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.
Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box.
I set Mint up for my 65 year old mother about 4 years ago, and she hasn’t had a single issue since. I think it’s less about Mint being usable out of the box and more about Mint not doing what you want out of the box…
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had so much trouble with Linux. I understand the frustration that comes with Unix based OSes especially after being a heavy Windows user for years.
I did a bit of searching on your profile and saw you’re dual-booting with Windows on the same hard drive. I personally had issues with trying to set that up myself (Windows is a finicky, jealous b****). My own solution was installing my distro of choice onto a separate hard drive - if you can eventually do that I recommend it.
I know you’re getting a lot of flak for your post but it’s good to see honest opinions from people who genuinely want to try Linux but aren’t necessarily the same level of hyper-nerd as the typical demographic here.
Having information from a wider opinion pool will help in understanding how to get Linux to more of the population - but that’s a side tangent.
It’s encouraging to see that you are still open to trying in the future and taking a break from it can help you clear your head and come back with fresher eyes.
Unfortunately I don’t have much experience with NVIDIA drivers, and probably a similar amount of troubleshooting as Mint but I’ve found EndeavourOS to be friendlier to a middle-upper tech/gamer use case. Mint, for me, seemed cold and “office”-y and didn’t work well for me as I don’t only use my browser and word processor.
That said, distros are an almost ridiculously personal choice and part of that is trial and error. If you haven’t gotten the chance I recommend test driving a couple other distros in an Oracle VM (for user-friendliness) so you can decide what you like the feel of before committing to an install again, if and when you feel ready.
Good luck and godspeed until then.
Use Pop Os, perfect for nvidia GPU support out of the box.
I can’t because I have a dual boot with windows and secure boot has to stay on
use boxes to have a virtual fully functional windows within linux :)
I would have no idea how to set that up. I already tried creating a VM within linux for windows, and it went very poorly
Bro. You need to grab for sanity right now. Switch back to windows until you’re ready to take another dive. It’s worth it imo, but a lot of these comments are just plane unhelpful. Linux is great, if it’s not working for your hardware try a different tact.
Nvidia support just turned a corner at the end of last year. It’s getting much much better.
I can see everyone down voting you to oblivion… And that’s sort of fair. But that’s beside the point.
I was having trouble with NVIDIA while using mint early on and decided to switch to Fedora. Maybe try that once. Fedora has better defaults for nvidia.
Use the KDE Plasma spin btw. See if it works.
Looks like you used hardware that was designed for windows and are blaming it now on Linux.
I am not understanding the issue you have that requires signing of drivers.
Yes some Bluetooth devices lack the support from the manufacturer’s for Linux, the Controllers i have used work great, at least for my needs.
Controllers have better support Linux for ages. Not understanding the issue here either.
Troubleshooting on Windows sucks at least to the same degree. The same non specific error message gets you 50 possible solutions.
No need to announce your departure.
The reality is, people will be using Linux on Windows hardware, people won’t build special computers just for Linux or buy a premade Linux computer, they’ll flash Linux on their Windows computer expecting it to work and get annoyed if it doesn’t, the person in the post is making very valid points and those issues should be worked on
I absolutely disagree with you. If a manufacturer does not care about Linux support, it’s on the manufacturer. Do not blame the thousands of unpaid volunteers and a few paid ppl for not supporting a specific BT chip or controller or whatever.
The signing issue is so on OP cause disabling secure boot or using a supported distro like ubuntu could have fixed that, and yes you can run Windows 11 with Linux dual boot without secure boot.
I’m venting because I don’t understand how the experience is so vastly different for people. And what do you mean hardware designed for windows? Literally the only thing is the NVIDIA gpu
And Bluetooth devices count as hardware. You bitched about that too.
Thanks for the response
Basically everything you stated, Bluetooth, Controller and GPU is hardware.
Your experience is probably different since you still think and act like you use windows. This is normal. When you are used to something and then switch to something that works differently you will run into problems.
I did a first install of mint months ago and daily drove it. I have gotten pretty used to Linux.
Not the guy your responding to and I 100% get your frustration, but I want to provide a little anecdote.
Back in November, I built a new desktop to replace my 7 year old one and put OpenSUSE on it. No matter what I tried, I could not get either Bluetooth or WiFi working. I tried updating drivers, restarting controllers, reinstalling the OS, replacing the OS with Mint. Nothing worked.
I did a lot of searching over the next few days, and it turned out that my motherboard was so new that it’s built in WiFi chip did not have Linux drivers yet. Like at all.
Most products aren’t created with Linux in mind, so compatibility isn’t a concern. It’s up to the community to create patches & drivers to make things work, and it can take a bit to get things working.
