Everyone's done with Ubuntu. It's just not good. Its got a stereotype at this point for being the easy noob distro but that's not even true. Its top to bottom awful and has been for many years.
Call me a noob if you like, but I don't like hunting down drivers. Tried to go to debian on my last dev machine upgrade, but reverted straight back to ubuntu. I may be lazy, but I really don't want to hunt down drivers. I'll try debian again next cycle.
I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.
If it really is something that you have had problems with, maybe try PopOS instead of Debian. The restricting non-free repos by default out of principle with Debian can sometimes get annoying when you need to install certain non-free drivers (looking at you Nvidia), but PopOS is a really well-polished ootb experience that is trivial to install. Second to PopOS for a set it and forget it experience, OpenSUSE is a rock-solid distro that does not seem to get much praise.
>I feel like hunting down drivers hasn't been an issue on Linux for any relatively modern machine I've run in over 10 years.
Try installing any Debian flavor on an Intel Mac. Keyboard, mouse, bluetooth, wifi drivers all incredibly hard to get working. Need to perform some voodoo extracting the drivers from a MacOS image then making them available during boot.
That probably depends on what vintage machine you're trying to install it on. I'm typing this on a "late 2009" 27" iMac running just that, Debian. I did not have to hunt down any drivers or slaughter any black cockerels to get things working, the only "special" thing I did was install rEFInd [1] to deal with the EFI bootloader. That's it, nothing more. A simple network install later I had Debian running on the thing, sound and network and Bluetooth and wifi and accelerated graphics and all. The "iSight" camera works, the "remote control sensor" works, I can control the screen backlight, things... just work. With 16 GB of RAM and the standard 2TB hybrid drive the thing has years of life left in it as long as I can keep the graphics card running - it has been baked in the oven once to get it back to life, no complaints from me since I got the machine for free because of the broken graphics...
Or another recommendation. If you want all the drivers and you want to run Debian, use the non-free image which I believe they just decided to make it easier to find?
I've tried non-free KDebian last month. It still booted without wi-fi. But what's most frustrating - it didn't detect any partitions on my drive. The KDE installer I mean. lsblk showed everything just fine. Same with Neon live.
And guess what? It works in KUbuntu. But ubuntu is just SO slow now. ( And I couldn't install it of my current dual-boot anyway because it does NOT have option to NOT TO install new bootloader. :-/ I love Linux (lie).
Didn't know that was an option! Thank you! If I only had a time machine to 3 weeks ago. Oh well. Thanks anyways. I'll try that again in a couple of years.
I haven't had trouble with drivers using Fedora in years. RPM fusion handles Nvidia drivers just fine. It's a far cleaner and "noob friendly" distro in my opinion, so long as you're able to google "how to install nvidia drivers fedora"
This is mostly just a Debian problem, due to their "no non-free software" philosophy, which extends to device drivers. I have never in my days booted a Debian install that worked with wifi out of the box, and I suspect I never will, due to that philosophy.. For that reason, I've stopped trying and I default to Ubuntu (-based) distros instead. All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.
Use the moment to replace ubuntu-server with Debian and you'll be glad you did when Canonical decides on its next move to ensnare users. Even when I used Ubuntu - back in the early brown-desktop days when they sent out free CD-ROMs to anyone who wanted one - I never felt tempted to use it on a server since it was never clear to me what it offered that Debian could not deliver while it was clear that keeping Debian up to date was (and is) far easier than doing the same with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu had its place in popularising Linux but they jumped the shark a long time ago, now they are just another player jostling for their own niche.
In the past you could use the images from here [0] to get installs with wifi firmware, but future versions will have it included in the official images. They've worked out of the box on almost all recent (last 5-10 years) systems I've tried it with.
I run Mint on my primary desktop and it's fantastic. What Ubuntu LTS would've become if it had continued to focus on a good desktop experience and pushed Flatpak instead of Snap
Ironically I was about to set up a new Linux Dev machine with Ubuntu and now I'm more inclined to go back to Mint since I never had a bad experience with it. I was fortunate to skip the Gnome 3 days and the Cinnamon and Xfce implementations have been very stable for a while now.
Give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a shot. Better than Ubuntu (in my experience) when it comes to drivers. They have the MacBook Pro 2015 facetimehd webcam (which Ubuntu doesn't have) and my brand new Asus Zenbook S13 OLED was perfect right out of the box. It's a rolling release so you get extremely recent packages. And its KDE is amazing (I switched from XFCE, it was so good). I love it.
You know what distro I had the most experience of hunting down drivers? Ubuntu.
I've given-up on Debian-like systems on a laptop, because the drivers were never good, just decide one last try with bare Debian, and have everything work out of the box. In my experience, Ubuntu never works, and when you suddenly get most things to work, they break down again in a week or two.
This was my last straw. I installed some 6 month old LTS release, and it had to go through a 2-5 second timeout step on the initial lookup of each new dns name. Then, it would populate a local cache, and work well until the TTL expired or whatever.
Anyway, if you are looking for a noob distro, I recommend manjaro. (The AUR packages are extremely unstable, but other than that, it’s pretty competitive with what Ubuntu was 10-15 years ago.)
I personally have had them ship out WIP patches not meant for production, which has wasted a lot of my (volunteer) time chasing down phantom bugs in software I maintain. This has personally happened to me on at least four different occasions. A lot of other FOSS maintainers I know have similar stories.
Is Manjaro really that noob-friendly? All I know about Manjaro is that it's based on Arch, which I always understood as being the LEAST noob-friendly distro besides LFS.
Arch isn't really noob unfriendly, it just requires an intimidating procedure to begin setup, which manjaro used to just do automatically for you, that was basically it's selling point, "arch without manually installing all your software."
Now it's just adware and unstable crap, not near as bad as Ubuntu but I won't recommend Manjaro anymore.
There are several less noob friendly distributions than Arch, I'd say NixOS, Void and Alpine probably top that list. Theyre great distros but they deviate significantly from what you'd expect from mainstream Linux.
It's middle-of-the-road IME. Arch with good (but not amazing) defaults and a team that has had a number of controversies that kinda give them a shady vibe overall.
Canonical makes decisions based on their own self interest. Not for their users and not for the benefit of the greater community. That's what drove everyone away.
I have meager needs so I haven't run into (m)any of the issues here, but what's a deb based alternative that isn't meant for absolute stability at the expense of anything modern?
(I ask with actual curiosity; I'm ignorant to most distros.)
FWIW I’ve been using Linux Mint for years and have never had a major issue. Most minor issues are with out of date repository packages which can usually be installed by other means.
Not only does it include Flatpak support, but as of 21.1 it can even handle Flatpak updates through the GUI Update Manager alongside .deb packages from standard repos/PPAs.[1]
Ubuntu can be a bit easier to get a laptop running than Debian (although I personally use Debian).
But whenever I see someone running Ubuntu on a server I think that there is a very real competence issue. Ubuntu should be kept as far from the server room, data centre or cloud as possible.