I tried, I really did

I’ve been an IT professional for 20 years now, but I’ve mainly dealt with Windows. I’ve worked with Linux servers through out the years, but never had Linux as a daily driver. And I decided it was time to change. I only had 2 requirements. One, I need to be able to use my Nvidia 3080 ti for local LLM and I need to be able to RDP with multiple screens to my work laptop running Windows 10.

My hope was to be able to get this all working and create some articles on how I did it to hopefully inspire/guide others. Unfortunately, I was not successful.

I started out with Ubuntu 22.04 and I could not get the live CD to boot. After some searching, I figured out I had to go in a turn off ACPI in boot loader. After that I was able to install Ubuntu side by side with Windows 11, but the boot loader errored out at the end of the install and Ubuntu would not boot.

Okay, back into Windows to download the boot loader fixer and boot to that. Alright, I’m finally able to get into Ubuntu, but I only have 1 of my 4 monitors working. Install the NVIDIA-SMI and reboot. All my monitors work now, but my network card is now broken.

Follow instructions on my phone to reinstall the linux-modules-extra package. Back into Windows to download that because, you know, no network connections. Reinstall the package, it doesn’t work. Go into advanced recovery, try restoring packages, nothing is working. I can either get my monitors to work or my network card. Never both at the same time.

I give up and decide it’s time to try out Fedora. The install process is much smoother. I boot up 3 of 4 monitors work. I find a great post on installing Nvidia drivers and CUDA. After doing that and rebooting, I have all 4 monitors and networking, woohoo!

Now, let’s test RDP. Install FreeRDP run with /multimon, and the screen for each remote window is shifted 1/3 of the way to the left. Strange. Do a little looking online, find an Issue on GitHub about how it is based on the primary monitor. Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row. Trust me I tried every combination I could think of.

Someone suggested using the nightly build because they have been working on this issue. Okay, I try that out and it fails to install because of a missing dependency. Apparently, there is a pull request from December to fix this on Fedora installs, but it hasn’t been merged. So, I would need to compile that specific branch myself.

At this point, I’m just so sick of every little thing being a huge struggle, I reboot and go back into Windows. I still have Fedora on there, but who would have thought something that sounds as simple as wanting to RDP across 4 monitors would be so damn difficult.

I’m not saying any of this to bag on Linux. It’s more of a discussion topic on, yes, I agree that there needs to be more adoption on Linux, but if someone with 20 years of IT experience gets this feed up with it, imagine how your average user would feel.

Of course if anyone has any recommendation on getting my RDP working, I’m all ears on that too.

ricecake,

Weird, sucks you had a rough time. I’m mostly perplexed about the network card issue, and the monitors. I haven’t had any trouble like that in more than a decade. I’ve honestly actually had more trouble with a new install of windows failing to detect hardware than Linux recently.

hactar42,

It was a strange one. I had never seen anything like it before. It could still see the hardware, but listed it as unclaimed. Nothing I could do would get it to start working. When I finally decided to reinstall, I figured I’d try a different distro.

Trainguyrom,

You don’t by chance have a formerly-mellonox card as your network card, do you? I wonder if something is checking for the Nvidia vendor string to only start one GPU and the devs forgot that Nvidia doesn’t only make GPUs

Quazatron,
@Quazatron@lemmy.world avatar

I read the first paragraph and saw your prerequisites included working with nvidia.

That is a non-starter, right there. You can blame Linux for a whole lot of little flaws, but most of the blame should go to your hardware vendor for providing shitty support for Linux.

gregorum,

Popos has out-of-the-box nvidia support that works great

lalo,

Works with CUDA and RDPing on a 2x2 monitor grid?

gregorum, (edited )

System76 (who makes popos) has their own CUDA repo for their NVIDIA implementation, but I don’t think it’s installed by default. So there’s a tweaked version to work on popos, but I’ve never tried it. From some cursory googling, it doesn’t seem to be too complicated to set up.

skullgiver, (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

deleted_by_author

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  • Huschke,

    Yeah it’s really weird. I have done what OP has done for a while now on an Nvidia GPU and Pop!_OS with KDE and have had 0 issues. I don’t use a 2x2 grid though. Can that really be the issue?

    bob_omb_battlefield,

    Isn’t most of the AI training work in the world done on Linux using Nvidia GPUs (in the cloud)? I guess it’s a different use case…

    AE5NE,

    Probably dedicated vector/tensor coprocessors these days - which don’t have to work with your monitor layout or desktop setup!

    rufus,

    And it also sucks in the cloud. Depending on the scenario there might not be many alternatives, though. CUDA is pretty much the standard in machine learning.

    remotelove,

    ROCm has hints of adoption, but it’s only just getting started.

