Linux always seems to be unstable for me

[AverageNinja]

Hey guys,
So in the past few months I've tried to get Linux up and running on my pc, as a dual boot with Windows 7. I've tried Ubuntu, Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon and Xubuntu. Though every time I'd try it, something would be wrong. Ubuntu would be quite slow, and it wouldn't open apps such as Steam (huge bugger) every now and then. When I got the NVidia drivers using the additional drivers section, it went bad and I couldn't boot into ubuntu anymore.

Mint 15 cinnamon was even worse, it wouldn't let me start any application or it would crash.

Now, Xubuntu. I installed it, selected NVidia's drivers as default and now I kind of have the same problem as with Ubuntu, except it still lets me boot. It won't let me access steam, when I use the Ubuntu Software app thing it will go to payment options and then freeze. I installed all the available updates (with some problems, it kept saying the updating app encountered an unexpected error).

Now, am I doing something wrong? I'm a Linux noob, that's for sure, but I can't seem to understand why it keeps going wrong ;p

Any help would be much obliged

Edit:
Thought I share with you guys that I fixed the problems with the software center in Xubuntu.
I did this by typing these codes in the Terminal (in this particular order, one at a time and letting each finish):

sudo apt-get purge software-center
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install software-center
sudo dpkg-reconfigure software-center --force

I think people with similar problems might find it useful

 

[Snortan]

Glad you solved it!
If some software fails to start, like steam you said, open the terminal and start the software from there. Usually if it fails to start it will throw some error/s in the terminal and you can have some idea of why it fails at least.

 

[alpenwasser]

I've been using Linux as my exclusive daily O/S since about 2007 or so (so while I'm not the
uber-hacker, I'm not an utter noob anymore), and I recently had massive problems getting the
proprietary Nvidia drivers to work (well, I failed TBH).

My plan was to do BOINC on my GTX Titan (hell, that's what I bought it for, after all), for which
I need the proprietary drivers (CUDA), but no matter what distro I tried, it mercilessly failed me.
I even tried FreeBSD, no dice either.

After spending about two weeks trying various things I eventually surrendered and threw Win 7
onto the machine. While it's not exactly optimal from a performance POV (at least from what
I've read in various BOINC forum threads Win 7 is a tad inefficient), it's been working
pretty OK so far. Plus, in Windows I can actually overclock my Titan, which is not
supported in Linux (and f*ck you for that btw. Nvidia, that's just an effin' prick move!:cussing.


I installed Arch Linux into a Virtualbox, so while underneath I'm needing to run Win for
the time being, I can still get my Linuxi goodness for most interactions with my PC.

But yeah, there's something seriously screwy going on with the whole X server/Nvidia
thing at the moment. I couldn't really pinpoint the errors' sources either, I got everything
from "missing display" to segfaults in my error logs, and no way to determine which
error was going to be thrown when and why.

 

[AverageNinja]

Well, it kind of crashed now. Completely :lol:
I installed Steam, it wouldn't open, not even manually using the Terminal. So I decided to reboot and now it boots into a black screen, can't do anything at al :/
Well, Windows it is

 

[equk]

I'm currently using Archlinux and don't have any desktop performance problems.
I did get lazy and tried ubuntu back in 2007 but soon dropped it.

How are the nvidia drivers on linux? I'm thinking of changing from AMD to nvidia at the moment partly due to linux driver support.

The AMD drivers seem ok but the gaming/3d performance seems really poor compared to windows 7

 

[alpenwasser]

I'm currently using Archlinux and don't have any desktop performance problems.
I did get lazy and tried ubuntu back in 2007 but soon dropped it.

How are the nvidia drivers on linux? I'm thinking of changing from AMD to nvidia at the moment partly due to linux driver support.

The AMD drivers seem ok but the gaming/3d performance seems really poor compared to windows 7

I've been using Arch for almost three years now and in general I've been
very happy with it. I've had one case of serious breakage during that time,
requiring system reinstall (well, maybe I could have fixed it, but it was a lot
easier to just reinstall), other than that it has been rock solid.

Until I tried to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers recently. As said above
that did not go well at all.

In general, when they work, the proprietary Nvidia drivers seem to be pretty
decent (last time I checked they seemed to be better than AMD's drivers,
which is one of the reasons I usually went with NV GPUs in my machines).

I can't say for sure if there really is something broken in the NV drivers at
the moment, but I do get the impression that there really is something wrong,
either in the drivers or somewhere in the X server
.
I tried to get them to work with two different graphics cards (my Titan and
a GT610 I had laying around) in two different machines (HELIOS and my
dad's new office PC), on clean installs of several different distros. The Nouveau
drivers worked fine in both Ubuntu and Debian, but when I tried to switch
to the proprietary drivers (because Nouveau does not do CUDA) it all went
FUBAR. In both cases the underlying system still seemed to be intact because
I could switch back to Nouveau successfully.


Anyway, in short: While my recent personal experiences with the NV drivers
have been atrocious, in general I'd say they seem to be decent (albeit castrated
when it comes to overclocking and such), both from my past experiences
and what I've read around the web.

 

[Zoot]

@Averageninja,

Get rid of that software centre and just learn to use apt/aptitude over the command line instead.

Although this is coming from a long time Debian user who's anti a lot of the features/interfaces in Ubuntu.

How are the nvidia drivers on linux? I'm thinking of changing from AMD to nvidia at the moment partly due to linux driver support.

The AMD drivers seem ok but the gaming/3d performance seems really poor compared to windows 7

Nvidia's linux drivers have always been quite good (the propriety ones that is). I get pretty much the same performance in Linux (Debian) that I do in Windows with my GTX 560 & GTX 780. AMD's drivers are a bit of hit and miss, although I'm not sure what they're like now, the last time I used a Radeon with Linux was with a HD 4870.

AMD have pledged to improve their Linux drivers to address SteamOS though, so you could probably tough it out for a while.

 

[equk]

Nvidia's linux drivers have always been quite good (the propriety ones that is). I get pretty much the same performance in Linux (Debian) that I do in Windows with my GTX 560 & GTX 780.

I might get nvidia next then

I always remember their drivers being better but the last time I had a nvidia card on linux was when I had a 8800GTX (think I was using gentoo back then).

With my current GPU (HD5770) I get FPS drops in DOTA2 on low settings in linux in windows I have most settings on high and get over 120fps stable

Recently I've also been having weird graphical bugs with newer catalyst drivers I'm thinking of putting on the opensource radeon drivers.