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.
Yeah you’re probably right, which distro do you use?
kubuntu and endeavouros
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.
I’m not sure OP sounds like someone who into reading Arch News, learning about pacnew/pacsave, etc. that’s more for hobbyists. An ubuntu flavor or something like Zorin might be better for them and then stick with it and solve any problem that may show up.
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
what is your usecase?
Just gotta learn to fix stuff yourself. Highly unlikely for any distro to be perfect out of the box.
Easier said than done sometimes. That’s the advantage of Ubuntu, Mint, etc. — they minimize the number of weird quirks you run into.
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
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.
You will get tons of distro recommendations, so here is one more: OpenSUSE, then use the YAST GUI GTK application select Yast Printer it has a GUI tool for all kinds of printer setup options and will show recommended drivers based on printer type, it then installs them via that GUI. Not to be confused with the regular printer settings app you see in most distros.
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!
do you people think Ubuntu will work for me?
Yes.
Seconded. Just don’t run it on incompatible hardware, okay? 😹
There is not a single distro where everything works out of the box. I would be very surprised if even Windows or MacOS work exactly like you expect, the second you boot into them the first time.
I like Arch / EndeavourOS, but you will definitely need quiet some configuration for them. If you want more user-friendly or more up-to-date Debian, try Sparky Linux. It’s honestly quite good. Instead of Ubuntu you might want to give Mint a try. Many fancy it as a more open and less corpo alternative.
Ubuntu itself is alright, but it’s being criticised for pushing anti-consumer moves lately (i.e. forcing Snaps and telemetry onto them). Also, updates on Ubuntu are extremely slow in my experience. Maybe that has changed, but in some areas I doubt it.
Windows generally does work exactly like that. It’s the reason it has such a huge market share of desktops.
Windows breaks something all the time. Just the other week I had to fix their stupid new Email program for my dad.
There are many reasons why their market share is so high:
- They were there before Linux
- They had a GUI before Linux even existed iirc (let alone before Linux’s were any good)
- They were focused on desktop + consumer market from the start
- They are for-profit and have a marketing budget
- They have the Office products many depend on (be it justified or not)
- For a long time, gaming was basically impossible on Linux
That is absolutely not true, Ubuntu has been a lot more out of the box experience for almost 2 decades. Thing is people are already familiar on how to do things on Windows, and most laptops already come with windows and drivers pre installed. Windows 10 was the first version to have a driver manager that could find the correct drivers for you, still you need to waste a few hours and reboots to get all of the drivers and updates.
But let’s be honest it still really isn’t an out of the box experience.
Just look at all the shit with Snap you see constantly.
No, it’s not, I said it’s more of an out of box experience than windows, not that it was perfect
As a very casual user, I can say that windows has intuitive solutions to issues that may arise. At least there are some things users can try by just using logic.
In Linux, solving issues requires you to type in the Romanian national anthem backwards, speperated by ; and the ocational “sudo” and “apt get”
If you tried to stumble your way around the UI on Linux you’ll probably find very similar UI paths to solve any issue. The thing is that Linux has several different UIs so when you ask in a forum it’s easier to give you the UI-agnostic solution. Let’s take a common issue with an apparent arcane solution, e.g. change your screen positions. On windows you do this by going start > settings > system > display and adjust them there, on Linux you’ll get given an xrandr command like
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --left-of DP-2, but on KDE you go start > system settings > display and monitor and adjust them there, but because you might be using Gnome, Lxde, XFCE, Mate, etc (all of which have a very similarly intuitive path to adjust this) it’s easier to give you a command that does it.For the first several years I used Linux I almost didn’t touched the terminal, and that was a long time ago so it’s not that it’s not possible or recent, it’s just that because windows has only a single graphical interface you get answers for it, but if you ask things on generic Linux forums you’ll get generic Linux responses, if you had to do things without asking anyone online they’re very much the same.
