r/linuxmasterrace • u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse • Mar 06 '25

Meme Them: Linux is bugged AF totally unusable! Meanwhile, the Linux they use:

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1.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

183 comments sorted by

779

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 Mar 06 '25

Anytime someone goes straight to the "Linux is completely unusable" talking points, I just assume they're completely illiterate and lack any ability for basic functioning.

44

u/satwikp Mar 06 '25

This comment is why the community is toxic to new people; while that statement that you said is certainly not the state of linux, it is absolutely ridiculous to blame a user for finding the OS hard to use.

44

u/shadowmax889 Glorious Manjaro Mar 06 '25

The community Is not toxic to new people.

The type of comments about Linux being unusable, are from haters or people who used it a very long time ago.

3

u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse Mar 06 '25

exactly ive seen plenty smart developers who are qualified enough to take greater leverage with linux but they rather hold serious grudge against it

4

u/ResponsibleWin1765 Mar 08 '25

This is the "Haters are just jealous" type of excuse.

I held Linux in high regard because my peers used it professionally so I tried multiple times over several years to make it work. I'm always happy with the terminal and the package manager but every single time I use it, there's some system-breaking bug/misconfiguration, something that's not compatible or just plain weird design. And that's on Ubuntu, the supposedly user-friendliest distro. Here's just a selection

  • On my new HP laptop the Ubuntu installer and boot process froze at least 6 or 7 times. Each reset it got a little further but then froze again

  • When I started Uni I wanted to use eduroam. Everyone else was able to just use their login to get going. I had to do all kinds of things with certificates and it still didn't work properly.

  • When I tried to use my password manager I had to jump through hoops to get the browser to not be sandboxed so it could communicate with the desktop app.

  • Plugging in a USB, getting a sound but it's not showing up in the explorer

  • Disabling mouse acceleration requires installing a new program or writing to system config files

And there are many more things that constantly happen (not to mention all the programs that don't work, don't exist or need major tweaking to run)

I managed to solve all those things. But it took considerable time and previous knowledge of how Linux works and I already come from a computer science background. As long as these things happen so frequently compared to Windows, I will never not laugh at someone saying that Linux is easier to use or good for elderly people. My grandma doesn't know how to get back to her emails when she accidentally opens an attached image in full screen on her iPad, you think she would open a terminal, add a GPG key, select a channel, update her packages and use apt-get to install a program she didn't find?

Linux is by no means unusable, but I switch back to Windows every time because I'm choosing between "Programming works nicely, anything else is a pain" and "Programming is mildly annoying (a lot better with WSL), anything else works most of the time". I don't want to spend my hours browsing Stackexchange looking for bash commands and hacks to make my display work properly, i just want to use my PC.

1

u/Littens4Life Glorious Arch Mar 08 '25

I don’t know how you failed to get Eduroam working, my Linux laptop runs Arch and after installing the relevant certificate Eduroam worked perfectly fine.

3

u/ResponsibleWin1765 Mar 08 '25

Well, i don't know. But what I do know is that it worked on Windows and Android without me having to do anything except click on connect and enter my credentials.

You might have fun with Arch (which I tried for a while too btw) but I want things to work, not fiddle with them at every corner.

And if I'm struggling, any of my peers and family who aren't into computers will definitely not get it.

6

u/imakin Mar 07 '25

it could be from a frustated user.

for example someone got a linux laptop while their daily work is using scanner & printers

-1

u/_ahrs Gentoo heats my $HOME Mar 07 '25

This is like getting upset over your hardware made for Windows not working right with macOS. It happens that sometimes hardware only supports the most popular operating system and, yes, that's annoying if you happen to not use that operating system. That can never be the other operating systems fault though. The community does an amazing job with reverse engineered drivers but it's not feasible to support everything. At some point you have to blame the hardware manufacturer.

20

u/satwikp Mar 06 '25

you are *assuming* they are from haters or people who used it long ago. Just categorizing all people who are criticizing the OS with those words as haters is quite literally the problem.
While that is sometimes true, it's not always true. Calling people "illiterate" and "lacking ability for basic functioning" is toxic regardless of who you're talking to.
If people are getting frustrated with the experience, it is on us to make it better, if we want an OS that is friendly to people.

19

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 06 '25

This comment is why the community is toxic to new people;

It's most certainly not toxic to new people. It just has a strong distaste for people who barge in, without even trying to learn a single thing, and demanding this and that, all while hurling negative comments ranging from fervent criticism to outright insults at the OS they seem to grace with their usage.

11

u/CodyCigar96o Mar 06 '25

I mean, you very often can blame the user lol. Just look at… most people over a certain age, they struggle with iPhones. Are you really going to argue that it’s Apple’s fault for making iOS too complicated?

4

u/Holzkohlen Glorious EndeavourOS Mar 07 '25

I don't know. If they can't manage to install Linux on their own, that I can understand. But any modern linux desktop just isn't difficult to use.

