I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro.
I’m sorry I’m just venting, do you people think Ubuntu will work for me? I think I will try it next.
Linux mint I would say its the one that tends to have better support in a large amount of hardware and it was the first one that I was able to stick with
Most operating systems mostly work find something that has a release cadence you like and is close to what you want then you will have to customize it to fit your needs
Ubuntu actually worked for some people, who, for example, had trouble with PopOS! and getting highest refresh rate on multiple monitors. So yeah, if Ubuntu doesn’t work, try Zorin OS, and if that doesn’t work, try Manjaro, and if Manjaro doesn’t work, there so many more to try out!
Yes, there is always something that won’t work. This often happens with Windows (not too often, but it happens), but most often with Macs. Linux is quite buggy in the userspace area, I usually find bugs or crashes within an hour of using any linux distro. The one with the FEWER bugs is definitely Debian. But it does that by not using hacks or beta drivers or software. This creates a rock solid architecture, but some hardware won’t work (in my case, it was the sound chip for an intel J-series cpu that required a third party patch to work and recompile the kernel – while Ubuntu ships with that patch by default, but ubuntu has way more other bugs all around).
So at the end, you will have to ask yourself if you want Linux because it’s the right thing to do and use, or you just don’t want to be bothered with ideology, and just use Windows and be done with it. I’ve asked myself that question and the answer is two fold: as a daily browser laptop, that doesn’t depend on third party hardware, I just use my Macbook Air. It’s a great laptop to have around in front of the TV, or traveling. For third party hardware dependency, and video editing, I use Windows with an nvidia card. For everything else, I use Linux. I have 8-9 computers, most run Linux. I create databases with it, I do some photo editing, financials etc.
Inform us on which distros you’ve tried. If possible, for each one of them list the following:
What exactly didn’t work?
Did you try any troubleshooting?
On a more general note, you shouldn’t feel the need to switch distros even if other distros might offer more convenient solutions.
Story timeWhen I was new to Linux, I wanted to rely on the Chromium browser for cloud gaming through Nvidia GeForce NOW’s web platform. For some reason, I just wasn’t able to get this to work on Fedora. Somehow, while still being mostly a newbie, I stumbled upon Distrobox and decided to give it a go in hopes of allowing me to overcome the earlier challenge by benefiting of the ArchWiki and the AUR through an Arch distrobox. And voila; -without too much effort- it just worked. More recently, after I’ve become slightly more knowledgeable on Linux, I just rely on a flatpak to get the same work done.
Moral of the story would be that there are a lot of different ways that enable one to overcome challenges like these. And unless you feel the need to go with a system that’s (mostly) managed for you (à la uBlue)^[1]^, you will face issues every now and then. And the only way to deal with them would be to either setup^[2]^ (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper (or similar solutions) such that it automatically snapshots a working state that you might rollback to whenever something unfortunate befalls your system or to simply become ever so better equipped in troubleshooting them yourself.
But therefore demands from you to engage with the system in a specific (mostly unique) way.
Yeah, Ubuntu works well for me. Ubuntu is operated by the Canonical corporation, which some people don’t like. If you would prefer a community-run Ubuntu-like OS, Mint is just as good as Ubuntu. Fedora is also one of the best community-run distros that always just works, especially when running the Gnome desktop environment.
I will say that until last month when I upgraded to Ubuntu version 23.10 (technically Xubuntu), Ubuntu always just worked with all of my hardware. But for some reason this last upgrade broke my wake-from-suspend function. This is the first problem I have had with it in many, many years, so I might actually switch to Mint or Fedora myself. EDIT: I figured out that the problem was being caused by the power manager daemon, I worked around this problem by disabling display power management (dims the display if you don’t use it for a while) in the Xfce settings manager, “Power Manager” panel, “Display” tab, switching the “Display power management” switch off.
Linux is kinda like a 3d printer. You can end up tinkering and tuning more than printing.
2d printers are just cursed and have been since the dawn of mankind though. Go to openprinting.org/printers/ and see if your printer is in there and if it is which functionality header it is under. I’m assuming it isn’t capable of driverless if debian didn’t work and the other distro just happened to have something preinstalled. Unless debian doesn’t handle driverless printing out of the box. I’ve only used debian headless for server stuff so I’m just making assumptions.
Arch maintainers recommend against aur helpers but for quite some time I just did exactly that and got the drivers for whatever jank ass printer I had at the time that way. Most of the official ones I have encountered are rpm and I hadn’t used fedora or other rpm distros until recently, and the aur pkgbuilds would unpack the rpm and install the drivers the arch way. Incidentally, last I tried silverblue/ublue/kinoite etc can’t install the brother printer rpms via rpm-ostree so having a driverless capable printer was lucky considering it was just randomly given to me by a friend that moved away.
If you share the printer model, someone here can probably also figure out what needs to be done without you having to go through a bunch of troubleshooting too.
Linux Mint is where I always go crawling back to. I have hopped so damn much. Mint sometimes needs a newer kernel installed, but I’ll be damned if that Ubuntu base doesn’t help with printers, graphics drivers, and scanners. Getting that to work on Arch was a blast and a half, on Mint I literally just turned my network printer on and it found it. IDK, you can do anything and there is always some issue eventually.
I’m a recent Linux convert I started with Debian testing and that worked out of the box for everything except Nvidia drivers. I hopped from Debian testing over to Pop Os because Debian testing wasn’t supported for a bunch of random things I wanted to use. I stopped using pop os a couple of weeks ago because it would crash all the time and was going to jump to Ubuntu just so pretty much everything would be supported. That flash drive install was corrupted so I ended up on nobara and have loved it with no issues so far.
Give Zorin a try. It’s based on Ubuntu but even more user friendly - so much so that my elderly mother has no issues using it, she even prints and scans (a Brother MFD) and has no issues.
Install Ubuntu and be done. I’m able to print to my brother network printer with no special drivers. I installed a gnome tweaks package to do some minor tweaks in gnome, and I did rip out the Firefox snap thing to install Firefox from a package so I could use my kpxc plugin, but that’s the only major change I made. Hell, Dell (laptop) even provides firmware updates via the package manager so your bios gets updated properly. Best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had over the past 5 years and I’ve been daily driving Ubuntu since 2004.
Ubuntu in my experience works best out of the box and has the best support reference online. Ubuntu works out of the box save for the webcam where Debian doesn’t even boot on my MacBook.
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