@cosmicrookie the intuitive solution to error 0x4f63e78 would be…? Because that’s how Windows issues typically are: no explanation of what has failed, only an hex string
I’m just saying that if something breaks in windows, i more or less know where i can go and change some setting that may help. I realise that because linux has so many variations, this is not a viable way, but its still a fact that its more complicated for me to solve an issue by myself om linux than or windows, as well as finding a solution for it on the internet. I’m not against linux, it’s just a feedback to the conversation about it, compared to windows
No offense but this is highly anecdotal. When my Linux systems broke, I’ve always found good leads to solutions on the internet with a good search. On the other hand, every time Windows broke on me, it’s been near impossible to find relevant information as everything is drowned in a sea of basic nonsense, and the built-in tools that were supposed to help me, e.g., revert the system to a previous state, either errored out or did nothing, leaving me only with reinstalling the whole system as an option. Absolute nightmare.
For me, I guess I needed to find solution to fewer things on windows issues than on Linux issues. Basically anything I wanted changed on Linux needed me to search for a solution. Many of the things I wanted changed on windows, I could do without a search
There is not a single distro where everything works out of the box.
On the other hand, if hardware manufacturers or software developers test their products with one Linux distribution, it will be Ubuntu. So that’s generally the safest bet - and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t use Ubuntu.
The only reason you should ever distro hop is for fun
Naah I think it’s super useful to know a bit about all popular distros. This makes you able to actually take part in conversations about what distro to pick for example.
I’ve ran them all at some point in my life, which makes me able to understand that it’s not just “different package manager” as some people say.
Conversations about what distro to pick are often the biggest reasons it is hard to pick a distro.
I mean, people say that, but for me it wasn’t a problem, I just picked one when I got started. Didn’t feel like a major decision since you can just switch again if you are unhappy.
I feel ya. I was the same way. They said don’t distro hop so that was the first thing I did 🤣 I guess the thing with a lot other people is they are used to the thing that “just works” (whatever the fuck that means).
For them, I just tell them use PopOS. Good distro. Little fuss. Maintained by a company with interest in keeping it going.
That said, I’m teaching a class this afternoon to CS majors and the first thing I’m having them do is install Arch in a vm 😉
Shit, that’s sound like a really cool class… Hope they enjoy it. :)
This is the kind of post that scares me away from trying Linux.
Why? Under Windows or Mac OS too, there’s always something that doesn’t quite work right.
My current work forces me to work with Apple (because they are lazy to prepare Linux for working), I have been on Linux for almost 10 years and I really want to quit my Job because of this stupid Apple laptop, it is trash, the DE is stupid, and I have many issues (with settings, login items, alacritty not working… yabai stopped to work without any reason…) that stresses me a lot… So good, I love my work and I still enjoy working, but the macOS is pure trash.
I prefer Linux and I’m OK with macOS. Windows on the other hand I dislike, it has bloated complex middleware and tries to control me like a hand puppet. I can work on it but given the choice I go elsewhere.
I can’t with macOS, even they keybinding makes no sense… it’s such a pain and I love Linux too much. About Windows… it at least has an easier way to manage the app windows and minimize and get it back properly, on macOS I need to install third party tools to be able to switch from windows from the same app, and it’s really a mess and slower than a built-in grid and windows switch manager. Also, if you are an expert of Windows you can always remove much bloated stuff, there are some high skilled Windows users that know how to clean their Windows OS, the only problem is WSL2 isn’t working properly for me, it is limited compared to a decent Linux system and on Linux you can always run Windows apps with wine, so I don’t see why I would want to use Windows haha.
True, but most of the fixes are super dumbed down (for the audience).
I told my sibling to search up
how to download an image and set it as a background(you can search it up if you want to see if you get the same results) and I get stupid ass articles telling me to download the windows photo app on my phone and sign in with Microsoft photos or some shit and sync it to my signed in Windows desktop and set it as a background photo. Wtf is that?For context, my sibling is on Ubuntu and the basic steps are pretty much the same on both Windows and Ubuntu: save image as, then right click on file and set as background.
In firefox, you can even just right click an image from the web and set it as the background directly.
That’s pretty cool. We’re both using firefox based browsers (librewolf) so I gotta check that out
You can always try Linux risk free in a virtual machine like VirtualBox.
If you like what you see, and you have any valuable data backed-up, you can try dual booting. That way you get to use Linux as your primary operating system, but can switch back and forth as much as needed.
