I’ve been an IT professional for 20 years now, but I’ve mainly dealt with Windows. I’ve worked with Linux servers through out the years, but never had Linux as a daily driver. And I decided it was time to change. I only had 2 requirements. One, I need to be able to use my Nvidia 3080 ti for local LLM and I need to be able to RDP with multiple screens to my work laptop running Windows 10.
My hope was to be able to get this all working and create some articles on how I did it to hopefully inspire/guide others. Unfortunately, I was not successful.
I started out with Ubuntu 22.04 and I could not get the live CD to boot. After some searching, I figured out I had to go in a turn off ACPI in boot loader. After that I was able to install Ubuntu side by side with Windows 11, but the boot loader errored out at the end of the install and Ubuntu would not boot.
Okay, back into Windows to download the boot loader fixer and boot to that. Alright, I’m finally able to get into Ubuntu, but I only have 1 of my 4 monitors working. Install the NVIDIA-SMI and reboot. All my monitors work now, but my network card is now broken.
Follow instructions on my phone to reinstall the linux-modules-extra package. Back into Windows to download that because, you know, no network connections. Reinstall the package, it doesn’t work. Go into advanced recovery, try restoring packages, nothing is working. I can either get my monitors to work or my network card. Never both at the same time.
I give up and decide it’s time to try out Fedora. The install process is much smoother. I boot up 3 of 4 monitors work. I find a great post on installing Nvidia drivers and CUDA. After doing that and rebooting, I have all 4 monitors and networking, woohoo!
Now, let’s test RDP. Install FreeRDP run with /multimon, and the screen for each remote window is shifted 1/3 of the way to the left. Strange. Do a little looking online, find an Issue on GitHub about how it is based on the primary monitor. Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row. Trust me I tried every combination I could think of.
Someone suggested using the nightly build because they have been working on this issue. Okay, I try that out and it fails to install because of a missing dependency. Apparently, there is a pull request from December to fix this on Fedora installs, but it hasn’t been merged. So, I would need to compile that specific branch myself.
At this point, I’m just so sick of every little thing being a huge struggle, I reboot and go back into Windows. I still have Fedora on there, but who would have thought something that sounds as simple as wanting to RDP across 4 monitors would be so damn difficult.
I’m not saying any of this to bag on Linux. It’s more of a discussion topic on, yes, I agree that there needs to be more adoption on Linux, but if someone with 20 years of IT experience gets this feed up with it, imagine how your average user would feel.
Of course if anyone has any recommendation on getting my RDP working, I’m all ears on that too.
Windows admin here. It was immediately clear to me how this would end:
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someone proficient in windows goes back to being a dumb newbie is gonna be frustrating as heck.
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being a power user/IT professional most likely means non standard setup
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there are very few windows native admins in the linux sphere to test things from a non dev/non user perspective
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the companies making „professional“ linux are still not comparable to M$
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„professional linux“ would probably be RHEL for you.
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you can try and run a windows vm in your linux to try if stuff works then.
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your mindset needs to change: you‘re now a guy responsible for implementing rdp correctly, embrace open source and make it work for everyone. See the amount of influence you can actually have.
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if you can, consider using windows and linux side by side as long as needed, until stuff works. Find the reasons people abandon windows (i.e. you finally have control).
Just a stream of ideas. Hmu if you have any questions.
someone proficient in windows goes back to being a dumb newbie is gonna be frustrating as heck.
This was me. I kept thinking Linux was making things “overly complicated” until I really stopped to consider how extremely complicated it is in Windows or MacOS to do anything, we’re just all used to it. Once I re-framed my perspective to that of “a noob that was learning” it made it so much less frustrating and now after learning I see that Linux in most ways does things so much simper.
Now I don’t think it’s ease-of-use issues that prevent people from going with Linux, it’s switching costs. Few have time to learn a new system. Even if it is the easiest to learn.
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I swear, every time one of these posts/comments pops up, the chances root issues are caused by Nvidia hardware is insanely high.
I read the first paragraph and saw your prerequisites included working with nvidia.
That is a non-starter, right there. You can blame Linux for a whole lot of little flaws, but most of the blame should go to your hardware vendor for providing shitty support for Linux.
Popos has out-of-the-box nvidia support that works great
Works with CUDA and RDPing on a 2x2 monitor grid?
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Nvidia is by far the most popular dedicated GPU manufacturer out there. If distros can’t figure out how to make it “just work” then Linux will never take off outside of the nerd market.
The problem is Nvidia’s drivers, not the distros.
You may as well be saying distros really need to get their shit together on releasing Photoshop for Linux
If someone with no experience installs Linux on their machine, and has to spend 20 hours fixing all of the problems they’re not going to stick with Linux. It doesn’t matter which distro it is, they’re just going to say Linux sucks and never use it again.
