Are we REALLY still complaining about systemd? Systemd has been one of the best things to happen to Linux.
For example Linux used to have a sleep mode which worked perfectly. Now it does not sleep reliably. For example if I move the mouse while it sleeps, it wakes up, even with the screen closed and uses the battery until there is no more energy in them. So the computer is unusable when I need it.
Another example is copy/paste. Today it works sometimes, some other times it paste another previous content. I use now Ubuntu 20.0.4 LTS. I just copied/pasted the version number from the system monitor panel to write this post, it pasted a previous content I copied in my browser!
A third example when I use a right click on Ubuntu's Chromium (a snap browser) then I have garbage on the screen. This browser can't display correctly non western characters.
So I do not know if its because systemd but a few years ago I used Trisquel Linux which did not used systemd at the time, and everything worked perfectly as I remember in the 2000'.
Power issues are always a pain. I built out the Linux OS for a fleet of mobile robots and found that the defaults for power management were very poor, but everything is there to get a bulletproof system. I could see how there would be issues with more unique laptop setups or external monitors/keyboards and whatnot.
It’s little more than a sales funnel for them to make sure people use Ubuntu servers as well, at this point.
Arch is amazing; the newest software often works the best; the rolling model gives you new hardware support the fastest; the AUR has all the software ever (from Minecraft to the OldSchool RuneScape launcher to SVP for video interpolation); the Arch wiki is the most detailed resource ever.
But installing Arch is hard, and rarely there might be manual intervention. Enter Manjaro, which is easy to install, holds back packages for a very little while to preclude users dealing with any manual intervention breakage, has super-friendly forums (unlike Arch ;p), has an easy GUI for switching kernels and drivers, and yet has the AUR and can benefit from Arch wiki since it's Arch-based.
In my experience, both Arch and Manjaro have worked way better than Ubuntu (in terms of freezes and crashes), which seemed deeply paradoxical.
>I am unimpressed with Ubuntu and Gnome Desktop.
GNOME 3 is a laptop/tablet DE. It barely supports multiple monitors, unlike KDE, which is foremost a *desktop* DE. Amazing panel (aka taskbar), multimonitoring is a first-class concern (you can game on one monitor while you have a panel with tray that can have your CPU/GPU temps and the time on the other), deeply customizable, and my favorite bit is that you can disable desktop composition in its settings. Why? Because that makes it buttery smooth, which extends to games. Try dragging a window around with your mouse on a >=120 Hz monitor with composition on and then off to see what I'm talking about. (And all you lose by turning it off is terminal transparency.) In GNOME, of course, doing this is impossible (or at least extremely esoteric; it's not a setting).
GNOME and KDE are the two most polished DEs out there, but only one of them is a desktop DE. :p