    Having spent the weekend trying to get it working on WSL2 for lulz, I can honestly say it’s just not there yet. Most of the issue is that AMD cards aren’t exposed properly through WSL, but it was worth a shot.

    rufus,

    Sure. But by the amount of adoption CUDA has, and the amount of GPUs / AI accelerators NVidia pumps out and into the datacenters of the world… AMD better hurry (and deliver an excellent product/ecosystem) or they won’t be part of the AI boom.

    umbrella,
    @umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

    thats guiless.

    x11 and wayland support (what matters for DESKTOP use) are complete garbage

    hactar42,

    I agree. The majority of my issues come down to the manufacturers. I even updated my BIOS to see if it would help with the ACPI issues, but no luck. Motherboard is 3 years old, so it’s not like I’m trying this on brand new hardware either.

    fuckwit_mcbumcrumble,

    Nvidia is by far the most popular dedicated GPU manufacturer out there. If distros can’t figure out how to make it “just work” then Linux will never take off outside of the nerd market.

    TheGrandNagus, (edited )

    The problem is Nvidia’s drivers, not the distros.

    You may as well be saying distros really need to get their shit together on releasing Photoshop for Linux

    fuckwit_mcbumcrumble,

    If someone with no experience installs Linux on their machine, and has to spend 20 hours fixing all of the problems they’re not going to stick with Linux. It doesn’t matter which distro it is, they’re just going to say Linux sucks and never use it again.

    There’s a pretty big difference between trying to run software for X OS on Y OS, and trying to just make your computer do basic tasks. The average person doesn’t know that Nvidia are a bunch of assholes, nor do they care.

    TheGrandNagus,

    I know.

    But there’s nothing that can realistically be done about it until Nvidia stops being dickheads.

    Distros can’t constantly hop about putting out fires that Nvidia starts, and neglect the other work they need to do.

    Even when they do that, it doesn’t work anyway. It’s still buggy, systems still break. It really is only Nvidia who can fix their shit drivers, unless the nouveau team make an alternative that’s superior to Nvidia’s proprietary drivers.

    And nah, there’s no difference between my Nvidia/Photoshop example. None whatsoever.

    deadbeef,

    It isn’t something that is in the distro vendors control. Nvidia do not disclose programming info for their chipsets. They distribute an unreliable proprietry driver that is obfuscated to hell so that noone can help out fixing their problems.

    If you use an AMD card it will probably work fine in Windows and Linux. If you use an Nvidia card you are choosing to run windows or have a bad time in Linux.

    Scubus,

    That’s a great explanation. Knowing next to nothing about Nvidia and Linux, the original comment made it sound as though Linux is just wildly incompetent.

    Your comment makes it sound like Nvidia is the graphics version of apple.

    deadbeef,

    Oh yeah. That video of Linus Torvalds giving Nvidia the finger linked elsewhere in this thread was the result of a ton of frustration around them hiding programming info. They also popularised a dodgy system of LGPL’ing a shim which acted as the licence go-between the kernel driver API ( drivers are supposed to be GPL’d ) and their proprietary obfuscated code.

    Despite that, I’m not really that anti them as a company. For me, the pragmatic reality is that spending a few hundred bucks on a Radeon is so much better than wasting hours performing arcane acts of fault finding and trial and error.

    fuckwit_mcbumcrumble,

    It doesn’t matter whose at fault at the end of the day. If it doesn’t just work™️ the average joe will never use it.

    The open source vs closed source drivers is a whole separate issue too, and only makes things worse for the noobs.

    deadbeef,

    I’m not the PR department for desktop Linux for everyone man.

    People who only have Windows experience see an Nvidia card that is premium priced product with a premium experience and think that this will translate to a Linux environment, it does not. I’ve been using Linux for like 27 years now and that was my opinion until a couple of years ago.

    Hopefully the folks that might read this thread ( like the OP 20 year IT veteran ) can take away that Nvidia cards in linux are the troublesome / subpar choice and are only going to get worse going forwards ( because of the Wayland migration that Nvidia are ignoring ).

    YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU,

    Non starter? As in you shouldn’t use Linux if you have a nvidia gpu? I hope that isn’t the take.

    possiblylinux127,

    Its not totally wrong honestly. Nvidia is kind of bad and you can get a used AMD GPU for $100 bucks.

    If you are using Nvidia use Linux mint or Pop os.

    YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU, (edited )

    It’s totally wrong imo. Having a Nvidia gpu should not all stop you from using Linux. Granted I’m still on X and can’t run AAA games but I have no issues with it otherwise. Running cuda happily along with everything else I need to build companies, create content, and consume media.

    Or Fedora, or Arch, or a bunch of other distros because most all have solid support.

    Edit: whole bunch of gamers out here

    Quazatron,
    @Quazatron@lemmy.world avatar

    Microsoft is free to publish minimum requirements for Windows (TPM 2.0 for Windows 11, for instance), but you don’t have that in Linux. You are free to throw it at any hardware you want, and it will mostly work out of the box.

    But that depends on companies and volunteers working on the hardware support. Intel and AMD provide good support for their hardware. NVidia does not. You should act accordingly, either buying supported hardware or sticking to software that supports your hardware (Windows or Mac).

    YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU,

    deleted_by_author

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  • Quazatron,
    @Quazatron@lemmy.world avatar

    Having a nVidia GPU does not stop you from running Linux, it just makes it more painful depending on what you’re trying to achieve due to nVidia’s poor Linux support.

    I merely suggest that one should use the appropriate tool for the job or endure the consequences. Blaming the tools achieves nothing.

    Octopus1348,
    @Octopus1348@lemy.lol avatar

    “Nvidia, fuck you!” - Linus Torvalds

    lemmyreader, (edited )

    Sorry to hear it didn’t work out for you :(

    To squeeze in a metaphor : Linux is just a hobby project that kind of got out of hand in a previously Microsoft dominated world.

    In the BSD world (FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenBSD etc.) things are actually much worse. I’ve read that on computer conferences BSD developers come with an Apple Macbook (Running MacOS) to show BSD software development, which is running on servers. And I like BSD, but on the desktop it is still lacking. One only has to look at the amount of packages which no longer have a maintainer. I am not complaining about it, as I realize that maintaining open source software can be a burden.

    If you want to play some more with Linux on the desktop, you can use WSL on Microsoft Windows, or use VirtualBox. Wanting to make Linux your daily driver may require more patience, or throwing money at it to speed up code development.

    possiblylinux127,

    Linux is honestly fine. The problem is bias and tendencies coming from Windows.

    Virtualbox is going to have less than great performance and WSL is very limited and not a full system. Best option is to grab a used laptop and get hacking.

    lemmyreader,

    Yes, I wanted to suggest the OP to get a refurbished laptop and play with Linux on that, but figured the OP may much prefer to use their own big monitors instead of a small one on a laptop. VirtualBox is probably good enough to play with Linux and learn more Linux, apart for 3D gaming and video editing.

    Fecundpossum,

    For me, the built up revulsion I feel towards windows and the sheer determination I feel to never use it again, means I would rearrange my monitors, or, you know, try more than two distros.

    Linux isn’t for everyone, I acknowledge that fact. It requires a user that wants to troubleshoot, wants to figure out why something doesn’t work and make it work. If the headache isn’t fun, you’re not the right kind of masochistic self flagellator that Linux attracts, and that’s okay.

    If you ever do decide to give it another whirl, try Linux Mint, MX Linux, or my personal flavor of choice, EndeavourOS. And put your monitors in a boring straight line like the rest of us before you coming crawling back.

    This reply is meant to be partially humorous but entirely honest.

    deweydecibel, (edited )

    I absolutely cringe to make this comparison, but reading your comment, it’s the first image that came to my pop-culture poisoned mind, so here we go:

    In Rick and Morty, when Evil Morty has finally achieved his long-sought and hard-won goal of escaping Rick and the Central Finite Curve, that sigh of relief he gives before stepping into the new untamed universe.

    That’s how I feel about making the move to Linux, personally. That sense of overwhelming relief to be free of something you hate so much is a reward. That’s why I put in the effort to manage Linux. Being free of Microsoft’s (and Apple and Google) shit is something I want so much that I’ll not only put in the time, I’ll even enjoy it somewhat.

    Nawor3565,

    Okay so genuine question from someone who’s used various distros for all sorts of things over the years, just never as a daily driver. What sorts of things have caused your revulsion towards Windows? Aside from Microsoft’s bullcrap like Alexa or MS Store ads which can all be disabled, I’ve personally never had enough of a problem with Windows that justified the effort required to move away from it. And I would consider myself a power user who loves to customize things.

    Again, I just want to genuinely understand what sorts of problems people have that cause them to hate using Windows that much, even if they’re just subjective things.