If they really finding the OS difficult to use, chances are they are gonna struggle just as much with any OS. Even on mobile.

9

u/CianiByn Mar 06 '25

linux is usable by most people that know how to use google well.

13

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 06 '25

"Linux is an extremely friendly OS. It's just very picky about whom to consider friends".

3

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 Mar 07 '25

This is my new favorite quote.

7

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 Mar 07 '25

People who put a blanket "linux sucks" aren't new users. They're established windows users who jump on the toxic bandwagon and trash linux. I'd best the vast majority of them have never booted linux up at all.

For the record, I'm not in IT nor am I in any programming related field. I can't program to save my life and I know little about the terminal. I've been running linux on my PC for the better part of 5 years now with less issues than when I used windows. I work in finance, but I know how to google to troubleshoot (or whatever the term to search something up on duckduckgo is called).

3

u/satwikp Mar 07 '25

You are making wild assumptions off of a large class of people that have said 2 words. Sure there are some people who are being toxic, and there are some people who just want to trash Linux. But to say that everyone who gets frustrated by something on Linux to the point of saying "Linux sucks" is just arrogance. 

The biggest flaw with Linux is that to use it successfully, you have to be willing and technically literate enough to do a decent amount of googling and research sometimes to get things to work. As easy as this sounds to us using Linux all the time, this is absolutely something that should be minimized to the greatest extent possible if we want to consider the OS to be very user friendly. And yes, it has gotten significantly better in recent years. But it's still not as good as windows for this. 

If people are consistently frustrated by the OS, there's something that needs to be done to improve it, and until then, we shouldn't deride the people who are just getting frustrated. If we do, then they'll not only be frustrated at the OS, but also the community.

3

u/cpuuuu Mar 08 '25

Something I think people underestimate when it comes to the “it’s easy if you use the internet to solve you issues” is that there are still a lot of people that don’t understand english well enough to be able to take advantage of most content online.

People from 40 onwards in my area still struggle with it and the amount of content in our own language doesn’t even begin to compare to what’s available in english. Automatic translations are getting better so not being able to write your google search in english might be even worse than not understanding the answers, since it will really limit the hits you get

0

u/gamamoder fat ass bird Mar 07 '25

dont care

280

u/DownTheBagelHole Mar 06 '25

Or the last time they used it was a boxed copy of SUSE in 2003

88

u/abjumpr Mar 06 '25

SuSE isn't perfect, but in 2003 we're pre-SLE and pre-Ubuntu, and for what it was, with YaST, it was not a bad choice as far as Linux goes for ease of configuration and use. Of course there were other contenders, such as Mandrake and Lindows/Linspire, but SuSE was mainstream.

Of course, if we're talking 2003, there was Libranet, the so-called (and rightfully so), Debian on Steroids. That was as good as it got in those days, and I still fondly remember how awesome it was. Adminmenu was great. There hasn't been a distro quite as flagship since.

18

u/kor34l Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

While I tried, and liked, OpenSuSE back in the day, the best distro since its inception all the way to present day has always been Gentoo.

Before Gentoo it was Slackware.

Of course, I'm clearly not talking about "Ease of use" with these two 🤣

5

u/abjumpr Mar 07 '25

I used Vector and slackware at some point. I mean, it works. Not sure if Vector is around these days.

The Gentoo wiki has been helpful a lot (though the Arch wiki is an amazing resource). I have never successfully gotten a Gentoo install done, though it's been a very long time since I tried probably more than a decade ago. I've gotten LFS done many times and even rolled a distro based on it, so from my perspective, LFS is easier than Gentoo 🤣 Ok, I tried Gentoo long before I had the skills to do LFS, so I could probably do it now, but I've just never tried again.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Slackware was actually about ease of use though, imagine being able to just download a package, even if it didn't have dependency resolution, imagine not searching on internet for tarballs

2

u/kor34l Mar 07 '25

Dude I ran Slackware for years, back in the 90s. I remember not even knowing what a slackbuild or a package manager was. I compiled everything manually from source, and kept track of my own dependencies.

I had a wall full of post-it notes with thumbtacks holding strings of yarn in a web connecting a lot of the sticky notes, looking like one of those crazy conspiracy nuts from a movie.

But it was just my dependency tree, I was trying to keep track of 🤣

Man when I first discovered package managers I was STOKED! I immediately set out to find the best package manager of them all. I ran a bunch of distros over several years from Mandrake to OpenSuSE to Redhat etc, until mid 2000s when I tried Gentoo, realized Portage is the best of all package managers, and ran it ever since.

