I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.
It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.
I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.
Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.
But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.
Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.
I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.
I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
This is not an airport Sir, no need to announce departures.
If it’s ok to announce you’re moving to Linux (and it is), then it’s ok to announce you’re moving away.
That’s arrivals
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
No, This Is Patrick!
No, this isn’t an airport because this is a product, not a service. A product wants to claim market share from newcomers like me. Expect people like you make comments like this that makes people like me feel unwelcomed and regret the decision to even try the OS.
You and your piece of shit attitude is the problem. There’s a difference between asking for advice with something you couldn’t figure out (it’s OK and It happens to all of us), feeling bummed or overwhelmed. Expressing some frustration healthily.
And walking into a place, complaining that nothing works, insulting their values, proclaiming that you’re leaving because you’re dissatisfied, then slamming the door shut.
Who tf are you? We don’t know you. You’re not part of our community. This is the first time we’re seeing you, and you’re acting like a little know it all shithead ranting about crap we are already aware of, we already have a solution for, or is not relevant to us because it’s against our principles. And you wonder why nobody here likes you?
Linux is not a product, no matter how much we like to discuss it, at the end of the day market share is irrelevant for FLOSS. We seek no profit, we chase no investor, we please no shareholder. It’s fitting you are feeling unwelcome, you are unwelcome. You don’t share the same values as our community.
Good riddance.
Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
Give up. You want Windows not Linux. You’re unwilling to tinker and didn’t even want to read about the differences between tailscale clients.
Stick to the walled garden. There are monsters out there.
A couple of hours spent trying to tinker with an OS is far from unwilling. I know all OSes need work. I never asked for it to be completely turnkey. Just **more **turnkey so I don’t have to spend all day just to get basic things working.
Is that a threat? Do whatever you want.
If you seek help, remove 95% of your post.
All distros work somehow, otherwise people wouldn’t use them.
I don’t know how to word this in a nice way but OP didn’t write anything that would make me assume they have bad intent.
People try things and can be frustrated when it doesn’t work for them. It can be specially frustrating in an ecochamber like this.
Why do you have to take critiques on Linux as a threat? Will Linux problems go away if they remove “95%” of their post?
If you talk shit about someone’s garden, don’t be surprised if they tell you to fuck off when you ask for gardening advice
OP didn’t talk shit though, they explained their experience in a pretty fair and neutral way. Don’t take criticisms against Linux so personally.
they explained their experience in a pretty fair and neutral way
Meanwhile OP:
Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible
Did I though? I praised it for how far it has come from 10 years ago. Then I highlighted my frustration with quirks and bugs I was experiencing.
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Did the dude tell you to fuck off?
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Literally the beginning of your post:
Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible
- If you need help, ask for it. There’s no need for a clickbait title, and a review from someone who doesn’t know how to use the product…
Lol, it’s kinda sad how personally you’re taking OP’s opinion about Mint’s UX. Time to touch some grass.
I don’t care about mint (MX is better), it’s just a really good example of how not to start your post. Also, both you and the op had the same rationalisation…
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A post like this doesn’t do anything towards fixing those bugs. I bet a soda you didn’t file a single bug report.
That’s the minimum first step if you want to contribute to the improvement of those issues.
Imagine if OP posted “new to Linux, please help me solve these issues” and just listed what they need help with. They’d get actual help instead.
I wasn’t being threatened. I’m giving you perspective from a newcomer who is having issues with trying out Linux. I’m happy you are not bothered by your OS. Now you know that someone else out there is not having the same experience as you.
OP, you need to understand that you are leaving your confort zone and things might not work and that’s okay. You can have plenty of issues with Windows as well but I think we’re just trained to ignore them or assume it not the OS’s fault.
I’ve had this sleep issue once with arch and I think that’s related with a lack of swap memory. Did you configure it?
Regarding issues with programs that you use like Slack etc, If it takes too long, there might have something wrong. I never used Mint so I have no idea on what Pop Store is but I would go away to search for the packages on their official websites.
