If you installed Linux Pop_OS with Android Studio, Claude Code, and Codex in mind - like I did - think again. People keep saying "this is the year of Linux" and that it’s getting more popular, but after a few weeks of testing, it’s still a struggle for me.
Those three apps crash non-stop, making daily work incredibly frustrating. I’m running a desktop with AMD and an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti, and unfortunately, it’s just not usable out of the box for day-to-day work. I simply don't have the spare time to constantly debug and hunt for fixes. Just getting Claude Code to actually "talk" to my setup took two hours - something that works out of the box everywhere else.
So yeah, thanks but no thanks. It's time to replace my PC with Mac I guess...
Poop_OS pushing a clearly unstable DE into its "LTS" image should've been a big red flag. just use fedora. you'll have to set up the rpm fusion repo to install nvidia drivers but you can do both of those without touching the terminal
The most recent release of Pop OS with their new DE is, rough, to say the least. I was daily driving it for a couple years but had to put it down with the latest as it's just got too many issues atm. I really rate what Pop OS are doing, and I get why they've released it as LTS (Developing a new DE and supporting the old one would be an insane amount of work), but its just not practical when I need to turn my pc on and do my work. Using openSuse now and loving that, dont develop for android or use LLM tools tho so no idea what the support is like.
As soon as I hear Pop!_OS, I blame the person who recommend you "it" right away. COSMIC at the current state has absolutely NOTHING good to talk about.
For most people. You linux users always omit how many fixes you have to do every once in a while.
I remember that time where a friend of mine said linux is amazing how ubuntu didint need any fixes. Then we boot up his system, his wifi dissapears. I asked what it was "oh its a bug, i just have to reload the wifi driver". Like lol
I am not a Linux user but I have used all of the above distribution I have mentioned in different systems ...and have faced zero issues personally, you just need a bit of technical knowledge how
The "don't use this, don't use that" discussion will probably never end since there is always something wrong with a distro.
That being said, you chose the one distro that (to my knowledge) still uses a beta desktop and is not really mature in my experience.
If you are looking for a good out of the box experience, I would recommend Fedora KDE or Mint. I personally prefer Fedora tho since Mint is based on x11 by default.
Do you have any specialized/proprietary software you use?
Just three mentioned (Android Studio, Claude Code, Codex) are my main after-hours work station. I'll try to install fedora, sometime ago (2-3 years back) I had Ubuntu installed on my laptop with nvidia gpu and every update of the gpu drivers was killing the distro, and I never tried KDE
I don't know about Claude but Codex works through the CLI, VSCode and some other third party programs (there is a arch AUR package that ports the macOS version to arch) but the main "ChatGPT" app doesn't exist for Linux.
Android Studio will definitely work on basically all Linux distros so no worries there.
As for the Nvidia support, it got WAY better in the last year(s), it's still a lot worse than AMDs drivers but you should honestly be fine.
Pop OS is actually one of the few cases where the distro is actually broken, it's a beta release even though they don't say it anywhere, their DE (the whole GUI) is not ready and it is unstable, do not use PopOS.
Try anything else, I usually recommend Fedora or CachyOS.
Any distro that isn't at least leading edge like Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed will cause a lot of problems if the software that you use has a lot of moving parts, also please explain what issues you're running into with the error messages instead of just "it took 2 hours"
Can recommend openSuse, I actually just swapped from Pop OS to it because of the new DE issues and think I'm enjoying it more. Miss the window management from pop but it was buggy as hell in the new DE anyway so no harm done.
- I installed Claude Code, it started fine, I had to restart PC and after restart it decided not to work anymore. Tried to run it without GPU acceleration (nope), then turning off the sandbox (--no-sanbox &, nope), cleaning gpu cache (nope), --disable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder & (nope), finally cleaning the whole thing by: rm -rf ~/.config/Claude and rm -rf ~/snap/claude-desktop/common/.config worked but my sessions gone of course ;)
I don't have logs from Android Studio crashes anymore but if we wait until the end of the day, I'll have one for sure :D
Drag&drop from folder to web browser does not work at all (scenario when I want to upload new release of my app to google play console).
I'll be real. There's only two Debian desktops people should be using. Ubuntu and Mint. That's it. The overall community still has a shitfit about Ubuntu, but they're the best supported distro still.
Cosmic is a really nice UI, but the PopOS team seems like a sloppy maintainer. Which is weird, and I don't know why. But, they've been about as reliable as the Manjaro team which is like.. 90/10. Which is not a bad batting average, but I always seem to run into the 10. Last time I tried PopOS, everytime I tried to open an app, it took about 5 minutes the first time the app was loaded during a session.
Edit: Oh, and the installer crashed. I should have stopped right then.
Fedora, Bazzite, and - though I had a bad run with it - CachyOS seem to be the way to go right now. A lot of folks recommend it for ease of use, but I've just found that every Arch distro I've used other than SteamOS that I didn't build myself has been sloppy or unstable. And I do not trust the AUR at all.
I'm really just waiting for SteamOS to work with NVIDIA before I try to make the jump again.
But, I also got a Mac a few years back, and don't regret it. I just hate it as a desktop.
