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I built a machine to try desktop Linux last year. I wanted it to double as a gaming machine, so I got an ATI/AMD card that's supposed to be well supported. 1-2

I built a machine to try desktop Linux last year. I wanted it to double as a gaming machine, so I got an ATI/AMD card that's supposed to be well supported. 1-2 crashes from both Wayland and Xorg on two very different distros, per day. Unusable for any purpose. Win10 on the same machine is perfectly stable. So I'm back to Win10 for gaming and macOS for work. I ran Gentoo on a Thinkpad and later an HP laptop for years, but I just don't have time for this shit anymore. I doubt I have a work-losing crash on my Macs more than once a year, if that. I also had to manually intervene with my old Gentoo skillz to get Debian to install on my boring, old (used) home server. It couldn't install Grub, on repeated attempts. All I did was drop into a shell and do exactly what the installer should have been doing, with no changes to config. Worked first try. Ubuntu on an early home server managed to render itself unbootable after an update. No idea what happened with that but it solidified my mistrust of LVM (who knows, may not have been its fault, but life's getting too short for me to want to find out) My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware.

fartcannon 5y ago
Please list the specs of this impossibly crashy machine so we can avoid at all costs. You found a unicorn of failure.
- handrous 5y ago
  I find that video cards are the reason for the overwhelming majority of stability issues on desktops and laptops for at least the last 15 years (they didn't seem quite as bad when those cards were much simpler), across all operating systems, including macOS (how many models have had stability issues related to discrete video card heat management or other shittiness? But windows laptops with discrete cards tend toward similar problems) so I'd bet it's that. Luckily, since I don't do anything with machine learning or 3D modeling or any of that, I can usually get away with using ultra-stable Intel video or something similarly bland. I only put a fancy card in this because I wanted it to double as a gaming rig. Win 10 on the same machine? Zero crashes in about a year. Linux in a VM on the same machine, hosted on Windows? No crashes. So it's probably the video card driver in Linux, not the hardware's fault exactly. Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine. Probably would have gone Nvidia but I'm aware which one works better on Linux has flipped sharply since Way Back When, the last time I ran Linux on a machine with a discrete video card. Didn't matter, still broken. No clear cause of crashes. Would crash in a game, crash while browsing, crash editing text. Often I've been able to track Xorg crashes to a specific action (playing Flash on the first version of Ubuntu to use PulseAudio, for example) but not this time. Driver is (or was, for the couple months I made a go of it) just absolute shit with this particular card, I guess. ("but that's AMD's driver, not Linux's fault" OK, but that doesn't matter from my perspective, the machine was unusable for either work or gaming with Linux on it, unless, maybe, I crippled the hardware by using an open-source driver) [EDIT] that it did it in both Xorg and Wayland is another indicator it's likely a driver issue. It's that or bad memory, but Windows and Linux-in-VirtualBox-on-Windows don't crash, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    So you’re saying Linux will crash frequently (1-2 times per day) with an RX 5500 XT? It shouldn’t be that hard to track someone down with that card to see if that’s true. Not that I think you’re lying, but you seem convinced that it’s the card’s fault while it could be something else. Also, > My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware. That conclusion is not supported by anything you’ve written. All you can say is that, based on your limited testing (and many assumptions), the RX 5500 XT linux drivers were unstable at some point last year. For the record, I’ve been using desktop linux (Kubuntu) for the past 6~7 years with an Nvidia GTX 980 with zero issues whatsoever. I use it for both gaming and work, and never had the system crash on me. I even upgraded the CPU/Mobo/RAM and GPU (originally had a 970) during that time without any issues. No need to reinstall linux or anything ridiculous like that. It just worked as expected. And when I eventually decide to upgrade again, I’m extremely confident that I wont have to do a reinstall either, or worry about system stability because in my experience, Linux is very stable and has excellent hardware support.
    - handrous 5y ago
      I've run Linux on lots of machines over a lot of years. It was my main desktop (well, laptop) OS on two devices over an ~8-year span, even. I don't think, based on fairly extensive personal experience, it's had a great position compared with Windows, on the stability and ease-of-maintenance dimensions, since Win7 came out and that OS got way more stable (arguably, since one of the service packs of XP, I forget which one—2, maybe?