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.
I’ve been using Linux for 10y and never distro-hopped to solve a problem. Overall I’ve only used 3 distros as daily drivers. IMO you should look into making things work with a distro you like instead of looking for the perfect off the shelf distro.
I second EndeavourOS. Nothing beats the arch wiki and arch user repository, and combining that with the easy and sane install of EndeavourOS makes it an almost perfect distro.
To build off of the above poster, some things sometimes take some tweaking to make work. When you distro hop you’re really just hopping to a different set of defaults and maybe a few relevant library differences. Learning what to do and how to do it can be daunting but when you get it its brilliant and then you have some idea what you need to do the next time you encounter a similar issue
Just gotta learn to fix stuff yourself. Highly unlikely for any distro to be perfect out of the box.
OP, my request/suggestion would be the following:
In order for us to better help you consider the following:
- Inform us on your hardware specs. You could even rely on the software found on linux-hardware.org for a (so-called) probe.
- 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 time
When 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.
- Or rely on a distro that sets it up for you.
When I install Linux for friends and family the only distro I use anymore is Fedora. I have used just about every major distro, and Fedora is the only one that has “just worked” on every computer I have tried it on.
Love them, or hate them, Red Hat is by far the single biggest company in the Linux community, and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux is renowned for being stable, performant, and very well supported. Fedora is where most of the updates that make their way into RHEL are initially available, so with Fedora you get a cutting edge distro with the backing and resources of a massive corporation that employs many of the top Linux-desktop contributors.
If you want a distro that “just works” I strongly recommend you give Fedora a try.
You can also try their immutable desktops if you’re not planning on tinkering with anything like the kernel and just want to install your apps and have them work.
p.s. if you ever run into performance or weird flickering screen issues with Fedora, switch to x11 on the login screen
Linux requires putting in some work to get everything working, just how it is right now.
Pick a distro you like, and stick with solving the issues!
