Linux sucks, please change my mind!

[Quaestor]

Hi guys, sorry in advance for any mistakes as English isn't my first language.

Since Windows 10 frustrated me in many ways lately and i can't/ won't get Win 11, i thought I'd give Linux Mint a fair chance on my ThinkPad.

I'm now 2 weeks in and have to conclude: gaming is impossible!

Steam ran fine at the start, but won't install or even play already installed games anymore, it's just giving me errors like hard disk write error and the likes.

Wine sounded promising, until i read that the version in the app-manager was seriously obsolete. Tried to get the new version via official website and a guide that was basically "ctrl+c, ctrl+v",

i almost got it done....almost, 'cause that damn terminal spat out more errors than i could care to even read.

I called foul on the Terminal who seriously betrayed me and settled with the outdated version. Worked fine for portable games, but every time i mounted an image to install some old game, i was greeted with a message saying "Put the damn Disk in!", even though it was already mounted.

To me, this kind of experience calls for one of three responses; either i call it quits and return to Windows (worst option), reinstall Mint and try again, or give another distro a go (which seems best, since Mint sometimes freezes up, that bastard)

 

i hope someone helps me make a decision after this rant XD

[Arika]

No, i agree.

 

source: me, someone who is currently running Linux on her laptop and NAS. it's an absolute pain and full of compromises and really really stupid "workarounds" for things that are meant to be simple.

[RollinLower]

i run Linux on all my machines and servers, and i agree. the user experience on Linux sucks!

[Alex Atkin UK]

Linux is hit and miss for gaming, definitely, but your specific problems aren't typical.  You shouldn't be getting disk write errors, where are you seeing that?

 

Installing game disk images you're definitely going to have a harder time, Linux gaming is currently really only optimised around Steam.  I've honestly not used a physical disk/image based PC game in over a decade, even on Windows.  AFAIK older games from physical media don't work on Windows 10 either without some hassle.

[Vishera]

11 minutes ago, Quaestor said:

I'm now 2 weeks in and have to conclude: gaming is impossible!

Steam ran fine at the start, but won't install or even play already installed games anymore, it's just giving me errors like hard disk write error and the likes.

Wine sounded promising, until i read that the version in the app-manager was seriously obsolete. Tried to get the new version via official website and a guide that was basically "ctrl+c, ctrl+v",

On my Manjaro installation Steam works just fine,but proton doesn't for some reason...

12 minutes ago, Quaestor said:

i almost got it done....almost, 'cause that damn terminal spat out more errors than i could care to even read.

I called foul on the Terminal who seriously betrayed me and settled with the outdated version. Worked fine for portable games, but every time i mounted an image to install some old game, i was greeted with a message saying "Put the damn Disk in!", even though it was already mounted.

To me, this kind of experience calls for one of three responses; either i call it quits and return to Windows (worst option), reinstall Mint and try again, or give another distro a go (which seems best, since Mint sometimes freezes up, that bastard)

Pretty much distro issues,

I recommend OpenSUSE or Manjaro,

Try them with a live CD.

[Sojiro84]

What distro are you using? Ubuntu based?

 

Also, from the errors you get, it seems like you are trying to run games from a NTFS drive?

 

This is bound to give problems, the best thing you can do is install games fresh on a EXT4 drive.

 

I don't know how it is with Ubuntu, but I am on Arch and I have no issues with Steam and Lutris. I prefer Arch since I am always up to date with the latest kernels and drivers and other software etc. In the past I used Ubuntu, but not getting app updates was annoying, and having to add PPA's for the latest version of stuff is cumbersome. Hence I am on Arch.

 

Although I am not a fan of Manjaro, I do recommend this if you want to try out a Arch distro. It has a good base system that should cover all your needs.

 

If you are more tech savvy, you can also try EndeavourOS, also Arch based (but starts out with a more minimal system). I run this together with KDE Plasma desktop with Wayland for that sweet performance and FreeSync and also less input lag. Gaming wise, I rarely have issues. But, I also don't play Multiplayer games aside from WoW, Overwatch and FFXIV.

 

I myself started out with Cinnamon, but Plasma is so much better. Performance wise and visually.

[SorryBella]

5 minutes ago, Sojiro84 said:

What distro are you using? Ubuntu based?

 

If you quickly google, yes. Mint is Ubuntu based. But honestly its not a bulletproof vest, ubuntu based distros is not always gonna be user friendly.

[Theextremerobotman]

First, i would recommend the Flatpak version of Steam from the GUI store, and if you're using it see if your using NTFS because it could cause problems.

