from Showroom7561@lemmy.ca to linux@lemmy.ml on 11 Apr 18:33
https://lemmy.ca/post/42140699
Hey folks. I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with Linux for over 20 years. Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it… leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can’t fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.
Windows 11 (even 10) are rock solid for me, even as a very heavy multitasker. No crashes. No needing to reboot, unless I’m forced to with an update, and really no issues with any hardware or software I was running.
But with Linux, I just can’t believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.
I’m trying to learn why this is, and how I can prevent these issues from coming up. As I said, I’m committed to using Linux now (I’m done with American software), so I’m open to suggestions.
For context, I’m using a Framework laptop, which is fully (and officially) supports Fedora and Ubuntu. Since Fedora has American ties, I’ve settled with Ubuntu.
All things work as they should: fingerprint scanner, wifi, bluetooth, screen dimming, wake up from suspend, external drives, NAS shared folders, etc. I’ve even got VirtualBox running Windows 11 for the few paid software that I need to load up from time to time.
But I’m noticing issues that seemingly pop out of nowhere on the software/os end of things.
For example, after having no issues updating software, I get this an error: “something went wrong, but we’re not sure what it is.”
Then sometimes I’ll be using Firefox, I’ll open a new tab to type in a search term or URL, and the typing will “lag”, then the address bar will flicker like it’s reloading, and it doesn’t respond well to my mouse clicks. I have to close it out, then start over for it to resolve.
Then I’ll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won’t.
Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I’ll get a popup asking to wait or quit.
Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted… all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.
I’m trying not to overload things, and I’m doing maybe 1/5th of what I’d normally be doing when running windows. But I don’t understand why it’s so unstable.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
FWIW, I’m not keen to switch away from Ubuntu, because I do still want official support if there’s ever a problem with getting hardware to work.
UPDATE: Wow, I did not expect to get so many responses! Amazing!
Per suggestions, I ran a memtest86 for over 3 hours and it was clean.
I installed Fedora 41 and am now setting it up. Seems good so far, and elevated permissions can be authorized with biometrics! This was not something I had to. Ubuntu, so awesome there!
Any specific tips for Fedora that I should know? Obviously, no more Snap packages now! 😂
UPDATE 2: Ok, Fedora seems waaaay more stable than Ubuntu (and Mint). No strangeness like before… but not everything works as easily. For example, getting a bridged network adapter to work in virtualbox was one-click easy on Ubuntu… not so much on Fedora (still trying to get it working). And Virtualbox didn’t even run my VM without more terminal hackery.
But the OS seems usable, and I’m still setting things up.
One thing I have noticed, however. When I search for how to fix or do something, nearly all websites and forums reference Debian/Ubuntu commands, so the fragmentation there is a little annoying
threaded - newest
You ever run a memtest?
That’s a good idea also snaps can run like hell in general but more so if memory is out of wack.
Also if they did pay for support what did canonical have to say?
That’s what I was thinking too… If they’re running Ubuntu then they’re probably installing packages through snaps, and that’s always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.
Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn’t be the default of any distro.
This in insightful! What are other distros using for their software store? Flatpak or native Debian packages (or both)?
I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.
Mint is basically Ubuntu with a lot of the questionable decisions fixed (and uses Cinnamon instead of Gnome, so it’s a bit more Windows like).
It doesn’t have snaps (though they provide instructions to add them if you want), it uses apt for packages and I believe pulls from a mixture of the Ubuntu repos and their own. It also has Flatpak out of the box and the software center does both, and clearly marks which you’re going to install with an easy drop down to switch if both are available.
Flatpak has been pretty solid for me overall, though there are occasional gotchas.
Honestly, I’d recommend going with Mint, pretty much anything that works with Ubuntu will work with it, and it’s better put together in my opinion (and doesn’t try to sell you a pro subscription by implying your system will be insecure if you don’t, which Ubuntu does). I know you’re not looking to switch, but I’ve honestly been very unimpressed with Ubuntu for the last, oh, decade or so
Yeah I run debian too and see no issues with Deb packages and flatpak and I run debian unstable on my desktop so i am asking for trouble and don’t see the types of issues OP described. Snaps seem to be the issue. I know they said they wanted Comercial support but unless you are buying a support plan now. Trying debian stable might be worth a shot. Since once it works it works for a good long while.
Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.
I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?
Na flatpaks are lighter and have better access control. But I only use them for basic applications like games or spotify or Obsidian
They are a little heavy on disk space but nothing too bad. They don’t trash your block device layout with bind mounts
Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.
I did a full memtest and chkdsk BEFORE installing Linux (I’m dual booting right now), and things were fine. Again, I only seem to be having issues in Linux, not Windows (native or through virtualbox!).
Even just now, Digikam is crashing, but it won’t let me force quit (waiting just brings up the window again).
Which memtest did you use?
It was the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool. Reboots into the diagnostics utility and tests. Same with the CHKDSK, all from the system recovery boot (no through the Windows GUI).
As others have mentioned I’d use a proper tester (aka memtest86+), it will probably take overnight.
Shit. Well, if I have to, I have to.
But this doesn’t explain why it would affect only Linux (assuming bad RAM). That’s the sort of thing that would cause Windows to go into a frenzy, and I simply don’t have that experience with BSOD or crashes like that.
It does seem like a hardware issue to me too…
It might be a driver issue… Windows does have the resources to test them more than Linux community, so - kinda hardware related - but Framework should be able to help here.
And as others have said, try memtest, I did on a laptop with similar issues to yours and found the RAM was the culprit. Personally, I recommend using this version, not the passmark version: memtest.org
It’ll boot from a USB stick
It will take hours.
For Linux use ‘sudo journalctl -xe’ (from memory) - it’ll explain the issues it finds, as best it can. You’ll probably see something in there
If you’re dual booting with Windows open the event log viewer and check under System (from memory) and see if there’s any red X warning logs… esp. Hardware ones.
Thanks. I’ve made the bootable memtest USB drive, and will test later.
The differences in memory management and allocation could explain it. Linux is far more aggressive at cache IO I think.
Like @wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works just said, run memory test.
What hw do you have in that laptop?
Check the system journal with
sudo journalctl -eIt’s the 11th Gen Framework 13 running:
This generates a lot of stuff. Anything in particular that I should post?
Look for an error in the journal as soon as the error you mentioned happens. Maybe some details get saved in the journal. Post it somewhere online like pastebin, then we can maybe tell you what to check next
Like others have said, what you are experiencing is super unusual
Errors and Warnings obviousky.
you coukd redirect the output to a file
sudo journalctl -e > log.txtand upload it sonewhere for us to checkThank you! I’m going to do a proper memtest once I’m off work, and will take it from there.
If there is a problem with memory, windows wouldn’t have worked too.
Highly doubt memory is the issue but doesn’t hurt to check
Offhand anecdotes here as I only have Ubuntu on a 2012 MacBook.
