OS reinstall: options?
Having used Windows for all my life I realized there's absolutely no reason for me to stay on Windows anymore. All my work is on Google Drive, Discord and Google Play Music both now have functional Linux apps, Minecraft runs fine under Linux, and for a simple desktop PC that's all I care about.
Linux can look better, is much more customization, package management is simple, it's faster, and of course open source.
I made the mistake of nuking my Windows drive and installing Ubuntu 16.04. I'm struggling to see how this can be called a stable LTS release. Unity crashes every few minutes, there's graphical glitches all the time due to no driver for my R9 280 (thanks AMD for supporting the 260 but not 280), customization options on Unity are almost non-existent, and it is seemingly unable to drive a monitor at 4k, cutting out every few minutes entirely. It often forgets my secondary monitor exists requiring a reboot. There's missing features that really should be included - ability for a different wallpaper on each monitor, ability to change your lock screen wallpaper, etc. Firefox is unstable also and likes to crash with only a couple of tabs of reddit open.
I don't know if my experience of Ubuntu has put me off Linux but I can't see myself using it in the future anymore given how awful this experience, and others, have been. For something that is supposedly stable it's borderline unusable.
I'm looking at options now. My motherboard has a digital entitlement for Windows 10 Pro so it's not hard to go back to that but I wanted to get away from Windows to start - to run Linux natively since I find myself needing a Linux command line (VirtualBox was used often) more than a Windows one. If AMD outright refuse, which it seems, to provide working graphics drivers for Linux then I think it's going to have to be Windows again unless anyone else has any idea? I've explored the potential of a Hackintosh which actually seems tempting, however I have to admit I have no experience with OSX and simple tasks such as locking the screen seem impossible.
Absolutely ideal would be Ubuntu with a less shit desktop environment, Compiz actually working, graphics drivers that work, running Windows in VirtualBox in Seamless mode. Right now VirtualBox won't even switch to Seamless mode due to graphics drivers. It's frustrating how I'm forced to use Windows for relatively common hardware to work.
Linux can look better, is much more customization, package management is simple, it's faster, and of course open source.
I made the mistake of nuking my Windows drive and installing Ubuntu 16.04. I'm struggling to see how this can be called a stable LTS release. Unity crashes every few minutes, there's graphical glitches all the time due to no driver for my R9 280 (thanks AMD for supporting the 260 but not 280), customization options on Unity are almost non-existent, and it is seemingly unable to drive a monitor at 4k, cutting out every few minutes entirely. It often forgets my secondary monitor exists requiring a reboot. There's missing features that really should be included - ability for a different wallpaper on each monitor, ability to change your lock screen wallpaper, etc. Firefox is unstable also and likes to crash with only a couple of tabs of reddit open.
I don't know if my experience of Ubuntu has put me off Linux but I can't see myself using it in the future anymore given how awful this experience, and others, have been. For something that is supposedly stable it's borderline unusable.
I'm looking at options now. My motherboard has a digital entitlement for Windows 10 Pro so it's not hard to go back to that but I wanted to get away from Windows to start - to run Linux natively since I find myself needing a Linux command line (VirtualBox was used often) more than a Windows one. If AMD outright refuse, which it seems, to provide working graphics drivers for Linux then I think it's going to have to be Windows again unless anyone else has any idea? I've explored the potential of a Hackintosh which actually seems tempting, however I have to admit I have no experience with OSX and simple tasks such as locking the screen seem impossible.
Absolutely ideal would be Ubuntu with a less shit desktop environment, Compiz actually working, graphics drivers that work, running Windows in VirtualBox in Seamless mode. Right now VirtualBox won't even switch to Seamless mode due to graphics drivers. It's frustrating how I'm forced to use Windows for relatively common hardware to work.
Comments
Personally, I'd just stick with Windows 10 and enable LXSS so you can have a bash environment available.
However, if you're keen to give Linux another shot, I'd suggest gnome for your desktop environment. You can install it in your existing installation or use the pre-built distro: https://ubuntugnome.org/
I'm not too sure about 16.04 on the desktop yet... I've seen some issues with it and obviously you've had some issues with it. 14.04 is definitely stable and not too old. Still plenty of support for it and you can give 16.04 some more time to mature.