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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

A decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users).

Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds my entire system to a crawl when everything is software rendered. YouTube basically kills my computer.

When I go with Mac or Windows, the main feature is that they have designers to make more than a Potemkin UI, and they care about the end to end UX. No, “oh go complain to some other vendor.”

Ubuntu is very very impressive for free. I certainly acknowledge how great that is, and how important that is to the ecosystem.

Anyways, sorry about the rant. I’m calming down.

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I used nvidia with linux >10 years ago. Never again. The FOSS philosophy doesn't mesh well with binary blobs and it never will.

The wild thing is that using the Additional Drivers UI is what bricked my computer last week. It probably downloaded some binaries but it also spent 30 mins running gcc compiling something. And then forced a kernel headers update but didn’t update anything else. Rebooted and I have no wifi or bluetooth.

The fix was a reversion and then CLI install of the nvidia 515 drivers.

Imo Intel graphics work best (not sure about the new dedicated GPUs) if that's powerful enough for you. I've had some issues with amdgpu although no special setup is required. Unfortunately a lot of hardware manufacturers are Windows first (and only) and some poor volunteer has hacked up a Linux driver via reverse engineering

If you want a good Linux experience, you should look for hardware with first class Linux support. Likewise, good luck with macOS on non-Apple hardware--it's possible but ymmv

The trick is to disable automatic updates once you have a working system. Yes, there is some risk. But at least your system will stay as stable as it was when you first installed it. Oh, and disable swap and have plenty of RAM.

32GB + swap off really does help for sure. I do have updates disabled but I admit I am sloppy with not picking through what I update. It doesn’t help that there’s new updates basically daily.

Keep an eye on 'snap' it tends to do nasty stuff without telling you.

You can disable that too.

"Potemkin UI"

Thats a good description for many linux GUIs. They look like they can get the job done, but to really get the job done, you have to use what the developers of said UI likely themself use - the terminal.

A friend used the term when I said, “I used Additional Drivers to update to the latest recommended driver and it bricked my computer.” He said never to use that UI and to do it via a terminal. The terminal approach worked effortlessly and in half the time, once I Un-bricked my laptop.

It feels like a lot of the UIs in Ubuntu are there just so they can claim it’s an OS that can take over for Windows or Mac.

I've since switched to using AMD graphics on my linux machine. Been running from a RX-580->5700XT->6800XT. It's been pretty good while using Fedora.

I've had lots of luck and fun with Fedora, AMD cards and GPU passthrough to VMs. Very stable and fast.

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