That said the error post update is likely just a service that didn’t restart properly. Many of these are not necessarily critical, does it say what program crashed? A reboot would guarantee a fix here.
Unfortunately the issues with apps might be the snap packaging, this does slow apps down a bit which could cause pretty much all the remaining issues. I haven’t personally used it but might look up flatpak as a replacement and see if that helps. If others don’t explain how to do this I will try to come edit this later with an explainer or link or something to help.
I’ve been reading about Snap packages not being ideal.
I did get flatpak working (one app is only distributed through flatpaks), but I wonder if it would be better to move any packages to flatpaks, or even just DEB packages instead of Snap.
Yes, snap sucks.
It would be worth a try since this seems to be mostly performance related glitches
The problem is, Ubuntu from my understanding will try to install the snap version even if you explicitly are installing the deb version, including replacing a deb version with a snap when you update.
I’ve not experienced this personally as I stopped using Ubuntu before they started doing snaps, maybe they’ve gotten better about that, but I don’t trust a corpo run distro to not enshittify at every opportunity, so…
Choosing Ubuntu over Fedora because of American ties is rich
Can you explain? I mean, anything is better than a Microsoft OS, tbh.
But I’d rather avoid American-based distros if I can.
I’d say Fedora is one of the best distros even the founder of Linux uses it. It’s FOSS like all of Linux, people can see if there’s an issue. Ubuntu has made a lot of decisions recently such as pushing snaps that people dislike. Most big name distros are connected to corporate funding, that’s how they continue to be maintained. Finally, Canonical being British owned certainly doesn’t make it better, possibly worse privacy wise.
Edit: conflating big American tech firms that steal your data with big America tech firms that make FOSS is just silly.
For sure. But also seeing Americans as friends and allies… and now we (Canada and the rest of the world, but not Russia) are being attacked with threats on our sovereignty, just doesn’t seem normal anymore.
Nothing that used to be logical can be taken as such now. An American tech that makes FOSS is still an American tech. And I hate even having to say that, because I would have gladly supported American FOSS just a few months ago.
we get it - you posture
there isn’t really any good reason to do what you are doing other than virtue signaling, but go off everyone is going to love you for it
Well you’ll hate to hear who contributes most to the linux kernel in that case…
I think you’ll find nearly every significant FOSS project will have American contributors software in its development. Typically, anyone who can code and wants to contribute can do so.
I guess the point is more about the leadership, who has the control, who are the majority, and not purism
I say still use fedora; just don’t pay for it! \s
Unity and Mir would like a word
because FOSS has no country lines, and fedora is a bit better nowadays.
Bro. Framework is an American laptop.
I bought it before the coup and threats to my country! 😂
Well I assure you Fedora is on the leftist side 😂
That doesn’t sound right.
Start with Linux Mint. I’ve helped Boomers use it. My dad has been using it as his daily driver for almost 5 years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a Word Processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”).
On this laptop, Mint was even worse, unfortunately!
I do have it running on a miniPC hooked up to my TV, though. Very basic stuff like video streaming. :(
It runs my TV too, which is a 7-year-old Dell All-in-One touch screen that works great.
Interesting, I’ve had terrible experience trying to get a stylus-supporting touchscreen to work on Mint.
Works perfectly on my Asus Zenbook.
I don’t use it much, but it works.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Linux has always been the way you’ve described across many different distros for me over the years.
By far the most stable for me was Fedora. I’ve been running CachyOS over the last year or so and it’s been solid.
Until today. For some reason KDE takes forever to startup now. A few apps have this problem as well.
I’ve used Linux as my main and only workstation for over twenty years, and I’ve never had an experience close to what OP describe, so no, I wouldn’t say it’s always been that way.
It’s almost like bugs and such rarely affect everyone. I can say just about the same thing about any OS. YOUR experience isn’t necessarily someone else’s.
it sounds like something underlying is wrong, so would test everything that is underlying your system.
a memtest is the easiest first check. i wouldn’t rely on the one that’s on your system since it could be bad too, but it’s still worth it give it a try since it only takes a few seconds. if it finds anything, then there’s definately something wrong with your hardware.
instead, i would rely on a usb stick with the ubuntu image you downloaded. first verify that the checksum for the ubuntu image you have on a trusted computer is the same that ubuntu has on its website. then copy it to your usb stick and then use memtest from there. if it comfirms that your ram is okay, use ubuntu’s installation tools to verify that image on the usb stick is good; google or deepseek can show you how with easy to copy/paste commands.
in your shoes, i would re-install because at his point because then there’s confidence that the base steps are verified and should be working correctly and then you can move onto othere testing strategies if you continue to experience the same behavior.
I’ll likely be downvoted for this, but if you’re committed to Linux, you might want to reconsider using Ubuntu (or Fedora for that matter). Ubuntu has a well-earned reputation for trying to make things “easy” by obfuscating what it’s doing from the user (hence that useless error message). They’re also a corporate distro, so their motivations are for their profit rather than your needs (wait 'til you had about Snap).
A good starting distro is Debian (known for stable, albeit older) software. It’s a community Free software project and the 2nd-oldest Linux distro that’s still running as well as the basis for a massive number of other distros (including Ubuntu). The installer is straightforward and easy too.
Or if you’re feeling ambitious, I’d recommend Arch or Gentoo. These distros walk you through the install from a very “bare metal” perspective with excellent documentation. Your first install is a slog, but you learn a great deal about the OS in the process, ensuring that you have more intimate knowledge when something goes wrong.
FWIW Debian isn’t a non profit. Debian is not a legal entity period. It receives funds via the Software in the Public Interests, which also holds the copyrights, but the project itself just is. It’s probably the world largest, longest running, self organized affiliation group.
Also debian testing is a fine rolling release. maybe sometimes a bit slow on security updates, but for a workstation that isn’t exposed to the internet, and using flatpaks for browser it’s mostly a non issue. That can also be mitigated by installing security updates from Sid. And secure-testing release take care of the most critical issues as well. If you avoid the couple’s weeks right before and after the freeze, it’s generally stable enough.
Sorry, I was on mobile so I over-simplified 'cause digging up the details on Wikipedia wasn’t so easy while also juggling my kid :-) I’ll try to amend the original post.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization
What are you talking about being downvoted for that. Ubuntu is not well-liked and switching it out is a common suggestion.
ironically, I think whining about anticipated downvotes for expressing the most mainstream sentiment is worthy of downvotes
I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve been shouted down more than a few times for suggesting that Ubuntu is a bad gateway distro.
Well, they’re also taking swings at Fedora which isn’t usually as maligned. Besides that, there’s a lot in their comment that people could have strong opinions about beside “Ubuntu bad”.
I do appreciate the reply. I’ll check with Framework to see how well Debian is supported. I might just go that route. I don’t need anything fancy or cutting edge, but I do need stability.