I’m genuinely sorry you had the experience you did, but I hope that if you do return to Windows that you’ll give Linux another try in the future. Search your products to see if others have had issues, along with potential solutions, before you dive in.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, and not chastising me like half the other people in this thread. Yes it’s been very frustrating because I want to switch full time. I don’t understand how I am having these issues on a reinstall of Linux, when my first install had none of these issues.
Nvidia isn’t supported well on Linux*. A touch of Google fu would have told you that.
So all of this can be traced back to using a NVIDIA gpu and having to use secure boot?
Why do you need SecureBoot?
Dual boot with Windows. Dumb windows requires it
You might be better off with bare-metal linux and shoving windows inside a VM where it belongs.
I tried installing a VM but man it was really laggy. I used the open source one on linix, not virtualbox. I probably fucked something up, though.
Windows does not require secure boot.
Windows 11 absolutely does require secure boot
Research before going with a distro helps. Like why didn’t you look into compatability for your hardware first? That would have given you ideas as to what issues you may face.
The issues you are having many others don’t. You getting angry at people who have commented is comical. Like relax dude.
Just because your setup didn’t work as you expected “out of the box” doesn’t mean that’s the case 100% of the time.
Linux is great for a daily driver. Use whatever tools you want. Just stop bitching. Are a kid? Because your behavior points that direction.
The Linux community is generally helpful, and if you don’t work with the folks trying to help, you won’t make any progress.
Calm down.
Wow telling someone to calm down and claiming they are a kid. Really helpful. Thank you.
I wasn’t trying to help lol. You acting out and throwing a tantrum dictated how I responded.
Mint isn’t the platform for gaming on Linux. It’s way behind on a lot of things like display drivers. Try something like Bazzite or Nobara that have a ton of tweaks for both Nvidia and steam. Honestly, I’m really shying away from recommending Mint to new users, it’s getting really stale.
Bruh. You been on here for two days complaining about something where you’ve been told exactly what the issue is, and it’s not your Mint install, Linux, or anything else about the same system or with the community you’re asking for help in.
You’re not doing the work to find the issue, or help the people trying to debug with you. You’re actually seemingly going out of your way to not be helpful and just complain, and that’s a YOU problem. Have fun on Windows 👋
Are you fucking serious? I’ve followed all the god damn advice I was given and have spent over 10 hours troubleshooting this ONE issue and nothing has worked.
Yes, and then you come back here raging that “Mint is not ready out of the box”, which isn’t true. The problem is with Steam and steam-input. You’ve been told this half a dozen times now. It has nothing to do with Linux (where you’re posting in), or Mint specifically. It’s your setup with Steam.
I don’t see how. I have done everything you suggested with steam. I’ve tried every possible configuration, and nothing works.
Read what you just wrote, then tell me how Mint is the problem, and why you’re posting in this sub.
Dude, I have the exact same steam configuration in Windows, and my controller works. Tell me that’s not a Linux issue
Again, it’s a driver issue. Has nothing to do with *nix. The manufacturer of the controller doesn’t ensure that *nix distros have access to the driver. So how can it work?
Specifically which controller is it? Have you looked for *nix drivers specifically for that device? From the manufacturer?
Thats the thing. I’ve tried both xbox and ps5 controllers, and none are working. I test with jstest-gtk and whats weird is the right joystick shows it only moves up and down. Not sure if that’s related, but it’s weird
That’s what atomic distros are for. Detecting problems at the development level, not the user level. Might give one of them a try. And get rid of the dual boot, that’s just pain in the ass
fucking hate bluetooth ngl, it’s a horrendous standard that doesn’t do what I want it to do and even when it can it fails horribly and is unbearably unreliable
how did you install the nvidia drivers btw? I thought in mint there was a “driver manager” thingy that installed it for you with one click
It was that easy this time around, because I’m dumb. The last time I never said I needed to sign them in the installer so I had to do it manually
Normally I don’t suggest distro-hopping for newbies but sometimes it’s a good idea to try a couple distro before settling in. Since there are tons of different hardware, some distros offer a better out of the box solution for some hardware.
Try openSUSE Leap for instance. Also someone suggested trying KDE Plasma on Mint, so try that first. It might alone solve your problems.
By the way, if your need for Windows can be covered on a virtual machine, go that way instead of dual boot. Windows really can mess with your bootloader.
I’ve been using Linux Mint for 2 weeks now. Everything worked out of the box. No nVidia driver problem, controller works fine, can’t speak for Bluetooth since I don’t use it. I only scratched my head on the Joplin synchronization with my phone using Syncthing, which was fixed after maybe 10min of tinkering. Haven’t rebooted to my backup windows install since. 10/10 would recommend.