Second, Also i would recommend the GUI store of Wine.

Thirdly, Honestly I would not recommend the Linux Mint for gaming, I would recommend PopOS! or Manjaro for gaming, or you can research another Distro.

Linux Doesn't suck, You just have to research what is the best Distro for you use case, And Don't expect a Windows-like OS because that is not Linux's main goal  .

[RONOTHAN##]

Half your issues do sound like they're distro specific. Trying a different distro might work best, especially if you go for something Arch-based like Manjaro. This way, you have the latest and greatest packages, and it's got the Arch Wiki to help you through problems (though that can often be overwhelming for new users).

 

That said, coming from someone who does daily drive Linux on everything, it's definitely not perfect. There's software for school that just doesn't work on Linux, getting it setup the way I like takes a couple hours rather than the 30 minutes that it does on Windows, and some software (i.e. the audio servers) just isn't anywhere near as complete as it is on Windows or Mac. A lot of this comes from just how small the user-base is, so there aren't companies working on making the user experience better, and because there aren't companies developing to make the UX better, the user-base stays small. The Steam Deck release in a few months will change that, and I expect in a year or two that Linux will have a lot of those issues ironed out. They've already fixed a lot of issues just over the past 2-3 years, so I'd expect that in another 2-3 they will have gotten it much closer to the point where it needs to be for the main stream to adopt it. 

 

The OS is always gonna be a personal choice type thing, and what may be perfect for someone will definitely not be perfect for another. I really enjoy Linux for the stability, especially on laptops. I've always had more issues with Windows machines than I have with Linux machines, and once everything is setup the way I like it, I make sure to update it once in a while but that's about the only maintenance I need to perform. Plus, the Linux terminal, if you learn how to use it, is an awesome tool for doing a lot of things, and its to the point where almost everything I do I can perform in the terminal (I don't, but I could). That said, I still keep Windows around on my gaming machine because for gaming, it just works. I can play a decent amount of my games through Proton without thinking about it, but with Windows I just hit run and expect it to work. Just because Linux works for me, does not mean it will be anywhere near perfect for you.

[Sauron]

If your only use case is playing games and you aren't willing to spend half an hour troubleshooting error messages, don't even consider Linux. Game developers rarely target it, which means in most cases you'll need workarounds which are not guaranteed to work or need a bare minimum knowledge of what you're doing.

 

Linux is not "Windows but free". It's a different operating system and it requires some time to get used to if you're never touched anything other than Windows. It's up to you to decide whether the reasons you want to quit Windows are strong enough to put in that effort.

[Chris Pratt]

You're both wrong and right. Linux doesn't "suck". It's a solid platform used all over the world by governments, businesses and individuals with great success. The majority of the Internet is powered by Linux, in one form or another. It's the backbone of virtually every smart device in existence.

 

What it's not is particularly user friendly. There's been much effort over the last few years to correct that flaw, but it's very much a work in progress. As good as things like Pop OS! Have gotten, as long as you have to drop to the command line for any purpose, it's still not ready for prime time. You still need to know what you're doing to run Linux, and if you don't have the requisite skill sets, it's not for you.

[Master Disaster]

Honestly, sounds like pebkac to me (absolutely no offense intended when I say that).

 

1) NEVER EVER EVER blindly follow a guide by using copy/paste without understanding what it is you're telling it to do. This is pretty much the universal precursor to a bricked install.

 

2) WINE is an abstraction layer, that means it technically doesn't have direct access to hardware on Linux. If you're trying to install a CD based game in WINE with the disc inserted into a Linux host then its obviously going to complain about a missing disc. For cases like this Lutris exist.

 

3) (Just my opinion) Mint sucks, for a debian based distro it has so many specific issues that non of the other debian based distros have I have no idea why people still use it. If you want a great debian based distro that is good for gaming then go with PopOS.

 

4) Based on the phrases in your OP I'd assume you're still a relative newcomer to Linux. In that case please ignore the advice to switch to anything Arch based, the advantages of using Arch are exactly what makes it difficult to newcomers. Because everything is about as new as possible its pretty common for updates to break things and then you have to spend hours trawling through configs to find the issue and fix it. Much better to stay on a stable release "just works" type distro where the software might be a few months old but you know it has been curated and tested to work on your system with no user input required.

 

Edit - Also as a newcomer I'd advise staying away from RHEL/SUSE based distros as well, these days they come with SELinux out of the box and that's 100% not something for a newbie to be getting into. Understanding Linux permissions for a Windows users is bad enough on its own without adding a whole new layer of complexity to everything.

