I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.
It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.
I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.
Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.
But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.
Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.
I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.
I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
No. It means take it’s current DE state with a gran of salt because it’s about to be completely replaced in a few weeks.
Ok so if I run into issues on Fedora 39 then I should take it with a grain of salt because Fedora is more cutting edge? What distro do you suggest then?
False equivalence. Fedora isn’t about to replace the entire DE with a completely new thing that’s been in development for the past 3 years. The problem isn’t that their critiquing, it’s what they’re critiquing that’s the problem. There’s no point critiquing a fork of Gnome that hasn’t had any development for the past two years and is going to be replaced with an entirely new & made from scratch DE in a few weeks from now. The Gnome fork isn’t anywhere near the current state of actual Gnome that’d you find on Fedora. If you want to criticize Linux Mint cinnamon DE, go for it. If you want to criticize Gnome, go for it. But criticizing Pop_OS!'s Gnome based cosmic DE is udderly pointless and irrelevant to the actual state of Linux DE’s has a whole.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t agree that it matters. PopOS is quite popular and recommended distro and it’s fair to critique it if you run into issues. For average user it does not matter that they are working on Cosmic and that they are not updating the current version much if at all. They picked it because it’s popular or was recommended.
If someone will have bad bug fiesta experience on KDE Plasma 6 it’s easy to shrug it away as “it’s new, they still need to iron out issues” the same way as “that’s 2y old, what did you expect?”.
No. It not the same.
Criticism of Plasma 6 is completely valid and welcome and it’s highly recommended to do so and provide bug reports as it’s actually under active development and allows the devs to fix them and improve the DE.
With the Gnome-Based Cosmic DE it’s entirely pointless because it’s not in development, it’s discontinued, period, end of story.
If you want to critique the Rust-based Cosmic DE when it releases, go for it.
Constructive criticism is supposed to let the developers know what they need to improve to make your user experience better. And in that sense there’s no point criticizing something that is not going to see any work, period, End of day.
It’s the same as whining about x11 bugs that’ll never get fixed, then not understanding when people go “what the hell do you want us to do about it? That shit is dead and being replaced with Wayland, go criticize and help improve Wayland instead”.
I agree with you but I feel like you’re completely missing the point I’m trying to make because this has nothing to do with what I’m saying. I’m talking from the perspective of someone who goes to try Linux and then runs into obscure issue and judges his experience based on that. It has nothing to do with how development works, bug reporting and making matters better. It’s just pure experience of what the OP encountered. From that point of view the things you are saying are irrelevant to the normal user. And my examples of Fedora or KDE Plasma were not meant to say it’s the same thing as what Pop!_OS is doing rather than drive the point that from someone else’s perspective who goes to try Linux and runs into obscure issues they may not even know how to find a solution to, it’s irrelevant what the devs do, how old is the distco, etc… They got the newest version available on the website and installed it expecting it to work with maybe some minor flaws and tinkering needed. The only thing that matters is that it’s not working as expected and the user is left clueless and frustrated when something completely breaks.
Plenty of new people who get lured into trying Linux don’t even know what to look for to make the right decision so they often go in blind and then get shunned by Linux “experts” because they “didn’t make research” regardless of which distro they went with because there will always be those who will say they picked the wrong one.