I’m over tinkering with my OS. So I’m looking for a distro that “just works” out of the box for my laptop. Also I want to test an “easy” distro I can install for my grandpa.
I don’t care for immutability, declarative config, being fully FOSS or having the newest stuff. I don’t want snaps, or a software center that relies on them. So no Ubuntu.
What I do want (ideally out of the box):
Important:
- as few annoying visible bugs and crashes as possible (looking at you, Ubuntu)
- Wayland support
- good package selection, so no independent fringe distro
- fluid YouTube videos, streaming, pre-installed codecs
Less important:
- ideally with Gnome
- encrypting the hard drive from within the GUI installer
- nice font rendering (used to be a problem, but I guess not anymore)
- installing Steam with a button press
- pre-installed sane-airprint and sane-airscan (automatic setup of my networked printer-scanner-combo)
You get the idea. The usual stuff (low-end gaming, browsing, streaming, printing, scanning) should just work. I don’t have any hardware that poses a problem.
From what I’ve read, Mint doesn’t yet support Wayland and doesn’t ship with video codecs anymore. (Or am I wrong?)
What are the other options? Is Zorin king of the block now? Is Manjaro good now?
Thanks for any and all input.
You may want to uninstall firefox and install it as a flatpak to have codecs out of the box. Or use a ublue variant which ships with flatpak forefox. if you’re into gaming, look into bazzite.
You can add any path to your PATH variable in your .bashrc or whatever you use anyway.
There are live USBs. It’s usually best to check it out yourself.