[paines]

I used to love the shit out of Debian., but nowadays, that I am really startled and shocked what it had become. Try to get nvidia graphics running on an optimus based laptop, and you will find yourself in a midst of an multiple hour long try and error prone session of head-shaking and cursing. Graphics installer -> no touchpad?!?!? Blueutooth A2DP -> fix it by hand..... This list goes on and on and on...

[Dunedan]

I built a PC in 2005 with an Nvidia graphics card and ran Debian on it exclusively. I had a lot of trouble with that graphics card over the years, but that wasn't caused by Debian, but rather by Nvidia, because they did neither offer nor even support open source drivers. My conclusion was to not buy any Nvidia product again, until they offer proper open source drivers for it. Since I retired this PC I haven't owned any Nvidia product anymore and I couldn't be happier. Sure the drivers for other graphics cards aren't perfect either, but at least I don't have to deal with binary blobs anymore where nobody except of the manufacturer can fix issues.

[kakwa_]

Well, it's hardly a new issue.

Hardware support and lack of polishing has always been an issue in the Linux world and all distributions have suffered from it one way or another.

Having spent quite a lot of time in the past on this kind of issues, I do sympathize.

But from my experience, things actually tends to get a bit better now days, for example, I'm far less cautious about avoiding Broadcom ethernet and wifi cards as they generally tends to work out of the box today (even if I still prefer Intel for these).

Fighting hardware/default configuration issues is unfortunately be part of the game, but in my experience, it's a game I play less and less often.