(solved) I can't get my linux system to run properly

Leugi@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 66 points –

I chose to use opensuse tw kde based on some vm tests. The installation was easy but for some reason the video playback on youtube is terrible. It stutters. First thing I did after install was to use opi to install codecs. Then I used Yast to get the Nvidia repo. Lastly, I used the software manager to install the video g06 driver.

To be honest I am happy using Windows 10 but I wanted to try Linux again because of the privacy and security, but there always seems to be something whenever I try to use linux. Should I keep using Windows or try a different distro?

My specs:

1080ti, ryzen 2600, msi b450 tomahawk.

Update: It was the secure boot setting. Nvidia drivers don't work with it on I guess. Thanks for all the other information though, more to look into.

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Is your os installed in a vm? No gpu acceleration?

That would be the most important question.

(I usually don't advertise for using Linux in a VM on Windows. There are use-cases for that. But it combines the downsides of Windows with the limitations of your VM software and issues on Linux (for example the proprietary NVidia drivers and whatever they do to pass through parts of the hardware, or weird stuff VirtualBox does). And it can make it slow(er) to unusable in some cases. None of that has anything to do with Linux, but people try it that way and blame issues on Linux, when it's really the VM software's fault. (Or you ticked the wrong config checkbox.)

A better way to do it would be trying a live image on an USB stick, testing performance and then looking for performance issues within your whole virtualization stack if you absolutely have to use Linux within a VM. This is certainly possible. I usually dual-boot. Or do it the other way around, Windows inside a VM on a Linux host. But I don't really use Windows, so I'm not a good example.)

For OP and other people with this issue, make sure you set media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to true in about:config in firefox. Unless you do that, hardware video acceleration often wont be used.

I've always been curious why this isn't enabled by default on Firefox on Linux, do you know why that's the case?

It brakes some things. I tried to enable it on my main desktop, but some site were not working properly, I don't remember exactly what was the problem, but for me, with a decent desktop CPU, everything was better without it. On my low end laptop it helped a lot with intel graphics. It depends on your hardware, and they bet on the safe side.

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TIL

I didn't have it set to true but I also never noticed any problem

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This may be a stupid question but is your video cable plugged into the gpu or into the motherboard?

Great question! I fuck that up every time.

My brother and a friend built his computer and couldn't figure this out. He called me a couple days later to vent some frustration and I said exactly the same thing.

"I know this is a stupid question, but is your Dport plugged into the mobo or the dedicated graphics card?"

"..."

🤦‍♂️

If this is a VM, video playback stutters do not surprise me one bit. There's many layers between the video and the image you see on screen here and they're not optimised for viewing fidelity. This is likely not due to Linux but because you're running this inside a with an emulated GPU. GUIs in VMs usually suck.

Optional codecs won't help for Youtube since they serve royalty-free codecs such as VP9 or AV1 most of the time rather than patent-encoumbered codecs such as H.264 and free codecs are always installed.
That would also not fix stutters, only videos not playing back at all (because there'd be no decoder that could).

If this is a VM, installing the Nvidia driver also won't do anything because the machine has no access to your host's GPU. Not that the nvidia driver would change anything about videos since no sane browser supports their proprietary crap driver, so it's software decoding either way.

You should try this on real hardware. You technically don't even need to install as most GUI distros have a graphical installer with Firefox etc. pre-installed that you can use to test this.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, I'd recommend you to try !pop_os@lemmy.world.

I’ve seen other comments suggest possibly trying a different distro, if that is the case I’d highly recommend Pop!_OS. They have an Nvidia specific ISO that works brilliantly, I’ve not had any issues with it.

Is it only on YouTube? Have you tried another browser or watching a video locally?

my experiece is that with nvidia you can't just choose which distro you want to use, you need to try them out and find the one that works. for me mint cinnamon worked great out of the box, i use the xanmod kernel on it because of load balancing. i'm still very much a noob but i have almost completely ditched windows, only need it for excel and word. also pop os gets praise for playing nicely with nvidia. not sure if running on vm can cripple something in the system, have you tried booting from a live usb?