 

5) Linux doesn't suck, it is however FAR from perfect in many areas (but then, so is Windows and macOS).

[Haraikomono]

the whole world runs on linux my friend

 

its just a matter of time before everything else adapts to linux

 

im guessing that this forum runs on a linux pod as well

[Quaestor]

Thanks for the quick replies!

My steam drive is EXT4, but even after reinstalling steam, it won't work.

I decided to switch distros and find something that works for me, starting with PopOS.

Yes, you're right, Linux takes time to learn. I was just a little salty there, having to re-learn everything just to use a Terminal when you've got 25+ years of experience in Dos/Windows. No use complaining, seems like i've got a lot of work to do!

have a great day folks!

[Kilrah]

"Linux sucks" is wrong, since so many things run on it and it's the best thing there is for those things.

The ecosystem is challenging at being a convenient and user-friendly solution for desktop PC use, yes.

 

Anyway watch the upcoming LTT videos of Linus and Luke trying to use Linux on their main / gaming machines for a month, it'll summarize things pretty well from what we see in last WAN show from 20mins on:

 

 

[Sojiro84]

2 hours ago, Quaestor said:

Thanks for the quick replies!

My steam drive is EXT4, but even after reinstalling steam, it won't work.

I decided to switch distros and find something that works for me, starting with PopOS.

Yes, you're right, Linux takes time to learn. I was just a little salty there, having to re-learn everything just to use a Terminal when you've got 25+ years of experience in Dos/Windows. No use complaining, seems like i've got a lot of work to do!

have a great day folks!

Just take your time. I was a noob as well when I switched over (at the time Manjaro Cinnamon). But I took it day by day, read some guides and noted down handy commands so I won't have to Google them again later. And the search engine is your friend for a lot of stuff.

 

I can't ever go back to bloated privacy invasive Windows. I had a short moment a few weeks back where I installed Windows again on my work laptop, but within the hour I was back on Linux. The fact I had to tweak so much and remove so much bloat to get a somewhere decent setup just was not worth it. Plus the fact that UI design in Windows is still incoherent as frack and also telemetry is still being send to Microsoft and still a lack of a proper system wide dark mode are all reasons to go back to the, for me, greener side.

 

And Plasma just looks a million times better, in my opinion. Good looking blur, great theme selection, wobbly windows and other fancy animations. Things many people don't care about I think, but I like my UI to look good and be a pleasure to work with/look at.

[igormp]

3 hours ago, Quaestor said:

either i call it quits and return to Windows (worst option)

In my opinion, yes, do that. Linux isn't quite ready for your specific use case (games).

 

I do game occasionally, but that's not the main focus at all for me, and for what I do/need, linux ends up being way easier, while on windows I needed many workarounds to get things done in a poorly way.

 

So, if your use case doesn't call for it, I'd say that trying to force yourself to use it just for games isn't worth it, at least for now. As others said, maybe steam deck will change things around

[Giganthrax]

Linux has many advantages, but gaming isn't one of them. Stick to Windows 10 if your primary goal is gaming.

[10leej]

So if steam is giving you disk read errors you're either mounting the disk wrong, or your disk has bigger problems.

Then for wine what did you expect?

Wine

Is

Not an

Emulator

 

It's a set of libraries built mostly on reversed engineered Microsoft code. What did you expect when you decided to run software on an unsupported platform?

[jde3]

I've used Linux almost every day since 1994 and at one point it was good but now.. I think he's right.. Linux sucks. It's far to complicated now and only getting worse. (I blame RedHat) It's fragile too, most of it's duct taped together with python scripts. -- It's created and controlled by programmers who have never administrated a system before and have no idea the needs and concerns that go into that. The sysadmins are no longer present in the discussion for OS design.

 

The problems I run into every day with Linux you would not believe.. most of them are self inflicted wounds due to it's complexity that take days to solve where as on FreeBSD they would be solved in minutes. Or they are engineering projects that have to be redesigned and shoehorned into it's stupidity. Simplicity has extreme value.

 

"Learning Linux" is a never ending tar pit of despair and misery, you will learn it and learn it and learn it again because they have no qualms about nullifying decades of experience with new shiny. RedHat does this intentionally to drive people to it's enterprise services.

 

Windows is not the solution though. (they have had the same problem of programmers running the show for longer)

If you want Good Unix(tm) - FreeBSD and MacOS are my go-to's for server and desktop respectively.

Illumos also catches my eye and is interesting. Solaris was 10 years ahead of Linux when Sun died.. and it still has a lead in a lot of areas today.