I found I was dual booting Windows and Linux for over 3 years before I was comfortable enough to stop using Windows entirely. Switching to Linux doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. You can take it as slow as you want.
Then stay away. If you don’t like to tinker with things it’s not for you.
I was in the same boat but Linux Mint just literally worked. Easiest transition ever. I keep my Windows dual boot because I need MS Office for work but I’m in mint 95% of the time with no tinkering.
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.
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
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 https://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.
Did you try Linux Mint Cinnamon? What about Linux Mint Debian Edition? They’re improved versions of Ubuntu and Debian, respectively.
What printer are you trying to use and how is it connected to your machine?
Why would you use Debian, it has the oldest packages and kernel of all distros. I would maybe run that on a server, but probably just use Ubuntu LTS instead.
For desktop you should try Pop OS. Really good distro from System 76.
Stay away from Ubuntu, it’s very buggy for desktop. I tried it six months ago, fresh install, and the console app wouldn’t even open on a fresh install. No error message, just didn’t open. Great impression…
Care to explain how you come to your harsh judgment of Debian? I’m not a fan of using it as a desktop OS either, but every other day you hear people talking about Debian having newer packages than Arch on occasion. If anything, Debian, Arch, Fedora and derivatives should give you the most recent packages.
I don’t know which people you are listening to, but Debian does not have newer packages than arch. It has older packages than almost all other distros. You can see this on distrowatch for yourself also.
The idea of Debian is that old = stable, which I don’t agree with personally. As an example, users of Debian are reporting tons of KDE Plasma bugs that was already fixed, but because they are running an ancient version, they still have the bugs.
But it depends. It’s correct that new versions of plasma had new bugs, that was fixed in the coming weeks or months.
I guess a better way of describing Debian is that it has old bugs instead of new ones, since it stays on older versions.
Debian isn’t old == stable, its tested == stable.
Debian has an effective Rolling distribution through testing than can get ahead of Arch.
At some point they freeze the software versions in testing and look for Release Critical and Major bugs. Once they have shaken everything and submitted fixes where possible. It then becomes stable.
The idea is people have tested a set baseline of software and there are no known major bugs.
For the 4-5 releases Debian has released every 2 years (Similar to Ubuntu LTS). Debian tends to align its release with LTS Kernel and Mesa releases so there have been times the latest stable is running newer versions than Ubuntu and the newest software crown switches between Ubuntu LTS and Debian each year.
For some the priority to run software that won’t have major bugs, that is what Debian, Ubuntu LTS and RHEL offer.
Debian has an effective Rolling distribution through testing than can get ahead of Arch.
I wouldn’t call a distro “branch” where maintainers say “don’t use this, it’s not officially supported and may even be insecure” an “effective” distribution. I’d consider it a test bed.
Debian tends to align its release with LTS Kernel and Mesa releases so there have been times the latest stable is running newer versions than Ubuntu
* Ubuntu LTS.
Ubuntu’s regular channel releases every 6 months, similar to Fedora or NixOS. That in itself is already a “stable” distro, just not long-time stable (LTS).
So Debian can for a short span of time after release be about as fresh as stable distros which is …kinda obvious? I would not consider a month or so every 2 years to be significant to even mention though, especially if you consider that Debian users aren’t the kind to jump onto a new release early on.For some the priority to run software that won’t have major bugs, that is what Debian, Ubuntu LTS and RHEL offer.
That’s not the point of those distros at all. The point is to have the same features aswell as bugs for longer periods of time. This is because some functionality the user wants could depend on such bugs/unintended behaviour to be present.
The fact that huge regressions have to be weeded out more carefully before release in LTS is obvious if you know that it’d be expected for those “bugs” to remain present throughout the release’s support window.
As an example, users of Debian are reporting tons of KDE Plasma bugs that was already fixed, but because they are running an ancient version, they still have the bugs.
The idea is that those bug fixes would be backported as patches; old feature version + new security/bug fixes.
In practice, that’s really expensive to do, so often times bug fixes simply aren’t backported and I don’t even want to know the story of security fixes though I’d hope they do better there.
