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.
You tried. That is far more than many people. Good for you!
I have had similar experiences, but from Linux to other OSes. The mental models for using them are really different, and those don’t get enough discussion.
Weird, sucks you had a rough time. I’m mostly perplexed about the network card issue, and the monitors. I haven’t had any trouble like that in more than a decade. I’ve honestly actually had more trouble with a new install of windows failing to detect hardware than Linux recently.
It was a strange one. I had never seen anything like it before. It could still see the hardware, but listed it as unclaimed. Nothing I could do would get it to start working. When I finally decided to reinstall, I figured I’d try a different distro.
IT for 20 years
Can’t use a live CD
Uh huh
Guess I should have said love USB, but some old habits die hard. Either way having to go in and disable ACPI just to get it to boot is not something most people would be comfortable with.
love USB
That sounds funky, I like it!
Damn autocorrect
FUD
I mean… You’re expecting your system which likely shipped with support for Windows to just work with Linux. Linux support by vendors is often non-existent and requires oss developers to play catch up.
Have you met Windows admins? 😛
In fairness, I’ve seen some Linux admins become completely hopeless as soon as any GUI appears.
To be fair, that’s not much of a thing with windows
I have 1 machine that will not boot most debian distros, and if they do it will not boot after install. It is a BIOS bug. non debian distros acknoledge the bug and move on.
Hey buddy, no stress, I feel ya! Switching OSes is like trying a new flavor of ice cream – it can be an adventure at times. But, let me share some wisdom from my Linux journey. When we focus on the small stuff, we unintentionally give power to the big guys. Linux is all about flexibility and community support. Sure, it might not be perfect right away, but that’s part of the fun! Keep pushing through, you’ll soon see why so many of us love this open-source world. Let’s rock this Linux life together
Not that you did anything wrong in this process but I think you stacked the deck against yourself by requiring an open-source OS work so seamlessly with a proprietary one.
I swear, every time one of these posts/comments pops up, the chances root issues are caused by Nvidia hardware is insanely high.
So, I’m coming to learn that about Nvidia. I figured with the 3080 being a few years old now things would be alright. I was wrong.
What’s a decent GPU that behaves nicely with Linux?
In my experience most things AMD fare pretty well. My 6750 XT is working great. My older RX 580 and Radeon HD 6870 were also pretty solid.
Might have Luck with Leap or Tumbleweed because nVidia hosts their own openSUSE driver repos. add nVidia repo to SUSE, GUI select the driver and click OK
but who would have thought something that sounds as simple as wanting to RDP across 4 monitors would be so damn difficult.
The ubuntu unstability surprised me (not that I would recommend it anyways), but this didn’t. Isn’t RDP a proprietary protocol of Microsoft? Probably not too many use it in the Linux world
It was but my understanding is that the patent on RDP lapsed. It’s why Oracle VirtualBox uses RDP as their virtual desktop protocol.
For rdp take a look at remmina
Yep, Remmina is awesome. I wish I had it at work.
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.
Isn’t most of the AI training work in the world done on Linux using Nvidia GPUs (in the cloud)? I guess it’s a different use case…
And it also sucks in the cloud. Depending on the scenario there might not be many alternatives, though. CUDA is pretty much the standard in machine learning.
ROCm has hints of adoption, but it’s only just getting started.
Having spent the weekend trying to get it working on WSL2 for lulz, I can honestly say it’s just not there yet. Most of the issue is that AMD cards aren’t exposed properly through WSL, but it was worth a shot.
Sure. But by the amount of adoption CUDA has, and the amount of GPUs / AI accelerators NVidia pumps out and into the datacenters of the world… AMD better hurry (and deliver an excellent product/ecosystem) or they won’t be part of the AI boom.
thats guiless.
x11 and wayland support (what matters for DESKTOP use) are complete garbage
Popos has out-of-the-box nvidia support that works great
Works with CUDA and RDPing on a 2x2 monitor grid?
System76 (who makes popos) has their own CUDA repo for their NVIDIA implementation, but I don’t think it’s installed by default. So there’s a tweaked version to work on popos, but I’ve never tried it. From some cursory googling, it doesn’t seem to be too complicated to set up.
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.
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Microsoft is free to publish minimum requirements for Windows (TPM 2.0 for Windows 11, for instance), but you don’t have that in Linux. You are free to throw it at any hardware you want, and it will mostly work out of the box.
