Im two days into using pop, and ive crashed more times that i can count, is it time to switch?

Hello everyone! I’ve just swapped over my main gaming PC / daily driver PC to Linux full-time! I’m loving it so far, aside from some minor annoyances, those being the following:

  • The DE of GNOME is very choppy at times, artifacting/flickering of Steam and Discord when they are layered on top of each other, for example.
  • Quite a few hard crashes on certain games that I think are due to a driver timeout. I’m not entirely sure, but I’m familiar with the error on Windows, and the steps to reproduce are the same.
  • GNOME as a DE looks pretty bad in my opinion. I don’t like its icons or much else for that matter.
  • When moving Chromium apps around on the desktop, something like Steam/Spotify or even Electron apps such as Discord has been very choppy. It makes Windows look like a work of art at times (and that’s saying something).

Now, I’m not sure if there is something wrong with my instance, as this is a fresh install with only minimal packages. On a side note, I hate how GNOME handles multiple windows of apps. For example, if I’m in a game and I alt+tab out, GNOME reads it as two separate Steam windows, one for the client and one for the game, making it hard for me to select the specific “Steam” window I need to get back into my game.

My main concern, however, is that for the most part, the gaming side of my machine has been rather solid. Single-player games have met, exceeded, or are only a few FPS lower on average than Windows, and for the tradeoff of a few FPS, I’m very happy with my transition to Linux. I also worry that due to my familiarity with Pop!_OS (I used it for 2 years in university), I worry that the move to an Arch system will simply be too much for me, and thus, I’ll end up just installing Windows again. I’m not really scared of using the terminal, as that is part of my job, but I am scared of messing up something in terms of config and having to deal with that.

I want a distro to be stable, reliable, relatively new, and to behave nicely within the DE. So far, Pop!_OS has only ticked one of those boxes, and I’ve only used it for two days.

I’m under no illusion that EndeavourOS is a big step up from Pop!_OS in terms of lots of things, but quite frankly, I’m annoyed at the experience so far. It’s not fluid at all, it doesn’t look nice, I’ve crashed on seemingly nothing quite a few times, and EndeavourOS seems like the perfect upgrade.

Curious to hear your guys’ thoughts on this. Is it something that you would recommend? Have any of you tried or switched from Pop!_OS before coming to EndeavourOS?

its probably your hardware and driver. Nvidia? I use Pop OS at work and had zero crashes for months, with Intel card.

It boils down to several things.

  • DE: the other alternative is KDE desktop if you dont like Gnome. Yes there are other DE and WM, but Gnome and KDE are the two big ones to try for sure. These can be used on Arch or on Ubuntu or Debian based, or others.

  • Distro: not sure you would get less crashes, it really boils down to driver support very often. Nvidia proprietary pain. Maybe on Arch there is a newer driver available? check it out, ideally list your hardware unless I missed it. Arch will require more maintenance considering updating your system, more frequent updates to stay on bleeding edge, but no need to do major upgrades every year. Ubuntu/Mint less frequent updates, or chances to break during updates, maybe more easy to begin with.

  • If you want to learn and also are enthusiastic about learning something about using the power of your terminal in addition to all the other stuff, go for it! Endeavour OS is awesome ! :wink:

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Hey thanks for getting back to me! My hardware is a rtx 4090 and a ryzen 7 7800X3D, i game on a 4K 240hz oled, and the driver popos has is a little behind the latest beta nvidia release that has wayland compatibility.

Would you say that the issues im having such as the sloppy DE are down to the driver then? Surely it cant be that simple? I have a pretty minimal setup as ive only switched 2 days ago, but one thing i did forget to mention is that there has been 2 instances where my monitor wasnt detected on bootup, IE just scanning for a signal and then going into sleep. I can’t seem to see many instances of my issues online either :confused:

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From my own experience over the years using different distris, all graphical glitches mostly boiled down to Nvidia graphics. It made me distro hop aimlessly for a long time :blush:

I never had an RTX though, and switched to AMD in the meantime. Also nvidia did not work well with wayland in the past, now maybe better, but you can also login using x11 to see if glitches persist.

I mostly game on Steam Deck so I wont be much help, but seems you have a very nice hardware setup. If you look for solutions this forum is great. Once you install EOS, you can post logs and better infos so people can help. Else its a bit difficult guesswork for troubleshooting. Its a great place to learn here.

Using the newer drivers might help.

You may want to bookmark this one

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I used pop for over a year with no problems. The actual reason why I left it is that they started using some enterprise policies in firefox, (Managed by Your Orginization). Maybe it was trivial on my part but after I chatted with one of the devs it was not hard to switch. Kinda glad I did too;)

You do have somewhat cutting edge hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a driver issue. I don’t know which driver versions Pop does provide. So maybe just try EOS if it provides more recent driver versions.

But in the end it’s most likely not PopOS at fault itself.

After waking up this morning it looks like i use X11 anyway, so that rules out the wayland issues that i suspected. So i guess this is just boiled down to the nvidia drivers being a little wonky on my machine, sad :frowning:

Are you on AMD? Or do you use a Nvidia GPU?

nvidia. RTX something or other. 3070 I think. Im on my phone so I cant look atm.

Do you have onlynvidia graphics? Do you have nouveau driver? Whats it like with that one? Oh. I re read. You are on amd cpu​:roll_eyes: First thing I would do is set gpu to low settings. Also try all resolution settings, and try running in windowed mode. Horizon crashes 10 sec into game if Im not in windowed mode. I also run on a 4 k lg oled tv by the way. I only run it at 60 hz though. I would also try changing that also. At least see what your options are.

I only have a Nvidia GPU as of right now. It uses PopOS!'s inhouse driver (which i think is offical?) Ive since re-installed the games that were giving me trouble, and they seem to work no problem (just my luck haha), but i do have the flatpack instance of Steam installed so im not sure if that has something to do with things, as i havent granted it any file permissions. I’ve also noticed that the steam client grinds to a halt when im downloading, and in turn lags most of my DE, terminal windows or file exploerer windws for example become very choppy.

steam does a thing that brings a computer to its knees even with the fastest processor: it caches shaders. Compiling said shaders takes hours even with top end CPUs and has limited benefits, and is enabled by default (at least on linux). Disable shaders caching (just google/ddg this) and see if things go back to normal.

Yep, disabled that, I ended up reinstallig the game that caused me the most headaches with driver crashes (TF2) and that seems to have fixed it, even boots directly into the game in fullscreen so not too bad really. I think last night i was just a little tired with dealing with it all after coming home from work.

I’m a little unsure why you would go to the Endeavour forum when needing help with PopOS, but Pop historically had been a very stable, great gaming distro even. They definitely have a way with Nvidia that most everyone else could take notes from.

I surely don’t know enough to help you with it though. They have a busy telegram, and forum themselves though, you should try them there. You don’t take your broken Ford to a Honda specialist.

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Last I checked pop os was woefully out of data as they await releasing cosmic desktop. You want to be on as current a kernel as possible with the latest Nvidia drivers when on newer hardware, at least until about a year after the hardware is released.

Quite right, and on retrospect I think it was due to it being late at night and simply trying to go to any places I can think of for some help with troubleshooting my woes.

I do eventually plan to migrate to endeavourOS so that it’s not just on my old laptop. But yes you’re right, this wasn’t the best place to bring this up and for that I apologise.