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.
Same as you, in IT forever, …I switched, and I’m never going back. It’s fast, and it’s brought the joy back for me. Nvidia needs to do better, but that was the only difficulty I had.
Sounds like your workflow is very much not operating system portable. If you are interested in Linux get a laptop and install linux mint.
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.
For RDP, i use Remmina, no idea if it will do what you want for your weird monitor layout, but it is a well featured RDP client.
I would say that your experience is unusual, even with nvidia. Ive always used nvidia, and its generally been a significantly smoother experience.
I tried Remmina and it wasn’t working either. I couldn’t even get it to connect using the same settings as RDP free.
Did you try just a basic connection? Or is your target box using Network Level Authentication? (I’ve heard most Linux clients don’t play well with this)
I’ve never had an issue with Remmina. Did you verify you had a working connection between your device and the server? (Silly question but its good to start at the basics)
I’ve used Remmina for years on Linux when administrating Windows Machines. I don’t think I’ve ever had a single problem with it. Love that program.
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.
For rdp take a look at remmina
Yep, Remmina is awesome. I wish I had it at work.
IT for 20 years
Can’t use a live CD
Uh huh
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.
To be fair, that’s not much of a thing with windows
Have you met Windows admins? 😛
In fairness, I’ve seen some Linux admins become completely hopeless as soon as any GUI appears.
I can believe it. Because OP is trying to make Linux work like Windows. Note how for remote access, they jump straight to RDP and don’t even bother with SSH. Which Windows 10/11 has a native client for.
I mean, the rdp is from Linux to Windows for desktop application access, so it’s the right tool for that job.
No. They’re installing an RDP server (that is, you connect to the Linux box via RDP, not the other way around), not a client like Remmina.
I need to be able to RDP with multiple screens to my work laptop running Windows 10.
They aren’t.
Ohhh…they’re fucking around with FreeRDP? Why?! Even for someone who comes from Windows, how did they not just go ‘fuck this, there’s got to be a better way’ and spend 5 more minutes Googling to find Remmina?
Below they commented they found Remmina, but it wasn’t working either.
Stop pretending like IT professionals don’t understand how to search their problems.
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
It’s also frankly not something they should have to do either.
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.
Thank you for sharing your story!
For your kind of use case and issues, I’d recommend finding someone local with a good amount of Linux experience and do a couple of pair sessions. I find this transports a lot more (especially ‘soft’) knowledge on concepts and how to do things efficiently. Also, it helps to share frustrations ;-)
Linux does not try to be another Windows. While it’s fairly possible to treat it kinda as such especially in newer times, it won’t feel efficient or convenient that way, in my experience.
Can you elaborate on what pair sessions are?
It’s being 2 people in front of the screen instead of one.
It’s something related to the main advice I can give to someone wanting to try Linux = do not be alone and ask for help a lot.
Just use Arch.
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
Or following scripts and copy-pasting the first result from Google.
Yeah, in Windows. Windows and Arch are two completely different beasts.
I get the sentiment (Arch has provided the least friction for me when I needed something niche/specific) but putting OP on Arch is still pushing them into the deep end IMO. If OP is open to trying Arch however, I’d throw out a recommendation for EndeavourOS which is just a pre-made Arch setup.
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.
With arch based flavored desktop installers (arco endeavour manjaro …) you get some GBs of stuff that is probably going to ask 1-2GB of upgrades, and then you end up dumping half the crap they came with.
On one you start from bottom up, the rest you start from top towards the ?bottom?.
You only learn when you start with the least needed to boot a system, have net access, and a pkg.mngr.
Some people learn that way, but most don’t. It’s usually better to start with a working environment and work on one thing at a time until you learn enough that you’re ready to dig down another layer. Start with little mysteries and learn the structure of things and how to troubleshoot before jumping in the deep end. Having a system that’s hopelessly broken and you don’t know why or how to fix it is just likely to turn people away from Linux entirely. People don’t win extra points for suffering needlessly.
There is an advantage in arch (and all pacman based distros) that the pkg mgr is friendly and vocal.
Say you want your system to run with vtwm you try and you get many dependencies installed, then try starting it. If it doesn’t start it will tell you what is missing still.
Usually with X is either xorg-xinit or a display manager (avoid) and adding exec vtwm into your ~/.xinitrc gets you going.
The problem there is that what people come to learn about the Windows OS becomes ingrained into them as “how to use a computer”.
Almost all of that goes out the fucking window when you jump to a non-Windows OS, but especially Arch.
EndeavourOS would be good
There’s also the easy archinstall script
What a fantastically shit idea for a beginner.
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!
The support for larger numbers of monitors and mixed resolutions and odd layouts in KDE vastly improved in the ubuntu 23.04 release. I wouldn’t install anything other than the latest LTS release for a server ( and generally a desktop ), but KDE was so much better that it was worth running something newer with the short term aupport on my desktops.
We aren’t too far off the next LTS that will include that work anyway I guess. I’m probably going to be making the move to debian rather than trying that one out though.