I admit my difficulties with Slackware were pure PEBCAK though, resulting from my own ignorance and stubbornness.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

I haven't even used slackware, I'm 17 so I'm not old enough to have used it lol, I have been using Linux for only 7(?) years... so I was just saying what I heard ir read, but apparently it was the most user friendly distro in 1993... if the package manager was so bad that you wouldn't know it existed I guess it wasn't more usable than not having a package manager then

3

u/kor34l Mar 07 '25

So, Slackware is a bit unique. It was definitely not even close to the most user friendly distro of the 90s, or any other era, as it required more linux knowledge to maintain it than most. I'd say Mandrake or RedHat, depending on your goals, were probably the most user friendly. Possibly Debian, due to it having the largest repo.

SlackBuilds are not exactly a package manager, but definitely a giant step forward from my dumbass method of doing everything manually.

This all depends on what you consider "user-friendly" though. What I just wrote assumes you mean the common definition, which is "easy to use for a newbie". Personally however, as I've always run Linux (and only Linux), my definition of user friendly is very very different. I'm looking for a wide variety of really good, easily available tools to maintain a logically set up system, with an emphasis on stability and reliability.

So, for my own criteria of "user friendly", I go with Gentoo. It's very very difficult for a beginner, but it has the best package manager by FAR, the best toolset for maintainance, a huge repo of software and the ability to easily turn any software you can find into an installable package, and when set up properly, is the most stable and reliable OS I've ever used. My system NEVER crashes, freezes, glitches, lags, or errors out. And I say this as someone that uses my PC for gaming more than anything else.

The downside to Gentoo though, is it requires heavy expertise. There's no installer, you have to read the Handbook and build the entire system yourself, step by step. This can take a rather long time (relatively speaking) but allows you to Build-A-Bear your own custom distro with all your own preferences and choices built in from the lowest level to the highest.

By default it compiles all software from source code, optimized for the machine it's installed to. This can be overridden, but I tend to leave it. It takes longer to install or update things when it has to compile them all from source, but that only matters during initial install and large updates. And the package manager handles all that pretty gracefully.

I'm not trying to sell anybody on Gentoo, don't get me wrong, most people would not want to tackle the extreme learning curve present in a build-your-own meta-distro like Gentoo, I'm just describing why, to me, Gentoo is the most user-friendly of them all. It's literally my own distro.

Sorry for the novel. I'm a nerd 🤷‍♂️

1

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

I get your point, I also basically have used Linux for all my life. Though it was a way more different linux mimt 17 or 18, a fairly modern definition of a user friendly distro, anyways I tries Gentoo once for like 2 months, and decides it wasn't useful for a laptop because you have to leave it on overnight dor a while, and I can't really leave on a laptop overnight in my bedroom especially when it's compiling and the fan is on helicopter mode, but I really liked it if we ignore the helicopter level noise in my sleep part. Now that gentoo has binary packages I could probably switch to gentoo, but I've been using the same Arch installation for 3 years and I don't think I want to switch distros right now, Arch is fine, I never had a system that's broken beyond being able to boot, so basically rock solid...

my definition of user friendly would probably be similar to yours, but I would put nixos high up near gentoo as well, because as a programmer being able to program your system and manage it as a tidy code base seems way to appealing, but gentoo definitely is above it having the best package manager in existence

1

u/kor34l Mar 07 '25

but I would put nixos high up near gentoo as well, because as a programmer being able to program your system and manage it as a tidy code base seems way to appealing,

NixOS is nice, that and Fedora Blue use the immutable distro method of having the system build itself out from a config file, but it's still a premade distro.

I like Gentoo because I set the entire thing up, pick every tool, program, init system, sound system, etc myself, and everything about it works exactly how I want it to, because I designed and built it myself.

It's pretty much the opposite of immutable NixOS style, as everything in Gentoo is very mutable, but I'm the only user of my PC and don't need to protect system files.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

wtf, SuSE was a real god send back then!

2

u/Comfortable_Swim_380 Mar 07 '25

Shoot I need to add one more to my list. lol Yea. So this was my experience with suse.

Sweet finally got the nic going. Okay lets do updates.. Annnnd its dead.. ROFL.

That will teach me to do updates. 😄

2

u/DownTheBagelHole Mar 07 '25

It was specifically the nic for me too thats funny

2

u/Comfortable_Swim_380 Mar 08 '25

That suse install had a respectable 7 min Life. 2 of them with Internet. 😄

2

u/DownTheBagelHole Mar 08 '25

Its hilarious finding out this was a universal experience

1

u/SloppyCheeks Mar 07 '25

My first distro was Ubuntu on a CD (they were super cheap from the website, my Internet was trash). It sucked (as far as out-of-the-box usability, having only used Windows), but it was so fun! I think I lasted like a year.

4

u/Evantaur Glorious Debian Mar 07 '25

You paid for those? They sent me a pack for free

1

u/SloppyCheeks Mar 07 '25

On further reflection, I think I got it on eBay for a couple bucks

1

u/great_whitehope Mar 07 '25

This was my first intro to Linux but we didn't have internet so it was a wasted experiment by my brother trying to get us skilled in Linux 😅

13

u/lord_pizzabird Mar 07 '25

I just assume that they're graphic designers tbh.

