I’m over tinkering with my OS. So I’m looking for a distro that “just works” out of the box for my laptop. Also I want to test an “easy” distro I can install for my grandpa.
I don’t care for immutability, declarative config, being fully FOSS or having the newest stuff. I don’t want snaps, or a software center that relies on them. So no Ubuntu.
What I do want (ideally out of the box):
Important:
- as few annoying visible bugs and crashes as possible (looking at you, Ubuntu)
- Wayland support
- good package selection, so no independent fringe distro
- fluid YouTube videos, streaming, pre-installed codecs
Less important:
- ideally with Gnome
- encrypting the hard drive from within the GUI installer
- nice font rendering (used to be a problem, but I guess not anymore)
- installing Steam with a button press
- pre-installed sane-airprint and sane-airscan (automatic setup of my networked printer-scanner-combo)
You get the idea. The usual stuff (low-end gaming, browsing, streaming, printing, scanning) should just work. I don’t have any hardware that poses a problem.
From what I’ve read, Mint doesn’t yet support Wayland and doesn’t ship with video codecs anymore. (Or am I wrong?)
What are the other options? Is Zorin king of the block now? Is Manjaro good now?
Thanks for any and all input.
What’s wrong with Debian?
Hmm, now that I think about it…not a whole lot. I’ve been running it stripped down to the bones for so long I just got used to it being like that, but by default it does tick all the boxes.
I may have over-thought this one.
Yeah Debian meets all those requirements except that I don’t know about sane.
I’ve gone rogue at work and formated my windows laptop with Debian which I’m also extremely comfortable in with stripped down servers. Running Wayland and using Microsoft teams and tools via the edge browser (mandated) has been absolutely pleasant. There are still initial headaches initially setting everything up and getting the drivers to work and thunderbolt docks to work but now its awsome. Best part is the 10 second shut down time when I run between meetings.
Debian ticks all of these boxes.
Stable release
Wayland or X Server
It’s Debian, so literally everything is built for it, except maybe some obscure arch packages
Has options for any DE you want
Steam can be installed via Flatpak
Only thing I’m not sure about is your air print stuff. I’m sure there is a package that a quick apt install would get, though.
Yes Debian and use Flatpak for any app you need with a recent version. You can also use a Distrobox with Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing if you need system packages that are more modern.
I dont know if Debian Testing is rolling, but Distrobox basically doesnt work with release distros if they need to system upgrade via a reboot, like Fedora. So Fedora Rawhide (dont) or Tumbleweed, Arch etc. are best.
I’ve had a pretty good experience with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with a pretty similar use case / criteria.
I’ve done my share of tinkering, and while I learned a lot, and enjoyed Gentoo, Arch, Debian, NixOS, and others (Mandrake, Ubuntu), I sometimes I just want get my work done…
With Tumbleweed, there are a few packages that you’d need to install for codecs, but that’s easily done via the CLI zypper package manager with a single command.
I’d definitely recommend checking it out - its been a solid daily driver for almost 3-years now with very few issues, and lets me focus on getting stuff done. I wonder if this is due to their QA build process (OBS)?
Anyway, good luck & have fun whatever you choose!
When I tried it a year ago, printer setup failed with a permission error until I disabled the firewall, and I had to install a community repo by a random person and manually edit a text file to get airprint and airscan working. Half the YaST modules didn’t seem to do anything or work correctly, or duplicated KDE settings. That’s what I consider to be “annoying visible bugs”.
I also find their software selection to be limited (without said random community repos), and you can only update Tumbleweed from the command line. It felt like an unfinished mod of their flagship LEAP distro.
I just switched to tumbleweed with gnome and I was shown firmware updates, package updates, and flatpak updates all from gnome software. Also there’s a whole gui in yast for searching and installing packages. I haven’t needed to print anything yet but i haven’t run into any difficulties elsewhere.
Fedora might be a good option, but it might require more setup with an Nvidea GPU. They use Wayland now, are a Gnome based distro, support full disk encryption. For me the package mangar has been fine, and they do support flatpak. It is a very large distro with backing from RedHat. So it should generally be stable.
Pop_OS! Seems to be the great distro if you just want to game and watch videos without any issues arround setting up the drivers. It has been a quite stable distro for me and it is quite similar to Ubuntu. Unfortunately this distro doesn’t have Wayland yet.
Manjaro is an Arch based distro, but it had some issues with using packages from the AUR. They do run Gnome on Wayland by default.
[Fedora] might require more setup with an Nvidia GPU
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
I only needed 3 Ctrl-Shift-V’s for that. Multimedia codecs are also about the same difficulty.
Fedora atomic GNOME (silverblue) or a ublue variant
Which parts of those immutable distros are actually immutable?
To be more specific, on Debian I usually copy the Android Universal Debloater and other bins from Github into /usr/local/bin so they’re in my PATH. Can I still do that on those distros?
Yes. You can read about it here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/technical-information/#filesystem-layout
You may want to uninstall firefox and install it as a flatpak to have codecs out of the box. Or use a ublue variant which ships with flatpak forefox. if you’re into gaming, look into bazzite.
You can add any path to your PATH variable in your .bashrc or whatever you use anyway.
There are live USBs. It’s usually best to check it out yourself.
