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Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

I use desktop linux on my work computer, it barely works and I have some issues. Although it's red hat enterprise which is running a lot of old shit.

I think using a friendlier distro like Ubuntu or Fedora would probably be a lot better and give a much better experience.

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I use Ubuntu on my work PC.

- had to buy a 2nd GPU to get 3 monitors to work

- GPU driver won't drive my 2560x1440 monitor at the max res

- popup volume control pops up every minute or so (and sound pops and stutters a bit each time this happens)

- when waking from sleep, TTY works immediately, but GUI takes about 30 seconds to appear

- something crashes on every boot, but it doesn't tell me what (I dutifully submit a crash report)

- any time I drag something in Firefox (text, image, tab, etc.), Firefox crashes

USB throughput and FS performance are very good though, and 3d, wifi and suspend-to-disk do work!

(Whatever the root cause of all of these things, be it Linux per se or some other issue, the fact remains that I don't have any of these problems on Windows. Of course, I don't get the smashing filing system speed either...)

Sounds like problems with the video card drivers. In Linux, it pays to research how well hardware is supported before you buy it, especially for video and wifi. Even then, you may still benefit from looking at alternative drivers or seeing if there are xorg.conf or kernel boot time options that resolve those issues.

Whether it's worth the trouble of tracking down arcane options to get your system working optimally is up to you. For most people it's not worth the effort, so there are relatively few of us running Linux on the desktop. If you're willing to put in the time and effort (and you happen to have compatible hardware) it is possible to get a system that matches or exceeds proprietary software desktops. Just be prepared to start all over again when you upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu.

It always pays to research if your hardware is supported on given OS, whether it's Linux, macOS or Windows.

Yes, but we usually run MacOS on Apple hardware and we get Windows on the PC we buy, with drivers tested by the manufacturer, so we can trust the hw/os combination. Instead I always researched how Linux would run on my computers. No major problems but some little issues that a manufacturer would have fixed before going to the market.

We have to check MacOS and Windows compatibility only if we do strange things, like hackintoshes or installing Windows from scratch on a different generation computer. I must admit that installing desktop Linux is always a strange thing, because very few manufacturers care of testing any distro on their hw. Quite the opposite for server Linux.

> - GPU driver won't drive my 2560x1440 monitor at the max res

Might be a lower refresh rate (49.9 v 59.9) will behave.

> - popup volume control pops up every minute or so (and sound pops and stutters a bit each time this happens)

Likely pulseaudio shit itself and got restarted by systemd...

I have Centos on my laptop and the Nvidia drivers work, steam works, 3 displays run flawlessly, SELinux is enforcing (!), but I'll be damned if I ever get the network printer to work.

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