Thank you for the intro, that helped.
Glad to hear it was helpful.
Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
Yup. FWIW, there's also the security argument; I.e. X11 makes keylogging trivial, while Wayland provides protection against it by default. Having said that, there is experimental support for Wayland in Linux Mint. But, ideally, it needs more time to cook.
Yeah, zero tweaks needed. It just works out of the box. Don't even need to use the terminal.
I've had no issues running ZorinOS.
since there’s several issues that have proven unsolvable for me
Could you be explicit? I think it's more beneficial that way. Thanks in advance!
I mean that it just as stable as the base system plus a snapshot on update shrug
which yeah, is generally alright
Only reasons I moved off of Mint was that it had minor issues with NVidia gaming performance, and I ended up liking KDE Plasma better than Cinnamon. Was plenty stable, otherwise.
Can't really recommend bazzite, that I moved to, since there's several issues that have proven unsolvable for me, due to the filesystem veing immutable.
I've layered a bunch of packages and have never had stability issues because of it
LMDE isn't Ubuntu redux. It's what i'm using because it was what i used from the get go 3 years ago and can't be ass'd changing because it works and has never crashed.
90% of what I do is use FF, Joplin, Darktable, Inkscape, Caliber and QBTorrent. A little gaming on Steam and Heroic and messaging on Singal Desktop is the other 10% of my use, so clicking an icon on a dock is about as easy as it gets.
My only minor annoyance is the PrtScr button on my Logitech KB doesn't work (have sollar Installed) but I just use Flameshot anyway.
Anything "immutable"
Any other answer is outdated and wrong.
Edit: holy shit the amount of mint recommendations is crazy. Stay away from mint, it sucks. It's just a less reliable version of Ubuntu. If all you like its desktop environment, that's called "Cinnamon", and it can be installed in other distros.
Fedora worked for me out of the box. The only software I had to install npmfusion (Nvidia driver) for a higher refresh rate and that was easy. But even without that, I had full resolution
I will say the major stability improvement on immutables is just running apps in flatpaks. You take any of the stock systems (debian, opensuse, fedora) pick a popular desktop env like kde or gnome, and install nothing but updates to the baseos and flatpaks and you will be very stable.
I do love my bazite, bluefin, and kinote though.
Depends on your hardware. I have had lots of issues with Linux regarding audio quality over Bluetooth, sound quality over laptop speakers, wifi driver reliability (had to disable power save), wake from sleep. For older NVDIA cards you can choose either the unsupported old binary drivers on an old kernel version or terrible performance and bugs with the free nouveau drivers. Wayland doesn’t work with the old binary drivers either.
Getting consistent theming between different versions of Qt and GTK working feels like an impossible task.
If you have HDR monitors or high resolution screens, that need fractional scaling you’re better off with Wayland and KDE.
The only downside of Mint is outdated packages.
Been on Bazzite for a while now. Have never been happier in Linux. I'm a software engineer and occasional gamer for context
I thought you were going to say you had to go way out of your way to fix it at first 😂 I was like wait what?
Nobara for gaming. I've had issues with multiple other distros but Nobara just works. It's based on Fedora but is preconfigured with everything needed to game right away. Every other distro I've had to fix some random issue from Steam not running (latest Fedora) to game controllers needing to be remapped. Nobara sorts this all for you. Fedora for a laptop. It seems to have the best support for a variety of weird hardware. Bazzite for TV gaming. That's basically what it's built for.
I can imagine a good NixOS config working pretty well. Just need to find someone's repo that has all you need already set up.
I installed catchyos last week and it's almost creepy how everything "just works"
Headless: debian
Gui: mint
Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
I really hate to be that person but that is unfortunately not always been my experience 😅
I've been using linux for like 10 years and aside from when I was doing really weird customization shit windows isnt supposed to even be able to do, I had pretty much zero issues. I've definitely experienced my fair share of jank on linux. I love it anyway, but as a less technical person I'm not entirely convinced thats always the case woth any popular distro
what is wayland
Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to 'the system' with all the necessary details. After which 'the system' does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.
how important is it?
Very. Basically, either it or its 'predecessor'^[The term is used loosely here, because there's a very big difference between the two.] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything^[Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don't go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*.] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment^[Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet.] of the surrounding ecosystem.
Respectfully disagree.
Gnome is the environment not implementing Server-side window decorations.
That makes everything harder for app developers since they have to implement client side window decorations to make apps movable just for Gnome.
When apps can't be moved around on Gnome because they don't have a window handle to drag, it doesn't really fit the "it just works" requirement.
It's the same Debian base under the hood, but has: