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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

What distro and kernel version are you using?

This, 100%. Running opensuse 15.3 but with a bleeding edge kernerl (via repo) to fix sleep and other issues. Works almost perfectly.

Ubuntu 21.04 (21.10 was reportedly full of even more bugs, so I'm anxiously awaiting 22.04 this week), 5.11 kernel.

Ubuntu is a bad choice for newer and esoteric hardware, a rolling release distro will have up-to-date kernels and userlands in comparison.

As an example, Ubuntu had issues with my newer Zen hardware despite the hardware being on the market for quite some time. Switching to the newest kernel fixed my issues with stand-by and sleep, along with weird issues like random freezing.

I think in this thread it's worth pointing out that it doesn't work well with even a very common Linux distro.

For someone who's considering a MacBook the primary viable alternative, I'm just trying to point out that it's a long way from a smooth experience on a refined product.

Sure, at the same time it's worth pointing out that anyone who wants to buy a laptop to run Linux on it full time should be using a Linux distro which provides up to date packages.

Can you provide a short list of those distros you recommend with up to date packages?

OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Arch and Arch-based distros like EndeavorOS, maybe Debian Sid (it's been a while since I've used it, don't know how up-to-date the packages actually are), maybe Fedora Rawhide. There's also Manjaro, but I can't really recommend it when there are better options. Then there are some other rolling release distributions that I can't speak for, some of them new and some of them old like Gentoo.

I've used Ubuntu and Debian stable and testing for decades, but have migrated over to rolling releases for desktop use because of better hardware support.

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