—whipped that OS into pretty decent shape, or maybe since 2K if we're allowing non-home-targeted versions). I'm not a Windows fan at all, but it's gotten far more stable while Linux in my substantial experience hasn't made much progress on stability, in a desktop OS context, specifically, where applications crashing with greater frequency or the windowing system crashing count against a platform, not just blue-screens and kernel panics. Major distros also have a bad habit of backsliding temporarily, but significantly, on stability with upgrades when major subsystems are changed out, in a way and to a degree that Windows and, say, macOS, do not (this is not a claim that those never have issues of this sort, mind you, they're just less frequent, less severe, and less long-lived, typically), and the alternatives are to use slow-changing distros that leave you hunting for sources for modern software to run on them when you need it, or stuck on old kernels without newer hardware support, or rolling distros, which are their own special stability risk. Meanwhile, most of the progress Linux has made on the desktop in the last 15ish years as far as features is lame, unhelpful-at-best GUI churn (to be fair, macOS and Windows are guilty of plenty of this, though not as much) and stuff that macOS and Windows already did better (very ordinary and basic wifi use not requiring you to learn yet another command line tool for something that's two clicks in a point-n-drool interface on other operating systems, stuff like that). Hell, one feature I'm now very interested in, which is X-Window-style remote applications (as are others, see: remote-Chrome-as-a-service as a business model) is stagnating tech that's on its way out, on Linux, not something the community is running forward with as a differentiator.
noobermin 5y ago
Last time had a mac book (2015) the experience was terrible. The wifi would drop every few hours, it was such a painful experience, it even froze on me during a national conference presentation which was hell of embarrasing. This was after years of seeing comments like this and deciding I wanted to see whether macos really was unix but better. In my experience it wasn't. So finally, the problem with personal experience is it's just that. Vast numbers of people use linux everyday without issues. And...apparently, numbers of people use macos everyday (and wifi doesn't cut out every two hours??? after my experience it's hard to believe but idk, people on the internet say it's true, right)
- sudopluto 5y ago
  try it not on a macbook, which are known for having hardware compat issues: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
- handrous 5y ago
  Macs have problems. My current one (an M1 air) requires me to switch networks, or disable-then-enable, wifi, to get it working if the laptop is on battery and goes into any level of sleep. ... but that's the only problem with it. And it's perfectly consistent, both the problem and the fix, so fairly easy to live with. It doesn't do any number of little weird things I used to tolerate without thinking much of it, in my Win + Linux years (I was fairly late to the Mac train). Some models have definitely been complete duds, though, that's absolutely true. Frankly it annoys me that even when they fuck up, everyone else is so far behind that I don't realistically have options to switch to that won't amount to cutting off my nose to spite my face. As happened when I tried to cheap out and switch back to Linux this time. Yet again. :-/
  - wayneftw 5y ago
    > …but that's the only problem with it. I doubt it. In your first post, you said you have a work losing crash once a year on your Mac. Sounds like a problem to me. (That’s never happened to me once on my Linux or Windows desktops.) You also had to build another machine just so you can play games and try out Linux. That you can’t just play games under macOS sounds like a problem too. I’m also sure that you’ve had problems just like everybody else has had with Macs, from updates that break software and services that you’ve installed. My Macs have been broken numerous times by this bullshit whereas my Linux and Windows machines just keep trucking along like they’re supposed to.
sudopluto 5y ago
If you did your research (/r/linuxgaming), you might have found that an nvidia gpu would have better choice if you wanted to run a distro with old mesa packages. If you're so old and your time is oh so important, maybe you should learn to measure twice and cut once, instead of blaming your tools.
- dash2 5y ago
  The GP just offered his experience on why he went back to Windows. Reacting with hostility seems like a way to trap yourself in a world where you never hear of problems with desktop Linux. You will then be constantly puzzled why Linux is not more successful.
  - sudopluto 5y ago
    the poster made a snarky comment, i got annoyed, made a snarky comment back. i don't care about evangelizing linux or converting people. as for losing users like him/her, for every 4/5ish of them there are 1/2 helpful people who aren't so self important
- handrous 5y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting which distros I tried on the machine out of that post (it was then-current versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, for the record). [EDIT] If you read quickly, you probably just missed that I related three instances of Linux problems across three of the four x86 machines I've run Linux on at home in the last ~decade, since it stopped being my primary OS for most purposes. Only one's a hardware problem, but the other two are failures at doing extremely basic things like installing its own boot loader or not rendering itself unbootable on a system upgrade. One of those is running Debian, that's true, but I wouldn't try to use that on a machine with a very modern video card, you're right that that'd be a recipe for trouble. The only one that wasn't a bigger pain in my ass than it was worth was a trash-tier Chromebox I installed Void on. That was basically fine. It's consistently good on Raspberry Pis, too, since that hardware has a lot of eyes on it and is very stable over time. Sorry I snapped above, no excuse even when insult is perceived, I've modified it to take that out.

