, to the point where they are recompiling a bleeding-edge kernel and breaking 10 other things, but have a working camera that never disconnects. Then we complain here about Ubuntu being broken and terrible :)

On a tangent – I think that it's kind of worrying that Canonical seems to have Ubuntu on the desktop as super-low priority – all I hear about them these days is them trying to market some kind of server product, or their various kinds of managed Kubernetes offerings, which as far as I can tell, go up to $4k/node/year on your own hardware [1] I wonder how much success they are having with this.

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[1] https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/b5f9ae49-Enterprise_Kubernetes_...

I think it's because most of the engineers behind the code that goes into Ubuntu are paid to work on their project for their set of users and usecases. There are very few whose remit is the whole system and overall user experience. That means the small but high impact bugs often don't get fixed. Things like the GPU drivers being uninstalled on an update (because that isn't the problem of either the apt team or the Nvidia team)

Oh, you actually get a graphical interface to fix it?

I always had to fix it in text mode with elinks, it was a complete nightmare and I switched to Nouveau.

Now I have an AMD based laptop and it has it's own problems (briefly had a mac on Intel) - they are all tricky.

You can indeed tell how tired and old the complaint is by the nature of what it complains about.

In 2021 we are instead lumbered with inconsistent support for hidpi displays, lack of DTMF in linphone, and Evolution’s option to disable pc beep on new message being a plugin.

But that was just the last week. Next week will be better and the fight for freedom is indeed an eternal struggle.

> Evolution’s option to disable pc beep on new message being a plugin.

Are you really complaining about GNOME software lacking options as if that wasn't what GNOME is all about. Please don't blame Linux for problems with one specific DE and its applications.

It's a fair complaint if the DE is officially supported by a popular distribution. Most ordinary users don't make the distinction between OS and DE. To them, a beeping email application is just an unpleasant aspect of the OS.

> In 2021 we are instead lumbered with inconsistent support for hidpi displays, lack of DTMF in linphone, and Evolution’s option to disable pc beep on new message being a plugin.

Those are not related complaints at all. Shifting goalposts much?

I read it as things getting better, problems becoming more minor.

Second this. I use Ubuntu Mate on a RPi4 for a couple of weeks now. All went fine. Last week, I suddenly thought: I should connect my printer as well, and expected to have a slightly harder time, just like setting up my printer on my last Ubuntu pc.

Click-click-done. I didn't have a hard time, not even with connecting my printer. I'm almost disappointed a bit, since there's no way I'm a cool computer guy if it's this easy.

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? ..., debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work?

Coincidentally, this is actually a good idea. Apart from using supported hardware (that others have checked actually works), contributing fixes for hardware that's not officially supported yet and hasn't been tested would benefit everyone in the future!

I remember having to dig through GitHub to find a repository that had the network drivers for my off-brand Chinese/Polish netbook (i'm somewhat poor and/or frugal) and they actually worked and turned a system that would otherwise not have any network connectivity into my daily driver for note taking. Now, the fact that i couldn't automate this lookup process and that there's nothing out there that lets you check for these drivers more easily (think something along the lines of https://appdb.winehq.org/ but for drivers) or maybe try multiple ones in a row, was disappointing because things felt needlessly hard. However, actually contributing or using the work of others isn't that much of a problem.

And, since the whole ecosystem is pretty much open, there's nothing actually keeping one from at least trying to address these problems for their particular configuration, apart from needing to learn how to do so. In a sense, working on open source is exactly putting your money where your mouth is, even if it's just alternative costs.

Yeah... when you have a home-built PC with *nix unsupported hardware and invested lots of $$ you're still looking for a hard time. First, there's the hardware cost. I'm not throwing my Surface out, and I'm not throwing out my perfectly working desktop components either. But that aside...

Every time I read how the great unwashed should just contribute fixes already to benefit everyone, I despair. I write code. I build my own PCs and I have a rather good knowledge of how to debug, fix, optimise and otherwise maintain all my software and hardware.

I happen to also LIKE my software and hardware.

If I were to start digging through Github repositories and... whatever other unknown resources I don't know the search terms to even search for I'd probably shoot myself.