    ChristianWS,

    I have a bunch of issues(some way smaller and borderline nitpicks) with windows, but I guess there’s some big ones:

    1. Linux runs smoothly on older computers, even with KDE which everyone talks about as if it was heavy. Windows is a slug in comparison.
    2. Linux is free, truly free. Microsoft can’t beat that.
    3. Shit just works (unless you are on Nvidia…), don’t need to install drivers and shit like that.
    4. most of the software you don’t get from a random website and they all update at once, rather than having each one update itself and only itself
    Fecundpossum,

    While my next rig is fully AMD, my current is Nvidia and shit just works with some fiddling

    Fecundpossum,

    The sinking sensation of realizing that my entire operating system is spyware that phones home tens or hundreds of times each time I sit down to use it. Massive bloat and poor optimization neutering my otherwise just fine hardware. My operating system deciding it will no longer support my beater legacy hardware.

    Really the shift happened when I became privacy conscious, and once I saw that all of my gaming and day to day tasks worked just fine on Linux I decided to go all in.

    deweydecibel,

    Also the fact Microsoft just doesn’t seem to respect that the user is the admin, not them. You can still claw back control, but over the years, the amount of clawing you have to do has increased.

    To put it simply, I hate when my OS does something I explicitly told it not to do, or undoes something I deliberately set. And as the years have gone by, the amount of times that happens with Windows has skyrocketed.

    Flaky,
    @Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

    For me, it was when Windows 11 didn’t even give me the luxury of moving my taskbar to the top of the screen and I had to use a third-party application to do so, which was janky as hell. It sounds very small, petty and superficial, but small things like that can immensely affect one’s experience and workflow. “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” is an applicable phrase to that.

    Sure, I can just use Windows 10, and I do in fact have a Windows 10 VM in VMware (since WINE has issues with MusicBee and WACUP, and I’m trialing the Apple Music app for Windows as well), but Windows 10 will no longer be supported next year.

    lemmyvore,

    What sorts of things have caused your revulsion towards Windows? Aside from […]

    You mean aside from the shitty way Microsoft treats their users? 😆 Yeah ok, if we leave all that aside then there’s no revulsion. I’ll use Windows without any issues, I’ve used it extensively and I use it daily for work but it feels bloated and old and Microsoft being shitty doesn’t help.

    Learning Linux is not that hard and you get an OS and DE where things work just as well as Windows and also nobody’s telling you what to do, and you get choices. Which is nice, because I think I should be able to make the most out of something that’s supposed to be a generic computing device.

    Corr,

    I’m sure there was a way to disable it but whenever I would hit print screen a one drive ad would pop up on my laptop. It also kept bugging me to update to windows 11, where the options were “yes” and “ask me again in 3 days”. I had no intentions of upgrading to win11.

    I also don’t like many of the changes made in win11, while I haven’t used it much I’ve touched it and it bothered me. Examples include the lack of vertical task bar, the weird context menu, the rounded edges, and the start menu. Plus my desktop PC doesn’t even support win11 for some reason so this seemed like a good time to make the switch.

    wizardbeard,

    Ok, but here’s the thing: OP is 20 years into a tech career and troubleshooted extensively. Even identified potential solutions that they deemed too much work for the payoff (such as compiling a software release for fedora themselves because the beta branch’s buildbot broke the fedora build).

    You need to put a shit ton more emphasis on your self flagellation point, and a lot less on the love of troubleshooting. We’re beyond troubleshooting and well into the “I have more fun trying to repair an engine while it’s running than actually driving a car”

    I get it, some people are more interested in making the best swiss army knife than actually using it to cut things. Just please don’t conflate it with a lack troubleshooting ability.

    Most of the issues on Linux faced by end users are some variety of “if you don’t like it then code your own software dumbass”, “real programmers use butterflies”, and “you’re using it wrong, but there’s no documentation anywhere of that being the case, only tribal knowledge. OUTSIDER! OUTSIDER! BURN THE OUTSIDER!”

    Especially the last one. For fucks sake, if I wanted piss poor documentation put together by overstreched amatuers, written entirely in the context of expecting everyone else to have their same deep domain knowledge, and unorganizedly spread over every far flung corner of space then I’d just move back to my old job in tech support (🥁 badum-tsh)

    Fecundpossum,

    Yeah, you make valid points. Maybe Linux isn’t for people who need windows capabilities for work. I enjoy the tinkering, but I don’t make my money on my Linux machine. I work in construction, I’m only a nerd at home.