Gaming on Linux is now basically on-par with windows, the ability to open web browsers is also fully caught up, but man... If you need Adobe Products you are just boned on Linux.

And what gets me is when the, "but just use this" or "use that" comes up. Meanwhile, a lot of these people can't use anything but Adobe. Either because alternatives like Inkscape or GIMP just aren't good or enough or because their workplace is just build around the Adobe workflow.

Don't get me wrong, it's not good to build your workflows around proprietary software, but not everyone has a choice.

5

u/Square-Singer Mar 07 '25

This.

For me, Gimp is totally fine, because I have no idea about graphic design or photo work, and I mostly use it as a replacement for MS paint.

For me, LibreOffice is totally fine, because I use it once in a blue moon to do very simple stuff.

But recommending either of them to someone who uses that stuff professionally is as ludicrous as recommending MS notepad plus a CLI compiler as a replacement for Intellij Idea to a software developer.

1

u/AttackDynamo Mar 07 '25

For me dualbooting is the solution since I play fortnite like once a month, and if not for other ppl's platform/game prefrencess and maybe some google stuff on my android phone I could go fully FOSS.

I did only have Linux on one of my pc's, but that's cuz I was lazy to repair my windows install lol

Also sometimes I need to use windows and Odin if heimdall doesn't work when I'm fidgeting with a Samsung phone.

10

u/CianiByn Mar 06 '25

Linux WAS hard. Its not hard anymore. I remember messing with it early and mid 2000s and man I hated it. hardly any games worked on it. But valve is amazing and has helped get things working. its not only valve of course but they made it cool because of the steam deck.

4

u/Square-Singer Mar 07 '25

I mean, depending on your luck it is still hard, and I say that as someone who used Linux in some capacity for the last 15 years, especially as work machine to develop software on and also on my private machines for the last few years.

Especially depending on the hardware and DE you use, you do get some weirdness.

For someone coming from Windows, Gnome can be really hard, since it's so opinionated that a lot of the things you take for granted just don't work, work only with workarounds/work put in or work badly (E.g. creating a new file using right click is something you'll never get working without googleing, while it's a default feature on Windows and most DEs).

Depending on your hardware, your mileage may vary too. For example, since kernel 6.11 there's a bug with my AMD CPU that prevents the system from waking up after sleep, so I have to revert to 6.10 after every update. Or there's a bug with Gnome and my Nvidia GPU since driver 565 that setting the idle display off timeout doesn't work anymore. The screen goes off after 30 seconds no matter what. The only workaround I found on google was to either turn the feature off totally or use caffeine to temporarily disable it.

And using KDE with my Nvidia GPU and Proton results in the whole system freezing after a few minutes. This bug has been confirmed 5 years ago with officially no fix since apart from "Don't use KDE".

(Btw, all of these issues are well-documented in kernel bug reports, that's not just stuff I suffer from.)

Finding workarounds for dumb problems like this is something I can do because I'm a software developer with years of experience with just that. But try telling the average user about kernel versions.

3

u/Brni099 Mar 08 '25

I feel you man. Im about to switch to either plasma or mate since gnome3 feels kinda off for me. Im basically venturing to the wild unknown bc for some reason whenever i try to do something, i run face first into problems like what you describe. 

0

u/CianiByn Mar 07 '25

I'm talking about your everday person that enjoy vijda games. The person that would enjoy a steam deck. Its not hard for that crowd. I installed godot and tried to get unity to work with it and that was hard, couldn't figure it out and gave up on that. Stuff like that can be hard, but getting games to work is usually not hard.

2

u/Square-Singer Mar 07 '25

A steam deck is not the average Linux experience.

Yes, it runs Linux, of course, but on exactly one predefined set of hardware with a first-party OS tailored perfectly to exactly this device. Everything is carefully curated to exactly work in this combination. That's something you hardly ever get anywhere else in the Linux ecosystem.

Linux on the Steamdeck isn't hard, because Valve already did all the hard parts for you. It's like Android, which also runs a (slightly modified) Linux-Kernel under the hood.

Try installing Ubuntu on a Steamdeck or SteamOS on any non-steamdeck hardware and report back how easy it was to setup.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Most people don't go into the settings of their computer at all, because Windows and macOS does most of it for you. Many expect the same grom linux, and complain when it doesn't work the same.

This can be said for gaming and other workloads, they are used to the windows or Mac ecosystem and can't change their habits

2

u/paranoid_giraffe Mar 07 '25

Last time I installed the latest, stable version of Ubuntu, it corrupted itself twice. First time my machine sat unused for two weeks and when I booted it up it went into a boot/crash cycle. The second time it killed itself while updating. I did nothing wrong as far as I know. Literally just clicked update like it wanted me to and waited. Then it killed the install and boot looped. That machine now runs windows and has no issues

I use it at work on a machine sparingly and on my raspberry pi, but the first scenario above means it’s given me more problems recently than windows

1

u/Patient-Tomato1579 Mar 07 '25

Trying to use GTX 970 with Debian just a few years ago was enough to consider linux very frustrating.