The point isn't that Windows is good. The point is that *nix assumes everyone's a *nix rocket surgeon and has nothing else in the world to do than spend days getting the blasted thing to deliver an equivalent level of productivity I get from my Microsoft setup.

As much as I acknowledge everyone's right to like what they like, and agree that *nix might offer one or two better things than Windoze there's just no way...

For Linux there is supported hardware from Vendors like system76 or similar. You don't expect to run Windows on Chromebooks, Android Smartphones or M1 Macbooks without issues, because these vendors only optimize & test for linux. But since linux is such an open platform, you have a large grey area "vendor didn't test it, ymmv". It may work fine, but you never know if the vendor decided to e.g. ignore standards for reboots and only react to the exact things that Windows does (This also applies to macos running on other devices, but way worse). Most devices have an entry in e.g. the arch wiki describing if they work OOTB, with hacks or some parts just don't.

There are devices where the vendor tries to support linux, e.g. Thinkpads, but if you're using Nvidia it's still a pile of hacks in the background.

I haven't needed to contribute any code myself nor use non-upstream drivers, but the process to use non-upstream drivers is usually pretty streamlined in arch (packaged in the aur).

And since we're in hacker news: Programming things close to the hardware can be a great learning experience, maybe not when done under pressure.

That was why I bought an Asus 1215B Netbook with GNU/Linux support out of the box, an Ubuntu distrubution actually.

First the wlan stopped working, because Canonical decided to replace the proprietary driver wih the open source one, however since it was still work in progress, dozen of us had to suck it up with LAN until the open source driver got feature parity.

Then my GPGPU experience got degraded from OpenGL 4.1/hardware video decoding to OpenGL 3.3 with the replacement of the AMD driver (fxgr) with the open source radeon one.

So in the end, it doesn't matter that much buying supposedly supported hardware.

> Every time I read how the great unwashed should just contribute fixes already to benefit everyone, I despair. I write code. I build my own PCs and I have a rather good knowledge of how to debug, fix, optimise and otherwise maintain all my software and hardware.

But i'm not saying that everyone should contribute, or even that everyone can. I know that i'm certainly not experienced enough in systems programming to do that, instead being more proficient with higher abstraction level languages.

That said, the fact that there's the possibility of contributing for at least some people is better than what Windows and other OSes let you do. Not only that, but if the problem is annoying enough and makes enough people frustrated enough, it's likely that there's actually someone amongst all of them who cares enough to fix the problem for everyone.

For the fix to land in the mainline might take a few months or years, but the end result is still better than looking at a black box and having literally no options to get it to do what you want.

If a new Debian updates break my GRUB install, it's likely that there will be people on GitHub discussing workarounds and fixes within minutes. If my off brand hardware doesn't work as i'd like, it's likely that i'll have to do some digging but the chances of me finding a fix aren't 0 either. If the same happened with Windows drivers, i'm not entirely sure what i could even do, since the hardware setup is something that almost noone actually cares about. In the case of *nix, if i were skilled enough, i could probably dig around the source myself and work on fixing it, as someone luckily had.

> If I were to start digging through Github repositories and... whatever other unknown resources I don't know the search terms to even search for

The package managers and their associated websites tell you exactly where the sources are; you don’t need to search for them yourself. This is how I found some quotes for `fortune` from CentOS that I liked which weren’t present in the macOS version.

What kind of hardware are we talking about here for a self-built PC which isn't supported by Linux?

● Intel Core i9 with 64Gb RAM ● Samsung 500 GB 2.5" SSD ● 2 x Western Digital 4TB mirrored disks ● NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 ● Sharkoon 600 Watt power supply ● 2 x Samsung U28R55 28" 4k IPS panels ● Das Keyboard 4 Professional ● S.M.S.L M6 Hifi Audio USB DAC with headphone amplifier ● 2 x Behringer MS40 digital 40-watt stereo near-field monitors ● Sennheiser HD 650 Open back headphones ● ELP 1080P wide angle webcam ● MANLI omnidirectional condenser microphone

Everything apart from the DAC should work (that may also work, but I'm not sure). The most important factor however, the motherboard, is missing in your post.

The GPU should work on distros like Ubuntu or Pop!Os per default, but due to Nvidia driver shenanigans you might have to do some manual config on e.g. debian.

