Any Linux users? Is my bad experience of ubuntu just bad luck?

[Ken Fabian]

After a discussion with someone who uses Linux, who assured me it will do all the things I would want as well as Windows will I gave Ubuntu-studio a try. And nothing has gone right.

tl:dr - Am I just unlucky or is this the usual for Linux? Do people ever use it and find it is essentially trouble free?

The longer version - I did a dual boot setup with my Win10 which seemed to install okay only to discover no "choose OS" option would come up at startup and looked to me like I couldn't start Windows at all, just Linux - not an encouraging start. After going to a help site I found out I could boot to Windows so long as I held the 'shift' key down at startup - a fix of sorts. Annoying but it worked.

Mostly Ubuntu did do what it should, well enough that I got a spare HDD  and in preparation I tried to make copies of things like address book, email and browser settings, current documents etc only to find Ubuntu had stopped recognising any usb devices, for no reason; I know I didn't do anything to mess it up. Looking for help with that... which led to a variety of 'open Terminal and do x and y and z (incomprehensible gobbledygook)' options. Do I really need to learn all that command line stuff to use Linux? I'd been assured I wouldn't need it. (If I tried to learn that stuff would I use it often enough to remember any of it later? The plan was that I wouldn't... at least not if Linux worked like it should, without throwing up problems that only commands in a Terminal can fix.)

Should have quit then I suppose, but I can be stubborn and I persisted. I copied the files from Windows to the usb, then did the new Linux install on the swapped HDD... and it appeared to be up and running, with no more installing going on but there was no notification it was complete. There was an icon "install ubuntu studio" onscreen - was I supposed to click on that? Who knows. Not me.

Without doing so it turned out I couldn't even get it to shut down (without the hold down the power button long enough option), so I clicked the ' 'install ubuntu' option (seemed to do exactly the same installation process, all over again, but asking me if I wanted to dual boot with the first installation! No thanks. Got through to a restart and 'remove installation media' that time, like it had actually finished installing. It shut down itself... only to not start again - no bootdevice found, install an operating system. FFS. Then I redid it all over from a fresh download, to be sure. And sure enough it still wouldn't work. FFS doubled.

 

[Eise]

Seems bad luck. I have an Ubuntu Long Time Support (LTS) 24.04 on my more than 10 years old notebook (along with my Windows, which I nearly never use anymore). Besides a few quirks (probably because my old hardware), it works like a charm. None of the problems you mention.

I had a quick glance at Ubuntu Studio, and I think it is not of Canonical (producer of Ubuntu) itself. It means you do not know what they have changed compared to the original Ubuntu Desktop Version. 

So some suggestions:

• Install Ubuntu from the Canonical Website (https://ubuntu.com/desktop), or
• Use Linux Mint: based on Ubuntu, I heard only positive about it. It should be one of the most user friendly distributions
• Then add the programs you need (is pretty easy with the Software centre)

[studiot]

Just now, Ken Fabian said:

tl:dr - Am I just unlucky or is this the usual for Linux? Do people ever use it and find it is essentially trouble free?

Good morning Ken.

Sorry to hear of your woes.

I too had less than good experiences with linux in the early days so I dropped it as I did not want to learn yet another op system / language.

 

To your issue.

What version of Windows are you trying to install with ?

I wonder if the hidden boot partition introduced in W10 is causing this ?

 

 

[Ken Fabian]

Thanks @studiot Actually the Dual Boot with Windows did work okay... once I found how to bring up the OS choice screen( holding down the 'shift' key). 

Until it stopped recognising any usb drives the ubuntu OS worked okay as dual boot. Then I got a new hdd and installed just Linux on it, starting with 'erase disk and install ubuntu', so no conflicts with Win10. After three install attempts with it, with two different downloads, I just get "no bootdevice" and "install operating system". 

I suppose someone will have a fix, no doubt with incomprehensible Terminal text commands, or I could try a different distro and hope I'm lucky, but I feel like I've wasted too much time and effort already. I have switched the hdd back to the one with the dual boot drive and am back to using the Win10, not the Linux.

[joigus]

Sounds to me like software could be interacting badly with hardware. Is the latter "old"?

I've recently had problems with boot-sector related stuff because of using old BIOS-based computer instead of UEFI-based one.

Had to redo mount points and tell ubuntu to set up the partition system as EFI partition table instead of GPT. Had to tinker a bit.

Generally speaking, you have to tinker far more with Linux systems than with Windows. But in my experience solutions can always be either worked out or found out. At least you can. With Windows, you are not allowed to tinker much, are you?

With Windows, again in my experience, some problems never get solved. My first experience with Linux was Red Hat, and I was left pretty much as @studiot has described. The dependency tree of new installs got messier and messier. But after I went over to a Debian-based Linux flavour I never looked back.

