My time with Linux has been equal parts amazing and absolutely infuriating. Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box. Here have been my issues:
Nvidia GPU - Trying to figure out how to get the drivers working was a nightmare with ten million different people giving different advice on how to get it to work. Eventually I was able to get them signed and it seems to work
Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux. It took hours to get it even remotely working ok, but I still don’t think it’s perfect.
Compatibility - Some things just straight up don’t work for seemingly no reason. None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.
And that is where I am disappointed. Troubleshooting Linux issues sucks. There are so many people giving their opinions and all of them are different and most don’t work.
When Linux is working right it is amazing, and I love it. But right now, it just isn’t as good as Windows and extremely infuriating more often than not. Guess I am going to switch back and give Bill Gates all of my info again. Really fucking disappointing
Update: Controllers seem to work after forcing compatibility mode in Steam. No idea why that was off or why Steam was essentially hijacking my controller, but it seems to work now. For everyone that helped thank you.
Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box.
I set Mint up for my 65 year old mother about 4 years ago, and she hasn’t had a single issue since. I think it’s less about Mint being usable out of the box and more about Mint not doing what you want out of the box…
My 73 year old grandmother also uses it and says its “minty fast” lol not sure what that means. She latched onto the name when she heard it.
lmao that’s adorable.
About NVIDIA: yeah, Nvidia on Linux is a big, big mess. Things are improving but it’s still a pain in the ass sometimes. Maybe some of your issues could be solved by changing to another Desktop Enviroment.
About Bluetooth: I don’t know how recent your hardware is, but maybe changing to a newer kernel (preferably a more up to date Distro, like Fedora) would solve it.
About Compatibility: I don’t know what controllers you are using. I personally had issues with Xbox Wireless Controller drivers, and after some searching I easily fixed it with xpadneo, maybe that could help.
Mint is usually a great distro for beginners, BUT it sometimes sacrifices shiny new updates for stability (which is a good feature of Mint), that’s why I recommend you to try Fedora. Good luck with your Linux adventure 😃
Thanks for the response I appreciate it
Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux.
Shitty dongles is shittier in Linux, that’s true. Never ever had a problem with Bluetooth on laptops.
None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.
They work with games outside of Steam? If true is a Steam problem, not a Linux one. “But it works with Steam on Windows”, well Valve can fuck up and introduce a bug on the Linux version.
Use Pop Os, perfect for nvidia GPU support out of the box.
I can’t because I have a dual boot with windows and secure boot has to stay on
You can absolutely dual boot PopOS! and Windows. The only real issue you’ll run into is Windows update is destructive–so you’ll have to manually keep fixing systemd boot to ensure your PopOS! instance can continue to boot after Windows update.
Properly dual booting is much more difficult than starting a vm. Starting a vm is as simple as installing boxes and choosing the iso.
Thanks ill maybe give that a shot
use boxes to have a virtual fully functional windows within linux :)
I would have no idea how to set that up. I already tried creating a VM within linux for windows, and it went very poorly
Bro. You need to grab for sanity right now. Switch back to windows until you’re ready to take another dive. It’s worth it imo, but a lot of these comments are just plane unhelpful. Linux is great, if it’s not working for your hardware try a different tact.
Nvidia support just turned a corner at the end of last year. It’s getting much much better.
Thanks. Just getting heated because I really want it to work for me
Yea and the purists are getting heated back. You’re obviously at a learning gap, and that’s the firmware gap. It’s annoying. But with older hardware it “just works”.
I’m guessing since mint is Debian based it’s not getting the latest and greatest firmware blobs, or it’s on an older kernel.
What’s your hardware? What version of Linux mint?
You might want to try some gaming specific distros as they are a little more cutting edge. I’d suggest giving Bazzite or Nobara a try. Bazzite is immutable, so if it’s not working on first boot just give up and switch. But it is my personals favorite.
Both are based on Fedora which is a little more cutting edge.
You also might want to try Manjaro which is like Arch Linux with training wheels. It may just work on boot.
Edit: Bazzite and Nobara will have Nvidia specific ISOs, so getting drivers working is no big deal. The core and legacy systems (Ubuntu, mint, Fedora, opensuse) all take a little more effort to get Nvidia working. Their spinoffs often times include the driver for you.
Why does secure boot need to stay on?
Even so, you should be able to sign the drivers and use the boot shim if you really want to go through that process.
I agree that linux is difficult t best for a desktop. I use MacOS for my desktop system. Its very linux-like under the hood, but it just works. In my opinion its way better than Windows.
Use cachy or bazzite, both are supposed to work well with ndvida theres also nodora
You’re actually right about this. I guess I’ve just gotten used to discarding most of the “advice” people give and also recognizing when somebody actually knows what they’re talking about.
I’m sorry you’ve had this experience. Hopefully you’ll be willing to give Linux another try again in the future and some of your issues have been addressed.
I appreciate it
Maybe Linux isn’t the solution you are looking for in this case? I use Linux whenever I can, especially at home because I have far fewer problems than with windows. But it’s not a panacea, and if it’s easier to use windows then use windows.
That’s the thing, I’ve loved Linux when it’s worked right. I want to use it full time. My first install, after fixing everything, was going great. I had to reinstall because I messed something up, and now I can’t fix any of this.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had so much trouble with Linux. I understand the frustration that comes with Unix based OSes especially after being a heavy Windows user for years.
I did a bit of searching on your profile and saw you’re dual-booting with Windows on the same hard drive. I personally had issues with trying to set that up myself (Windows is a finicky, jealous b****). My own solution was installing my distro of choice onto a separate hard drive - if you can eventually do that I recommend it.