fartcannon 5y ago

Please list the specs of this impossibly crashy machine so we can avoid at all costs. You found a unicorn of failure.

handrous 5y ago
I find that video cards are the reason for the overwhelming majority of stability issues on desktops and laptops for at least the last 15 years (they didn't seem quite as bad when those cards were much simpler), across all operating systems, including macOS (how many models have had stability issues related to discrete video card heat management or other shittiness? But windows laptops with discrete cards tend toward similar problems) so I'd bet it's that. Luckily, since I don't do anything with machine learning or 3D modeling or any of that, I can usually get away with using ultra-stable Intel video or something similarly bland. I only put a fancy card in this because I wanted it to double as a gaming rig. Win 10 on the same machine? Zero crashes in about a year. Linux in a VM on the same machine, hosted on Windows? No crashes. So it's probably the video card driver in Linux, not the hardware's fault exactly. Lemme see exactly the card.... Radeon RX 5500 XT. Not exactly cutting-edge even when I bought it—I usually shop bang-for-buck, plus deliberately went a little out-of-date since I was buying for a planned Linux machine. Probably would have gone Nvidia but I'm aware which one works better on Linux has flipped sharply since Way Back When, the last time I ran Linux on a machine with a discrete video card. Didn't matter, still broken. No clear cause of crashes. Would crash in a game, crash while browsing, crash editing text. Often I've been able to track Xorg crashes to a specific action (playing Flash on the first version of Ubuntu to use PulseAudio, for example) but not this time. Driver is (or was, for the couple months I made a go of it) just absolute shit with this particular card, I guess. ("but that's AMD's driver, not Linux's fault" OK, but that doesn't matter from my perspective, the machine was unusable for either work or gaming with Linux on it, unless, maybe, I crippled the hardware by using an open-source driver) [EDIT] that it did it in both Xorg and Wayland is another indicator it's likely a driver issue. It's that or bad memory, but Windows and Linux-in-VirtualBox-on-Windows don't crash, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.
- bogwog 5y ago
  So you’re saying Linux will crash frequently (1-2 times per day) with an RX 5500 XT? It shouldn’t be that hard to track someone down with that card to see if that’s true. Not that I think you’re lying, but you seem convinced that it’s the card’s fault while it could be something else. Also, > My experience is that desktop Linux is only tolerable (stable) in a VM or on extremely conservative hardware. That conclusion is not supported by anything you’ve written. All you can say is that, based on your limited testing (and many assumptions), the RX 5500 XT linux drivers were unstable at some point last year. For the record, I’ve been using desktop linux (Kubuntu) for the past 6~7 years with an Nvidia GTX 980 with zero issues whatsoever. I use it for both gaming and work, and never had the system crash on me. I even upgraded the CPU/Mobo/RAM and GPU (originally had a 970) during that time without any issues. No need to reinstall linux or anything ridiculous like that. It just worked as expected. And when I eventually decide to upgrade again, I’m extremely confident that I wont have to do a reinstall either, or worry about system stability because in my experience, Linux is very stable and has excellent hardware support.
  - handrous 5y ago
    I've run Linux on lots of machines over a lot of years. It was my main desktop (well, laptop) OS on two devices over an ~8-year span, even. I don't think, based on fairly extensive personal experience, it's had a great position compared with Windows, on the stability and ease-of-maintenance dimensions, since Win7 came out and that OS got way more stable (arguably, since one of the service packs of XP, I forget which one—2, maybe?—whipped that OS into pretty decent shape, or maybe since 2K if we're allowing non-home-targeted versions). I'm not a Windows fan at all, but it's gotten far more stable while Linux in my substantial experience hasn't made much progress on stability, in a desktop OS context, specifically, where applications crashing with greater frequency or the windowing system crashing count against a platform, not just blue-screens and kernel panics. Major distros also have a bad habit of backsliding temporarily, but significantly, on stability with upgrades when major subsystems are changed out, in a way and to a degree that Windows and, say, macOS, do not (this is not a claim that those never have issues of this sort, mind you, they're just less frequent, less severe, and less long-lived, typically), and the alternatives are to use slow-changing distros that leave you hunting for sources for modern software to run on them when you need it, or stuck on old kernels without newer hardware support, or rolling distros, which are their own special stability risk. Meanwhile, most of the progress Linux has made on the desktop in the last 15ish years as far as features is lame, unhelpful-at-best GUI churn (to be fair, macOS and Windows are guilty of plenty of this, though not as much) and stuff that macOS and Windows already did better (very ordinary and basic wifi use not requiring you to learn yet another command line tool for something that's two clicks in a point-n-drool interface on other operating systems, stuff like that). Hell, one feature I'm now very interested in, which is X-Window-style remote applications (as are others, see: remote-Chrome-as-a-service as a business model) is stagnating tech that's on its way out, on Linux, not something the community is running forward with as a differentiator.