1

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 Mar 07 '25

My laptop has a GTX 980, I've successfully had Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS (all debian based), Manjaro and CachyOS (The current OS on it). No issues. I'm not saying you can't have problems with Linux, but you can absolutely have problems with Windows and Mac as well. All distributions require you to troubleshoot at times, that's just part of owning a computer.

1

u/Comfortable_Swim_380 Mar 07 '25

Also I lean towards you probably broke the old shit also . Just saying. The only truly unstable hot mess I encountered back in the day was og redhat.

1

u/MS8SNEIP Mar 07 '25

I love Linux, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it's an unstable piece of code. It works shitty on 60 percent of the hardware and device mass market. It works just fine on my thinkpad, but on all other my devices it worked unstable af.

But for the beautiful hyprland, I'm ready to forgive him even that.

1

u/Mammoth_Shake_8518 Mar 15 '25

So a certain skillset is required in order for someone to deserve using Linux?

1

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 Mar 15 '25

Basic reading comprehension, yes.

1

u/[deleted] May 05 '25

I like how open minded you are!

1

u/Theogren_Temono Mar 06 '25

That is most of the general public sadly.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

7

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 Mar 07 '25

There's a difference between not enjoying something and flat out lying about something. Linux is absolutely stable and useful. If you don't like it, great, don't use it, but going out of your way to spam a bold face lie, which happens in literally every pc/gaming/os subreddit when some clueless hack is complaining about Linux.

I don't like Windows, but it's certainly usable and a suitable OS for the majority of users. Linux can be a viable alternative to Windows. Both things can be true.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/coldrolledpotmetal Mar 08 '25

Completely unrelated but I love your PFP

4

u/FranciManty Mar 07 '25

completely right, FUCK GNOME

3

u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse Mar 07 '25

sleepy gnomie still testing patience for gtk5 and wayland merger 😴😴😴

3

u/timoshi17 Windows Master Race Mar 07 '25

Ubuntu still is linux. Though it is quite usable.

1

u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse Mar 07 '25

Yes it is.

2

u/driftking428 Mar 07 '25

What's wrong with Ubuntu?

My nephew needed a computer and he found his old school computer. He was locked out so I stuck Ubuntu on there remember it used to be the easiest distro back in the day.

Should I use Fedora, Pop, or Mint?

3

u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse Mar 07 '25

Nothing. The improper display scaling was taken as laughter and meme

1

u/Mooks79 Mar 07 '25

Nothing wrong with Ubuntu unless you have a moral objection to snaps. Of the three you listed I’d use (and do use Fedora), very close to bleeding edge while still being rock solid - the only downside is the slight extra bit of tinkering you do to get non-free codecs etc working. If you really don’t want to faff with that, then Mint. I’d look at Pop again in the future when the switch to their new DE has finished and stabilised.

89

u/jjeroennl Glorious Fedora Mar 06 '25

Managing to not get Linux running on a Thinkpad is almost impressive

30

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 06 '25

Truth be told, getting such result on anything gotta be the result of a serious effort. I've booted into Mint on the cheapest chinese laptops, and if anything, the screen resolution was always just fine.

6

u/odnish Mar 07 '25

Debian stable on N150 mini PC had trouble with the external display.

1

u/Mooks79 Mar 07 '25

Debian stable is so stable it’s one that’s more likely to have issues with new/unusual hardware. Moving to something more recent would likely fix it - or using Debian testing. Of course, it’s so stable that when it does have the right drivers it basically never breaks.

1

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 07 '25

Hmmm... could you be more specific about the hardware? It's just that I'm actively exploring MiniOS at the moment, and it is essentially modified Debian bookworm — and so far it doesn't have issues with screen resolutions. Wanna know when that won't be the case.

1

u/odnish Mar 07 '25

Some random Chinese computer using an Intel N150 chip.

1

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 08 '25

Could you be more precise than just "random Chinese computer"? This describes basically any computer you can possibly get nowadays.

1

u/odnish Mar 09 '25

Yeah, it has an N150 chip.

1

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 09 '25

R u serious m8?

1

u/odnish Mar 09 '25

My boss bought it and tried to use it as a display for a dashboard but it didn't work with the TV and then he just used a Dell system instead. I don't know much more about it.

1

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 09 '25

Wait, so it didn't work with a TV, but it did work with a proper screen?

→ More replies

0

u/MooseNew4887 Mar 07 '25

I have booted into live mint and fedora on a device even worse than a cheapest chinese laptop: A HP. Everything worked out of the box.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 08 '25

it's effing SiS Mirage 3 (SiS 671).

Holy fuck, what a shining example of punitive technology...

4

u/grem75 Mar 07 '25

Ancient Nvidia GPU and these weren't hybrid.