There’s a pretty big difference between trying to run software for X OS on Y OS, and trying to just make your computer do basic tasks. The average person doesn’t know that Nvidia are a bunch of assholes, nor do they care.
I know.
But there’s nothing that can realistically be done about it until Nvidia stops being dickheads.
Distros can’t constantly hop about putting out fires that Nvidia starts, and neglect the other work they need to do.
Even when they do that, it doesn’t work anyway. It’s still buggy, systems still break. It really is only Nvidia who can fix their shit drivers, unless the nouveau team make an alternative that’s superior to Nvidia’s proprietary drivers.
And nah, there’s no difference between my Nvidia/Photoshop example. None whatsoever.
I agree. The majority of my issues come down to the manufacturers. I even updated my BIOS to see if it would help with the ACPI issues, but no luck. Motherboard is 3 years old, so it’s not like I’m trying this on brand new hardware either.
I get it, but could your use case e any more niche?
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but if someone with 20 years of IT experience gets this feed up with it, imagine how your average user would feel.
Do you think “your average user” would run into something like this? How many people are running 4 monitors?
You definitely are not a typical user, and you have specific requirements that heavily bias towards Windows.
Just do what works best for you. Yes, you’ll have to put up with Windows BS, but your problems with daily driving Linux are worse.
Weak
Every 5 years or so Windows annoys me so much with its nonsense that I salt the earth and install a Linux distro.
The last time I did this was Ubuntu (tried manjaro or whatever its called before too) and every time I find a problem that requires hours of trawling the Internet just to find I need to basically rebuild/test/maintain my own version of the library/component.
It gets to the point where I can’t really be productive and I begrudgingly go back to windows as it’s less faff and more productive for me. Then the timer starts again for I get too annoyed with windows.
I want to love Linux, but its not as simple as “just using it.” (unless you are using a steam deck, that is brilliant for its use case).
Part of the problem for me I feel is that the Linux eco system is so wide and vast that we don’t have a singular collective agreement on where to share effort to get something as stable and easy to use as Windows etc. From this thread alone people seem to hate Ubuntu, and sur maybe it’s bad, but most non Linux people only know of that Linux distro.
The sheer vastness of the eco system is it’s downfall, if there was 1 main shell everyone got behind and was used by companies and end users then we would have a huge knowledge base of problems and fixes as well as a concerted effort in a shared direction. As it stands at the moment most companies using Linux don’t have a shell layer, then end users are probably all using various different shells and related components etc, so effort and support is not consolidated as everyone is pulling in their own directions.
I get this is one of the things that draws in the current Linux userbase, but for those of us who just want to do same stuff we do on windows/mac we don’t really care about being able to mix and match stuff, we just want to get behind something that gets out of our way and let’s us use the computer, not faff in the infrastructure of the OS.
Multiple mistakes:
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You went with a very old distro, Ubuntu 22.04 is almost 2 years old. You could pick a non-lts ubuntu instead. Thankfully you ended up picking Fedora.
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A single google search could’ve given you better alternatives to FreeRDP like Remmina. You can always ask people stuff like this on Lemmy or elsewhere (“what’s the best rdp client on linux?”) rather than waiting till you run out of patience.
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You shouldn’t need to compile software by yourself, you can use flatpak to install newer versions of software and flathub even has a beta repo you can add for even newer software.
It’s not against you, we all learn from mistakes. Just try to be more social about your linux journey if you don’t want to struggle
Tldr: you made the classic mistake of going head first into this without a friend to help you or at least documenting yourself properly on the current state of Linux desktops through various medias like Youtube. It doesn’t help that you suffered from the ol’ “I’m a windows expert so this should be similar/easy and if it fails it’s not my fault”
Ubuntu 22.04 is not “very old”. It’s the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. I do not, at all, fault an IT professional for picking the LTS release instead of the absolute latest latest release.
I think it is a communication failure for Linux to not communicate that the jump between Linux distro versions (e.g. from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39) is not the same as a jump from Windows 8 to Windows 10. It is similar to the jump between the different Windows subversions, like from 21H2 to 22H2. Most people don’t even know what those numbers mean, and for most people, it doesn’t matter. A distro upgrade is nothing more than a big update, and that’s how I think it ought to be presented. People should be encouraged to use the non-LTS version as a default, and gently nudged to upgrade once a new one comes out. It shouldn’t be presented as a conplete change in operating system versions, but rather as a feature update. That’s what Windows does, and Windows versions are practically invisible!
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I would think that some of these problems with RDP and monitors might be caused by running Wayland with an Nvidia GPU. I’m pretty sure both Ubuntu and Fedora use Wayland out of the box by default. Best off using Xorg until Nvidia sorts their shit.
Just use Arch.
What a fantastically shit idea for a beginner.