There’s a saying: “Don’t break Debian.” It’s considered among the most stable options, and that’s in part because of its extremely long test cycles (which can come with its own set of problems, on occasion).
I do find it curious that you’ve chosen to divest from even American FOSS projects. Like, Microsoft makes sense; they have no qualms about doing whatever they want with user data for profit, which inevitably goes towards billionaire machinations. But why draw that same line with FOSS?
Honestly, not knowing enough about how linux distros are funded is part of it.
And the second part is more “If I’m going to commit, I might as well start off with something I can live with through whatever geopolitical wars we have to endure.” My preference is to remove as much American influence from my life as possible, including the OS and software I use.
This is the only reason why I’m moving away from Windows, because it’s served me well.
Well, welcome to the Free side fellow traveller :-) I too ditched Windows for (different) political reasons 25 years ago, and haven’t looked back. You’ll love it here, 'cause if you don’t, you now have the power to change it 'til you do.
First of all, I’m not trying to tell you how you should live your life. My following commentary is well-intended and in the spirit of making informed decisions, of which I believe everyone has a fundamental right. At the end of the day, follow your conscience. It’s your life to live.
Spoiler, because I'm long-winded
>Honestly, not knowing enough about how linux distros are funded is part of it. Every distro is different. Some have zero financial investment and only volunteer labor. Some have community donations only. Some have funds from non-profit foundations or trusts with specific philanthropic qualifications. Some have corporate sponsors. Some have a mixture. Since you’ve narrowed things down to Ubuntu and Fedora, I recommend exploring where their money each comes from, how they use that money, what kind of governing bodies they have, etc. Though Canonical is based in London, for example, they have a reputation for being the Microsoft of the Linux world. It’s simpler to just dismiss all projects with American ties, but FOSS is unique in its collaboration, and drawing a hard line will make life in the FOSS space difficult, if not impossible. On top of that, it’s very unlikely to have any effect towards boycotting the billionaires and politicians that make all our lives awful. FOSS is unique in that it does best when everyone works together. This is antithetical to most governments, most corporations, and practically every billionaire. I get your desire to diminish American influence, and as an American myself who’s trying to do the same, I have to be careful that I don’t inadvertently harm the philanthropic efforts still happening in my own back yard. To me, FOSS is a way to rebel against the kind of polemicizing and politicking happening across the globe, because working together without their approval is the last thing many of them want us to do. Lastly, good luck with your transition! I hope you figure it out and love whatever you ultimately pick!
I really appreciate that. I really do.
Considering how the EU is now looking to make a distro… based on Fedora… I’m more comfortable with the idea.
And you are right, FOSS projects are a collaboration, and I think it’s worth for me to explore the best option for me, rather than what I feel might be the best option.
That said, I’m backing up my Home folder, I’ve got memtest loaded on a flash drive ready to run, and I’ll be prepping Fedora 41 to install once that’s all done :)
Good luck! I’ll be there with you, figuring things out. See you on the Arch Wiki 😉
I know some people are suspicious of fedora specifically because of its ties with IBM.
In case you’re not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that’s about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.
But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it’s not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can’t benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.
Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I’d recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.
And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it’s not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.
Yeah, Ubuntu is really corpo these days, tons of bloat too. I avoid it like the plague.
@danielquinn @Showroom7561 The differences between Ubuntu and Debian is trivial, however, Debian does do some things more securely, in a business environment that might be more of a consideration, things like requiring a signed kernel and modules, require that debian packages be signed, but if you're learning, going to be compiling your own kernel, packages, Ubuntu is the better choice, as those things won't get in the way and also the support for PPA's is useful.
The latest arch with archinstaler is actually very straight forward from boot to full desktop install. It just does not have a gui for installation. Very ligh, minimum packages by default but works great.
Another potential cause for random slowdown, errors and crashes could be overheating. Check that the fans are spinning and airflow is unobstructed. I don’t remember from the top of my head and I’m not near a computer but maybe somebody else remembers his to check that all sensors are detected and operational.
I haven’t tested temperatures, but things (fans) appear to be responding as I’d expect. These issues are coming up even when there’s nearly no CPU usage and without the computer really doing much of anything.
Framework fully supports Ubuntu and has full guides on them. If you have issues, I’d suggest posting on the Framework message boards, they’re very responsive.
Yes, I think I might need to, especially if advanced troubleshooting is needed.
I was hoping perhaps that it’s something I’m doing wrong. Clearly, this isn’t how it should be, but I’ll keep trying to get this working!
I think they have a live usb that you can boot into to see if the issues are still occurring there to try and rule out hardware. Would probably be my first go-to. If that works well, probably backup, wipe, follow the framework guide for your OS, and hopefully that does it. :)
I don’t know the support model for Framework but they should really be able to work through these issues for such a common distro. With the various things you mentioned it doesn’t sound like bad configuration, it sounds like a hardware issue. Given that Windows is so different from Linux it may be the case that Win11 does a better job masking the issues.
Just FYI. My family has used linux for 25 years on many systems and we do not have stability issues. We use mostly Ubuntu or Debian.
Have no idea why your having issues. Could distro or hardware related. Also are you sure your storage media is good.
This has been my experience with Linux over at least six different laptop and desktop PCs. As I said, I’ve been dabbling for decades, and always have to go back to windows because of how Linux crashes and burns for me.
Then again, I do usually stick to Ubuntu and distros based off it, so maybe that’s my problem. LOL
Just thinking what possibilities. Some thoughts.
We always use Ubuntu LTS and do not install or upgrade a release until is out for 6 to 9 months. For Debian we use stable.
Make certain your install media is good and also the computer storge media.
Keep the system updates current.
Use packages installed from the standard repo and supported by the security team.
Not sure what else.
Can you be more specific? Does this mean use snap packages? Debian packages? Flatpak (which isn’t even officially supported without installing some extra packages to begin with)?
Snap packages seem to be hated for their instability, so it could be related to that.
I use primarily debs but if your using Ubuntu it will include Ubuntu supported snaps. This is all from the distro supplied repos generally.
Installing random stuff not distro support contains a lot of addition risks such as potentially more bugs and malware.
I think the only 3rd party program I have installed is an AppImage of Joplin. I found the snap buggy.
I am not big fan of snaps or flatpacks as I had issues with both. One rarely needs them on Debian based distros anyway.
I don’t know about that. I’ve been running Mint, an Ubuntu based distro, for over a decade now on tons of machines with no stability issues at all. But then again I make sure to buy hardware that is known to support linux well. All of my laptops have been from Tuxedo except for this last one which is a Framework.
It’s certainly weird that you have these issues on a Framework + an officially supported distribution.
Does it really run flawlessly on Windows 11? Because we have Framework 13’s at work, which run W11 and they DO NOT run flawlessly.