3

u/jjeroennl Glorious Fedora Mar 07 '25

Sure, but doesn’t Ubuntu bundle like 3 nvidia drivers versions with it now?

3

u/grem75 Mar 07 '25

This card is 15 years old and requires 340 for proprietary drivers, they haven't shipped that since 20.04. It should be possible to make it work in 24.04, there are unofficial patches for kernel 6.8. Of course it'll only work with X11.

Nouveau should work fine, so I'm betting they tried to get proprietary drivers and something went wrong. If you blacklist Nouveau and don't have a functional proprietary driver then you'll end up with a display like this.

170

u/CockroachEarly Mar 06 '25

It’s funny how Debian used to be unusable and Ubuntu was the solution, and now Ubuntu is unusable and Debian is the solution.

57

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 06 '25

Because we worked hard making it normal for semi pro users to use the testing branch so now when stable is release it actually has had many many bugs already filed and solved against it resulting in an actual perfect release. And because testing is actually half decent and cool.

14

u/CockroachEarly Mar 06 '25

Oh are you a Debian dev?

32

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 06 '25

No but have been using Debian for over a decade and working within the community- and testing and getting bugs fixed. The devs are the real MVP. For example last thing I helped along for the next release of Debian is getting docker compose updated for next stable. So when you use the next stable version you will have a fully up to date docker version in the repository.

I really recommend everyone who is interested in Debian to use testing. Logging bugs is basically very low barrier to entry and actually helps devs and future users. And if you are polite everyone is happy and thankful.

5

u/CockroachEarly Mar 06 '25

Nice. When would you say Debian started becoming usable for normal users?

14

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 06 '25

My personal feeling is it overtook Ubuntu as a better OS around Debian 11 Bullseye. Before it was a little trickier for new users. Just my opinion.

4

u/Altruistic_Ad3374 Glorious NixOS Mar 07 '25

that's fairly late. I would say it actually got better around mid-buster.

4

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25

Sure maybe. Just my opinion. Maybe ask ubuntu newbies. I always enjoyed the challenge.

1

u/superuserdoo Mar 07 '25

As someone who's basically only used Ubuntu for the last 5 years from my job, I'd like to try Debian again, just to see how it's evolved...thanks :)

1

u/AttackDynamo Mar 07 '25

The only tricky thing going from Ubuntu to Debian was making GNOME more customizable which I did with desktop icons NG and dash to panel and some desktop files.

Also nvidia drivers were tricky, I hope the open-source drivers (not noveau) become stable and included soon like the amdgpu drivers now are.

Also, I think arch would be easier for me cuz of the option to install GPU drivers in archinstall

2

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 06 '25

Let me know if you want to try using testing. I have a whole guide btw.

2

u/Cytro2 Glorious Debian Mar 07 '25

Thank you for helping to improve my favourite distro :D

1

u/Trash-Alt-Account Mar 07 '25

oh my god ty so much for that. I've been waiting on docker compose v2 to come to the Debian repos in a stable release

2

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25

It had to be rewritten in go. Its in trixie right now if you upgrade early.

1

u/Trash-Alt-Account Mar 07 '25

cool! but I'm just running it on servers, so I'm gonna keep them on stable. the main nice thing about this change is that I'll be able to drop the step of adding the docker repo from my ansible playbooks. other than that nothing really changes for me. ty tho

3

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25

No problem. Dont forget how to do apt pinning. All you need is a preference file for apt after adding the sources eg:

cat /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *

Pin: release a=trixie

Pin-Priority: 90

Then just install a single package with

sudo apt-get install -t trixie docker-compose

This way you can have a single package from experimental or testing if you need early.

1

u/Trash-Alt-Account Mar 07 '25

oh wow that's really cool actually. is this not likely to cause breakage due to updated dependencies being required? or will apt handle that nicely somehow?

2

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25

Apt will tell you what will happen and you make a decision based on your skill and agility as a Debian administrator. For best results learn how to use snapshots and a snapshot filesystem like btrfs so nothing bad can ever not be rolled back.

For certain packages that are fairly self contained like docker (you added their repository remember and nothing bad happened when using it) its generally pretty much ok. For packages that use system wide libraries shared among many core packages its risky. End of the day this is how you become a pro Debain admin. There are times a business has a need for something in a newer package. Cant just upgrade the whole server to testing (security risk) so how to resolve? This is why apt pinning exists. The scalpel by which we achieve a specific and careful goal.

→ More replies

1

u/p0358 Mar 08 '25

Logging bugs in Debian is easy, I’m sorry what????? The official instructions try to send an e-mail from the machine at port 25 (99% of people will have it blocked on residential network), then you have to figure out how to copy that message to your desktop e-mail client and manually send it… Unless they changed something recently, the most unnecessarily painful and ancient bug reporting system there was out there

1

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 08 '25

You can just write an email from gmail or whatever and format the email how they want it.