[10leej]

9 hours ago, jde3 said:

I've used Linux almost every day since 1994 and at one point it was good but now.. I think he's right.. Linux sucks. It's far to complicated now and only getting worse. (I blame RedHat) It's fragile too, most of it's duct taped together with python scripts. -- It's created and controlled by programmers who have never administrated a system before and have no idea the needs and concerns that go into that. The sysadmins are no longer present in the discussion for OS design.

 

The problems I run into every day with Linux you would not believe.. most of them are self inflicted wounds due to it's complexity that take days to solve where as on FreeBSD they would be solved in minutes. Or they are engineering projects that have to be redesigned and shoehorned into it's stupidity. Simplicity has extreme value.

 

"Learning Linux" is a never ending tar pit of despair and misery, you will learn it and learn it and learn it again because they have no qualms about nullifying decades of experience with new shiny. RedHat does this intentionally to drive people to it's enterprise services.

 

Windows is not the solution though. (they have had the same problem of programmers running the show for longer)

If you want Good Unix(tm) - FreeBSD and MacOS are my go-to's for server and desktop respectively.

Illumos also catches my eye and is interesting. Solaris was 10 years ahead of Linux when Sun died.. and it still has a lead in a lot of areas today.

What? Been using Linux myself and it has gotten easier not harder to administrate a desktop and server. 

[cretsiah]

@Quaestor your trying to game on a laptop???  (last i knew thinkpad was a laptop/notebook)

 

if you tried linux mint cinnamon and it is freezing up I'd say its a pretty low spec laptop maybe try the xfce version (if that still causes freezing then your laptop is very low spec) and not likely to game with any distro you use..

 

hard disk write errors sounds like a bad drive or at least a badly formatted one

 

how old is this laptop?

what are the specs of this laptop?

what kind of games are you trying to play on this laptop?

 

WINE:

in terms of the disk issue, if its a legal copy of the game then after installing, finding a no-cd exe file might help with that.

however installing winetricks will help with wine

 

 

[maplepants]

On 10/11/2021 at 1:18 PM, Kilrah said:

"Linux sucks" is wrong, since so many things run on it and it's the best thing there is for those things.

The ecosystem is challenging at being a convenient and user-friendly solution for desktop PC use, yes.

 

Anyway watch the upcoming LTT videos of Linus and Luke trying to use Linux on their main / gaming machines for a month, it'll summarize things pretty well from what we see in last WAN show from 20mins on:

 

 

I think that the narrow scope of this challenge actually does a lot to show the limits of Linux. Both Luke and Linus have multiple computers, and it's telling that they didn't switch them all. They have two laptops in front of them which are, quite notably, not running Linux. They are only switching one of the many computers they have in their lives. 

 

Both Luke and Linus are going to spend most of their time in Windows, including doing all of their work in Windows. And they've also only installed Linux on a spare drive. When they're done, you can bet they're going to put the old Windows drive back into their machine and call it a day.

 

If you're a regular person deciding which operating system you should put on your one and only computer, the calculous for "should I use linux" changes quite a bit.

 

I love Linux and have had at least one linux machine running in my house for about 20 years. But it's not as good of a general purpose desktop OS as macOS or Windows are. The setup I've had for a while now is a Mac as my main computer, Windows PC hookup up to my TV, Ubuntu Server and Raspberry Pi boards for various jobs like smart speaker brains etc. 

 

Even with my experience running Linux for 20 years, I wouldn't use it as my main desktop OS or my TV PC because I want those machines to be as hassle free as possible.  

[jde3]

17 hours ago, 10leej said:

What? Been using Linux myself and it has gotten easier not harder to administrate a desktop and server. 

It's just not the case on a high level. I can give you examples but they would be technical. One is RHEL 6 gave us optional NetworkManager. This is a Linux desktop application used to configure networking but it's primary intention was for wifi and ease of use. In RHEL 8 this is now mandatory to use for servers.

 

It's pointless because nowhere ever was configuring a network interface hard on a Linux system. it was - NEVER - a problem that needed fixing.. but now we have a big bloated thing with dozens of hooks throughout the system that can go wrong with it being mandatory to use.

 

Compare with FreeBSD, you set the address in a single line in rc.conf and it's been that way for decades. (incidentally it's the same way Linux use to be) Sysadmins do not need something to detect connectivity or a gui to help them configure the network. When things are normal and the system is running fine it's not a problem.. the problem comes in when things go wrong.. then it becomes very difficult to dig through this desktop bs mess of a program to find out what it's doing wrong. FreeBSD alternatively and careful and makes changes to the system very rarely and when they do it's something people really want. They don't do it to check some box off a marketing teams proposed new feature list they want to advertise and sell.