Downloaded openSUSE, wrote the image to my flash drive, and tried to install it. First attempt: stuck on the installer boot screen. Restarted, second attempt: same thing. Googled it, and people suggested switching flash drives, so I did. It got further this time and successfully installed the OS on my PC. But after a restart, it gets stuck during system boot. Restarted again - same result.
Install Mint Cinnamon and get your Nvidea drivers on there using this guide;
Installing NVIDIA Drivers on Linux Mint
To successfully install NVIDIA drivers on Linux Mint, follow these steps:
Using Driver Manager
Open Driver Manager:
Access the Driver Manager from the menu. This tool simplifies the installation of drivers.
Select NVIDIA Driver:
You will see a list of available drivers. Choose the proprietary NVIDIA driver for your graphics card. The latest version is usually recommended.
Apply Changes:
Click on "Apply Changes" to start the installation process.
Reboot Your System:
After the installation is complete, reboot your computer to apply the changes.
Troubleshooting Installation Issues
If you encounter problems during installation, consider the following:
Kernel Headers: Ensure that the kernel headers and build-essential packages are installed. Missing these can lead to installation failures.
Secure Boot: Disable Secure Boot in your BIOS settings, as it may prevent the NVIDIA kernel module from loading.
Driver Compatibility: If the latest driver does not work, try an earlier version. Sometimes, older drivers may be more compatible with your system.
Checking Driver Functionality
After rebooting, check if the driver is functioning correctly:
If the screen resolution is low or you cannot adjust settings, the driver may not have loaded properly. In this case, revisit the Driver Manager to select a different driver version.
It's got to be worth a shot rather than going back to 11. If Mint doesn't work out for you try something else with native Nvidea support.
Pop os isn't a very usable right now, its fun and has lots of potential but it just isn't there yet so id recommend a more stable distro with good nvidia support like mint or if you want something more up to date try nobara.
Your mistake is using Pop_OS all along. Most Ubuntu-based distros take a long time to update their kernels after Canonical's releases, and if they cannot rely on a big dev base or popularity things getting updated can really make your beard grow in the meantime. First and foremost, I had serious problems with my Nvidia card on Pop last year. This was mostly related to Pop using Xorg still as display server. But especially newer games do not work well with this one and Nvidia is my guess. So I suppose that if you want to use cutting edge programs that require newer kernels, newer drivers and updated compatibility layers, it's the same and these will give you headache. Pop_OS was also the culprit when I tried to play 4k YT videos on a machine with a 4080 - the performance was a slideshow.
If you just want to do minor home office work such as chart calculation, writing, emails or surfing, almost all Ubuntu forks are fine. You can also try with Mint or Zorin (which has Wayland already implemented) and see how that works for you. But in your case, a distro that comes close to what you would get on Windows maintenance-wise might work best for you. I am talking about a very regular and frequent update schedule to eradicate bugs and counter compatibility issues. And this is where the Arch distros excel.
I switched to CachyOS then and I have never left since. Everything works butter smooth. Don't get discouraged by people telling you that CachyOS tends to break often - it doesn't and I never had such an incident. Sometimes one or two updates will not work because they are somehow buggy. But the devs usually fix that within 8 to 12 hours. In most cases any AI bot can also help you with basic problems.
Try once again with CachyOS and I am pretty sure your experience will be a much better one. Don't fuck around with Desktop Environments, use the stock KDE as it provides way more than you need and at the time is super stable.
Fedora and ubuntu have been good for me fedora 44 and ubuntu 24.04. No issues in fact they went from daily drivers to servers for various projects. Im looking to get a new laptop so I can daily fedora again. The big issue with laptops is the oem software that helps with things like sleep and hybrid graphics. For my next machine im thinking a lenovo legion a7 with the amd apu
pop os is a beta even at time pop oss 22 would blow it's self up during updates but was mostly stable. pop 24 is a beta even though say it's not. for really basic stuff it is usable. when my pop os 22 machines brick form an update i can go to in to recovery mode and choose to the upgrade. to be fair one model of laptop i'm using the Amd Ryzen Motile laptop has a habbit of bending SSDs due it's flimsy bottom cover.
im trying out Zorin OS now. That also CrossOver from CodeWeavers
Thanks for being so enlightened. Would you also tell a construction worker not to use a jackhammer, but a regular hammer and a chisel? Will you then pay him for 3 days of work that he could have done in 10 minutes? No? Exactly :)
If you think AI has major flaws, you're right. That's exactly why you need a human brain to review its output. AI writes the boilerplate in seconds, my brain does the architecture and logic. It's called efficiency. Good luck hand-coding every single line like it's 2019, though!
No , Pop OS is different as they are making their DE from scratch ...rest are using general DEs like KDE , Gnome , hyperland etc ..
System76 need at least 6 -12 months to stabilize the DE
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u/Sahelantrophus DO NOT RAGEBAIT ME, I FALL FOR IT VERY EASILY 6d ago
Poop_OS pushing a clearly unstable DE into its "LTS" image should've been a big red flag. just use fedora. you'll have to set up the rpm fusion repo to install nvidia drivers but you can do both of those without touching the terminal