What about a fresh installation of Ubuntu? Do you have issues then? It could be some kind of configuration that you do, that screws with your system?
OMG, yes. Windows 11 has been running perfectly on both my Framework and an old (15 year old) desktop that doesn’t even officially support Windows 11! LOL
No crashes, no BSOD, no driver issues, no lockups. That’s why I’m so frustrated right now. I don’t want to use Windows, but I feel spoiled by the experience with it. :(
I installed Ubuntu several days ago (after several failed attempts to get Mint working). The problems started pretty quickly, but they are ongoing, and it’s getting annoying.
Someone else suggested another distro. I may need to see if that’s a better option.
Which issues do you have with Mint?
Off the top of my head, issues with installing. Like, it would say that installation is complete, I go to reboot, and it’s like it did nothing. No partitions were created, no boot changes. Then it would load without audio or issues with the fingerprint reader…
It is listed on the Framework site as being community supported, but Fedora and Ubuntu are officially supported by Framework.
It should at least install properly.
What kind of installation medium do you use? Have you tried a different USB? How do you make the bootable USB?
Could be an issue with Secure Boot in BIOS.
I had tried several, actually. But Ubuntu was installed through an external SSD.
To create the bootable drive, I’ve tried Rufus, Ventoy, and Etcher. I believe Etcher was the last one, and the one that got me to actually install Ubuntu.
Secure Boot and Bitlocker were turned off before I installed anything, as I know these could be issues. I haven’t turned either back on, but will once I get this to be stable.
I use Debian on an old Thinkpad and (mostly) don’t have such issues. Installs and upgrades in particular work fine. I had probs with the wifi driver on my x220 but it works fine on the similar t520. Framework might be trying to do too much.
I work in a small lab. Our systems are controlled using two computers that run 24/7. The main real-time control stack is open source and open hardware. I happens in a Linux box that runs NixOS. I would trust my life to that machine and fly it to the end of the universe and back again. It just never fails. We can even run updates while everything keeps running undisturbed. Some devices need drivers that only work with Windows. The second computer runs those under Windows 11. In contrast we have to babysit that machine constantly, USB connections are unreliable, things fail randomly. When we have to update, the world comes to a halt. It‘s an amazing difference.
That was my experience before Windows 10. But 11 has been very stable.
But, I’m hoping to get the same from Linux.
I hope it works out for you in the end. Good luck!
This blows my mind, honestly. Since I moved to Linux about 8 years ago, I’ve had little to no issues. No force of nature can ever make me go back to Windows and it’s constant crashing for no reason. I run PopOS on a PC, Fedora Workstation on my laptop, my wife is also in Fedora, kids too (Nobara), and everything works. Mind you, the only device that is “made for Linux” is my laptop.
Your experience is very out of the ordinary.
That gives me hope! LOL
If it is something I’m doing, then this could be remedied.
It’s purely anecdotal but every time I’ve used an Ubuntu based distro it has been unstable or it nuked itself after 6 months to a year of use. I’ve been on fedora for 2-3 (4?) years now and I’ve not had a single issue apart from the Nvidia drivers behaving wonky sometimes.
For you I suggest this >> Aurora.
Everything will work out of the box, you won’t get weird errors like Ubuntu gives, you can go back easily from GRUB if something goes wrong. Being an atomic distro may feel different but I’m sure you won’t mind.
Distrowatch lists it as discontinued: distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=aurora
This is Aurora SPARC, not Aurora. Currently Aurora doesn’t exist on Distrowatch. It’s Bazzite’s sister. You can check how active it is from Github. Latest stable release, 5 days ago.
Ah, cool! I have heard of Bazzite.
Ok nice. This is exactly like Bazzite for non-gaming people. You can still game if you want though.
Funny enough, it looks my laptop manufacturer now officially supports Bazzite! Very cool.
That’s actually great to hear. If they support Bazzite, then Aurora would be the same as well, since both of them are Universal Blue distros.
Something is awfully weird here, because Linux literally runs the worlds infrastructure for the internet. It is not unstable by any stretch of the imagination. Something you’re doing between all distros has got to be the culprit - something you do differently than other people.
Or hardware issues (i still have night sweats over wifi on laptops even though that has been better for decades now).
Server infrastructure does not run X Servers / GUI
Yeah, Linux never had any issues with graphics …
OP is a newbie and is externalizing his lack of knowledge.
A 747 would seem like a death trap if a toddler were given control but there, as here, it isn’t the plane that’s the problem.
Coming from Windows, Linux (especially when only talking about GUI environments) seems to not tell you anything about your problems. Eventually you learn how to find the relevant logs and the problems seem less arbitrary.
I installed Arch on my daily driver because I wanted a challenge.
It’s too dependable, even when updating every other day and installing a bunch of nonsense from the AUR. Where’s my challenge?
This was my experience as well … 20 years ago. I’ve not had many of these issues over the past few years using any distro. I used Debian for a couple years and now I’m on Arch. Really, it just works for me…
TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.
That seems to be the consensus from reading the other comments!
Yeah, I didn't want to be not supportive of your choice of distros, but my immediate thought was not Ubuntu... I use it headless for some homelab servers, but nowadays as far as desktops go, Ubuntu is not it.
Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite's sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite's sisters, also on Framework, and it has been pretty set it and forget it. They're all "atomic" desktops in that it's hard to be able change the underlaying important parts of your computer, while you have free reign on all the bits that aren't important to keep the lights on. Updates happen frequently, but don't touch your files on top, so it's always the latest, and if something does break, you can easily boot up into the last image you were on.
If you're not looking to tweak your computer too much and just want it to run, I'd recommend Aurora or Bluefin depending on your desktop preferences.
I know nothing about these… but I just installed Aurora in Boxes to try, and damn, it’s nice. Maybe a little “too busy”, but it’s got everything I could ask for out of the box (no need for extension manager). I might replace Mint with Aurora on my MiniPC, but if it’s as unbreakable as they say, it may replace Fedora.
Right now, Fedora has still be very stable, but since I’m staring from scratch, I might as well get it right the first time. I’ll be experimenting more to see which I prefer.
If it makes you feel any better it sort of is Fedora. Fedora has both original and atomic flavors. Someone took the atomic flavor of Fedora (which comes as a blank slate) and added in some quality of life changes. Nothing permanent, just tweaking some settings and preinstalling some programs. And then called it as Aurora.
And the only difference between Aurora and Bluefin is KDE (very customizable and Windows like) vs Gnome (customizable through widgets, but not enough if you're a power tweaker and more of a Mac style desktop environments). And Bazzite is the same, but gamer focused (I installed it on my steamdeck).
Since you say the thing is working fine on Windows, there’s almost certainly a bug or several. I’d say probably a driver in the kernel, but could be something else. Changing distro or kernel version does sometimes help with that sort of thing, mainly because another distro may have newer or older kernels and other software, and bugs get both introduced and fixed every release.