I know you’re getting a lot of flak for your post but it’s good to see honest opinions from people who genuinely want to try Linux but aren’t necessarily the same level of hyper-nerd as the typical demographic here.
Having information from a wider opinion pool will help in understanding how to get Linux to more of the population - but that’s a side tangent.
It’s encouraging to see that you are still open to trying in the future and taking a break from it can help you clear your head and come back with fresher eyes.
Unfortunately I don’t have much experience with NVIDIA drivers, and probably a similar amount of troubleshooting as Mint but I’ve found EndeavourOS to be friendlier to a middle-upper tech/gamer use case. Mint, for me, seemed cold and “office”-y and didn’t work well for me as I don’t only use my browser and word processor.
That said, distros are an almost ridiculously personal choice and part of that is trial and error. If you haven’t gotten the chance I recommend test driving a couple other distros in an Oracle VM (for user-friendliness) so you can decide what you like the feel of before committing to an install again, if and when you feel ready.
Good luck and godspeed until then.
Thanks for the reply. My next build will not have windows on it at all, If I can help it. Honestly mint is great and was working amazing until I had to reinstall it.
in the beginning I dual booted too and windows did cause some strange issues, but they disappeared when I disabled fast boot from somewhere in windows settings.
also I distrohop every now and then, and a I had trouble installing nvidia drivers a few times. on distros that earlier had no trouble at all with it. bluetooth works great on my pc, which was a pleasant surprise. I don’t own a controller, but I heard that PS4 controllers work best.
all of your existing hardware may not be supported, but in the future you may want to search and check if the peripheral or component you are buying will play nice with linux if you want to move in that direction.
People are downvoting your comments about your actual experience and that’s not helpful.
Folks, please don’t downvote an unpopular (to you) opinion. Instead, try to prove for more info and provide your expertise to help someone try to have a better experience. The point is to help someone learn how to enjoy Linux, not hate them for not liking it. Don’t be counterproductive and solidify a bad reputation of Linux users.
It’s probably because I come off as a whiny bitch, which I do. Lol just frustrated.
Thanks so much seriously. This is great
i had a similarly confusing and frustrating experience when trying Ubuntu on a netbook many years ago. It has come a long way since then but sometimes you can get a bunch of annoying issues all at once.
It could just be bad luck with the hardware you have (no one really ever cares about the bluetooth adapter in their system until it causes issues) or Mint being behind the bleeding edge.
You might find Fedora KDE to be more compatible with your setup, or you can leave it a bit longer and check back later. No harm in patience!
If you come with expectations that you’ll just be fully catered no matter what your setup is and expect things to just work without ever trying to understand problems, you sure can be disappointed. Believe or not, most of the time those issues are out of control for Linux or the distros, as your hardware vendor made it to work on Windows and Windows only. Community is here to help you, but with your attitude it gets difficult no matter how much others try to help.
Mint isn’t the platform for gaming on Linux. It’s way behind on a lot of things like display drivers. Try something like Bazzite or Nobara that have a ton of tweaks for both Nvidia and steam. Honestly, I’m really shying away from recommending Mint to new users, it’s getting really stale.
Bazzite has been great for me. Bluetooth, Nvidia GPU, controllers, Bluetooth controllers all worked out of the box, and it’s based on Fedora so you get all of those perks, and the rollback feature, which comes by default, works (to an end user) rather like timeshift (I think - it lets you return to the previous working configuration if an update has a problem, which admittedly did happen to me recently, I just rolled back and waited for the devs to fix the problem the next day, lol).
It doesn’t have a live boot option so it just has to be installed to try it, which is disappointing.
But I totally get if OP wants to take a break and maybe come back to Linux in a few years, because Linux will keep getting better and Windows will keep getting worse.
Bruh. You been on here for two days complaining about something where you’ve been told exactly what the issue is, and it’s not your Mint install, Linux, or anything else about the same system or with the community you’re asking for help in.
You’re not doing the work to find the issue, or help the people trying to debug with you. You’re actually seemingly going out of your way to not be helpful and just complain, and that’s a YOU problem. Have fun on Windows 👋
Are you fucking serious? I’ve followed all the god damn advice I was given and have spent over 10 hours troubleshooting this ONE issue and nothing has worked.
That’s what atomic distros are for. Detecting problems at the development level, not the user level. Might give one of them a try. And get rid of the dual boot, that’s just pain in the ass
Yes, and then you come back here raging that “Mint is not ready out of the box”, which isn’t true. The problem is with Steam and steam-input. You’ve been told this half a dozen times now. It has nothing to do with Linux (where you’re posting in), or Mint specifically. It’s your setup with Steam.
I don’t see how. I have done everything you suggested with steam. I’ve tried every possible configuration, and nothing works.
Read what you just wrote, then tell me how Mint is the problem, and why you’re posting in this sub.
Dude, I have the exact same steam configuration in Windows, and my controller works. Tell me that’s not a Linux issue
Again, it’s a driver issue. Has nothing to do with *nix. The manufacturer of the controller doesn’t ensure that *nix distros have access to the driver. So how can it work?
Specifically which controller is it? Have you looked for *nix drivers specifically for that device? From the manufacturer?
Thats the thing. I’ve tried both xbox and ps5 controllers, and none are working. I test with jstest-gtk and whats weird is the right joystick shows it only moves up and down. Not sure if that’s related, but it’s weird
Kid, if you want proof, DM me an invite to a call somewhere you can screencast and I’ll show you exactly what the issue is and fix it quickly. I’m that positive.
