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.
@LouisIngenthron Sucks you've had so much trouble. I haven't ran into issues like that for years/decades (which is not to say your issues are bs or invalid). I wonder what the hiccups are from.
@idropyou Yeah, this was pretty much what I ran into the last time I made a serious foray into Linux (about ten years ago). Although, I am glad to say, I had to do a *lot* less console work this time around to get the basics done.
My guess about the hitch is that I've got a custom-built PC (which isn't too crazy; Intel/Nvidia) but I've also got 5 monitors (2 of which are 4K; 2 of which are portrait orientation). Windows handles that fine, but it's not exactly standard.