Gnome is a bit like CosmicDE. They all have their pros and cons. Best part about FOSS.

Im gonna give Plasma a try when i switched over. Im not sure about Gnome cause my first ever distro was PopOs Cosmic when i jumped into the Linux space. I keep hearing positive views on Fedora so why not.

Glad it didn't turn out to be a hardware thing. At least you have some peace of mind now. I think Fedora is a good move. You can always give pop-os a try after CosmicDE gets finished sometime down the road. I've got a buddy on Fedora and it's been rock solid for him for a few years now. If I was having problems or wanted a change, I think I would jump over to Fedora as well and see how the water is there. I think Fedora already packages CosmicDE, so whenever CosmicDE is finally finished, you wont have to go far to try it out again if you were favoring Cosmic over Gnome or Plasma.

I think for now im just gonna have stock everything, want things stable first before exploring

I didn’t know that Niri was for Gnome. For some reason I thought it was more like Hyprland. Maybe I’m not understanding this compositor and windows manger dealie correctly. Anyways, if you’re using KDE, Konveyor is pretty polished experience and the dev seems pretty active on it at the moment. Simple to install as well as uninstall on a vanilla KDE install. Konveyor with Klassy is super slick.

Karosel doesn’t look that good in comparison. I’ve yet to setup Niri. I’ll have to check out PaperWM as well.

No I used Karosel before but it wasn't as good as Niri or PaperWM

This looks cool, I’ll have to check this out. Have you played around with Konveyor?

If you still want tiling check out Blackdons KineticWE it's built on kde. https://gitlab.com/theblackdon/kineticwe

fwiw I hopped a lot but landed on Endeavor, hope you find your distro soon :)

I’d recomed giving Fedora a shot. Fedora + Niri / Noctalia is my daily driver now. But Fedora KDE is great on its own.

Because there is still the mindset unfortunately that Linux can be slighly intimidating if your not a programmer. We're picking the smaller distros cause they're supposed to be more user based friendly, but apparently thats not the case.

Ah I see. Yeah I used to stick to Debian/Ubuntu for most everything, I tried pop OS but it didn't run well on the laptop I was using. Mint seems to do alright whether something has barley any resources or does have a plethora.

I'll have to install Ubuntu on something again sometime and see what it's been up too.

Not everything you hear is true. LLMs are responsible for finding and helping fix thousands of bugs.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-CVEs-Nearly-2000

There is a big difference between a professional coders being assisted by a LLM and “AI slop”. I hate AI slop, but not all LLM assisted code is slop.

Mint back in the day had a valid reason for being. It made installing proprietary codecs and drivers easy. It was based on Ubuntu but handled the stuff that Ubuntu just refused to.

Now days Ubuntu handles proprietary codecs and drivers very well. There is no “point” to using Mint now. You get a downstream smaller community and lose the support that that larger upstream distro has.

Mint isn’t bad per say, but in 2026 I don’t see why you would choose it instead of the thing it’s based on.

I mostly get concerned when I see new to Linux users choose smaller less well supported distros instead if mainstream ones. Less so with mint but very much so with Zorin.

Cause then you hear the LLM is used in the programming and causing the bugs, with the refusal of people fixing them or taking forever to fix them. Its hard to trust anything cause of that.

I mean Linux itself heavily uses LLMs to assist in programming.

Also both Zorin OS and Mint are based on top of Ubuntu. So it would be the same except the distros are less used and have worse support.

Lastly I know some people on Lemmy really loud and assume that any LLM assisted coding = bugs and bad. But in reality neither Linux itself nor Ubuntu, nor Fedora are “vibe coded”. It’s mostly LLM assisted bug finding. They’re literally finding thousands of old (pre LLM) bugs per Linux kernel release.

I have no idea what your talking about but, im definitly gonna update the post with my laptop specs, eventually and see if that helps.

What are your qualms with mint my I ask? It seems to have natively accepted any hardware I've thrown it on. Intel/AMD, NVIDIA/Radeon nothing has come back with driver issues.

The only issue I think I've had with 1 machine i believe is a dependency issue I haven't looked into yet, because python3 wasnt being updated from the standard apt update/upgrade.

Isnt Ubuntu using AI in their programming? I really dont wanna be bothered with bugs because of it. Pop OS uses Ubuntu as well, so if im going through this cause of who know whats, i dont think i would want to try Ubuntu

I’d recommend trying fedora KDE or Ubuntu. Both are mainstream distros that are well supported and have up to date hardware support.

I was thinking of trying mint or Zorion OS

That sounds like a terrible experience. At first glance it also sounds like a hardware issue but updating anything with an Ubuntu base was always painful to me.

It would help if you gave a little bit more info (like logs), without it, this is my blind guess:

• 1, 2 points to a storage drive on your system
• 5 points to your system drive specifically, that some parts of the drive are failing. Although I would expect that to happen with HDDs, not SSD
• 3 has logs, you can switch to the detail screen during the shutdown splash by hitting Esc? Or maybe a different one on Ubuntu, don't remember. Should tell you which service doesn't want to stop (and if it's always the same one, if you check multiple times)
• As for 4 and 6...I cannot fathom how is that happening

That’s why I really wanted to try Pop. I have a Steam account and I really wanted to set it up but I can’t with all these dam bugs, it’s been frustrating for the past month or so and I’m getting tired with trying to tinker with it. I’m glad I see that there are others as well seeing the issues. Visually, I really like cosmic, but I agree, they really need to work on the bugs

I’m gonna run some hardware test just in case if could be my hardware but if it isn’t, I’ll definitely be switching.