I have nvidia 1060 and popos is working likea charm. Was thinking what distro to choose, but have no reason to look any further

Well, kinda. openSUSE is directly supported by nVidia, they have a repo that nVidia hosts for SUSE openSUSE, leap amd tumbleweed. zero issues on my OpenSUSE machines, so their issue might be some other config / codec issue. packman repo is suggeated over OPI repos

If it's only on YouTube then it could be a non-chrome browser issue and/or youtube being messed up from the anti ad-blocker stuff. YouTube has been very glitchy over the past month and even so for the past couple of weeks.

No, it was the secure boot setting. Almost everything worked well enough with it off. However, not well enough for me not to go back to windows. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years.

I have had weird issues with Tumbleweed too. Never any issues with Arch based distros. I suggest trying EndeavourOS or Garuda Linux. Love both

Or just do a pure arch install by just running archinstall in the original ISO from their website and following their wiki.

I recently installed Linux Mint on my laptop and all video play on Firefox stutters. I'm using chrome temporarily since that works fine until I fix it. Idk if it's the same issue but just throwing it out there.

what are you using as a hypervisor? if it is virtualbox you will struggle to get smooth video playback, its gpu support is very poor. vmware is much better. yes yes it is proprietary but so is virtualbox with extensions which is the only way to make it kinda usable lol

OP is running on bare metal. They used the VM for testing and have now moved on from that

It is? I didn't understood that, he said was using the KDE based distro in VM tests.

based on some VM tests

Personally, this makes it seem like they have already done tests in a VM. OP would need to clarify for us though.

Yeah, the way it is phrased is not clear, I can see how you understood that too

Not sure about the opi method but I installed an opensuse tw recently with same nvidia/ryzen config and everything works just fine.

Enabled nvidia and packman essentials in yast and replaced the system packages. That's option 3 here.

Do you have VAAPI installed and configured properly for hardware acceleration? Does video playback outside YouTube, e.g. with YouTube-dl and MPV, work?

What's the browser you're using ? and also please do:

glxinfo|egrep -i "^direct"

You're looking for a line that says "direct rendering"; specifically whether or not it says "yes". This will help pinpoint if you're actually using your GPU or some onboard chipset instead.

With that being said, even assuming you use the latter, stuttering video playback in the browser is weird; if using firefox, out of curiosity: try to disable or enable hardware rendering (options > advanced > general), and try again. Switch it back to what it was when your test is done.

glxinfo|egrep -i "^direct"

Does that come with base SUSE? They might need to install it, but it's in the default repo for Arch so I assume it's in the base repo for yast as well.

Well this thread sure scared me off tryin linux.

Maybe I wouldn't have had any problems if I tried a more stable distro like Debian. I guess it all depends on what you want to use your PC for and if you like to tinker.

I would recommend Zorin OS, but honestly, anything goes, as long as you can get it running properly. No harm in trying another distro if the current doesn't function well.

I have installed zorin on another pc and it worked okay, but I wanted to try kde for the customization as well. I will probably try fedora kionite next and if that doesn't work i don't know.

Try Ubuntu first, then go to more advanced distros if needed

Please, don't recommend Ubuntu. It actively gets in your way, even as a new user. Something like https://distrochooser.de/ could help OP figure out what distro works best for them.

I get that people don't like snaps, but how is Ubuntu "actively" getting in anyone's way?

With snaps and their weird approach to software management in general. I don't have any idea which mainstream distro with KDE I could recommend since Mint doesn't offer an official spin and Fedora doesn't have the same LTS release cycle as Ubuntu.

So I'm kind of at a loss here, as there don't seem to be sensible beginner distros anymore.

Codecs

That's U.S. patent law actively getting in your way, not the distros.

I assume this means "Ubuntu is known to distribute codecs that don't work well" but since you gave me practically nothing that's purely an assumption

I was recommended opensuse first lol. Good thing I found the solution.