[ogogmad]

As inflammatory as it is, my experience with Ubuntu (non-LTS) was the biannual death march. An upgrade broke my system. I never had any such experience with Win or Mac, so it was a Linux-specific problem. I suppose I could've used the LTS version, but then (again unlike Win and Mac) I would've been limited to only old versions of packages. Mint would probably have been similar.

Nowadays I'm using Manjaro for 3 years running. There's no 6 monthly release cycle, but a continuous stream of rolling releases. An upgrade has never broken my system to the same extent as it did with Ubuntu. It's closer to the Win and Mac experience for me.

Caveat though: Manjaro is not as beginner friendly as Ubuntu or Mint or Pop!_OS.

[hoistbypetard]

If you don't want to go full rolling, Fedora's every 6 month upgrade has been smooth for me. I have a desktop I've been upgrading since Fedora 17 that is currently on Fedora 35.

[vladvasiliu]

I think this is a YMMV kind of situation. Isn't Ubuntu non-LTS supposed to be more... experimental? Like they try out new things which may or may not go on?

Anyway, I've never used Manjaro, but my daily driver is Arch. I remember around the upgrade to Linux 5.16 and gstreamer 1.20 (not 100% sure of the version) the sound on my laptop went to hell.

Pipewire would die and while the system was still more or less usable, it wouldn't turn off. It would hang indefinitely trying to shut down pipewire. Apps that didn't need the sound would work OK, but others would hang at launch, like Telegram. Firefox worked as long as it didn't try to play anything. As soon as it did, it would become unresponsive. I could work around it by disabling pipewire, and I could get back to work by installing the LTS kernel, which was still at 5.15, and the sound worked (I need to be able to make calls with Teams).

My laptop is AMD Zen3 based, but on my (older) Intel boxen everything was OK. However, on the laptop, sound wouldn't work with external sound cards or BT headphones, either.

This was quite shocking to me, since I'd been using Arch since ~2011 IIRC, and this was the only time when an upgrade was this terrible.

[thaumasiotes]

> An upgrade broke my system. I never had any such experience with Win or Mac, so it was a Linux-specific problem.

Counterpoint: somewhat recently, a Windows update permanently disabled my wireless headphones. They still work with any device that isn't running Windows. They won't work with other people's devices that are running Windows.

[mattigames]

Never heard something similar before, what headphones exactly are they?

[thaumasiotes]

Bose QC35 II.