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.
Nvidia 3080 ti
Unfortunately, you’ve found out that Nvidia’s drivers are pretty terrible across the board. The later ones are better, but even the cutting edge ones have problems. You couldn’t have reasonably known about this and it’s time Ubuntu and other distros start warning Nvidia owners about this crap.
No idea what’s causing the conflict between Nvidia and your network card. Sounds rather nasty. As a tip in case you ever run into this again: use your phone to tether your WiFi over USB, saves you a lot of rebooting.
Of course if anyone has any recommendation on getting my RDP working, I’m all ears on that too.
I use Remmina as an RDP client, that seems to work just fine for RDP’ing into Windows across multiple monitors. You may want to go into the connection settings and make sure to tweak them to your liking, though, because by default the quality settings will make it look like you’re connecting over dialup. You can hide the sidebar as well, check the settings for shortcuts to hide it and get it back.
RDP is and will probably always remain a proprietary Microsoft standard, so don’t expect full feature parity. It’s honestly a miracle that it works already. Unfortunately, Linux and the open source community don’t really have an answer to RDP. There’s VNC, which is terribly insecure (though you can wrap it in an SSH tunnel, that’s kind of what RDP does anyway) and a few X11-based protocols, but nothing that comes close to RDP. With X11 forwarding or Waypipe you can run applications on remote Linux servers, and that should even work for Linux tools on Windows 11 with WSL2, but remote Windows applications will have to run over RDP.
The best RDP replacements I’ve come across for Linux clients connecting to Windows hosts are game streaming services; Steam Link/Nvidia Gamestream/etc. work very well. Parsec works really well on just about any platform without any gaming software installed, though it does need a server on the remote side. Great for personal applications, not great for connecting to your employer’s servers.
Nvidia 3080 ti
There’s an app on Flatpacks called Thincast remote desktop client. I don’t htink it’s using the free rdp libraries, so it’s possible that the bugs you encountered with the other open source apps (that all use the same underlying libs), might not be there.
Jfc all this sub is is people bitching and moaning about windows. Do you all really have NOTHING else to talk about?
An entire sub dedicated to Linux and all you can do is talk about windows.
Dont fall for bait guys
Sorry to hear it didn’t work out for you :(
To squeeze in a metaphor : Linux is just a hobby project that kind of got out of hand in a previously Microsoft dominated world.
In the BSD world (FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenBSD etc.) things are actually much worse. I’ve read that on computer conferences BSD developers come with an Apple Macbook (Running MacOS) to show BSD software development, which is running on servers. And I like BSD, but on the desktop it is still lacking. One only has to look at the amount of packages which no longer have a maintainer. I am not complaining about it, as I realize that maintaining open source software can be a burden.
If you want to play some more with Linux on the desktop, you can use WSL on Microsoft Windows, or use VirtualBox. Wanting to make Linux your daily driver may require more patience, or throwing money at it to speed up code development.
Linux is honestly fine. The problem is bias and tendencies coming from Windows.
Virtualbox is going to have less than great performance and WSL is very limited and not a full system. Best option is to grab a used laptop and get hacking.
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.
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.
What sorts of things have caused your revulsion towards Windows? Aside from […]
You mean aside from the shitty way Microsoft treats their users? 😆 Yeah ok, if we leave all that aside then there’s no revulsion. I’ll use Windows without any issues, I’ve used it extensively and I use it daily for work but it feels bloated and old and Microsoft being shitty doesn’t help.
Learning Linux is not that hard and you get an OS and DE where things work just as well as Windows and also nobody’s telling you what to do, and you get choices. Which is nice, because I think I should be able to make the most out of something that’s supposed to be a generic computing device.
I have a bunch of issues(some way smaller and borderline nitpicks) with windows, but I guess there’s some big ones:
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Linux runs smoothly on older computers, even with KDE which everyone talks about as if it was heavy. Windows is a slug in comparison.
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Linux is free, truly free. Microsoft can’t beat that.
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Shit just works (unless you are on Nvidia…), don’t need to install drivers and shit like that.
