Honestly, I don’t know. Though, I’d reckon there would be any significant difference between distros.
stability
Depends on what you mean with stability. If you meant it like how “stable” is used in “Debian stable”, then it would be any distro with a release cycle that chooses to not continuously deliver packages; but instead chooses to freeze packages and hold off updates (besides those related to security) for the sake of offering a relatively polished experience in which the behavior of the distro is relatively predictable. Some distros that score good on this would be Debian stable and openSUSE Leap. It’s worth noting that Distrobox, Flatpak and Nix allow one to have newer packages on these systems if desired.
If, instead, you meant that the distro is less likely to break upon an update, then it’s important to note the following:
While you shouldn’t expect breakage to happen in the first place, unfortunately it’s realistic to expect it every so often (read: 0-2 times a year on non-stable distros).
If you have a lot of packages, then it’s more likely that at least one of them causes some breakage.
Technically, every update is a potential ‘breakage-moment’.
Packages that haven’t been installed through the official/native repos are more likely to cause breakage.
Relying on Distrobox, Flatpak and Nix for (at least some of) your packages should benefit the stability of your base system.
(GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper allows one to create snapshots one can easily rollback to in case of breakage. Therefore it’s worth seeking out a distro that configures this by default or set it up yourself on whichever distro you end up using (if it isn’t included by default).
So-called ‘atomic’^[1]^ distros are (generally speaking) more resistant to breakage, but (arguably) they’re less straightforward compared to traditional distros. It’s still worth considering if you’re adventurous or if your setup is relatively simple and you don’t really feel the need to tinker a lot. Don’t get me wrong; these atomic distros should be able to satiate ones customization needs, it’s just that it might not be as straightforward to accomplish this. Which, at times, might merely be blamed on lackluster documentation more than anything else.^[2]^
As for recommendations you shouldn’t look beyond unadulterated distros like (Arch^[3]^), Debian, Fedora, openSUSE (and Ubuntu^[4]^). These are (in almost all cases^[5]^) more polished than their respective derivatives.
speed
Most of the distros mentioned in this comment should perform close enough to one another that it shouldn’t matter in most cases.
If you’re still lost, then just pick Linux Mint and call it a day.
More commonly referred to as ‘immutable’. Atomic, however, is in most cases a better name.
If you’re still interested, I’d recommend Fedora Silverblue for newcomers and NixOS for those that actually know what they’re getting into.
I believe that one should be able to engage with Arch as long as they educate themselves on the excellent ArchWiki. It might not be for everyone, though. Furthermore, its installation (even with archinstall) might be too much for a complete newbie if they haven’t seen a video guide on it.
Ubuntu is interesting. It has some strange quirks due to its over-reliance on Snap. But it’s worth mentioning, if you don’t feel like tinkering.
With Linux Mint (and Pop!_OS) being the clear exception(s).
my dell runs kubuntu, but i plan to move it to arch as well (after i back up my data)
i liked it for a while and suddenly had tons of issues with snap, especially with firefox, and webusb breaking constantly on chromium (i use android flash tool a lot)
I honestly don’t understand why recent Ubuntu releases are popular. However, I enjoyed it in the early 2000s. There was another popular release a few years ago that had zero hotkeys enabled and I have never felt more disgusted by a release in my life. I can’t even remember what it’s called, it traumatized me hahaha.
you have faulty hardware, whether it’s RAM or cooling or storage related, no way to tell but crashes like that don’t happen nowadays.
edit: I recall having some issues with a 7490 a few years back, it needed some special module for the fan or the sensors, not sure. don’t know if that’s your issue, but look it up.
I think you mistyped the model, if it’s a 7390 it should be the same hardware as the 7490 I’ve mentioned. the module I needed was i8k, check if your model needs it.
The RAM is fine (Memtest ran 4 times without faults), and cooling seems to work well enough. Storage is ok and I used two different SSDs through this whole process and saw the same problems on both.
I tried the previous known-good kernel options on the Manjaro install and it seems to be OK now. According to the Arch Wiki the Intel 8th Gen mobile CPUs and especially iGPUs are known to be a little problematic on Linux so the kernel options to disable some power saving options are basically non-optional. It’s weird though that it works now and didn’t on the Tumbleweed reinstall.
