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Comment by minot | Hacker News Reader

Not btrfs and anecdotal but fedora 33 / 5.8 kernel / default gnome was unusable for me on amd r5 3500U. Headphone microphone didn’t work. Bluetooth ear phones and mic didn’t work. USB headphone microphone worked though. Sure enough most of the issues were resolved by 5.9 but I can no longer recommend Linux on the desktop.

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With the problems you are listing, you would have never been able to recommend Linux. The problem stem from lack of driver support in the kernel for the devices on your machine.

If that is the case, then your machine maker obviously does not support linux. So, it's no surprise that your machine had problems with linux.

If you buy a machine that supports linux, you would not see those problems. Nothing to do with linux, mostly to do with interaction of linux and your machine manufacturer.

Sorry I failed to mention that things were much better before the update. Sure the fingerprint reader goodix never worked but the things I mentioned above are regressions. I’m all in favor of wayland but if we say we remove existing working features (fedora 32) because security or whatever we might as well wear tin foil hats and stay away from computers.

I suggest you try Ubuntu LTS (not latest) or Debian less coolness factor but you don't get regression because only security updates are happening. Your hardware must be compatible and you need to resist the urge to get the latest shiny stuff.

Over the last 15 years, I've run a lot of distros on a lot of different hardware.

On desktop, Fedora has been by far the most reliable. Ubuntu LTS, as far as I can tell from using it for work, just means that annoying bugs that have been fixed in the upstream never get backported.

Case in point: Bluetooth on Ubuntu LTS has always been much less reliable for me than on Fedora.

Disclaimer: This is only my anecdotal experience, use whatever works best for you.

You can't have it both ways, you can't get only the bug fixes without the new bugs , except on LTS you can if you know how experiment with getting a new kernel or video driver but not updating your DE,

> getting a new kernel

> you can't get only the bug fixes without the new bugs

> if you know how experiment with getting a new kernel or video driver

I would agree with you if I was on my old machine with an nVidia graphics card which for what it is worth my new machine is a much better experience with AMD processor and integrated graphics but still how do you explain audio in failing to work as soon as I upgraded to Fedora 33 / kernel 5.8 and it (mostly) resolving itself when upgrading to 5.9 kernel? Is this a kernel bug or not? What caused it? What can we do to prevent it from happening in the future?

What I would personally do is install Kubuntu LTS, then if I really need a new kernel because some hardware feature I enable a PPA that gives me that new kernel , if I need a different NVIDIA driver I install a PPA and try all the availleble drivers, find the one that works. Then if all works fine I don't upgrade the kernel or driver until I am forced and I always have the option to rollback,

Then when I want to try the next LTS years later I install it on a different partition and check if it works or not for my use case.

For my work I use Intellij , when there is a big update I get the .tag.gz and try it. If something goes wrong I still have the working version and I can go back.

Updating to latest and greatest was fun when I had the time and when I knew how to format the disk using "fdisk" and it was pleasurable to read and tweak stuff, this days I don't care about shiny stuff and my work does not require latest libraries and I am not using any first gen of hardware.

So IMO if you want stability and no surprises and the ability to maybe upgrade the kernel and a driver Ubuntu is a good solution(not sure about Debian or SUSE) and also I don't have experience with Wayland so maybe that invalidates things and is impossible to get a stable working Wayland setup.

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