It’ll boot right into a fully functional Gnome desktop and hardly anything else. The only extra software this installs are yelp, gnome-shell-extension-prefs and network-manager-gnome. Uninstall them with sudo apt purge and sudo apt autoremove --purge if you don’t need them. sudo apt install cups if you need printing and remove your wifi device from /etc/network/devices to let network-manager-gnome handle wifi if you use it.
When installing Linux, you first have to partition your hard drive.
You can create a seperate partition for your /home folder in addition to the one you create for the rest of the system.
Then when you install a different distro, you can tell the installer to use your /home partition without changing or formatting it. After installation, you will have the new Linux system and the /home folder from your old one. That way, all user settings and flatpak settings will be the same as before reinstalling.
But if you’re a new Linux user, I don’t know how helpful this is. It’s easier to just copy everything in /home to an external drive, then copy it back after you reinstalled, for the same effect.
If your laptop periodically freezes, switching distros won’t fix it.
Identifying the underlying issue (which is most likely a hardware defect) would be a better use of your time.
Your first step would be to try and reproduce the issue. See under what circumstances it happens. See if it happens from a live USB or only from your installed system (If it does, this eliminates the SSD as most probable culprit). Do a RAM test. Then ask for help with further trouble-shooting.
Also, with open source projects, I actually want to help the developer improve their project, whereas with Windows I simply do not care and won’t donate a second of my time to a large corporation for free.
either the fedora, or the flathub build of firefox didnt come with some video codec, OpenH264 i think. switching to the other build fixed it (imo more a licensing issue with the codec than a flatpak problem)
Just in case anyone in this thread also has problems with video playback on flathub Firefox, I just solved that by installing the ffmpeg-full flatpak.
No idea why a dependency that is needed to play video without jitter isn’t installed automatically.