Freezing issues can have lots reasons, including buggy apps, RAM exhaustion due to memory leaks, bugs in the graphics drivers or graphics stack more generally, various blocking I/O things taking unexpectedly long due to network issues or faulty hardware or drivers.
If you want a chance to figure this out, you probably need to run things in the terminal, like installing software updates through the apt and snap (?) cli utilities. GUIs are notoriously shit at reporting unexpected errors, whereas all sorts of programs (including GUI apps if you start them in a terminal) do regularly print warnings and error messages to stderr, which will show up in a terminal. This is because it’s easy for the programmers to do that with just single
printf()(etc.) line.For driver issues, looking at the kernel logs can sometimes show interesting things as well. I will say that, when looking at logs or terminal output, there often are warnings that are completely unrelated and/or harmless, and that’s not necessarily obvious to the user.
If this is a software issue, framework imho shouldn’t advertise their stuff being able to run Ubuntu if they cannot stay on top of issues that are happening in this configuration.
Unrelated to OP—
This community is the fuckin sauce! Y’all really jump in to support each other and it’s really cool :)
I just set up a usb boot for mint yesterday and am prepping my pc to switch once I feel confident enough about Linux. I’m starting to gather that will be much sooner knowing the community is here to help out! I can’t wait to get all my services switched to FOSS alternatives.
I work on Linux and use Linux at home. I’ll try to go through the problems you mentioned:
If I had my hands on your laptop I’d be running a vulnerability scan by now but I don’t think the problem is serious enough to warrant it.
Thank you.
Nothing needed to be updated. One package was “deferred”, and that was the “ubuntu-drivers-common”.
Default Firefox, and I just checked, and it’s listed as Snap package.
Full chkdsk was performed before installing Linux on my SSD. In the Western Digital utility (in Windows), everything tested OK, too. No issues in the S.M.A.R.T. logs, either.
I don’t know if it actually rebooted, or if it just closed everything and returned on the login screen. I wasn’t home when it happened, I just came back to that :(
But that was days ago. And it hasn’t happened since.
I’ll be running a proper memtest shortly, and will post an update once that’s done.
Do your issues appear on a fresh install? At my admittedly limited level of expertise, I’d probably start from there. If a clean install works properly, then something that’s happening later is messing it up. You’d have to keep track of changes you make to your system and check for issues as you go.
If a clean install is borked from the get-go, maybe try different distros. Since Framework supports Fedora, I’m surprised that anything would go wrong.
I don’t know if Framework offers any support or warranty, but you could check with them too.
Before, during, and after a fresh install, depending on the day I’ve tried! LOL
I’m going to do a proper memtest as others have suggested. Then I may just start fresh again, perhaps with another distro. Thank god it’s Friday, so I’ve got a few days to sort this out. haha
I use Zorin OS 17 (based on ubuntu) on a desktop AMD based system and a framework laptop 16 for about a year now and even before that used an older version of Zorin OS for about 4 years on a shitty lenovo laptop and never had any stability problems. Even the lenovo still runs reliably.
The only problem I’ve had on the desktop is that the linux driver for an ntfs formatted drive constantly corrupted my data on that drive to the point where some of the data got lost. All other drives are formatted with ext4 and work without any problems. Maybe your problems could be similar?
If you want to try a distro that can just work for you, instead of reading about it, do this:
They are both from the Universal Blue family of distros which are based on Fedora Silverblue.
They are all immutable and atomic. They won’t break. They will be more stable than windows. It will be easy. And it will come with batteries included.
Also, if you do gaming and are also a developer, there’s bazzite-dx which will be releasing soon.
+1 for UBlue-based distros!
Which is based on Fedora and OP wants avoid American ties (on an American laptop)
The following is genuine curiosity, no sarcasm or anything negative is intended:
Why is it American? In name? Because technically it isn’t. Or at least not different from any other distro. I mean, isn’t the Linux Kernel mostly American? How about SystemD? I believe we don’t need to keep listing stuff…
These are more questions for OP. But Fedora is based on RHEL which is owned by IBM. I don’t really fault OP for wanting to avoid American products in this current era. Linux however seems more of a trans-national product.
Exactly.
What do you mean by unstable? I don’t get what this means. Install? Perhaps choosing a graphical install if available for your distribution of choice. I’ve heard nice things about Mint (can’t tell, I’m using Artix, and Guix is in my plans).
That said, US or EU are not that different. Actually the EU is little by little deteriorating the data privacy it used to say it protected, but moreover, even if the data is kept in EU, what does it prevent US gov or corps to get access to the data? Did people forget about the 5 eyes, the extended ones (not sure how many, there were several extensions)? Did people forget that no matter the current differences, the EU and the US are allies (not just politically) any ways?
Linux (kernel) itself has already identified itself as a US org, since it complies with the US requirements and law, to the point of banning developers from countries the US doesn’t like to be cooperating with US orgs (whether gov or not).
So, focusing on country based software developers shouldn’t be the main motivation. Looking for free/libre software if possible, so that you get some freedoms of yours sort of intended to be protected through licenses, or if not available then open source, is what we should be looking for. On top of that, communication software should be e2ee, and if possible distributed or peer to peer, or at least decentralized, and so on. Also we tend to forget that the data kept in the cloud is no longer yours anymore, no matter the cloud, neither the country, and if in need to keep personal data on some cloud we should make sure it’s encrypted, but still the data keeps being the cloud owner hands, so having personal backups is important, and clouds usually don’t advertise what metadata they leak.
Having said that Fedora sounds OK to me while Ubuntu sounds too commercial to me and actually now a days looking for users to get packages from its own “app store”. Instead of the “country of origin” for a distro, perhaps more importantly it is to see what your needs are, for example do you prefer rolling release vs. stable releases? Do you prefer vanila kind of packages (as close to upstream as possible) or your fine with the distro making changes to the upstream software as that serves better your purposes? How user friendly the distro is? Though perhaps you’re out of options if the framework laptop requires firmware or patches not found upstream, then you might better stay with the “officially supported” distros, unless what you miss by not having such firmware or patches is something you can live with, but usually x86 laptops are “easily” used with gnu+linux on top, except for some drivers not fully working with your hardware or missing firmware, but people usually still uses those laptops with gnu+linux on top. For arm laptops (I believe framework has laptos with arm CPUs, and actually is offering some initial ones with risc-v cpus) that tends to be a little more involved and I personally have no experience with that, and actually I’m waiting for a cheap enough and not so low level risc-v laptop or mini-pc to start experimenting with it (not all distributions support arm and even less risc-v).
