It's been a week. Ubuntu Studio, and every day it's something. I swear Linux is the OS version of owning a boat, it's constant maintenance. Am I dumb, or doing something wrong?
After many issues, today I thought I had shit figured out, then played a game for the first time. All good, but the intro had some artifacts. I got curious, I have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and thought that was weird. Looked it up, turns out Linux was using lvmpipe. Found a fix. Now it's using my card, no more clipping, great!. But now my screen flickers. Narrowed it down to Vivaldi browser. Had to uninstall, which sucks and took a long time to figure out. Now I'm on Librewolf which I liked on windows but it's a cpu hungry bitch on Linux (eating 3.2g of memory as I type this). Every goddamned time I fix something, it breaks something else.
This is just one of many, every day, issues.
I'm tired. I want to love Linux. I really do, but what the hell? Windows just worked.
I've resigned myself to "the boat life" but is there a better way? Am I missing something and it doesn't have to be this hard, or is this what Linux is? If that's just like this I'm still sticking cause fuck Microsoft but you guys talk like Linux should be everyone's first choice. I'd never recommend Linux to anyone I know, it doesn't "just work".
EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who blew up my post, I didn't expect this many responses, this much advice, or this much kindness. You're all goddamned gems!
To paraphrase my username's namesake, because of @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone and his apt gif (also, Mr. Flickerman, when I record I often shout about Clem Fandango)...
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall GNU/LINUX OS grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."
I think the official method is to check your pacman cache and pray that it’s still in there. Arch only rolls forward, for good or ill.
Yeah, that checks out. I think there's other ways of doing it, I just never manages to get it working. I'll have to check again, but I thought KDE had something in the system settings that let you swap versions. I could be just misremembering the kernel swap settings though.
There's also some nvidia command hoodoo I tried and everything went well except at the end where I wound up with no graphical output at all, lol. I did a lot of messing around on fresh installs until the cord swap finally worked.
I was being facetious mostly.
You can use the Arch Linux Archive to get older versions of software: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive but it isn’t a simple process like it is in some other distributions so I only use it as a last resort.
You're not wrong, though. If you want all your packages to work correctly, you gotta stay up to date. I know some of my packages will break if I go more than a week.
Yesterday I read about RATs becoming more frequent in the AUR in some packages. They predict that they're going to become more frequent soon. I'm wondering if it might be time to switch my main machine to NixOS now. I may check out Bazzite and Nobara first, though.
However, I guess Arch is doing something to protect against these? It's going to be part of BumpBuddy.
Yeah, staying on top of updates and watching the announcements is pretty much a requirement for Arch. Things change fast, that’s both the advantage and disadvantage of this distro.
The AUR, like any repository where users can submit software, is going to have malicious uploads from time to time. The AUR team does a good job of removing these as soon as they’re discovered but there’s nothing that can prevent it. There’s a voting system so you usually see which packages are the most commonly installed but even that could be manipulated if someone were motivated enough.
I would guess that if it became common enough they could enable some more stringent identity verification for submitters in order to cut down on bad actors. But it is very much at your own risk and there’s a big warning about it in the wiki saying as much.