Since you want a just works deal, I’d go with a ublue based immutable distro, my favorite is Bazzite. You can pick between KDE and Gnome, and change between them cleanly at any point. User apps auto update in the background, your system also updates while it’s running and you only need to reboot to apply. If anything ever goes wrong, you have painless rollbacks. All that with up-to-date fedora packages and kernel.
I’ve been running it on my deck for a while now and it’s never let me down so far, really pleasant experience. It generally keeps out of your way and takes care of the chores while still allowing you to mess around if you want.
I second bazzite. Been running it on my gaming laptop for a few months now and loving it. My main desktop is running Garuda Linux, which I also absolutely love but I was weary of a rolling release arch based distro on my laptop which isn’t on and running 24/7 - tried manjaro on my laptop previously and it was broken more often than not. (although I am learning that is likely more a manjaro problem than an “arch-based” problem, it gave me a reason to try bazzite)
Ubuntu uses LTS with five year support, which is why they like to keep a lot of software versions back. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu I think. PPA is something you can add to Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Linux distributions to have newer or specific software repositories as extra on your system. Here’s a guide on PPA : itsfoss.com/ppa-guide/
Honestly, I tried Plasma on my friend’s 2-in-1 laptop and it’s pretty great with gestures and touch. I haven’t tried gnome but I can definitely recommend plasma.
Nobara (wayland/gnome) + NVIDIA 2080ti, screen and projector dual setup = never add any issues. I’m a noob, came to linux 6 months ago. I’m really curious about why so many people are having problems with Wayland and NVIDIA but my system basically worked out of the box. I guess I was lucky?
Ahh, itsfoss.com. they had some article on “being a supercharged Joplin user” or some nonsense and suggestion 3 or 4 was “Create a notebook”… Really being a power user when you’re utilizing the most basic functionality the app was created for…
I thought about doing that but updating nixos confuses me. Does nixos-rebuild switch pull new packages? To my understanding there is a file that saves all currently installed versions of packages and switch only adds new things but wouldn’t update packages.
Like, if I want to update Google Chrome. Doing switch wouldn’t change anything if the config hasn’t changed, right?
I believe that’s correct – if nothing has changed from your last generation, then the new generation will be identical. But if something has changed, it will do a bunch of duplicating and remapping symlinks in the Nix store to ensure that everything plays nicely together and that you can rollback to a previous generation if needed.
So if you do a rebuild switch regularly, you will end up with gigs worth of old “copies” of things that aren’t being referenced in your current generation.
That’s what nix-collect-garbage handles – once you know your current generation is working well, you collect the garbage and recover that space, at the expense of not being able to roll back.
That’s why I think building a core system with NixOS and then having user software come from Flatpak is a nice combo for simple workstation that won’t update and bork itself, leaving my grandpa without a laptop until I can come take a look.
Edit: To clarify, nixos-rebuild-switch won’t update your Flatpaks at all – just the Flatpak service
That makes a lot of sense. I can setup their computer with nixos and stuff that needs to be updated regularly (like a web browser) can be flatpak which should be more stable too.
Then flatpak update would get them updated without rebuilding the whole OS.
My grandparents have been rocking Linux Mint for a few years. I have managed Chrome through Flatpak since I discovered that was possible on Mint. I’ve been flirting with the idea of having NixOS instead so I don’t have to remember what I’ve configured in the past. I’m not 100% sure now though :-P
EndeavourOS is an arch-based distro that “just works”. I put it on a new machine recently, and the installer manages to let you pick a desktop environment, and still manages to be user friendly.
If it really has rebooted, it could be some graphics driver issue causing it to freeze up. I had stuff like that on Nvidia graphics back in the day. Linux will reboot itself after a while if it freezes.
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