Surprising to myself, I have been a Linux user for over 12 years…
Through the many years I have bounced between and tried Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, Parrot OS, Linux Mint, Manjaro. I have tried Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, KDE, Mate, Deepin. And more. I have 3 computers, all using a Linux distro right now.
I love the idea of Linux - free, free as in freedom, free of telemetry. And well, I thought I would never entertain the idea of switching, here I am today, strongly considering Mac OS.
Lately, I have become extremely frustrated and tired of dealing with little bugs, crashes, versions, and dependencies. Not to mention notable UI issues. It is starting to hamper my productivity when working.
Right now I am using Ubuntu and I cannot drag and drop into VS Code from Nautilus, I can’t drag and drop from the default archive manager, I am experiencing screen tearing issues, one piece of software I use crashes often but not Debian and vice versa, I have to manually reset screen brightness when it dims after timeout, etc. I have experienced issues of similar nature across all distros I have used and I am becoming burnt out.
I think part of the issue is that there is a huge variety of Linux distros, different combinations of kernels, desktop environments, window managers, package managers, file managers, network managers, etc… Not to mention devices. There is too many variables, and too many projects to maintain.
Sorry for the rant, I have seen many similar posts, but I have been using Linux for over 12 years, powering through, ignoring and working around these issues and I am pretty fed up.
While I am conflicted, I am thinking Mac OS looks like a good middle ground.
Any suggestions? What has been the most stable distro and compatible for you?
My experience has been the opposite. I started out full time with Linux in 2000. Back then it was hit and miss on hardware support. Lots of fiddling with config files. Compiling from source. Gradually hardware support got better and better. Software became less buggy. I lost the distro hopping bug.
So currently (2 years) Endeavour OS has been smooth sailing for me on my self built desktops. (My laptop is an HP Elitebook 840G refurb.) I am still pretty anal about checking compatibility on any new piece of hardware. If it isn’t clear if it’s supported out of the box, I don’t buy it. Also, one of my absolute demands before purchase is in-kernel drivers. (Once one ditches Nvidia and experiences the pain free operation of AMD and Intel graphics…). All on KDE 5.27 and Wayland.