My time with Linux has been equal parts amazing and absolutely infuriating. Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box. Here have been my issues:
Nvidia GPU - Trying to figure out how to get the drivers working was a nightmare with ten million different people giving different advice on how to get it to work. Eventually I was able to get them signed and it seems to work
Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux. It took hours to get it even remotely working ok, but I still don’t think it’s perfect.
Compatibility - Some things just straight up don’t work for seemingly no reason. None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.
And that is where I am disappointed. Troubleshooting Linux issues sucks. There are so many people giving their opinions and all of them are different and most don’t work.
When Linux is working right it is amazing, and I love it. But right now, it just isn’t as good as Windows and extremely infuriating more often than not. Guess I am going to switch back and give Bill Gates all of my info again. Really fucking disappointing
Update: Controllers seem to work after forcing compatibility mode in Steam. No idea why that was off or why Steam was essentially hijacking my controller, but it seems to work now. For everyone that helped thank you.
I’ve been on and off with Linux for about 15 years and just want to counter some of the people trying to troubleshoot or criticize to say: it can be really tough.
We need our computers to work and we expect things to function correctly.
I’ve used dozens of distros over the years. I was a super early Arch adopter, mained Gentoo for about three years, ran my own BSD server for programming projects, and still maintain several small home Linux servers. And even I sometimes want to pull my hair out trying to get semi-new hardware working right in my distro of choice. I spent three hours today fighting Nvidia and sound drivers and eventually just had to give up on that machine after being told that what I want just flat out isn’t supported in Linux on the hardware I have.
Take a breath, set it aside until you’re ready to take another crack at it, and know that it’s a journey. You’ll get there or the software will catch up and meet you halfway. No shame in being frustrated :)
Thanks so much! I appreciate it. Already giving it another go with Pop OS
There comes a time where it goes from frustrating to fun if you keep at it. You’ll snap into it and be like, “I know how to fix this!” or other times you’ll be furiously searching the web for your answer. I don’t think you’ll regret Pop!_OS. I started there and have been distro-hopping ever since. A lot is set up right out of the box in Pop.
Just sit back and work on one issue at a time until it works. Check into and learn how to setup Timeshift (basically system restore), you may thank yourself later. Though, Debian is pretty damn hard to break without actively trying to break it.