[Ken Fabian]

Hi @joigus . I use a HP laptop that was upgraded to fresh install of Win10 before i bought it 'refurbished'. By the sticker on it, it originally ran Win7. 

Ubuntu ran okay as dual boot, until losing the ability to mount USB (and SD) along the way - which worked fine, until it didn't.

I wondered if I was supposed to have pre-formatted the new HDD somehow - I just assumed (always risky to assume) that the install process could cope, even do it better with a new, untouched HDD and assumed it would make the appropriate partitions (boot partition?) after I used the 'erase disk and install' option. Without an OS I don't have a ready means to format. 

Give myself a bit of time to get over the frustrations and I might try again, with a different version, but I don't enjoy the tinkering, which for me is only for problem fixing, out of necessity - the better it runs the less tinkering I would expect to face, which, ideally, won't be enough to gain lasting knowledge or skill with Linux Terminal/Konsole.

My uses are quite basic - the choice of ubuntu-studio was for the audio software (I play a bit of guitar and sing a bit - preferably not where people can hear me!) - but mostly just for browsing, emails and occasional documents and picture printing.

[CharonY]

Linux on older laptops have been a nightmare, usually related to driver issues. That being said, I never found Linux to be a good platform if you intend to only use is it as a graphical OS. The advantages are elsewhere (unless something radical has changed) and quite a bit of it is is that the command line is much more flexible than the Windows command line.

Dual booting has been a bit of a hassle, too and while I got it to work on desktops without any issues, it worked maybe on half of my laptops. Usually the issue was on the windows side and I had to re-install it.

[Ken Fabian]

Naive of me to expect the installation package to come up with a "hardware not compatible" notice if hardware was not compatible?

I know from painful past experience that Windows (Win7 I think it was) can go through the whole installation process and - only at the very end, an hour or two later - give a notice like that. Would've been helpful for it to have checked compatibility at the start, before directing me the wrong way down a one way street.

@CharonY my needs are basic and I had been given the impression those could be provided reliably with Linux. I think the working reliably without resort to Terminal text commands for fixes part is an essential requirement for me - without an ongoing need to use Terminal any attempt to learn is not going to stick. Whilst Win10 hasn't been perfect mostly it has worked reliably - an occasional boot into safe mode when icons on start bar go missing has been the worst of it.

My post is more rant than call for help, but thanks for all the offers of help.  I probably will try Linux again, but not any time soon. I need to get over it first.

Edited Wednesday at 01:01 AM by Ken Fabian

[Externet]

Hi.

Running Ubuntu 24.04 now since 5.10 non-stop when I excommunicated Windows forever.  I will never go back to Windows even being unskilled in Linux to tweak or wring whatever expert users get out of it. 

It is an operating system for nerds but works so well that a non-nerd can enjoy its reliability.

A couple of decades ago a 40 MB hard drive in an old bones compfuser is all I needed.  Inflated now.  Still have the drives, as when I upgrade, I archive the drive with the spider webs and put a new or used one with the new version.  But never dare to have a dual-boot nor anything Windows less than 10 metres away.

If you want Windows in the same machine; use a swappable pluggable drive that will have only one drive powered up at a time.

My suggestion is reverse all and go back to your Windows only.  Want Ubuntu?  ---> install it in another blank hard drive.  When happy with its performance and getting used to a loooong learning curve, think again about doing the dual boot.

 

[Sensei]

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Linux on older laptops have been a nightmare, usually related to driver issues.

This is a problem regardless of the operating system. When Win10 first came out, in which MS changed the driver API, rendering older drivers (and therefore hardware) useless. People ended up with useless equipment, whose manufacturers abandoned and/or went bankrupt. Therefore, people were very reluctant to update their systems. I still know companies/people who use Win7 only because their hardware is not supported by Win10+.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

That being said, I never found Linux to be a good platform if you intend to only use is it as a graphical OS.

I mostly use it that way. But I do use Kali Linux.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

The advantages are elsewhere (unless something radical has changed) and quite a bit of it is is that the command line is much more flexible than the Windows command line.

In Windows, people are not familiar with the command line. Have you ever used the net or netsh commands? reged from the command line? Doubtful.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Dual booting has been a bit of a hassle, too and while I got it to work on desktops without any issues, it worked maybe on half of my laptops. Usually the issue was on the windows side and I had to re-install it.

I was told that you have to install Windows first and then Linux, not otherwise, because the Windows installer treats the Linux installation as an empty uninitialized disk and replaces everything. At least the Kali Linux distro.

 

17 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Do people ever use it and find it is essentially trouble free?

It depends on what you do..

Any system can cause problems.

 

 

17 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

After a discussion with someone who uses Linux, who assured me it will do all the things I would want as well as Windows will I gave Ubuntu-studio a try. And nothing has gone right.

Personally, we think Ubuntu is crap..