    So, my machine does everything I need it to in Linux. Some things require me to memorize fairly lengthy commands and perform more complicated functions than I’d ever have to in windows. Sometimes I learn things the hard way, sometimes my shit breaks. I try to learn something while fixing it, and if it doesn’t work I nuke and pave and keep good backups.

    The satisfaction I get from becoming competent must give me some serious dopamine because I’ve stuck with it, and I’ve come to perform most day to day actions in the CLI.

    I certainly don’t think OP has a lack of ability to learn, but, I also don’t think Linux is a good fit for his use case. Yet.

    SheeEttin,

    Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row.

    Did you try setting them up as one big display across all four, instead of four little ones? I think that’s something you can do.

    Does the multi-mon RDP thing work from a Windows client too? I’d be surprised if it did, Windows’ multi-monitor support is fairly lacking in my experience too.

    hactar42,

    I did try using the spam, same issues. I tried only using 2 of them and other combinations. Unfortunately no luck.

    I use multiple monitor RDP in Windows on a daily basis. I want to keep my work and personal systems separate, but love having 4 monitors. So I just RDP into my work laptop from my desktop. It was buggy in the past, but I’ve been using this setup for a few years now and it’s been seamless in Windows 10 & 11.

    folkrav,

    I swear, every time one of these posts/comments pops up, the chances root issues are caused by Nvidia hardware is insanely high.

    lemmyvore,

    Perhaps we could suggest OP other things to try before we suggest they should rip out their GPU. I don’t know, basic problem-solving approach, like using the Nouveau or generic Vesa driver to rule out the proprietary Nvidia driver, or a different screen-sharing method to rule out RDP. Which is a proprietary Windows protocol so it may not work perfectly from Linux and with an unusual hardware configuration.

    folkrav,

    I don’t completely disagree with you. But it’s also a reality I’ve had to deal with myself as well. My personal take is I’d rather avoid the brand altogether if you care about Linux, but I also realize it’s not always possible if you care about - or need, for various reasons - things like CUDA, NVENC and RTX. In this case, OP specifically wants CUDA, and that won’t work without the proprietary driver.

    lemming741,

    Life is easier with a mediocre workstation card for video outputs, and the Nvidia card doing just CUDA.

    hactar42,

    So, I’m coming to learn that about Nvidia. I figured with the 3080 being a few years old now things would be alright. I was wrong.

    folkrav,
    jkrtn,

    What’s a decent GPU that behaves nicely with Linux?

    folkrav,

    In my experience most things AMD fare pretty well. My 6750 XT is working great. My older RX 580 and Radeon HD 6870 were also pretty solid.

    deadbeef,

    I have two AMD Radeon cards for Linux that I’m pretty happy with that replaced a couple of Nvidia cards. They are an RX6800 and an RX6700XT. They were both ex mining cards that I bought when the miners were dumping their ethereum rigs, so they were pretty cheap.

    If I had to buy a new card to fill that gap, I’d probably get a 7800XT, but if you don’t game on them you could get a much lower end model like an RX7600.

    jkrtn,

    I’d be interested in one that could do gaming and compute stuff. Thank you for the specific recs, I’ll check those out!

    possiblylinux127,

    Most of AMD is good. Slightly older is going to be best

    possiblylinux127,

    Most AMD GPUs are good

    Honytawk,

    Are they actually good? Or are they decent?

    Because AMD on Windows has a lot of flaws compared to Nvidia. Nvidia can run anything with tons of cutting-edge features and everything is documented. AMD on the other hand, doesn’t come close to that kind of support.

    AMD does work of course, just not always how it should.

    Is it actually good on Linux out of the box? Or does it still require finicking every now and then?

    possiblylinux127,

    The brand new devices will require a newer kernel but other than that they work out of the box

    ReakDuck,

    I had issues with my Nvidia gpu and Wayland Desktops.

    Especially with the new Steam Big Picture mode both Linux and Windows being laggy.

    AMD on the other hand had one issue in Windows where my friend told me to reinstall the drivers because the second Monitor couldnt be detected at random times when rebooting.

    On Linux on the other Hand… zero issues. Literally. I am satisfied how good it works compared to trashy Nvidia having constant issues. Even on Windows I had issues with Nvidia because you need to sign in and download the drivers. Sometimes there is an update and you never know, and wonder why your game doesnt work. Well, because you need the newest update suddenly. Not with AMD on Windows. And on Linux. You dont even need to install amything. Mostly preinstalled Mesa drivers but I am not that certain.

    BCsven,

    Might have Luck with Leap or Tumbleweed because nVidia hosts their own openSUSE driver repos. add nVidia repo to SUSE, GUI select the driver and click OK

    Hubi,

    From what I’ve read, I must be the luckiest person in the world. I’ve been on Linux for 10+ years and only ever had Nvidia hardware. I’ve never had any issues aside from the occasional Vsync annoyance.