If you don’t have the patience to learn a new OS just don’t do it. You’re not obligated to do so, you’re not inferior because of it and you are free to choose what is better for you. I do feel better using Linux these days because I am honestly very tired on MS making decisions on what’s best and I enjoy fixing issues by myself.
I think you wording might offend a lot of people here because Linux and open source is almost a lifestyle for a lot of people, so if you need help staying it might be more productive to calm down and elaborate on your isssues in the future.
This is what I was about to write hahaha
If the OP is looking to do things like he does in Windows, just use Windows. I’ve been daily driving MacOS, Linux and Windows (which I fully dropped a few weeks ago) and I have a different workflow in each one. You can’t expect the same behavior/approach in a different OS (in Linux, even in different distros).
In the end, just use what works for you. If you wanna try something else, the “easier” path is to just adjust to that OS, unless you are into customizing it to whatever you are used to, what does not seem to be the interest of the OP.
But I have to say, it is a pain in the ass whenever to be judged because you like/dislike and operating system. Just live your life hahaha
Wow, I never considered swap. I’ve had this problem with my laptop for the last year. I’ll fix this, thank you.
I went into this project understanding that I need to spend some time to make it work for my workflow.
For the sleep issue, I tried this command sudo kernelstub -a mem_sleep_default=deep
It didn’t seem to work. I ran out of ideas to try and got frustrated. How do I configure the swap memory?
Thank you, but I’m very calm. I just didn’t realize how sensitive the Linux community is with their lifestyle.
Swap is only required if you want to hibernate your system, it’s the linux equivalent of
hiberfil.syson windows. When hibernating, the kernel freezes all processes and writes the contents of the RAM to swap (usually a separate partition on the disk), where it can be restored from on the next boot. Since you have issues with sleep/suspend, adding swap won’t help you here, and I also assume PopOS configures swap automatically during the install process anyway. (Also, swap is used as additional memoty in case the RAM is full, so it also functions as thepagefile.sysequivalent.)Anyway, suspend/sleep may fail due to various reasons. It doesn’t work on my desktop (same symptoms you also have), but works fine on my laptop. The command you executed (
sudo kernelstub …) adds a kernel parameter to your bootloader, that advises your kernel to use S3 sleep instead of modern standby (S2Idle), see this wiki article for the differences: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernateSince the kernel is only loaded when you start the PC, my question is: Did you restart your PC after running the command? Check via
cat /proc/cmdline, whether the parameter is present. You can also configure this while the system is running viaecho deep > /sys/power/mem_sleep(needs to be run as root, i.e. login as root viasudo -ibefore running it). See also: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate#Changing_suspend_methodIf you use a desktop PC I would honestly just disable automatic suspend via the PopOS system settings. If you use a laptop on the other hand, I can understand why you would want sleep to work. You can try reading the Arch Wiki article I linked, it contains a lot of information regarding sleep, but keep in mind that the instructions there are for Arch Linux, not for PopOS, so if the Arch Wiki advises you to change something, you’d have to look up the PopOS way of doing that. Unfortunately I don’t have any further hints I could give you, but I hope this information at least helped you to understand some of the terminology. Best of luck!
This was very informative. I am not very knowledgeable so I just assumed it might be related to swap (since I had this issue before configuring it and never again afterwards).
I assumed sleep/suspend would work kind of the same as hibernate. Thank you for your knowledge!
Edit: I just read the other person comment about swap not being the case plus your distro might already configue it on install, so it might not help at all. Sorry!
If you need information on why have Swap space you can read more about it here and here .
In the past, when installing Linux you would create a small partition in your HD for swap memory but nowadays you can just create a swap file. I think this guide might help you.
I don’t know if English is your first language but by the way you wrote your post it was a bit negative which made me understand you were frustrated, that’s why I said to calm down.
I agree with the people who say you should go back to Windows.
Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way.
Different operating systems work differently. There are several projects to get (GNU/)Linux to work more like Windows, but if your goal is to be like Windows, you won’t get any better than, well, Windows. I, like most Linux users, think the way Windows does things is terrible, and I’m on Linux precisely because of the differences with proprietary OSes like Windows. But if the differences are a negative for you, I suggest you use the OS that works the way you like it.