+1. Linux support is pretty good these days... unless you're trying to run it on a Surface Pro or something. I'm just worried that I won't be able to find any alternative to the iPhone. The Librem and Pine phones look promising... it's just not clear how long it will be till they're stable enough to use as daily drivers.

I recently spent a full day trying to debug wifi on my dual-boot desktop with "newish" hardware. The wifi would occasionally drop 100% of packets, for between 5 seconds and 10 minutes, and then go back to normal. I tried installing different drivers and following some askubuntu forum posts, but nothing seemed to work.

I'm not an expert on hardware stuff so I haven't got the knowledge to dig deep and find what caused it. But on Windows this stuff "just works". My impression is that Windows has "solved" wifi.

In the end I just bit the bullet and connected the ethernet cable...

Make sure windows is shutdown completely, not in hibernate. It is not like wondows has "solved" wifi but it created problem in first place.

It's not bad at all, in fact: it's great! I just switched from an M1 mac and an Intel MacBook Pro to a Manjaro desktop with Gnome 4. In several ways, I found the Gnome 4 user experience to be better than macOS Big Sur. Even 3 finger swipe gestures with the Apple Trackpad work fine to switch between desktops. And my PS5 DualSense controller? Even the touchpad works, in a Wine/Windows application under Linux of all things!

With proper cooling, the machine is near-quiet on light loads like browsing. The background noise in my house is generally higher than the idle fan noise. It's obviously noisier with higher loads, but that's what you get with a beefy graphics card. (the CPU cooler has a 24 db upper limit).

I also had no issues with BlueTooth or AX WiFi. Resume-after-suspend works solidly too. The only hickup I had was that my graphics card is too new (Radeon 6700 XT) and that I had to get a newer Manjaro ISO from GitHub, rather than the main website.

You ommitted resume from suspend which is still a frigging problem. At least some finally support UEFI so your usb key install doesnt freeze on the first screen.

But yeah wifi and nvidia are solved - just a black screen and single mode startup the first time to deactivate the opensource drivers for some obscure reason (I understand they prefer it but why does it crashes... might as well just put the nvidia ones directly)

Resume from suspend works fine on my Linux laptops and desktops.

A year and a half ago, we tried to convert a well-spec'd Dell laptop from Windows to Ubuntu for a new dev. We couldn't get the wifi to work. The dev now uses a MacBook.

There are tons of github repos for non-mainline wifi chips. Did you check if you could find something for the model you had?

I can't really remember. I think I tried looking for some error message, perhaps in combination with the model, but it simply took too long. It may be fine when you're tinkering with a hobby machine, but at work it's basically me who can support Linux, so it was a no go. Wifi was not a solved problem at that moment, from my POV.

Linux has all kinds of issues, but I haven’t had a single one with drivers in the last (probably over) 7 years, whereas I had a few on Windows.

Until they can manage to make updating software seamless, it will continue to not be viable for mainstream.

Fun fact: We had to switch from Lenovo to something else because wifi did not work reliably in fedora.

Which Lenovo model?

Sounds very odd indeed since Lenovo support is the first which hits the kernel. Maybe model was too new and bit patience was required.

My 1215B Asus Netbook with Ubuntu doesn't share that opinion.

It is basically the surviving device I still bother to run GNU/Linux bare metal on, and it was sold with Linux support from the get go, yet....

Can I upgrade video drivers without being dumped to a command line?

On Ubuntu, nvidia drivers update seamlessly as part of system updates. On Windows, I have to sign in to an nvidia account, solve 3 capcthas and then manually download half a gig of "driver".

Last time I had to install either AMD or Nvidia drivers there was GUI installers. Or in the case of AMDGPU the driver is already in kernel and is updated automatically via package manager.

You can with AMD cards, presumably Intel too. Applications, including the display server, will continue to use the old drivers until they are restarted of course.

With Ubuntu 18, no. Updating it fails roughly as often as it works. And the error messages are obscure and confusing.

I didn't try Ubuntu 20 because it has known incompatibilities with software that I use.

Ubuntu, PopOS and Manjaro have GUI utilities for driver installations.

Or Dell.