[eYrKEC2]

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.

[conor-]

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.

[hnzix]

>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.

[the_third_wave]

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...

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

[phendrenad2]

Debian is not the competitor to Ubuntu, Mint is.

[tcmart14]

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?

[IYasha]

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).

[eYrKEC2]

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.

[JohnFen]

In all fairness to Debian, they do cover this in their installation instructions.

[webkike]

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"

[GlumWoodpecker]

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`.

[addingnumbers]

> All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.

That's not enough. Some package could eventually drag it back in.

    $ apt show firefox
    Package: firefox
    ...
    Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd

If you really want to keep it off your system for good, you need something like this:

    $ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd
    Package: snapd
    Pin: release a=*
    Pin-Priority: -1
    $

[WirelessGigabit]

When I try to remove snapd it says it'll also remove ubutu-server-minimal. And that scares me.

[the_third_wave]

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.

[WirelessGigabit]

Thanks for the recommendation. Before I do that I'd have to check which binary drivers I have so I don't end up with a server that has no internet.

And by server I mean that dusty NUC...

[kej]

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.

[0] https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images...

[mynonameaccount]

that does not get rid of snaps forever when you want to 'apt install firefox' or any package that is snap only. That's all it takes

[skrtskrt]

Yeah I use both Fedora and OpenSuse (Tumbleweed) and it's a really stupid easy no-config setup on both distros.

Ubuntu is just maddening.

Pop OS is nice out of the box too, but I just don't want to use Ubuntu derivatives at this point even if they've removed snaps

[entropicdrifter]

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

[at-fates-hands]

I came here to say this too.

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.

[raffraffraff]

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.

[marcosdumay]

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.

No other distro ever gave me that experience.

[panick21_]

Use PopOs. Better hardware and is mostly Ubuntu with lots of the dumb Snap stuff removed. Plus some other cool features.

[entropicgravity]

You could also try Linux Mint. I moved to that two years ago when Ubuntu started to go sideways and I've been very happy so far.

[reportgunner]

What machine are you using ?

[mb7733]

You want Linux Mint.