Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

I am not going to bash one distro or another, but I have been using Linux since (literally) 1992, so I have some history with slackware, gentoo, redhat (since the early TSX-11 archive days), ubuntu, mint, MXlinux, SuSE, Debian, and Fedora. I was a real RedHat user for many years, and some of those I listed I was intimately familiar with.

I echo some other comments... I think perhaps 10-12 years ago, I would strongly recommend Ubuntu to new users. I find now I actively try to get people to stop using it. Here at the uni professors blindly ask for it since it is so popular, but it causes more trouble than it is worth. I used to be a very large Mint proponent, but even now I find it harder to recommend that distro.

In an odd twist, my most stable builds are gentoo boxes, which are by no means built for any kind of novice, or heck, even some real linux users have issues with it. I installed and used MX a few times, and perhaps will migrate most to that distro.

Other than moving to Debian, I wonder what is a truly stable desktop distro these days, which someone could recommend for a new user? Might have to break down and start trying some cherry picked ones from the distrowatch list again...

Pop_OS! It's not without its bugs too, what isn't? But I've had far fewer major issues like the one noted in the link. System 76 and community, maintain it specifically as desktop Linux. Unlike Canonical which is much more focused on enterprise, server, these days which is why I think we've seen desktop Ubuntu slide on quality.

Wouldn't call the issue on article major (edit: and it's more of GNOME than Ubuntu issue). Installing Steam removing the desktop environment on the other hand...

I'm guessing you're referring to LinusTechTips video, where is he would have actually read what was written in the terminal, he could have avoided all this...

But I do think that as long as users have to enter the terminal, the experience won't be very user friendly.

It's hard to say where fault lies exactly in terms of the bug itself. Except it's up to the distro maintainer to decide what software they include, test it, and ensure it works as expected along with the other pieces of software they decided to include. I don't know kernel stuff particularly well so maybe this is wrong, but presumably a GUI application, that lets you control other aspects of the OS, not working with the kernels own performance settings seems egregious if not also serious or "major".

Being a computer geek, Pop_OS! is not my distro of choice but my girlfriend has been happy with it and runs her online school with it. I had her briefly try the Cinnamon edition of Manjaro (about a month) and so many bugs kept surfacing, that I simply put Pop OS back on. I was a Linux Mint user for a long time, and I can't recommend that distro either because of all the bugs.

Strong but tentative recommendation for Pop_OS! as well.

I don't use it, but a friend who built a PC with a new graphics card recently and couldn't get Windows to boot stably with it downloaded it as a live distro for troubleshooting at the recommendation of a popular YouTube channel.

When he asked me to remote in a few hours later to take a look, he'd already replaced Windows with it and installed his Steam library.

His comments were that "he didn't know Linux was like this", "if he'd known it was so easy he would have done it years ago", "he's so sick of Windows, and now he feels like he's in control of his computer again", and "how does it just work without having to install anything". He's a heavy equipment operator living where there's only cellular internet access, 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store, and this is his first computer since before his children were born.

He was very impressed by the free software catalog and customized his own widget to monitor his hardware after showing him lm_sensors. A few months on, I'm having to remind him I don't know everything when he calls about how OpenRGB or WINE prefixes work.

I'm the pig that enjoys being wrestled in the mud by my projects, so I don't pretend to anyone that my way is the best, but to anyone who is looking for something with support for modern gaming hardware, both in the software and community sense, Pop_OS! is what the Ubuntu Forums were circa 2006.

Pretty confident in Fedora, even for new users.

Fedora is my "Just Works" distribution of choice as of 36.

I haven't upgraded to 37 (which just came out).

GPU drivers for NVIDIA graphics card have been a bit of a hassle for me, I'd love to see a version with (proprietary) NVIDIA drivers included, like Pop!_OS provides.

Unlikely first party, truly unencumbered software is one of the tenets

As I understand it, that would be Nobara: https://nobaraproject.org/

Fedoras inside Qubes is perfect. The worst that could possibly happen is a partial restore, with no data loss.

i am genuinely interested why you find it harder to recommend mint. I stopped distro hopping a few years ago, all my boxes are setup with mint and run flawless, so I didn't look elsewhere for a while.

I used to use Mint ages ago, but then I switched to Ubuntu MATE because I had some problems with Mint. It's so long ago I can't clearly remember what they were, but it had something to do with the way Mint's package repositories were based off the Ubuntu ones and how sometimes Mint's additions made things inconsistent with each other.

However, I've not had a good time with Ubuntu since I upgraded to 22.04. I normally stick to LTS releases, but I upgraded to 22.10 in the hope it would fix some of my issues. I've switched one of my machines to Mint and it's been pretty good, so I'm thinking about ditching Ubuntu entirely. I haven't really evaluated a the distro space, so I just picked Mint because I used it before and it seems okay.

> truly stable desktop distro ... for new users

Immutable filesystem distros such as Fedora Silverblue or MicroOS don't get enough attention in the Linux community but they aim to address this particular issue. If you don't muck around with the "system" partition as I understand it, you can pretty much guarantee a stable UX.

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