 

 

17 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

The longer version - I did a dual boot setup with my Win10 which seemed to install okay only to discover no "choose OS" option would come up at startup and looked to me like I couldn't start Windows at all, just Linux - not an encouraging start.

In Linux, there is such a thing as GRUB (grand unified bootloader).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB

 

 

17 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Do I really need to learn all that command line stuff to use Linux?

Obviously.

 

17 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I'd been assured I wouldn't need it.

Don't listen to the fools..

 

17 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Without doing so it turned out I couldn't even get it to shut down (without the hold down the power button long enough option), so I clicked the ' 'install ubuntu' option (seemed to do exactly the same installation process, all over again, but asking me if I wanted to dual boot with the first installation! No thanks. Got through to a restart and 'remove installation media' that time, like it had actually finished installing. It shut down itself... only to not start again - no bootdevice found, install an operating system. FFS. Then I redid it all over from a fresh download, to be sure. And sure enough it still wouldn't work. FFS doubled.

Even in Windows, the installation flash drive should be disconnected to prevent rebooting from the flash drive..

 

My experience with Ubuntu is mainly through Virtual Box. I installed it in a virtual machine (VM) on Kali Linux.

The only cool thing was that there were graphic editors and office suite (which I personally find completely unnecessary for me).

 

Download VirtualBox for Windows, download Ubuntu ISO, download Kali Live ISO, install them and play with them for a while as a virtual machine to find out if they meet your needs before you throw yourself in at the deep water..

Edited Wednesday at 01:11 AM by Sensei

[CharonY]

Just now, Sensei said:

In Windows, people are not familiar with the command line. Have you ever used the net or netsh commands? reged from the command line? Doubtful.

Well, yes I do use the command line frequently, but I didn't have to deal with networks for quite a while now. But it is mostly because I got used to it from working with SPARC systems and later linux (mostly for bioinformatic work). Many tools I use are only running from command line, but I take your point, this is not how most folks would use windows. I always tell myself that I am going to install linux onto all my old servers but then I never do and just have huge paperweights.

7 minutes ago, Sensei said:

I was told that you have to install Windows first and then Linux, not otherwise, because the Windows installer treats the Linux installation as an empty uninitialized disk and replaces everything. At least the Kali Linux distro.

Quite possibly- I honest cannot recall. There was an order to things that did not make a lot sense to me when I tried.

 

13 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

my needs are basic and I had been given the impression those could be provided reliably with Linux. I think the working reliably without resort to competency with Terminal text commands for fixes part is an essential requirement for me - without an ongoing need to use Terminal any attempt to learn is not going to stick. Whilst Win10 hasn't been perfect mostly it has worked reliably - an occasional boot into safe mode when icons on start bar go missing has been the worst of it.

If there is really just a tool that you need with it, you could either just make a clean linux install, or perhaps even try a portable version to see if it suits your need.

17 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Naive of me to expect the installation package to come up with a "hardware not compatible" notice if hardware was not compatible?

Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Always comes at a surprise whether you can actually use the hardware you got. Or try a quick fix you find on some fora which takes hours and then breaks something else. Or not.

[Sensei]

If anyone wants to use Linux on an Android phone/tablet, they should try Termux:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/

(skip the F-Droid installation)

Direct link https://f-droid.org/repo/com.termux_1020.apk

(it will take ~ 3 mins)

 

Then:

apt update

apt upgrade

pkg install x11-repo

apt install xfce (it will be a long download 1 GB+)

apt install tigervnc (or other vnc server)

 

Configure VNC:

vncserver

Enter password.

 

Enable WiFi in the phone or make a Hotspot.

Check what is an IP address:

ifconfig

 

Connect to VNC via PuTTY on Windows or vncviewer from Linux.

 

You have a graphical user interface on your smartphone Linux distro.

 

if you want an apache server then apt install apache2 php

Your phone is now the web server.

 

 

If you want to connect to your Termux VNC install VNC client app from:

https://search.f-droid.org/?q=vnc&lang=en

This is a good one:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.gaurav.avnc

Then you'll have a mouse pointer to click the Linux GUI on your Android phone

You can buy USB OTG and connect USB hub and an external keyboard and mouse.

The smartphone will only do as a screen.

 

 

 

Here is how it works (but he used a crappy VNC client - it only worked in 8 bit mode):

 

Edited Wednesday at 01:35 AM by Sensei

[Ken Fabian]

46 minutes ago, Externet said:

Running Ubuntu 24.04 now since 5.10 non-stop when I excommunicated Windows forever. 

Mine would have been a variant of that distro. I can still use it dual-boot - just unable to use usb (where I like to keep backups of email addresses, important documents, browser settings etc).

[Sensei]

6 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Mine would have been a variant of that distro. I can still use it dual-boot - just unable to use usb (where I like to keep backups of email addresses, important documents, browser settings etc).