Your problems likely can be diagnosed and troubleshooted if you have the patience—some bugs I was experiencing took me like 6 years to diagnose what the problem was—but fixing your bugs will not change the fact that (GNU/)Linux is intended to work differently from Windows, i.e. it’s not a bug. So it sounds like it won’t solve the underlying problem.
I’ll echo what someone else said in another comment and ask why you chose to switch to Linux in the first place. Out of curiosity? In which case, it sounds like your curiosity has been satisfied and you’ve discovered that Linux does not meet your personal requirements. But I think the reasons why most people switch, ie privacy and customisability, and more generally what comes with free software ie the freedom to do whatever you like with your system, are reasons which motivate people to either overcome learning curves (to learn the better way to use your computer, the way you are supposed to use GNU/Linux distros) or to dedicate the time and effort to troubleshooting problems with their system. If you don’t have those motivations, you probably want to just go back to Windows.
It is a tool, use it when it fits. Use both where they fit.
Yeah, laptops with dedi nvidia cards were always pain with Linux, at least my experience was always terrible (there is no feature parity to windows, especially energy saving stuff), though for me I am in the position where I would rather have Linux with my configs (which translates into: I’ve spent a lot of time on tweaking and fixing stuff over the time) then windows, so a nvidia gpu in a laptop is no-go in the first place.
Linux requires time investment, not everyone is comfortable to dig in. The fragmented nature of Linux (multiple Desktop Environments, graphical libraries, heck even low-level stuff: va-api/vdpau, …) lends itself into it so there is no sugar-coating it.
If you can’t or don’t want to fix it then win is the way but I would hope one day you will give Linux another chance - the community is there, so there is a high chance it will be better the next year and the one after that, and so on.
My nvidia card is probably my main issue. I will likely try again in a few years and maybe next time purchase a Linux box from the manufacture to get some support.
So basically
- bad experience with XOrg, use Wayland
- bad experience with Flatpak installs: they download all the libraries at the beginning, just wait
- bad experience with swipebactions that every app does independently? No idea, Firefox has this
- broken sleep? Known one, switch to between s2idle and suspend-to-ram maybe
I use Linux because I work faster on it than Windows. If it doesn’t help you, why bother keep using it?
But I think the question is why did you switch to Linux in the first place? Both have things they are good at and they aren’t, so if you can’t compromise you will only be unhappy no matter which OS you are on.
I care about privacy and have a spare computer willing to see if it can completely switch over. I don’t think it’s a compromise having my computer freeze each time it needs to sleep. I think that is more of a bug.
That’s the point. Problems on this platform, no matter big or small, can take you countless time digging into forums, logs, even source codes. There are never short of stories about an update breaking the whole system, and sometimes even the developers couldn’t reproduce it due to widely different combinations of tools and configs. As long as it is community driven, it will happen.
Microsoft will take the blame and pay its engineers to solve the problem for you because they take something away in addition to money.
But having 2 computers running 2 systems can be a solution.
Linux Mint works perfectly as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never seen or heard of the issue you mention where the menu resizes all by itself. Or do you mean that after you switch to 4k it’s too small to see? (btw, do you know that you can resize its window using the mouse?)
If you want something larger for a 4k display, simply install the Cinnamenu instead (you can find it from the Applets window, and then download it from there). I have it setup to show large icons instead of a list. It looks absolutely great on my 28" 4k screen. And it’s also resizable.
Then, there’s the issue of tailscale. Why download it as a flatpak? Why download 1+ GB of data for something that is just 26 MB even when statically linked, directly from the OFFICIAL website? https://tailscale.com/download/linux/static Why use third party uploads for something as critical as a server, where security could be an issue? Just get it directly from the official website.
Perhaps I didn’t give Mint a good enough chance. I felt the UX wasn’t very good. Like, why are there so many apps just preinstalled and thrown in an “All Application” section.