Other examples of stupidity: Removing /bin, /sbin, /lib, /lib64 etc. This is soo stupid.. do they intend us to rewrite every script in existence and move it's shebang?? /bin had actually reasons for existing on the root. Aside from doing this they didn't update the packages.. so the packages still think they are installing stuff into /bin etc. It makes no sense and I expect the symlinks to have eternal life. A symlink is not a cureall for everything.

Another? So pam_mkdir didn't work with SELinux flags and this was reported to RedHat as a bug, they marked it not a bug and wrote pam_oddjob_mkdir but neglected to add NFSv4 support to it. Why? because Pam project controls the former and RedHat/IBM want to force you over to their products. (Homed not NFS.)

 

More? RHEL 8 added the crypto policy framework. Sounds good on the surface but configuring daemons cypher was never something that was hard or needed fixing. This is what sysadmins do and they are use to it.. what this is now is a python wrapper script that rewrites the way your daemon startup files work adding policies for government listed security types. (oh I'll just set it to whatever NIST recommends, done.. seems easy right?) But... Where this fails is the government is often very slow, and you need a fix now not wait till the government updates their policies on this so instead of just changing the cipher in the daemon config, now you have to create a "custom policy" file (XML of course) and apply that. A it's confusing and requires more training and B it's more complex and more crap that can go wrong. It's sprung from the minds of people that have never done operations work. It's asinine and again a problem that never needed fixing. 

Every RHEL update I dread in fear for changes idiot programmers will make to it and the tar pit of ever complexity to be extended and the retraining I'm going to have to do for people. Nullifying peoples experience and making things that use to be small problems take days of research is NOT a benefit.

[10leej]

3 hours ago, jde3 said:

It's just not the case on a high level. I can give you examples but they would be technical. One is RHEL 6 gave us optional NetworkManager. This is a Linux desktop application used to configure networking but it's primary intention was for wifi and ease of use. In RHEL 8 this is now mandatory to use for servers.

 

It's pointless because nowhere ever was configuring a network interface hard on a Linux system. it was - NEVER - a problem that needed fixing.. but now we have a big bloated thing with dozens of hooks throughout the system that can go wrong with it being mandatory to use.

 

Compare with FreeBSD, you set the address in a single line in rc.conf and it's been that way for decades. (incidentally it's the same way Linux use to be) Sysadmins do not need something to detect connectivity or a gui to help them configure the network. When things are normal and the system is running fine it's not a problem.. the problem comes in when things go wrong.. then it becomes very difficult to dig through this desktop bs mess of a program to find out what it's doing wrong. FreeBSD alternatively and careful and makes changes to the system very rarely and when they do it's something people really want. They don't do it to check some box off a marketing teams proposed new feature list they want to advertise and sell.

Other examples of stupidity: Removing /bin, /sbin, /lib, /lib64 etc. This is soo stupid.. do they intend us to rewrite every script in existence and move it's shebang?? /bin had actually reasons for existing on the root. Aside from doing this they didn't update the packages.. so the packages still think they are installing stuff into /bin etc. It makes no sense and I expect the symlinks to have eternal life. A symlink is not a cureall for everything.

Another? So pam_mkdir didn't work with SELinux flags and this was reported to RedHat as a bug, they marked it not a bug and wrote pam_oddjob_mkdir but neglected to add NFSv4 support to it. Why? because Pam project controls the former and RedHat/IBM want to force you over to their products. (Homed not NFS.)

 

More? RHEL 8 added the crypto policy framework. Sounds good on the surface but configuring daemons cypher was never something that was hard or needed fixing. This is what sysadmins do and they are use to it.. what this is now is a python wrapper script that rewrites the way your daemon startup files work adding policies for government listed security types. (oh I'll just set it to whatever NIST recommends, done.. seems easy right?) But... Where this fails is the government is often very slow, and you need a fix now not wait till the government updates their policies on this so instead of just changing the cipher in the daemon config, now you have to create a "custom policy" file (XML of course) and apply that. A it's confusing and requires more training and B it's more complex and more crap that can go wrong. It's sprung from the minds of people that have never done operations work. It's asinine and again a problem that never needed fixing. 

Every RHEL update I dread in fear for changes idiot programmers will make to it and the tar pit of ever complexity to be extended and the retraining I'm going to have to do for people. Nullifying peoples experience and making things that use to be small problems take days of research is NOT a benefit.

maybe don't use rhel then?