There are different file systems. Windows obsolete FAT16, FAT32, more modern NTFS. Linux has its own EXT, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4.

Copy the data from one test flash drive to a physical drive (or use some new empty one) and try formatting it with Linux to EXT4.

 

A brand new flash drive with a capacity of >4 GB is usually formatted to exFAT file format.

Discover the file format on Windows.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

Frankly speaking - I would be very concerned to see that usb flash drive worked and suddenly stopped on the same system.. you checked if on it there is still the data you uploaded and it was not corrupted (on Windows of course).. ? Every file needs to be checked..

not just list the contents of the directory, but review the data..

Edited Wednesday at 01:59 AM by Sensei

[Ken Fabian]

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

Frankly speaking - I would be very concerned to see that usb flash drive worked and suddenly stopped on the same system.. you checked if on it there is still the data you uploaded and it was not corrupted (on Windows of course).. ? Every file needs to be checked..

not just list the contents of the directory, but review the data..

Not a usb device but every usb device... except the wireless mouse, that has a usb dongle (I just realised), so maybe just storage devices. And SD cards don't show/mount either. Haven't checked the cdr/dvd drive. I suppose if usb devices worked I might still use the dual boot version - but I would not trust it.

Haven't checked every usb file but the ones I looked at seemed fine (on sticks and external hard drives, on Windows of course - can't access them on Linux to see). I had noticed ubuntu did not like the NTFS formatted external drive - it would not allow copying of files to that drive although I could open and read the document files on it. Was not so long after that I noticed I couldn't access any usb devices.

Edited Wednesday at 04:00 AM by Ken Fabian

[Sensei]

6 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Not a usb device but every usb device... except the wireless mouse, that has a usb dongle (I just realised), so maybe just storage devices. And SD cards don't show/mount either. Haven't checked the cdr/dvd drive. I suppose if usb devices worked I might still use the dual boot version - but I would not trust it.

Haven't checked every usb file but the ones I looked at seemed fine (on sticks and external hard drives, on Windows of course - can't access them on Linux to see). I had noticed ubuntu did not like the NTFS formatted external drive - it would not allow copying of files to that drive although I could open and read the document files on it. Was not so long after that I noticed I couldn't access any usb devices.

Try

sudo dmesg -w

Then connect the USB device

to see if a new log appears.

 

or use

sudo dmesg

Then connect the USB device
and repeat it at the other terminal. Compare.

 

Do you have a /var/log/syslog file? If yes, then:

cat /var/log/syslog

or

tail /var/log/syslog

or

sudo tail /var/log/syslog

in the terminal.

 

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+system+logs

 

 

There is also journalctl

journalctl -h to show help

or

man journalctl

 

[Sensei]

21 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I had noticed ubuntu did not like the NTFS formatted external drive - it would not allow copying of files to that drive although I could open and read the document files on it.

This is not an Ubuntu issue. I have the same thing on other Linux distros (although also Debian-based) (Debian-Ubuntu-Mint-Kali)

This is a feature of the NTFS file system. Depending on how the Windows is shut down or put to sleep, it switches NTFS drives into different modes. In one you have only read-only mode, and in the other you have read-write mode.

NTFS file system "driver" on Linux was created by reverse engineering, without having Microsoft's proprietary source code. The authors did not want to damage the disk structure.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+modes+sleep+linux

 

21 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Was not so long after that I noticed I couldn't access any usb devices.

You still haven't said what file system they have. If you bought them and just plugged them in, without manual format, it's doubtful they are NTFS. As long as they are bigger than 4 GB I would make a blind guess exFAT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

"exFAT has been adopted by the SD Association as the default file system for SDXC and SDUC cards larger than 32 GB."

 

Use the mount command from the terminal.. with the appropriate arguments..

 

Some tips from the web:

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

 

 

BTW, have you used:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

right after installing the operating system?

 

 

Edited Thursday at 01:19 AM by Sensei

[Ken Fabian]

@Sensei Thank you, the sudo dmesg -w command fixed it first go. 

I was reluctant to enter Terminal (named Konsole in this case) because what is being done is incomprehensible to me, but I was at the point of abandoning it completely, so nothing to lose. But I am making a copy of that instruction where I can get to it easily, just in case the problem recurs.

FWIW the usb sticks I tried were fat32 and one external drive shows as vfat (I though it was fat32?) but the other (2TB) external drive was NTFS. I will avoid the NTFS. 

I might keep going with the dual boot version and see how well it goes. (But I only gave Linux the minimum partition space, just to try it with minimum impact on Windows.) I will hold off for now on a standalone install on a different HDD; have to be a different distro, given the results with the Ubuntu-studio downloads I tried.

Edited Thursday at 04:57 AM by Ken Fabian