I see its categorized as well, but it’s just daunting the first time using it.
That’s what “ALL Applications” does, it lists all applications. And it’s best to have enough apps to start someone up, than to be bare bones. There are categories to easily find what you need. I personally never use the “All Applications” option. I must say again, download Cinnamenu, it’s better than the default.
If you don’t have a specific need that only Linux can fulfill, or are not an advocate of open source software or don’t really care, then why make yourself go through this and not just stick with Windows if it works so much better for you?
I can use it fine, because A., I don’t have to work with anybody else, and B. I use it mostly for programming and electronics engineering, which it excels at. You have other use cases, so it’s probably not a good fit. I’m not the kind of person that will blindly push Linux on everybody and their grandmother while lying through their teeth about the “easy” user experience. I ain’t gonna sugarcoat it, it’s an OS developed by tinkerers for tinkerers, and if you’re not a tinkerer, you’re going to get frustrated.
I do care about privacy. This was the primary reason to try Linux again.
I just didn’t realize how much work for a newcomer would need to do to get basic functionality working.
People switching to Linux forces a Rethink of how you do things. There is loss and change, and the mistake people make so often is thinking “I this in windows, why not Linux?”. I think this is an understandable expectation because they look so similar. The trick is reaching this understanding and resetting your expectations.
I run EndeavourOS (Basically Arch), and I love it, but it doesn’t do everything. I have to use windows for my music creation stuff because the instruments and effects I want can’t be installed on Linux. I’m prepared to switch between the 2 OSes and I’ve slowly managed to move almost everything I do on to Linux by finding alternatives and accepting the different ways it does things.
Doesn’t mean it will work for everyone but that’s the way I think about it.
I get that. I think my line of work doesn’t require much. I just want the basics like slack and zoom. I just need the basics working “Back Gestures and a non freezing computer”
I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either.
NVIDIA dedicated card
This may be related, because a while ago, when I installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, exactly the same issue happened. PC was waking up, but GPU wasn’t.
Unfortunately unless you buy hardware with the intention of running Linux on it you’re rolling dice.
It is very likely your laptop can work well with it but unless you buy a Linux certified laptop you’re going to have a few quirks. Generally, if it comes down to it, the Kernel code can be adjusted to accommodate the quirks of incompatible hardware but that requires reporting the bugs.
This is why people say Linux works great on older devices. It’s because Linux users got the laptops brand new and put in the time to report the bugs the needed parties so they get resolved and included in newer Linux (kernel) versions.
Actually a lot of these issues stem from a long history of Microsoft breaking standards and manufacturers catering to Windows. This is especially apparent with ACPI which ties into power consumption and sleep reliability among other things.
If you buy supported hardware, manufacturers specifically test and align better with standards (often offering a Linux mode in the bios). Linux actually “just works” better than MacBooks do. Some laptops Ive owned and loved are:
- Thinkpad t480
- Dell XPS 13 (Developer Edition)
- Framework Laptop
The last two of these go the extra step to publish their bios updates through “LVFS” which means I can get bios updates, OS updates, AND app updates all from the “app store”. This is so underrated and a far cry from the windows experience.
If you want to use Linux without quirks and you have the capability to, consider getting a Laptop that ships with Linux. Key things that play into this are wifi and sleep compatibility.
Please don’t judge Linux unless you try it on hardware that is all supported by Linux. (The great thing is you can take action, even without coding experience, to make your hardware work if it does not today).
As for the software experience, Nvidia is notorious for difficulty with Linux but have been taking strides to change that. I feel that in a years time things will be better.
This specifically affects the Wayland compatibility (modern display stack), which also influences the touchpad experience especially around multi touch (Wayland is paired with libinput a modern input stack).
Dual boot is the gateway I stepped through many years ago. It’s been months now since I chose team MS. I do lot of dev, gaming, and media work, and it’s all faster on the linux side. With the recent forced data mining “feature” update, I really doubt I’ll keep it around for my next upgrade.
So I’m just offering dual boot may be a good scenario. And also, popping in another drive is better than messing with your windows drive.