noobermin 5y ago

Last time had a mac book (2015) the experience was terrible. The wifi would drop every few hours, it was such a painful experience, it even froze on me during a national conference presentation which was hell of embarrasing. This was after years of seeing comments like this and deciding I wanted to see whether macos really was unix but better. In my experience it wasn't. So finally, the problem with personal experience is it's just that. Vast numbers of people use linux everyday without issues. And...apparently, numbers of people use macos everyday (and wifi doesn't cut out every two hours??? after my experience it's hard to believe but idk, people on the internet say it's true, right)

sudopluto 5y ago
try it not on a macbook, which are known for having hardware compat issues: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
handrous 5y ago
Macs have problems. My current one (an M1 air) requires me to switch networks, or disable-then-enable, wifi, to get it working if the laptop is on battery and goes into any level of sleep. ... but that's the only problem with it. And it's perfectly consistent, both the problem and the fix, so fairly easy to live with. It doesn't do any number of little weird things I used to tolerate without thinking much of it, in my Win + Linux years (I was fairly late to the Mac train). Some models have definitely been complete duds, though, that's absolutely true. Frankly it annoys me that even when they fuck up, everyone else is so far behind that I don't realistically have options to switch to that won't amount to cutting off my nose to spite my face. As happened when I tried to cheap out and switch back to Linux this time. Yet again. :-/
- wayneftw 5y ago
  > …but that's the only problem with it. I doubt it. In your first post, you said you have a work losing crash once a year on your Mac. Sounds like a problem to me. (That’s never happened to me once on my Linux or Windows desktops.) You also had to build another machine just so you can play games and try out Linux. That you can’t just play games under macOS sounds like a problem too. I’m also sure that you’ve had problems just like everybody else has had with Macs, from updates that break software and services that you’ve installed. My Macs have been broken numerous times by this bullshit whereas my Linux and Windows machines just keep trucking along like they’re supposed to.

sudopluto 5y ago

If you did your research (/r/linuxgaming), you might have found that an nvidia gpu would have better choice if you wanted to run a distro with old mesa packages. If you're so old and your time is oh so important, maybe you should learn to measure twice and cut once, instead of blaming your tools.

dash2 5y ago
The GP just offered his experience on why he went back to Windows. Reacting with hostility seems like a way to trap yourself in a world where you never hear of problems with desktop Linux. You will then be constantly puzzled why Linux is not more successful.
- sudopluto 5y ago
  the poster made a snarky comment, i got annoyed, made a snarky comment back. i don't care about evangelizing linux or converting people. as for losing users like him/her, for every 4/5ish of them there are 1/2 helpful people who aren't so self important
handrous 5y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting which distros I tried on the machine out of that post (it was then-current versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, for the record). [EDIT] If you read quickly, you probably just missed that I related three instances of Linux problems across three of the four x86 machines I've run Linux on at home in the last ~decade, since it stopped being my primary OS for most purposes. Only one's a hardware problem, but the other two are failures at doing extremely basic things like installing its own boot loader or not rendering itself unbootable on a system upgrade. One of those is running Debian, that's true, but I wouldn't try to use that on a machine with a very modern video card, you're right that that'd be a recipe for trouble. The only one that wasn't a bigger pain in my ass than it was worth was a trash-tier Chromebox I installed Void on. That was basically fine. It's consistently good on Raspberry Pis, too, since that hardware has a lot of eyes on it and is very stable over time. Sorry I snapped above, no excuse even when insult is perceived, I've modified it to take that out.