I like Arch, but a first-time install of Arch for a beginner who doesn’t have a lot of patience for reading documentation and troubleshooting is not good advice.
He said he’s an IT professional for 20 years. That’s like the epitome of patience for reading documentations and troubleshooting
The bigger problem when running Arch is that there’s a very high gap between “the bootloader makes the kernel run” and “functional desktop system”. The installation guide will get you to the first one. For someone who’s used to Windows, even as an IT pro, learning Arch is a firehose that’s hard to drink from.
Once you’ve pacstrap’d and set up a user you reboot and start your new OS. Except you have no internet because you didn’t know you had to install dhcpcd. Fine, install that–except your user isn’t in sudoers, so you have to figure out how to get back to being root to edit the sudoers file. With visudo. Ten minutes later you’ve figured out how to find and edit the right line. Another ten to get out of vi. Then once that’s sorted you’re sitting at a terminal you don’t know any commands for with no idea how to get to a graphical environment.
You look on your phone and find a recommendation for XFCE4 as a lightweight and simple DE. Great, install that. Try to launch it, and…a bunch of arcane errors. Another hour of troubleshooting and you learn that you missed xorg, which for some reason isn’t a dependency of XFCE4. O…kay. You don’t want to have to launch it every time you boot, so you go digging and find out you need a desktop manager. Takes some time, but you finally install one and enable the service in systemd, which you have to do manually for some reason.
Finally you get to a graphical environment, and…the fonts are all weird, and unicode symbols are just placeholders. Wait, fonts. You have to install fonts. More research, but you get there. Finally you launch a browser and are delighted to find something familiar. It all works the same. Great! Let’s watch a video to make sure playback is working, and…no sound.
Okay, more research, and turns out you missed pulseaudio. Install that, start the daemon aaaand…no audio. Fine, how do you check the audio level? Ah, there’s an XFCE4 plugin for pulseaudio. Find that, install it, put it on your panel, click it and…pavucontrol isn’t installed. Whatever that is. Okay, install it and try again. Great! So, for some reason the default audio level when you install is 0. Turn that up and you finally hear sound! Hours after starting the process.
And every. little. thing. is like that. For weeks. Especially with Nvidia, and especially if you make the mistake of following a recent guide that shunts you into a Wayland environment. Every time you need to do something there are 20 options, five of which are well-documented but deprecated, the first three you try don’t work for reasons you don’t understand, then you finally find something that works well enough. Rinse, repeat, for every little thing.
And this is coming from a complete Arch stan. I love Arch. It’s my only distro these days. I’m on Hyprland, my neovim is tricked out, everything is slick, responsive, just takes a couple keystrokes to accomplish anything I want to do, and I have everything set up exactly how I want it. It took a long time to get there, though, and I’ve been using Linux off and on for over 20 years, maining it for the last 10.
I mostly use SSH to manage servers, but you could try cockpit if you want something more graphical.
Why Ubuntu?
Its literally the worst Linux
I hate ubuntu with a passion. It’s the most bloated linux distro, snaps are a terrible idea, it looks terrible, and linux mint is just the better option.
Same, I just dont get why I got so many downvotes.
if someone with 20 years of IT experience gets this feed up with it, imagine how your average user would feel.
The average user just wants to open up a browser to use tiktok, instagram, gmail, and whatever else it is people use these days. Maybe edit a few documents and look at local pictures? The average user isn’t going to use RDP or train an LLM.
As others have said: NVIDIA sucks for linux. They have sucked for linux for more than a decade (snippet). And RDP: try Remmina.
Also dualbooting is so-so. Windows likes to mess up the bootloader for no reason during updates. If you switch, it’s best to go full linux or try first from a VM.
Even the average user will sometimes need non-average features.
Maybe they want to print a document and have an old HP printer laying somewhere.
Maybe they want to try this AI filter thingy that is such a fad on Tiktok
Maybe they need to digitally sign a document, or log in using their card reader and government ID to do their taxes.
If even one of those don’t work how they should immediately out of the box, then Linux is not for the average user.
Maybe they want to print a document and have an old HP printer laying somewhere.
Linux is probably your best bet actually.
Maybe they want to try this AI filter thingy that is such a fad on Tiktok
Browsers work on linux
Maybe they need to digitally sign a document, or log in using their card reader and government ID to do their taxes.
All works on linux, most likely even works through the browser (which is what I’ve been doing).
If even one of those don’t work how they should immediately out of the box, then Linux is not for the average user.
And they work “out of the box” on windows? You have to go to a download page, to get the right driver, ensure you have the right windows version and service pack (those are still a thing right?), restart your computer and hope it worked. Hey, maybe there’s even some new fangled “security measure” that installs a rootkit that requires you to go into your BIOS to activate a feature in order for it to work.
Since it’s not “out of the box”, maybe windows should also be canned, right?