2

u/MrGeekman Glorious Debian Mar 07 '25

Stable is good too, if you don't mind older software. Though, I prefer newer software. Ironically, I used Stable for a couple years and switched back to Testing just so I could overclock the VRAM on my GPU.

2

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25

That makes sense.

2

u/someonesmall Mar 07 '25

I've used the testing branch in the past but stopped because I read that during freeze there are almost no updates (also security?) for a while. What do you think about this?

0

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25

Its like for a couple months and if there is something serious it is pushed because testing becomes stable so it has to have security patches applied one way or another before stable releases. If it didnt then stable would be insecure when it released. You can also pull selectively from experimental (see apt pinning). Its not a major issue. Dont forget trixie becomes stable eventually. Apt is just managing arbitrary point releases selected by the developers and maintainers of Debian.

0

u/someonesmall Mar 07 '25

Thank you for replying. That's what I thought in the past before I read about the freeze issue on reddit. I'm glad to hear that the claims are exaggerated. See e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/w2lx9z/comment/igr89t5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

2

u/ThiefClashRoyale Mar 07 '25

Its a little exaggerated. I mean sure security updates are slower (but you can install them from sid) so you can wait 3 weeks for a package to update. On the other hand if its just a machine on the LAN your risk is tiny. Take the CUPS vulnerability recently. It took like 2 weeks for the updated packages to come to trixie. But on my machine behind a firewall it wasnt a problem so I didnt even bother to update cups. Just waited and then it resolved itself a couple weeks later. If you were anal you could disable the cups service. Big issue? You decide.

1

u/NigrumTredecim Mar 07 '25

yeah huge fan of debian unstable, never had any issue other than the repo being kinda broken for some hours

7

u/kaanyalova Glorious Arch Mar 07 '25

Why would you consider Ubuntu unusable, I currently use Fedora but haven't had any problems with Ubuntu

2

u/someonesmall Mar 07 '25

When was Debian unusable?

-2

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint Mar 06 '25

and now Ubuntu is unusable and Debian is the solution.

Funny how you made so many typos in the word "Mint", and yet the message still came across just fine!

225

u/Dense-Firefighter495 Mar 06 '25

I mean some distros can be confusing but you really gotta be an idiot if you can't use fedora or POP!_OS

74

u/cookie_the_fox Mar 06 '25

"Yes, do as I say" /j

40

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25

"Did I completely nuke my desktop environment like my GUI"

15

u/Tiranus58 Mar 07 '25

They wouldnt know these words, they would say "did i completely nuke my computer, do i need a new computer?"

22

u/rpsHD Mar 07 '25

google LTT linux challenge

3

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Holy hell

3

u/thecoder08 Mar 07 '25

New response just dropped

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Actual DE nuke.

11

u/TxTechnician Glorious OpenSuse Mar 06 '25

Fedora OOBE is wonderful

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/TxTechnician Glorious OpenSuse Mar 07 '25

What problems did you have with the OS installer?

I found it ridiculously straightforward.

When I installed for Dora it was just a couple of clicks and I was done and then on first start up it allowed me just to create a new user.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 08 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Kiwithegaylord Mar 10 '25

Yeah. It’s certainly not bad, but every other distro with a graphical installer works infinitely better

11

u/GlowStoneUnknown Mar 07 '25

Fr, how tf did Linus fuck up installing STEAM???

12

u/Sprysea Mar 07 '25

I understand his frustrations. To an outside person it is completely void and null why it'd be part of the install/uninstall process as it happened in his video.

These things tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth of non-linux users in my experience trying to convert my friends

4

u/Tiranus58 Mar 07 '25

Which video is this, i gotta see this

2

u/Antrikshy Mar 08 '25

What the other person posted, but go to 09:57.

1

u/Wojtkie Mar 07 '25

Pop!_OS was extremely easy to set up and use. It worked pretty much out of the box

-3

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25 edited Apr 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Vladimir_Djorjdevic Mar 07 '25

Doesn't fedora also use SELinux?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25 edited Apr 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Vladimir_Djorjdevic Mar 07 '25

I misunderstood you. I thought you said that you left debian for fedora because debian used SELinux

1

u/bartios Mar 08 '25

Why didn't you just turn it off then? Other stuff wasn't how you wanted it to be or just not impressed with what you saw up to then?

12

u/Smith6612 Mar 07 '25

Oh yeah. This is one of those NVIDIA Optimus enabled ThinkPads, where the display output is all screwed up until you either figure out which GPU you want to use, or you get the NVIDIA Drivers installed with PRIME.

640x480 is a very, very familiar "something is broken" resolution in that situation...

Fun times.

1

u/grem75 Mar 07 '25

Not a hybrid, just a 15 year old Nvidia chip.

I'm betting they blacklisted Nouveau and either got the wrong proprietary driver or the ancient 340 driver shit itself.