    Jean_Lurk_Picard,
    @Jean_Lurk_Picard@lemmy.world avatar

    Just use Arch.

    Zak,
    @Zak@lemmy.world avatar

    I like Arch, but a first-time install of Arch for a beginner who doesn’t have a lot of patience for reading documentation and troubleshooting is not good advice.

    Jean_Lurk_Picard,
    @Jean_Lurk_Picard@lemmy.world avatar

    He said he’s an IT professional for 20 years. That’s like the epitome of patience for reading documentations and troubleshooting

    verdigris,

    Or following scripts and copy-pasting the first result from Google.

    Flaky,
    @Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

    Yeah, in Windows. Windows and Arch are two completely different beasts.

    I get the sentiment (Arch has provided the least friction for me when I needed something niche/specific) but putting OP on Arch is still pushing them into the deep end IMO. If OP is open to trying Arch however, I’d throw out a recommendation for EndeavourOS which is just a pre-made Arch setup.

    Squiddles,

    The bigger problem when running Arch is that there's a very high gap between "the bootloader makes the kernel run" and "functional desktop system". The installation guide will get you to the first one. For someone who's used to Windows, even as an IT pro, learning Arch is a firehose that's hard to drink from.

    Once you've pacstrap'd and set up a user you reboot and start your new OS. Except you have no internet because you didn't know you had to install dhcpcd. Fine, install that--except your user isn't in sudoers, so you have to figure out how to get back to being root to edit the sudoers file. With visudo. Ten minutes later you've figured out how to find and edit the right line. Another ten to get out of vi. Then once that's sorted you're sitting at a terminal you don't know any commands for with no idea how to get to a graphical environment.

    You look on your phone and find a recommendation for XFCE4 as a lightweight and simple DE. Great, install that. Try to launch it, and...a bunch of arcane errors. Another hour of troubleshooting and you learn that you missed xorg, which for some reason isn't a dependency of XFCE4. O...kay. You don't want to have to launch it every time you boot, so you go digging and find out you need a desktop manager. Takes some time, but you finally install one and enable the service in systemd, which you have to do manually for some reason.

    Finally you get to a graphical environment, and...the fonts are all weird, and unicode symbols are just placeholders. Wait, fonts. You have to install fonts. More research, but you get there. Finally you launch a browser and are delighted to find something familiar. It all works the same. Great! Let's watch a video to make sure playback is working, and...no sound.

    Okay, more research, and turns out you missed pulseaudio. Install that, start the daemon aaaand...no audio. Fine, how do you check the audio level? Ah, there's an XFCE4 plugin for pulseaudio. Find that, install it, put it on your panel, click it and...pavucontrol isn't installed. Whatever that is. Okay, install it and try again. Great! So, for some reason the default audio level when you install is 0. Turn that up and you finally hear sound! Hours after starting the process.

    And every. little. thing. is like that. For weeks. Especially with Nvidia, and especially if you make the mistake of following a recent guide that shunts you into a Wayland environment. Every time you need to do something there are 20 options, five of which are well-documented but deprecated, the first three you try don't work for reasons you don't understand, then you finally find something that works well enough. Rinse, repeat, for every little thing.

    And this is coming from a complete Arch stan. I love Arch. It's my only distro these days. I'm on Hyprland, my neovim is tricked out, everything is slick, responsive, just takes a couple keystrokes to accomplish anything I want to do, and I have everything set up exactly how I want it. It took a long time to get there, though, and I've been using Linux off and on for over 20 years, maining it for the last 10.

    yianiris,
    @yianiris@kafeneio.social avatar

    There is an advantage in arch (and all pacman based distros) that the pkg mgr is friendly and vocal.

    Say you want your system to run with vtwm you try and you get many dependencies installed, then try starting it. If it doesn't start it will tell you what is missing still.

    Usually with X is either xorg-xinit or a display manager (avoid) and adding exec vtwm into your ~/.xinitrc gets you going.

    @Squiddles @hactar42 @Jean_Lurk_Picard @Zak

    yianiris,
    @yianiris@kafeneio.social avatar

    With arch based flavored desktop installers (arco endeavour manjaro ..) you get some GBs of stuff that is probably going to ask 1-2GB of upgrades, and then you end up dumping half the crap they came with.

    On one you start from bottom up, the rest you start from top towards the ?bottom?.