Again, I’ve heard nice things of Mint, particularly for people new to gnu+linux, and it’s not a rolling release distribution. Though I’m one of those thinking that rolling relase distributions are easy to live with, at least not on the server spectrum (there are actually servers running on top of rolling release distributions such as Arch, but that’s not the majority of them) given they can’t afford reboots (very few updates actually require reboot on gnu+linux, linux/kernel itself being one of those which better get a reboot ASAP but not necessarily immediately) or changes requiring a service to drop even for a little while. But with rolling releases one doesn’t have to deal with big differences between distribution major versions upgrades, and the changes requiring using intervention when upgrading packages are distributed on time, so no need to focus on a lot of them at once.
Just my two cents, :)
If you’re on the 24.04 LTS release it might be worth upgrading to 24.10, as it has a lot of bug fixes and improvements from upstream, especially if you have a recent Framework board. Although it isn’t your preferred option to change distros, it may be worth giving openSUSE Tumbleweed at least a test drive to see if it’s an issue with your laptop or just an Ubuntu issue, as I have had Ubuntu have issues even on fully certified laptops, and openSUSE has been pretty plug and play for me on a secondary machine even with its faster update cycle. Might be worth checking your hardware too, as random hitches and reboots could indicate that you might need to reseat RAM or that the CPU/GPU is for whatever reason unstable.
Arch also can absolutely be installed just as quickly as any other distro if you use the archinstall script. I used it recently to install KDE plasma onto a Chromebook from 2017 and everything worked exactly as expected, I haven’t had any issues with stability so far. Can absolutely be done in under half an hour. It ofc doesn’t come with the advantage of understanding exactly how your system is set up, like you would if you did it yourself.
The last time I did that (slightly different setup with xfce) though I broke it somehow and ended up with if freezing often when booting, although I’m still not sure if that was a hardware problem or not, but it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. I also broke something with the audio jack somehow around then during an update, but chromebooks have weird audio drivers and you need to use this script maintained by (afaik) one person in their spare time. Anyways I would expect a framework laptop to handle it better as it’s newer and more common hardware.
Could this be a snaps thing?
I despise snaps and left Ubuntu for that reason. I don’t remember the specifics but I think even after installing firefox with apt it somehow get’s magically switched to a snap.
I daily drive debian on a t490s and it’s rock solid. There’s just no way anyone could consider this set up unstable.
In recent years I’ve found most of my problems come from the fancy new packages. In order of reliability I find that it goes apt > .dev > AppImage > flatpak > snap
If it’s for work, I’d suggest using whatever works for you best. Sounds incredibly frustrating so I don’t know why’d you be so set on ditching windows. Use the tools that work for you. Having said that, I’ve been running Linux since early 0.99 kernels and Debian since 1.3 and stability is really unmatched these days.
Your screen flicker issues with browser sound like hardware acceleration related bugs and I’d hazard a quess that random freezes and reboots have something to do with graphics drivers as well. But of course it’s impossible to tell without logs, which you didn’t provide.
People downvoting a post asking for help have very weak egos. I hope you’re able to find a better Linux experience, OP.
Well, I’m pretty sure I had this happen once or twice in the recent past after wake from suspend I think, but it might be that my CPU is just one of the faulty intel ones.
Either way the rest of this does not reflect my experience at all. Try distrohopping, I feel like you’ll find one that you like and doesn’t have these issues. openSuSE is always one of my suggestions, it was the one that I used for a long time when I started out as well, but tbh I’m out of touch with the more mainstream distros, I’ve only touched Gentoo and NixOS in the past >5 years. (I also specifically recommend against using Ubuntu.)
Check journalctl --user, and also htop, specifically the process state, for the last one (you mention a NAS, is it perhaps stuck on IO? I’m in a fucked network where that regularly happens with my NAS.)
This has not been my experience. I’m not on Ubuntu, but OpenSUSE and NixOS. Everything works and operates as expected everytime. The only issue once was nvidia driver updated versions before kernel did and I had to reboot to a previous snapshot and wait a few days till the kernel update was released to work with whatever happened to the driver. But 8 years of a dependable system otherwise
now that is something that can easily make the system unstable, especially a laptop that will disconnect from the network at least ince in a while. my experience is with KDE, that if there’s an unresponsive SMB mount 8n the filesystem, the whole KDE plasma environment fill freeze left and right, maybe with the exception of the window manager. but I have experienced this with other programs too. I suspect they all do filesystem accesses on the main thread and that’s why when a directory read hangs, they can’t do anything even handle clicksuntil the read times out.
its infuriating honestly, in a sense. of course, I have got all my money back lol. but it’s like nobody is testing software with SMB shares, but I guess probably same goes for NFS, SSHFS or anything remote
You need to stop worrying about “official support.” You aren’t a business so it doesn’t matter for you. There is more support out there online for free than you realize. There’s nothing magical framework does for you that doesn’t get ported out everywhere else eventually anyway. Stop limiting yourself like that.
That being said, Ubuntu is built in Debian. Debian is an incredibly solid and stable distro. Ubuntu does do a few questionable things with it but it’s still very reliable. If you have problems with stability, it’s very unlikely Ubuntu is the problem unless you did something so incredibly stupid to it support wouldn’t help you anyway.
I have a theory. Windows can dance around memory corruption issues in ways Linux just refuses to do. Windows will misbehave in strange ways trying to make things work until it just can’t anymore. Linux is more of a binary thing. It works or it doesn’t. It’s not going to play pretend for you. It refuses. Linus has an obscene hand gesture for your hardware.
I want you to get a copy of memtest86+ and boot it off a flash drive. Then just let it beat the shit out of your CPU and ram for a couple hours.
Framework laptops are generally Intel. Intel hasn’t been making the best stuff over the past few years. It’s possible your cpu might be affected by a flaw Intel tried to cover up for a while. If it has it, nothing in earth will ever make that chip reliable. It’s not fixable. It will only get worse with time no matter what OS you use.
Yeah, this was my first thought: test your hardware.
Frameworks have all AMD options too, just a heads up. I have one and it runs great!
They do indeed! And if I had a framework that’s exactly what I would buy unless they had an ARM offering.
Where did you get this laptop from? Did you buy it new or used?
The reason why I ask is because it sounds like you have hardware issues.
Yep, the Firefox thing is weird. I’d run a memory test . Does this laptop do the same thing with Windows?
Also op mentions 20 years, were your other experiences like this?
Great guidance here and I know you want to stick with Ubuntu, but but if you tire of trying to fix it try a different distro before you give up.
Lots of people swear by Ubuntu, but for others (like me) it’s nothing but trouble. For instance, I get errors when running the latest version of Ubuntu on a current laptop that runs Debian 12 perfectly, and a previous Ubuntu load on one of our laptops (tried with a new SSD) had so many issues that I gave up and restored the Mint backup.
By contrast, we have 2 different laptops and one old desktop that run Linux Mint almost flawlessly. “Almost” means a system lock up every 3-4 months and the inability to wake from sleep for the desktop. Debian 12 was a bit more difficult to get fully working, but since the initial install it has been been completely stable with zero problems. We have one laptop that is running Windows 11 and it has more problems than any of the Linux machines.
