[QuadrupleA]

Too much research and extremely low level troubleshooting required (i.e. source code reading) to get things working. Especially around wayland, multi-monitor, multi-GPU, Nvidia, etc.

I hate what Microsoft has been doing with Windows, but Linux just isn't practical for my setup yet.

[berkes]

You are either extremely unlucky or chose a very strange setup.

The problems you describe were common in early 2000s, but haven't been common in Linux desktop for a decade or so.

For those reading above and thinking "I'll skip Linux, if that's the current status": it's not. Just pick Ubuntu LTS. Use it on common hardware (e.g not bleeding edge) and stick with the defaults. Don't try to make it exactly like your Mac or Windows machine but lean into how it does things. They are different . They may be uncomfortable. Then, once familiar feel free to tinker and hack.

I'm on Linux since 1996. I've hacked and tweaked everything in my younger years. Now I'm on a boring, hardly configured Ubuntu LTS. Well, my she'll and nvim are tuned beyond recognition, I guess. The rest: boring.

[badpenny]

> For those reading above and thinking "I'll skip Linux, if that's the current status": it's not.

I politely disagree. I recently installed Fedora on my desktop PC because Microsoft decided that displaying a full-screen ad for Windows 11 that prevented my PC from booting was acceptable behaviour. Anyway, one of the first things I noticed on Fedora was that video playback was stuttery. After ages spent digging around, I discovered Fedora had disabled GPU hardware video decoding for legal reasons. Around the same time I made the mistake of trying to delete a directory with lots of files in it on an NTFS drive. The operation failed and corrupted the filesystem, and I had to spend a week or so downloading and restoring backups. Needless to say I'm back on Windows now.

[QuadrupleA]

I'm not new to all this - I used Slackware and Red Hat on the desktop in the early 2000s, and I use Linux on the server side daily. But on two separate laptops recently, manufactured 10 years apart, I've had all kinds of glitches and performance problems with (Arch) Linux, on a variety of desktops (Sway, KDE Plasma, Gnome) especially around video and GPU. You could say just don't buy Nvidia - but one, too late, and two, if you want to do anything interesting in AI these days they're hard to compete with.

YMMV and if you're just in the shell and in VIM all day you might not notice video glitches and performance problems (computers did text terminals in the 70s so it's not a high bar). But as a lapsed game dev I have an eye for stutter, missed frames, etc, and those were pretty constant in my configs, despite sinking probably a hundred plus hours in, time I won't get back.

[ametrau]

I have wasted so much time trouble shooting just basic things on Linux DEs. Example: mouse wheel scroll speed. In general it’s a mishmash of various egos, various low efforts, various high efforts, etc. Not usable imo if you just want to use a computer and have the OS out of your way.

[pjmlp]

They are quite common on laptops, here is a second anecdote on the matter.

We even have an internal how-to about what works and what not, for those that want to try their path outside the Thinkpad/Windows, Macbook official IT path.

[pjmlp]

I feel you, as subscriber from Linux Journal during their print lifetime, I eventually found peace in Windows 7 and later, alongside desktop VMs, than ensuring everything on a laptop does indeed work properly.

Even Linux branded laptops keep having issues, example on the one I still have around, I never got around fixing it dropping wlan connections, so for large OS updates it needs to be plugged on the LAN.

[gitaarik]

Nvidia is indeed not well supported, on which Nvidia is mostly to blame (also see Linus Torvalds finger to Nvidia). That is too bad because the community can't do much about it.

Multi monitor support should generally be fine in most desktop environments, at least for 2 screens. More than that can indeed be quirky, dependent on the desktop environment and window manager (X or Wayland) you're using.

Multi-GPU is probably a bit niche to have good driver coverage, partly probably because of the Nvidia issue.