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most of the software you don’t get from a random website and they all update at once, rather than having each one update itself and only itself
While my next rig is fully AMD, my current is Nvidia and shit just works with some fiddling
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For me, it was when Windows 11 didn’t even give me the luxury of moving my taskbar to the top of the screen and I had to use a third-party application to do so, which was janky as hell. It sounds very small, petty and superficial, but small things like that can immensely affect one’s experience and workflow. “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” is an applicable phrase to that.
Sure, I can just use Windows 10, and I do in fact have a Windows 10 VM in VMware (since WINE has issues with MusicBee and WACUP, and I’m trialing the Apple Music app for Windows as well), but Windows 10 will no longer be supported next year.
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 it’s the first thing 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.
For RDP, I use Remmina. Multimon only works on X though, not wayland, so make sure that’s the graphic server you’re running. Idk if it’ll work for 2x2 tho, I only have 2 monitors.
For the headaches, I use a magic pill that I’m not legally allowed to view the ingredients of and cry into my Tissues as a Service.
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.
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.
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 of AMD is good. Slightly older is going to be best
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Did you try setting them up as one big display across all four, instead of four little ones? I think that’s something you can do.
Does the multi-mon RDP thing work from a Windows client too? I’d be surprised if it did, Windows’ multi-monitor support is fairly lacking in my experience too.
I did try using the spam, same issues. I tried only using 2 of them and other combinations. Unfortunately no luck.
I use multiple monitor RDP in Windows on a daily basis. I want to keep my work and personal systems separate, but love having 4 monitors. So I just RDP into my work laptop from my desktop. It was buggy in the past, but I’ve been using this setup for a few years now and it’s been seamless in Windows 10 & 11.
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
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.
What a fantastically shit idea for a beginner.
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.
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.
All extremely valid points. Especially…
- 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.
This is the mind set I need. I was most likely so frustrated at the driver issues by this point, I probably didn’t give it the go it needed. Like I said when it came to compiling a dev branch, I just said f it. Hopefully I’ll get some time in the coming days to approach it with a fresh mindset.
Awesome to hear it. Feel free to update.
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.
I completely agree that linux is quite simple. Additionally, it allows for a lot of customization which is nice imo.
That’s a lesson I learned switching to macos for a few years. After spending that much I basically had no choice but to learn to adapt.
It did make it a lot easier to switch to Linux later on because I’ve already abandoned a workflow and a set of apps once already.
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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’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.
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)
Its sad but linux is still a second class citizen. Nvidea drivers have improved greatly over the years, but it can be still flaky especially newer ones.
Multi moniter support too, it has a history troubled with challenges. Its much much better than it used to be but sometimes there are setups and usecases which have problems. It used to be multiple monitors, just having them as a desktop, was impossible. Nowaday I can daily drive Linux and expect to have a good desktop experience across multiple monitors.
Mindyou, every windows update its a dieroll what breaks for my work surface labtop. Often my display or dock behaviour breaks or my bluetooth, or my networking. Not to excuse the bugs in linux, but to show that even MS on their own hardware have bugs like that. Pcs are hard and even MS can’t do it flawlessly.
What you describe as simple multimonitor RDP might actually be a very complex task from a technology and display standpoint.
That being said, it totally sucks having a usecase and finding out that for you have problems getting there. I agree that Linux still has major hurdles for general adoption, (although again, it is so much better than it used to be). Look at it this way: if desktop linux had the same amount of money and development time thrown at it as Windows or MacOS, we’d have a very different experience.
As for tips. I recommend to dualboot. Use MS for your usecases that are not a good experience and use Linux for the other things. Keep checking in with the multiple RDP tech/workflow to see if it works. I did the same thing for years. The only reason I used windows was my games. For other things I used Linux and learned my way around the desktop while doing that. Eventually Proton came along and I could switch entirely.
If you go back a bit further, multi monitor support was just fine. Our office in about 2002 was full of folks running dual ( 19 inch tube! ) monitors running off matrox g400’s with xinerama on redhat 6.2 ( might have been 7.0 ). I can’t recall that being much trouble at all.
There were even a bunch of good years of the proprietry nvidia drivers, the poor quality is something that I’ve only really noticed in the last three or so years.
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.
While you make many valid points, I think it’s not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles he had, if he 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.
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.
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