    You only learn when you start with the least needed to boot a system, have net access, and a pkg.mngr.

    @Squiddles @hactar42 @Jean_Lurk_Picard @Zak

    Squiddles, (edited )

    Some people learn that way, but most don't. It's usually better to start with a working environment and work on one thing at a time until you learn enough that you're ready to dig down another layer. Start with little mysteries and learn the structure of things and how to troubleshoot before jumping in the deep end. Having a system that's hopelessly broken and you don't know why or how to fix it is just likely to turn people away from Linux entirely. People don't win extra points for suffering needlessly.

    520,

    The problem there is that what people come to learn about the Windows OS becomes ingrained into them as "how to use a computer".

    Almost all of that goes out the fucking window when you jump to a non-Windows OS, but especially Arch.

    Aatube,
    @Aatube@kbin.social avatar

    EndeavourOS would be good

    There's also the easy archinstall script

    TheGrandNagus,

    What a fantastically shit idea for a beginner.

    CameronDev,

    For RDP, i use Remmina, no idea if it will do what you want for your weird monitor layout, but it is a well featured RDP client.

    I would say that your experience is unusual, even with nvidia. Ive always used nvidia, and its generally been a significantly smoother experience.

    Lettuceeatlettuce,
    @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

    I’ve used Remmina for years on Linux when administrating Windows Machines. I don’t think I’ve ever had a single problem with it. Love that program.

    hactar42,

    I tried Remmina and it wasn’t working either. I couldn’t even get it to connect using the same settings as RDP free.

    520,

    Did you try just a basic connection? Or is your target box using Network Level Authentication? (I've heard most Linux clients don't play well with this)

    possiblylinux127,

    I’ve never had an issue with Remmina. Did you verify you had a working connection between your device and the server? (Silly question but its good to start at the basics)

    scorpiosrevenge,

    I’ve been extremely happy with Linuxmint the past 2-3 yrs. However I have a higher end AMD card. 97% of games play great under Proton with steam. I use Rustdesk to remote into other Linux machines as well as windows OS servers/desktops even with multiple screens and it works without issue. Just my $0.02 and I know it’s heavily Ubuntu based but the stability and usability as a daily driver, also working as an IT professional has been great.

    Last piece, it’s been a rare occurrence but if I’m messing around using bleeding edge graphics drivers or “playing with fire” messing with deeper system configs, drivers, etc and shit the bed I have had 100% success using TIMESHIFT to completely restore my OS back to its previous state with zero data/config loss or issues. You just need to have the discipline to remember to take a backup before you know you’re going to be potentially blowing something out. But, that said, it fully restores everything. I have a 18TB external USB I just use for that and it doesn’t even take long either, restoring a 2 & 4TB SSD system that’s pretty loaded up with data.

    pbjamm,
    @pbjamm@beehaw.org avatar

    I have been using linux off and on since I first installed Slackware from floppy. Mint is generally what I go to when I just want to have a working desktop and not dick around with it too much.

    rufus,

    The accustomed workflows sometimes don’t translate well to other platforms. RDP might be such a case, I don’t think it’s the standard in the Linux-world, maybe try the standard solution of your distribution, or look up which one is good for multi-monitor setups, there are lots of other VNC solutions. Yeah, and I’d skip Ubuntu as a first choice, but you figured that out the hard way.

    520,

    Can confirm. SSH is the standard under Linux. OP will be happy to note that Windows has an inbuilt SSH client since Windows 10 that functions nearly identical to its Linux equivalent.

    deadbeef,

    Sorry to hear about that mess.

    I posted here lemmy.nz/comment/1784981 a while back about what I went through with the Nvidia driver on Linux.

    From what I can tell, people who think Linux works fine on Nvidia probably only have one monitor or maybe two that happen to be the same model ( with unique EDID serials FWIW ). My experience with a whole bunch of mixed monitors / refresh rates was absolutely awful.

    If you happen to give it another go, get yourself an AMD card, perhaps you can carry on using the Nvidia card for the language modelling, just don’t plug your monitors into it.

    z00s,

    IT for 20 years

    Can’t use a live CD

    Uh huh

    520,

    I can believe it. Because OP is trying to make Linux work like Windows. Note how for remote access, they jump straight to RDP and don't even bother with SSH. Which Windows 10/11 has a native client for.

    biscuitswalrus,

    I mean, the rdp is from Linux to Windows for desktop application access, so it’s the right tool for that job.

    520,

    No. They're installing an RDP server (that is, you connect to the Linux box via RDP, not the other way around), not a client like Remmina.