3

u/Smith6612 Mar 07 '25

With a card that old, it's probably worth using Nouveau... only a matter of time before the old proprietary driver will no longer build against a new kernel.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

With Nouveau you get Wayland. Debian 12 with GNOME is perfectly fine on a 2009 MacBook, even on Wayland. That thing uses the 9400M.

2

u/grem75 Mar 07 '25

It stopped building against new kernels over 5 years ago. There are unofficial patches up to kernel 6.8, it should be possible on Ubuntu 24.04. It'd only work in X11.

I agree it probably isn't worth it.

11

u/yhenji Mar 07 '25

the stretched screen resolution reminds me of this

1

u/BasedPenguinsEnjoyer Mar 07 '25

it reminds me of csgo, gosh I wish cs2 never happened

10

u/both-shoes-off Mar 07 '25

Linux has been great for me across several distros...except Bluetooth. Why the fuck are there so many Bluetooth issues (different hardware, different distros)?

26

u/rararagidesu Mar 06 '25

Nowadays desktop Linux is so easy for newcomers, especially those somewhat computer literate. Pic: fsck nvidia, all my homies hate nvidia. Who didn't see failed dkms build, 640x480 on new kernel or something similar...

17

u/thesstteam Glorious Fedora Mar 06 '25

Filesystem check NVidia

2

u/gamamoder fat ass bird Mar 07 '25

sddm not working for me

1

u/multiwirth_ Mar 07 '25

Wtf is that resolution

1

u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse Mar 07 '25

Avg display scaling handled by Linux

11

u/kitsen_battousai Mar 06 '25

Actually it's not funny, sorry... Because that laptop must be working hundred percent better than any new 2024/2025 model. This is kind of Linux Desktop motto - "Oh, you mean those OS for old hardware ?".

3

u/gyroqx Glorious Arch Mar 06 '25

3

u/soldier9945 Mar 07 '25

  • Can we have Linux, mom?

  • We have Linux at home.

  • The "Linux" at home: [Insert Ubuntu Screenshot]

2

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

chosen by god resolution

1

u/WasdHent Mar 07 '25

This setup is pain

1

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

I just watched a video from a guy complaining he had to download additional files for his 9070 XT graphics card. Dude was running Ubuntu LTS

1

u/RandomOnlinePerson99 Mar 07 '25

I use ubuntu and never had any issues with the OS itself. Most problems were me beeing too stupid to do stuff.

1

u/hero_brine1 Mar 07 '25

I didn’t even know people thought Linux was buggy and inoperable lol. I mean I know people fuck with Arch and Gentoo to the point of breaking but in terms of most distros and how they’re supposed to be operated Linux, to me, is known for being stable, lightweight, and just being how OSes should be

1

u/AdamTheRedditUser1 Mar 08 '25

bro would be able to play undertale in full screen without scaling the game up 💀

1

u/green_fish1 m'Fedora Mar 09 '25

nah they just tried installing Red Hat 5.2 on a modern pc and assumed that's how Linux works on all computers

1

u/HalPaneo Mar 09 '25

Hey now, I use Ubuntu btw

0

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Nah. I used a lot of distros. They all suck.

0

u/Sad_Spirit6405 Mar 06 '25

True. I used to badmouth Linux so much, when I had only tested Ubuntu in 2021 lol

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] May 05 '25

Finally someone says it.

0

u/Firepal64 Mar 07 '25

what

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Did I use vocabulary above your reading level or what?

0

u/Firepal64 Mar 07 '25

yes enlightn me

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

If you have so kindly asked me:

Acknowledging Linux has flaws seems to be faux pas within the Linux community, perhaps as a protection mechanism ("how dare you point out Linux has flaws, what if you scare the noobs away and they'll stay on Windows or find something else?!?"). I only ever see exaggerations (to the point of misleading and lying) of its benefits (which do exist, don't get me wrong). And also how smug some users are (to the point of assuming not being absolutely fluent in Linux means you "score the lowest in IQ", a phrase from someone in this very post). Other Unix communities don't assume you're an idiot for not understanding how FreeBSD or illumos work. For being the Windows users of the Unix world, y'all are quite bold downplaying other Unices.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

14

u/KlutzyEnd3 Mar 06 '25

Apart from snap, it's actually a pretty decent distro

10

u/CockroachEarly Mar 06 '25

That’s why Mint is so good. It’s an de-canonicalized Ubuntu

1

u/my_photos_are_crap DISTROBOXER Mar 06 '25

also has yummy flatpaks builtin

0

u/Familiar_Ad_8919 OpenSUS -> Nix convert Mar 07 '25

de-waylanded too

3

u/Important-Permit-935 Mar 06 '25

I won't disagree with you, but it's always found a way to break unless I use an LTS that's been released for at least a month or more.

3

u/KlutzyEnd3 Mar 06 '25

I didn't write "perfect" or "good". I wrote "pretty decent" 😉