Hey all,
I used to use Linux for a few years. Distro-hopped a bit, used Manjaro, Kubuntu, Mint, and Debian. I want to go back, but what I want is stability. I want to be able to do my regular day-to-day tasks without any sacrifices to my regular performance and stability on Windows 10.
Using Linux, I had the following issues:
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Manjaro - for a first-timer, I think the problems here were pretty self-explanatory
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Kubuntu - worked like a charm, up until I needed to update to the latest version, which it refused to do no matter what I did, causing me to swap to Mint. Reinstalled at a later date only for the entire distro to crash every so often with simple tasks like minimising and maximising windows, opening browser tabs, etc.
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Mint - worked, but disliked the layout, swapped to Debian
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Debian - Most in line with values, but could not for the life of me figure out how to install the Nvidia drivers. I reinstalled the distro multiple times after following the official tutorial to install the drivers to a tee... which would brick the distro entirely each time. Also had same issue with simple tasks like minimising and maximising windows, navigating browser tabs, etc. crashing my system.
I want to enjoy Linux, but I also want basic functionality. For all the crap I rightfully give Windows, it's never crashed on me, whereas with the two distros I mainly used, it would crash probably once or twice a day. I'm not a AAA gamer, and I don't feel it's a hard ask to play a game like osu! without constant stuttering when it runs effortlessly on Windows.
I went back to Windows because I simply couldn't deal with the issues anymore, I had to get a whole new computer and I feel that the constant issues with stability I had and needing to constantly manually turn the power on and off because of the crashes, and reinstalling distros for mundane reasons wore out my SSD much sooner than it should have.
If anybody can help me find something that I can be confident in to simply work without major issues, I would greatly appreciate it. I feel trapped, I want to ditch Windows, but also don't want to deal with those nonstop issues all over again.
I currently have an Nvidia 1060 Ti, and was mainly using KDE save for Mint and whatever it was I had with Manjaro. Too long back to remember for the latter. Think the GPU in the previous comp was exact same model, either that or a 1080 Ti.
I had a 1070 until recently and that was working fine on debian and ubuntu. Usually you need to allow proprietary drivers somewhere in your package sources and then install the nvidia-driver package. Its possible to run into weird configurations issues and those can be annoying to solve. If you wanna avoid that, i would go with a distro that ships with either the drivers prepackaged or supports a guided setup for gpu drivers.
Popular distros that do this are for example Bazzite or PopOS which both come with nvidia drivers pre installed.