My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We’re talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking “dissidents” so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.
I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been… entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn’t work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn’t make me happy, and it’s not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn’t reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.
What I primarily want is the sort of “mostly just works” like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?
Any major distro should do it imo. Personally I run Fedora because I tried it out years ago and I’m past the distro hopping phase. It just works™ (most of the time, as every distro).
PopOS is getting traction, and I think it’s deserved. I only use it on my gaming rig and never had major problems. Based on Ubuntu if I recall so the majority of Ubuntu tutos should be compatible.
I tried ZorinOS as well. It’s paid (10 bucks per major version if I recall), but it’s surprisingly stable and well fleshed out. It aims to mimic Windows or MacOS design out of the box, for people that migrate to Linux. They have a free lite version. Based on Ubuntu as well. The only reason it’s not my main OS is because Fedora is already installed on my main rig and I’m lazy.
As suggested, Debian is still its old self, and it’s a good thing. The stability thing although means that you won’t get the latest bells and whistles. On the other end of the spectrum there’s Arch but it’s far less “set and forget” than the other distros. At least it’s longer to set, harder to forget. I would rather go with Manjaro, with which I had a really good experience years ago, never any major struggle. But It still needs a bit of minimal maintaining.
Years ago, when Ubuntu started their Unity and Amazon partnering bullshit, I switched to Linux Mint. I don’t know how it is today, but at the time it was the go-to replacement for Ubuntu: all the advantages without any of the inconvenient.
Honestly, just pick one of the major ones, try it in a live environment to be sure the defaults suit you, and you should be good to go for years.
I was worried about that with Arch, and yes the setup takes longer, but other than that for me it’s just been “run ‘pacman -Syu’ every few weeks” and otherwise forget, been running like that for a few years. So I’d still say it’s set and forget tbh, just that the set part is a bit more work.
There was another post on here about Manjaro taking about going opt out on some things that to me is a deal breaker. EndeavorOS has been mentioned a decent amount for a more user friendly Arch based distro. I can’t personally speak about it, but just a little extra but for others going through here.
Or Garuda. Sure, the theme it applies to KDE by default is pretty garish but nothing keeps you from just going to System Settings and seeing a different theme. Other than that it’s basically just Arch with a bunch of stuff preinstalled and some convenience scripts.
The Manjaro maintainers are a bunch of clowns. Constantly letting TLS certificates expire, enabling an indev, broken driver on Macs without asking the asahi devs why it was disabled in the first place… literally clowns
I’ve had Fedora on several computers, and everything worked for quite a while while. Eventually though, things just began to break randomly - probably a sign of me not doing much maintenance.
The most common issue was Gnome Software center failing to update anything. I just ignored that app, and continued to upgrade through the CLI for a while. Eventually, I just got tired of that, and installed Debian on my HTPC.
Now I can finally treat that computer the way I want. Just install, watch videos, update when needed, and ignore the rest. I have another computer for satisfying my tinkering desires, so this one is just for the videos and very light browsing, but not much else. Therefore, Debian is the perfect distro for this kind of use.