Well, first, I’m sorry that you’re finding this level of frustration. Honestly, I feel your pain. I’ll try to help with some perspective.
For newbies: there are no “elite masters of the Linux universe”. Anyone holding themselves out as such is, well, neither elite nor a master of anything. OTOH, my career is operating systems, and I’ve been using Linux since 2001, previously SunOS/Solaris and Digital UNIX and before that, VM/ESA. So, you think I’d know something. And I do. And, actually, I don’t.
The thing is, no one knows everything, and the “elite” are those who understand to some extent what they don’t know. I’ve had to dig into insanely ugly stuff (yesterday was Google Cloud Platform permission settings for hardware security module-backed encryption keys to provision /tmp securely - sounds impressive, no?), but at the end of the day I learned a few things - about exactly what I was doing. Almost certainly more on that tiny little piece of things than anyone else here, but so what?
Other than a few exceptional polymaths (I’ve worked with some, sure) we’ve learned what we’ve learned, and if we have expertise it’s just a feeling that we’ve been lucky when someone comes to us with a question that we can actually answer. Yes, there is stuff that is more-or-less “commonly known”, but you would be surprised how small a fraction that is of what most of us carry around in our heads.
I think your question was “I have a particular and specific issue”, framed inside a couple of assumptions. I am not able to help with the hardware/graphics stuff, but I can comment on the framework and the previous reply base on my own experience, for what it’s worth:
- I’ve have had to give up on a few similar kinds of projects - not because I wouldn’t eventually figure it out, but because I got far enough in to realize that mastering something wasn’t going to be worth the cost in terms of my time (and happiness!).
- It sounds like you’ve tried some other well-known distros and thought that CL, being “Intel’s Linux Distribution”, might offer better support for your Intel hardware configuration. From what I have seen so far here, this might be true for kernel/CPU integration - but my impression is that the graphics side of the GPU business is much more the Wild West. Hopefully, if this is inaccurate someone will correct me, and I’ll be happy to be apprised of the truth there.
- I’ll tell you that the reason I don’t have experience in this area is because I personally don’t see (or use) Linux as a workstation OS. The entire graphics card drivers support thing is really a mess. The economics of the markets have always worked against open-source in this particular segment. Microsoft and Apple create strong incentives to push GPU and driver stacks to support their own platforms, and those commercial relationships are lucrative for the vendors; the size of that market makes it less interesting to open APIs and hardware interfaces especially given the intensity of competition at that level.
- Conversely (I’ll really display my bias here), the very idea of “Microsoft Windows Server” has always personally struck me as ludicrous.
- To reiterate, I know of no one running Linux as a desktop OS who hasn’t endured pain with their graphics card - eventually. You may prevail - but I think you see the writing on the wall, so to speak. I really don’t know of a font of knowledge on this topic, but I do have to agree that in spite of a lot of questions in this forum, there is an argument to be made that this is not a strong claim for CL.
I use Clear Linux to host containers and KVM guests for my “home lab” - Freeswitch, Elastic Stack, Nextcloud, are the big ones, along with a Red Hat VM as my general development environment. But I use macOS as the thing I interact with full-time (yeah, never, ever have to deal with graphics drivers), along with X11 server (free with the OS) for things like Emacs and GUI monitoring tools and the like. And Windows is much better than it used to be.
Clear Linux strikes me as lighter weight than RHEL (CentOS is what I’ve mostly worked with, but things have Changed there, and anyone can now run RHEL for free for up to 16 instances), though the Debian and Debian-based distros are not that much heavier and extremely popular. I really would think you’d find more answers from the Ubuntu community about your issue.
I will also say that I have not yet figured out how to set up a dev environment on CL to port the (drivers!) for a hardware RNG that worked great on CentOS, this is going to be something that will only get worked when that pain outweighs the cost of digging into it. But as I implied at the beginning of this post, if someone isn’t paying me to do it, solving this one will have to measurably increase my net happiness. It seems like it could be a bit more straightforward, to be truthful.
Does any of this help? I’ve had my own frustrations; we all have different perspective on things and tolerate certain types of roadblocks differently. I hope sharing what I’ve experienced and what I think I’ve figured out might provide some assistance in working out your next steps… if there is something that I can answer (other than your specific configuration problem), let me know.