But that depends on companies and volunteers working on the hardware support. Intel and AMD provide good support for their hardware. NVidia does not. You should act accordingly, either buying supported hardware or sticking to software that supports your hardware (Windows or Mac).
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Having a nVidia GPU does not stop you from running Linux, it just makes it more painful depending on what you’re trying to achieve due to nVidia’s poor Linux support.
I merely suggest that one should use the appropriate tool for the job or endure the consequences. Blaming the tools achieves nothing.
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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.
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?
I run 6 on 2 gpus and it’s Just Werked TM for a few years now. On a Core2 Duo machine even.
This is stupid. While i am all up advocating for foss, trying to argue peoples usecases into non existence is not helping anyone.
My grandparents ran into problems with Linux because they wanted to connect their TV (second monitor) and use team viewer with it (to control it from their phone.
Some of my super non it friends use lots of monitors because who the hell knows why they need this for office stuff.
Its really bothering me that a part of “Linux die hards” always blames missing features or complicated processes on the user.
“Oh yeah, you want a working system? HERES WHY YOU SHOULDT WANT THAT AND WHY IT IS ACTUALLY A FEATURE THAT ITS NOT WORKING. Noob”
I think we need to accept that Linux is not for anyone.
Sure I can install the aur version of team speak from console, but my grandparents can’t. They can’t even read English documentation.
For people living it Linux is fine, and better than other systems, you can change your desktop envirment, fit it to your needs, not be constantly spied on, change everything you want (if you understand it enough to compile from source) nice.
But if you want anything more than “one monitor, mail, office (with bad grammar and spell check)” but are not comfortable with reading through pages and pages of documentation or spending an amount of time tinkering with your PC others spend with their kids, Linux just won’t work!
And we need to be honest to people with that or we set wrong expectations.
I am not dumb and not a total noob, but I broke my system recently because I wanted to change my username and didn’t read through all the little details why Linux can’t do this like any other os. On any payed os this is one klick, on Linux your documents break (because of groups), your desktop items break, your taskbar breaks (and I still haven’t got the taskbar panel working today, because no matter what the home folder in plasma settings is, panel always interprets ~/ as the old homefolder path, which doesn’t exist anymore and for the love of god I can’t find where panel stores this info), loots of symlinks break and im thinking about just installing from scratch because it is easier than to fix everything.
Linux just isn’t a payed os and you can’t expect everything from it you can from windows or osx. There are (lot of) usecases win and osx easily accomplish, and Linux doesn’t if your not a nerd or have lots of time.
Just saying those usecases are “not needed”. While people clearly need them is only helping Microsoft and apple.
For me, the built up revulsion I feel towards windows and the sheer determination I feel to never use it again, means I would rearrange my monitors, or, you know, try more than two distros.
Linux isn’t for everyone, I acknowledge that fact. It requires a user that wants to troubleshoot, wants to figure out why something doesn’t work and make it work. If the headache isn’t fun, you’re not the right kind of masochistic self flagellator that Linux attracts, and that’s okay.
If you ever do decide to give it another whirl, try Linux Mint, MX Linux, or my personal flavor of choice, EndeavourOS. And put your monitors in a boring straight line like the rest of us before you coming crawling back.
This reply is meant to be partially humorous but entirely honest.
Ok, but here’s the thing: OP is 20 years into a tech career and troubleshooted extensively. Even identified potential solutions that they deemed too much work for the payoff (such as compiling a software release for fedora themselves because the beta branch’s buildbot broke the fedora build).
You need to put a shit ton more emphasis on your self flagellation point, and a lot less on the love of troubleshooting. We’re beyond troubleshooting and well into the “I have more fun trying to repair an engine while it’s running than actually driving a car”
I get it, some people are more interested in making the best swiss army knife than actually using it to cut things. Just please don’t conflate it with a lack troubleshooting ability.
Most of the issues on Linux faced by end users are some variety of “if you don’t like it then code your own software dumbass”, “real programmers use butterflies”, and “you’re using it wrong, but there’s no documentation anywhere of that being the case, only tribal knowledge. OUTSIDER! OUTSIDER! BURN THE OUTSIDER!”