Fixing problems is a great way to learn, but if it’s not the way you want to spend your time you may be heading down the wrong path. Unless you have a hardware issue you should be able to find a distro that has few or none of the problems you’ve been fighting.
Id switch to mint, most windows like and all the knowledge youve learned will work on it. If you want true stability go Debian.
Just want to chime in that there is a Linux Mint Debian Edition. Nice stability, sidesteps criticisms of Ubuntu, and has the polish of Mint
Mint also has issues :/ I’ve been having weird bugs where the mouse and keyboard just stop responding randomly… Searching for it you find other people with the same issue with no resolution
It really sucks, because something utterly basic as mouse keyboard should not be an issue
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Running a framework 16 with FedoraKDE and before that a 4gb ram 2015 toshiba satellite (in 2024) running Fedora (regular Gnome) and haven’t had one of these issues. Most issues I have had were caused by me, every now and again I run into a regular old bug in something and half the time that gets fixed pretty quick.
I wish I could help, but we just have opposite experiences unfortunately. That said, because of this I don’t think it’s “linux,” or I’d likely have at least similar experiences.
OH for a while I did have a bug where VLC would stutter playing video and nobody had a fix, so I uninstalled/reinstalled VLC and it works now. Idk, I’ve had shit like that happen on windows too though, it’s basically the software version of power cycling hardware when it acts up.
Usually with Linux, once you start out you’re gonna get a ton of issues and you’ll have to troubleshoot them one by one. However, afterwards it should just be a smooth sailing.
Also as a word of warning from my personal experience, official support isn’t something you should be that concerned about. When it comes to software, when some corporation makes some official version for a specific distribution (like Ubuntu), it usually is made by some B-team and doesn’t work that great. If the program is good, it should be available on most major distros rather than just “an official version for just one” if that makes sense.
Also good call - if one distro is causing a fuck ton of issues, just give another one a try. The main difference for users between distros is what kind of software setup they are going with, and some setups are just prone to issues on some hardware or wasn’t tested properly. Still, I do hope Fedora treats you better.
You need to start with Linux mint. The errors you are mentioning are common in ubuntu, crashes happen and popup all the time on my ubuntu installations too. But never on Mint. Mint is based on the stable version of ubuntu, that it has long term support and it’s regularly getting updates to make it even more stable and secure. So please start with Mint, or Debian 12 (although Mint is better for new users).
this! and whilst i don’t know the hardware support for new framework models on mint, i recon it’s pretty good.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
i agree that immutable distros are good for beginners and this is especially true for users who are not exactly tech savvy or don’t want to mess with their systems, but i don’t think the features that cinnamon misses are that important to as many users as you think there are
HDR is nice but not everyone can afford it, and mixed refresh rate displays might be important for gamers and desktop users but not as much in a laptop ( and yes i know that high refresh rates drain the battery but why would you game on battery anyway ), mixed DPI displays ??? only a small subset of users have those. yes the OP is a heavy multitasker but again he is using a laptop (but having support is nice)
however what i do agree with is that fractional scaling is awful in cinnamon and the reason i consider it a serious problem is that high res displays are now common and fractional scaling directly affects user experience
Yeah but there’s so many more reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here’s some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:
and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon… cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don’t believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you’ll note kde isn’t developed on github and that’s just a mirror. It’s not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn’t even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you’re SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.
I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don’t think it’s a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv… it’s much more common than you think.
In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they’re mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.
first this is not a criticism of kde. use what ever you want i just want to keep expectations within the realm of reality.
now about the security issues, afaik those problems exists because X11 not cinnamon specifically which is why cinnamon for Wayland exists ( it’s gonna take WAY longer to mature than KDE), but i don’t think that this is a big problem for most for now since our user base is small so there is much less malware and targeted attacks (well as long as you are not a high profile employee at a company with vast data access privileges )
the mixed dpi displays is a fair point too, i do that sometimes and i would say that i used it more than the people i know who might used it once or twice for a PowerPoint representation or something. programmers, gamers, graphical designers are peanuts compared to office work and regular users ( watching youtube, arguing on the internet etc)
i don’t understand what you mean exactly by performance when talking about a DE ( responsiveness, ram and cpu usage ? …). in terms of cpu and ram usage i’m pretty sure that kde consumes more and in terms responsiveness i would assume that kde is better but how much ( a difference between 5 s and 2 s is huge but from let’s say 80 nanosecond to 60 is just for benchmarks and won’t be noticed in real world usage)
what really holds us back is the lack of commercial software compatibility and at least decent alternatives compared to industry standards
oh yeah, and nvidia drivers + wifi and bluetouth
Security is not as huge of a problem on linux as it is on windows for sure. But EVERY SINGLE proprietary app you use can snoop on EVERYTHING. and I do not trust proprietary apps, beginners especially will use a ton of proprietary software. Remember that we’re recommending to a beginner, not a linux evangelist who is willing to do anything to make linux/foss work for them.
If you use KDE on a laptop from like 2002 it will be a HORRIBLE experience, they use way too much ram, way too much rendering (with animations and whatnot), absolute cpu and gpu hogs for a machine from back then. that’s pretty much the reason xfce and lxde exist. It’ll also be real bad on cinnamon. Maybe this is better now, I haven’t tried in a while.
The only reason I see for a beginner not to choose KDE over xfce is if they have a laptop from the 32 bit era. Elsewise, KDE if you use windows, Gnome if you use macos. The development speed alone and the fact that they have proper funding means in 20 years they’ll probably still be around, cinnamon development is nearly dead by comparison, we shouldn’t be encouraging people to use significantly less supported software unless there’s a compelling reason, and for cinnamon, there really just isn’t. People won’t want to relearn everything when cinnamon breaks for them, might as well start on the most well supported stuff for all hardware.
I personally don’t use KDE, but I don’t think we should be recommending anything but KDE/Gnome to beginners without very good reason. Sure, use whatever you want, but that isn’t a valid course of action for someone who doesn’t even know where to start, and the obvious answer for where to start is KDE.
I think many people here have been linux users for so long that they forget their solution isn’t the best choice for beginners.
i don’t trust them either but from what i have seen most don’t care
this is a bit of a stretch
the development rate is a deciding factor for sure and i agree that we shouldn’t encourage using software that is considered “obsolete”
i don’t agree on everything and maybe you’re right i still don’t get why they dropped support for kde but still support MATE
They get this benefit for free on KDE. Even if they don’t care, it’s still better for them.
I don’t see how it’s a stretch, someone was posting with basically this exact problem on one of the linux forums on lemmy like, last week. I don’t feel like digging up the post but this happens sometimes.
Makes absolutely no sense for a beginner distro.