    2xsaiko,
    @2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    I need to be able to RDP with multiple screens to my work laptop running Windows 10.

    They aren’t.

    520,

    Ohhh...they're fucking around with FreeRDP? Why?! Even for someone who comes from Windows, how did they not just go 'fuck this, there's got to be a better way' and spend 5 more minutes Googling to find Remmina?

    Honytawk,

    Below they commented they found Remmina, but it wasn’t working either.

    Stop pretending like IT professionals don’t understand how to search their problems.

    hactar42,

    Guess I should have said love USB, but some old habits die hard. Either way having to go in and disable ACPI just to get it to boot is not something most people would be comfortable with.

    berg,

    love USB

    That sounds funky, I like it!

    hactar42,

    Damn autocorrect

    520,

    It's also frankly not something they should have to do either.

    atzanteol,

    I mean… You’re expecting your system which likely shipped with support for Windows to just work with Linux. Linux support by vendors is often non-existent and requires oss developers to play catch up.

    z00s,

    FUD

    BCsven,

    I have 1 machine that will not boot most debian distros, and if they do it will not boot after install. It is a BIOS bug. non debian distros acknoledge the bug and move on.

    WhyJiffie,

    To be fair, that’s not much of a thing with windows

    Jestzer,

    Have you met Windows admins? 😛

    In fairness, I’ve seen some Linux admins become completely hopeless as soon as any GUI appears.

    onlinepersona,

    if someone with 20 years of IT experience gets this feed up with it, imagine how your average user would feel.

    The average user just wants to open up a browser to use tiktok, instagram, gmail, and whatever else it is people use these days. Maybe edit a few documents and look at local pictures? The average user isn’t going to use RDP or train an LLM.

    As others have said: NVIDIA sucks for linux. They have sucked for linux for more than a decade (snippet). And RDP: try Remmina.

    Also dualbooting is so-so. Windows likes to mess up the bootloader for no reason during updates. If you switch, it’s best to go full linux or try first from a VM.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    OsrsNeedsF2P,

    Did you just CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 your comment?

    onlinepersona,

    Looks like it, doesn’t it?

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    Honytawk,

    Even the average user will sometimes need non-average features.

    Maybe they want to print a document and have an old HP printer laying somewhere.

    Maybe they want to try this AI filter thingy that is such a fad on Tiktok

    Maybe they need to digitally sign a document, or log in using their card reader and government ID to do their taxes.

    If even one of those don’t work how they should immediately out of the box, then Linux is not for the average user.

    onlinepersona,

    Maybe they want to print a document and have an old HP printer laying somewhere.

    Linux is probably your best bet actually.

    Maybe they want to try this AI filter thingy that is such a fad on Tiktok

    Browsers work on linux

    Maybe they need to digitally sign a document, or log in using their card reader and government ID to do their taxes.

    All works on linux, most likely even works through the browser (which is what I’ve been doing).

    If even one of those don’t work how they should immediately out of the box, then Linux is not for the average user.

    And they work “out of the box” on windows? You have to go to a download page, to get the right driver, ensure you have the right windows version and service pack (those are still a thing right?), restart your computer and hope it worked. Hey, maybe there’s even some new fangled “security measure” that installs a rootkit that requires you to go into your BIOS to activate a feature in order for it to work.

    Since it’s not “out of the box”, maybe windows should also be canned, right?

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    Certainity45,

    It faschinates me a lot how a company like Nvidia can’t make working drivers even for xorg despite all the hype Nvidia moving their drivers into firmware. Amd sells gpu’s very low numbers and they never have these issues because they can afford to release their drivers for Linux.

    Linux foundation should ban Nvidia. So many headaches and wasted resources cured immediadly.

    wizardbeard,

    Except then no one with an nvidea gpu even has a chance of using linux. Something’s better than nothing.

    Certainity45,

    Then demand Nvidia for better drivers. The new Linux users doesn’t deserve all the current hassle because that instantly kills the motivation for even actually starting the Linux journey at all.

    ryannathans,

    I’m on the ubuntu derivative Pop!_OS. I RDP with multiple monitors of different resolutions using remina. Nvidia is also supported out of the box. All you’d need to do is install pop and then remmina.

    Is your problem that you just want one big window across all your monitors? I.e. not multi monitor RDP, or that you want a separate window on each monitor where each is seen as another monitor on the remote system?

    hactar42,

    I’d prefer separate windows for each monitor. I tried both ways but it really didn’t like my setup.

    ryannathans,

    Weird that you’re having issues, try a distro that supports nvidia out of the box instead of trying to install drivers

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