Especially the last one. For fucks sake, if I wanted piss poor documentation put together by overstreched amatuers, written entirely in the context of expecting everyone else to have their same deep domain knowledge, and unorganizedly spread over every far flung corner of space then I’d just move back to my old job in tech support (🥁 badum-tsh)
Yeah, you make valid points. Maybe Linux isn’t for people who need windows capabilities for work. I enjoy the tinkering, but I don’t make my money on my Linux machine. I work in construction, I’m only a nerd at home.
So, my machine does everything I need it to in Linux. Some things require me to memorize fairly lengthy commands and perform more complicated functions than I’d ever have to in windows. Sometimes I learn things the hard way, sometimes my shit breaks. I try to learn something while fixing it, and if it doesn’t work I nuke and pave and keep good backups.
The satisfaction I get from becoming competent must give me some serious dopamine because I’ve stuck with it, and I’ve come to perform most day to day actions in the CLI.
I certainly don’t think OP has a lack of ability to learn, but, I also don’t think Linux is a good fit for his use case. Yet.
I absolutely cringe to make this comparison, but reading your comment, it’s the first image that came to my pop-culture poisoned mind, so here we go:
In Rick and Morty, when Evil Morty has finally achieved his long-sought and hard-won goal of escaping Rick and the Central Finite Curve, that sigh of relief he gives before stepping into the new untamed universe.
That’s how I feel about making the move to Linux, personally. That sense of overwhelming relief to be free of something you hate so much is a reward. That’s why I put in the effort to manage Linux. Being free of Microsoft’s (and Apple and Google) shit is something I want so much that I’ll not only put in the time, I’ll even enjoy it somewhat.
Okay so genuine question from someone who’s used various distros for all sorts of things over the years, just never as a daily driver. What sorts of things have caused your revulsion towards Windows? Aside from Microsoft’s bullcrap like Alexa or MS Store ads which can all be disabled, I’ve personally never had enough of a problem with Windows that justified the effort required to move away from it. And I would consider myself a power user who loves to customize things.
Again, I just want to genuinely understand what sorts of problems people have that cause them to hate using Windows that much, even if they’re just subjective things.
The sinking sensation of realizing that my entire operating system is spyware that phones home tens or hundreds of times each time I sit down to use it. Massive bloat and poor optimization neutering my otherwise just fine hardware. My operating system deciding it will no longer support my beater legacy hardware.
Really the shift happened when I became privacy conscious, and once I saw that all of my gaming and day to day tasks worked just fine on Linux I decided to go all in.
Also the fact Microsoft just doesn’t seem to respect that the user is the admin, not them. You can still claw back control, but over the years, the amount of clawing you have to do has increased.
To put it simply, I hate when my OS does something I explicitly told it not to do, or undoes something I deliberately set. And as the years have gone by, the amount of times that happens with Windows has skyrocketed.
I’m sure there was a way to disable it but whenever I would hit print screen a one drive ad would pop up on my laptop. It also kept bugging me to update to windows 11, where the options were “yes” and “ask me again in 3 days”. I had no intentions of upgrading to win11.
I also don’t like many of the changes made in win11, while I haven’t used it much I’ve touched it and it bothered me. Examples include the lack of vertical task bar, the weird context menu, the rounded edges, and the start menu. Plus my desktop PC doesn’t even support win11 for some reason so this seemed like a good time to make the switch.
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.
“something as simple as RDP” haha hahaha you’re a funny one!
My recent experience with helping a friend with an nvidia card to work on Linux is that I never want to touch an nvidia card again.
Also, please tell me which average user makes its own windows installation. When I was young in the 90s I was paid to install windows in my village.
But yes, much progress is still needed to smooth the installation. The problem is that the hardware is often a fault though, through their shitty drivers.
I’ve certainly had issues with RDP in Windows.
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!
While you make many valid points, I think it’s not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.
I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.
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Don’t give up too easily friend. I’ve been slowly moving some of my hone systems away from Window’s, and much like you, I’ve spent close to 20 years as a Windows admin. I have the advantage of using Linux on my always ancient laptops over the years and it is my personal opinion that Debian is the way to go.
Give LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) a go, it is very familiar to navigate coming from Windows and isn’t going to have constant updates breaking stuff (looking at you Arch).
First thing after installing run apt-get update, then add the Nvidia drivers (add the source to your sources and install, if you need help, post back and we’ve got you!) and reboot.
fedora’s Nvidia support is leagues ahead of anything debian based in my experience. that’s not to mention debians insanely out-dated package repo.