Also, dont download packages as .rpm /.deb files, that almost never works. They could have just used their phone with usb-tethering to get Ethernet. I suppose.
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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“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 installed Linux multiple times and have multiple monitors and I don’t know what RDP even is.
It’s Remote Desktop Protocol. A Microsoft protocol for taking controle of a remote (Windows) computer.
I’ve certainly had issues with RDP in Windows.
There are two different RDP implementations in Linux: freerdp (which is the underlying library for remmina as well) and rdesktop. Each has its own set of bugs. No idea if rdesktop offers better support for what you want to do—I use it, but I only have single-monitor setups at both ends. (It has an annoying bug that can make it require multiple attempts to establish a connection, though.)
News Flash!
“Linux is still a pain in the ass, even for experienced IT professionals.” More at 11…
I’ve run Linux for a great many things over the years. Running 2 AWS LightSail instances for my own use. Running dozens of Ubuntu Server instances at work. Shit just works.
But Linux is a hard fail for a daily driver. Maybe not for you, but for most of us it sucks.
I’ve tried and tried and tried, for 20+ years. Of course I can make it work, but it’s a pain in the ass. I got work to do on my daily driver, and fucking around as well. I need a desktop that just works. With everything.
Weird, I’m using Linux as my daily driver and have A LOT less bullshit to handle.
It does take a bit of setup, but I’m a lot more productive and haven’t really any Windows “exclusive” tools, except for some Windows only protocols for which I still need to boot up Windows now and again.
The problem is people try using Linux like Windows. It’s like using a hammer to drill holes, obviously you’re going to have a bad experience if you use the tools the wrong way.
It’s more like Linux is a pain in the ass, especially for IT professionals.
How many people are trying to use 4 monitors with weird configurations and admin software? Most people open up their laptop lid and run some programs, that’s about it.
Point in case, much like OP I do personally use 2 monitors + Nvidia GPU + LLM and it worked out of the box on Arch Linux, but Wayland crashes my setup so I need to be aware of that.
I swear, every time one of these posts/comments pops up, the chances root issues are caused by Nvidia hardware is insanely high.
From what I’ve read, I must be the luckiest person in the world. I’ve been on Linux for 10+ years and only ever had Nvidia hardware. I’ve never had any issues aside from the occasional Vsync annoyance.
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.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
What’s a decent GPU that behaves nicely with Linux?
I have two AMD Radeon cards for Linux that I’m pretty happy with that replaced a couple of Nvidia cards. They are an RX6800 and an RX6700XT. They were both ex mining cards that I bought when the miners were dumping their ethereum rigs, so they were pretty cheap.
If I had to buy a new card to fill that gap, I’d probably get a 7800XT, but if you don’t game on them you could get a much lower end model like an RX7600.
I’d be interested in one that could do gaming and compute stuff. Thank you for the specific recs, I’ll check those out!
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.
Most AMD GPUs are good
Are they actually good? Or are they decent?
Because AMD on Windows has a lot of flaws compared to Nvidia. Nvidia can run anything with tons of cutting-edge features and everything is documented. AMD on the other hand, doesn’t come close to that kind of support.
AMD does work of course, just not always how it should.
Is it actually good on Linux out of the box? Or does it still require finicking every now and then?
I had issues with my Nvidia gpu and Wayland Desktops.
Especially with the new Steam Big Picture mode both Linux and Windows being laggy.
AMD on the other hand had one issue in Windows where my friend told me to reinstall the drivers because the second Monitor couldnt be detected at random times when rebooting.
On Linux on the other Hand… zero issues. Literally. I am satisfied how good it works compared to trashy Nvidia having constant issues. Even on Windows I had issues with Nvidia because you need to sign in and download the drivers. Sometimes there is an update and you never know, and wonder why your game doesnt work. Well, because you need the newest update suddenly. Not with AMD on Windows. And on Linux. You dont even need to install amything. Mostly preinstalled Mesa drivers but I am not that certain.
The brand new devices will require a newer kernel but other than that they work out of the box
Most of AMD is good. Slightly older is going to be best
Perhaps we could suggest OP other things to try before we suggest they should rip out their GPU. I don’t know, basic problem-solving approach, like using the Nouveau or generic Vesa driver to rule out the proprietary Nvidia driver, or a different screen-sharing method to rule out RDP. Which is a proprietary Windows protocol so it may not work perfectly from Linux and with an unusual hardware configuration.
I don’t completely disagree with you. But it’s also a reality I’ve had to deal with myself as well. My personal take is I’d rather avoid the brand altogether if you care about Linux, but I also realize it’s not always possible if you care about - or need, for various reasons - things like CUDA, NVENC and RTX. In this case, OP specifically wants CUDA, and that won’t work without the proprietary driver.
Life is easier with a mediocre workstation card for video outputs, and the Nvidia card doing just CUDA.
i’ve been using a stick for 20 years of combat. i’ve seen people use f16 fighters and flew on a plane once. now i am bummed out i can’t operate an f16.
I have seen few comparisons as deranged as this one
i have seems english.
Thanks for the heads up I guess…?