I have an issue involving similar hardware, can you share the mandatory stuff for 8th gen iGPUs? read through the intel_graphics article but found no direct mention.
I linked the specific wiki page section in an edit to the main post. It’s in the troubleshooting part at the end.
I didn’t try the i8k module but looking at a couple things it looks like the issue was more apparent around Linux kernel 4.15 from a few years ago. I also don’t have any specific complaints with temperature control. The fans only ramp up in the 70-80C range which seems to be quite reasonable.
I’ve always experienced weird annoying bugs, and I much prefer the UX and minimalism of gnome. It’s better for productivity. I don’t just use my desktop for gaming.
This is my complaint as well. KDE certainly has advantages and neat design ideas, but I always come across some major bugs that make my device unusable.
Definitely not saying GNOME doesn’t have bugs as well though.
Well, Nobara is a gaming-oriented distribution and as the changelog outlines, does Plasma currently offer technological benefits. As is the case with everything, this isn’t set in stone and might change at some point but right now the main target audience for paid development work for Gnome are corporate users where for Plasma it’s being Desktop Mode for Steam Deck.
But why? Not being the default doesn’t mean that Gnome isn’t available. As both are Fedora derivatives, both should have good Gnome support inherited from Fedora anyway. As the changelog says, only a handful of Gnome Shell extensions will no longer be provided in the Nobara repository but instaling them manually from extensions.gnome.org is a breeze.
They still have a gnome ISO, but you’re going to throw it out because it isnt the “official” version. That sounds like a hissy fit.
The non-official KDE previous version was fine, since the point of the distro is the backend optimizations for gaming and editing. Its not what DE leads point since you can add whatever Fedora has in the repos, which is pretty much everything.
While I don’t know the term hissy fit, switching distributions just because the default of a user-changeable setting is different is definitively a bit over the top.
Speaking on Bazzite, KDE is our default to match SteamOS, but we put more effort into the GNOME release if anything due to us trying to maintain feature parity with Valve’s KDE, including being able to right click and add to steam, use the desktop nested, enable VRR, add custom themes based on the ones Valve shipped, and add the steam deck wallpapers ported to GNOME.
That being said, GE’s points about GNOME are very real, and they have a lot of catching to do in regards to gaming. KDE has DRM Leasing, VRR and HDR right now.
As I understand it, that’s not even needed because the current DE choice is being preserved at an upgrade. The only thing that needs manual tweaking is reinstalling the extensions from the Gnome website which isn’t really an issue at all.
Firefox Translations is an add-on that helps translate websites in Firefox without using the cloud. Additionally, Firefox version 118 introduces a built-in translation feature, allowing you to perform translations locally within your browser, prioritizing your privacy and security. This feature enables you to effortlessly surf the web in your preferred language. For in-depth guidance on utilizing this feature, explore our Firefox built-in fullpage translation guide.
I think it's just because some things have country-specific formats. For example, if you want to prefill credit card details, you have to figure out how the credit card fields are labelled.
I’m hoping their translation software ends up supporting Chinese/Japanese. Also come to Android please! Hopefully on Android in and out of reader mode.
It pains me to say this, but voidlinux, though I’m still not in the stage of “this one is not for me”, it has potential and hopefully I can sort all the issues I’ve encountered so far.
I’ve tried multiple distros, and also used artix for a while so I’m used to not using systemd but man void is really another thing, this isn’t the first time I’ve used it, I tried it a year ago and gave up, recently I decided that I’m up for the challenge and began using it again, here’s what has happened so far:
Well right now I’m dealing with the pc freezing when quitting the user session, for some reason I need to exit i3 before logging out, otherwise the system freezes.
Also I wasn’t able to get a clean boot screen even though I had the typical kernel parameters quiet, loglevel, etc, it even prints info on the login prompt where I should be putting my username, though I managed to mitigate this a lot by passing a kernel parameter that tells it to use another tty for the boot messages.
file-roller is broken, I can’t compress some directories to 7zip, the weird thing is that it only happens to some directories and not all.
Though the very good news is that they fix issues very fast, puddletag was broken and they fixed it in like 2 hours after I reported the issue.
Edit: It is not just file-roller that is broken, it is all of 7zip on void, I can’t compress with xarchiver either
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