Okay, I'm doing it. I'm giving #Linux a fair shot for the first time in about a decade. You fediverse people convinced me.

Well, that went poorly. Just a bunch of blank screens and unresponsive flashing cursors, even after updating graphics drivers.

Oh well. Maybe I'll try again in 2034.

So, I figure, maybe it was just not the best distro. So, I try downloading a whole other one. It has its own program to download an image and write it to a USB stick. Great. I wait and that finishes and I try to boot it and... it fails disk validation.

People, this is why #Linux will never overtake Apple & Microsoft. I want to believe and I'm super tech oriented and I can't even install the damn thing.

Continued misadventures with trying and failing to install #Linux:

I re-downloaded the Fedora image and it still failed to validate before installation.

I tried the latest bleeding edge version of LinuxMint and it only shows up on one monitor (even though the desktop covers the others). Once I update the graphics driver, it stops showing up at all, and all I get after login is a black screen with a frozen mouse.

PopOS installed easily enough, but whenever I tried to adjust the display settings, I'd lose all displays and have to reboot. Also, running apt-get upgrade caused the whole OS to crash.

Anyone got any other suggestions for distros that might actually work for a dev machine with a 3080?

Final log:

I tried downloading #Fedora straight from the website and even that failed validation during installation, so I guess Fedora is just screwed atm.

Then, I tried #Ubuntu finally, which I was trying to avoid. It installed okay, but as soon as I log in, it goes straight to an "Uh oh something went wrong" crash screen.

For all the shit it takes, I haven't had any such problem with #Windows on this same hardware (at least not since the 95/98 days).

I don't know how #Linux can ever truly take off while such fundamental issues persist. But I also don't know how I can remain with Windows as they push ads and spyware into their OS.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, I guess I'll just procrastinate on this issue until I build out my next rig.