I use Linux sine 1999 and I prefer Mint. It works just fine for everyday users. The thing wiht Mint is that it has setting panels for most things, and it makes sense as a design. It might not have the latest support, but what it does, it does well. The same can not be said about other distros in conjunction to care-free users.
Honestly, your usage of linux since 1999 is why I don’t trust you know what’s best for beginners. I give tons of people linux, mostly the elderly, cinnamon has been an absolutely terrible experience for them. You’re highly experienced and used to something that works for you, the best choice for beginners changes more than you do.
Can you not say this about fedora/bazzite?
The very purpose of an immutable distro is to stop carefree users from doing exactly that, until mint makes an immutable distro, it simply isn’t the best choice for beginners.
Do they not care about mixed refresh rate displays, mixed dpi displays, the security issues involved in x11, etc? I think they will prefer if those things just work. Mint doesn’t have that, sure what works works well, but that’s true for fedora/bazzite too… and more works.
I agree with you completely. No disrespect to Mint, but immutability is (IMO) possibly the most important advancement for Linux adoption in its entire history. I would love to see more distros release immutable versions.
Can I just say thank you for offering help like this. I have wanted to switch to Linux for years, but due to proprietary software I simply must use I can’t.
If I ever get away from needing this software can I take you up on the offer?
What is matrix lol
element.io
it’s essentially a federated messenger, just like lemmy is a federated reddit.
It’s likely you can get that proprietary software working, if you want to try.
My username is on my profile!
I would throw out that Windows executables work surprisingly well on Linux these days via “wine.” I use EndeavorOS and it’s pretty much no work on my part, I double-click a .exe and it starts it up via wine. I think the only thing that’s been spotty for me is Meshmixer crashes sometimes, but it’s also abandonware so I’m not sure it actually runs better on Windows.
Somewhat obvious tips to get a more stable experience:
Good advice, also Fedora’s “atomic” distros are both bleeding edge and extremely stable!
Atomic distro sounds like an interesting way to avoid breakage due to admin/user mistakes, so it’s a good suggestion. But it doesn’t help much with bugs in new software releases.
So the best choice depends on what exactly caused instability in OP’s case.
I started using Linux more or less full-time in 2014. I find it to be just as “stable” as Windows or OS-X, which is to say: it’s stable until you do something that makes it not stable.
If you’re staying in the mainstream, using a “stable release” from a big distro (Ubuntu, Debian, there are others…) and waiting at least 6 months after the release of that stable release before using it, I have found Ubuntu to be just as stable as Windows or OS-X. You might want to use an unstable app, that can be a problem in any OS, but granted: there aren’t as many “stable” apps to choose from in Linux as Windows.
OS-X and their apps have burned me hard, repeatedly, for things that Windows and Linux had under control 10 years earlier.
The major difference in my WIndows vs Linux experiences has been: when you want something to work and it just doesn’t, in Windows you have to shrug your shoulders and explain to your customers: It just doesn’t work, there’s nothing we can do. In Linux, you have the option to do the heavy lifting and make it work. It will frequently not be worth the effort, but if you’re really determined you can fix just about anything in Linux.
I’ve been running Linux for 20+ years as well (on-amd-off for most of that, but mostly on). Stability has almost never been an issue, only when I was fucking around and finding out lol. My biggest problem in recent years was Ubuntu never having what I wanted, and Arch always having what I needed… So I just moved to Arch and things have never been better.
This. If you’re going to fuck around with your root, be prepared to find out. Most other problems is a quick search, “oh I don’t have x dependency”, and done.
Nowadays you just need to learn how to use Timeshift and make a save point before messing with stuff. System unstable after tinkering? Time to roll back. Linux is easier and more stable than ever before.
Just stay home, literally in your system, and you’ll be fine 99% of the time.
I’m using Nobara, which is based on Fedora, so I hear you, but the only thing you really need to do is learn enough about DNF to translate “apt” commands in your head.
And maybe set up a few aliases you’re used to.
People shouldn’t HAVE to do that if they won’t want to. You should just be able to use your OS, not learn a new language to use it “okayish”
I shouldn’t have to learn where setting is in the windows UI every few years but that’s just the shit we live in. I find Linux easier because I just have to change one word. In windows I got to go through three different setting panels. Same but different
I just search for what I need in windows. Haven’t browsed through menus in years.
… You know there are menus with search in Linux just like Windows, right?
We’re only talking about the people who want to use the command line.
It’s less than the difference between windows CLI and poweshell. And if you’re like “I don’t use those”, guess what? You don’t need to in Linux either. You can run the update app.
A new language? It’s one app.
And if you learn it, you are back to the same level of usage, not “okayish”.
But yeah, no one HAS to move from Ubuntu/Debian to another flavor. (Which is what OP is talking about).
No one has to move off Win 11, either, if that pain doesn’t make it worth it to them.
The latest Ubuntu defaults to using Wayland. On my Framework, it would freeze the whole box every few days. I switched to Xorg, and it was much better. (It’s an option on the login screen - just clock the little cog and choose Xorg before you log in.)
Surprised to hear stability questioned. We have RHEL systems at work that have been running 24/7 for over a year.
From the look of it, I may just have really bad luck with Ubuntu and related distros.
I’ve been on Fedora for the last 24h, and it’s been incredibly stable. Even heavy multitasking with Boxes running two VMs in the background! haha
I was told Ubuntu was a good beginner distro and used it for like a year and then towards the end of that year things got weird. So since then I’ve moved to arch, because it rolls so much and I don’t keep up, it’s even more unstable. I got some other laptops running bazzite (fedora based) and they seem ok.
So yeah, like your edited comment, I would recommend fedora or even vanilla Debian.
I see your edits and I had the same experience with Ubuntu. For whatever reason on my ThinkPad I had bugs and just weird issues that no one else would run into every single time. And I would try Ubuntu after every major update and it would still be some weird bugs never the same ones.
I’ve now been using Fedora for almost 4 years it’s solid. I always recommend enabling RPM fusion to get those proprietary codecs and I like to change my zram config to what is recommended on the arch wiki.
pebkac
Love how when someone has issues with Linux but not Windows somehow it’s pebkac. Classic annoying Linux user response.
I’d love to know what hardware you are using as well.
It’s the 11th Gen Framework 13 running:
I’m assuming stock ax210 wifi card as well.
I had a lot of stability issues on 11th gen Intel but I was using windows. (I have switched to an amd motherboard on my laptop (no it’s not a framework))
Yes, I’m using the Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX210 No vPro®. It’s been very stable, and highly performent (on Windows, at least). So far, no issues with Wifi on Fedora-based distros.
Mine had issues with integrated graphics where the driver would crash constantly.
If you’re using Ubuntu make sure you’re using the most recent LTS release instead of the latest one. Stability issues shouldn’t be a problem on those.
Using only non american oss is literally impossible.