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Me: Oh and Mint, could you also add my old printer that I can’t get to work on any other OS I’ve tried?
Mint: Sure thing.
Ha. On Windows I had this ancient Ethernet Canon IP printer. Windows hated it, even with the supplied Canon drivers and network Utility. It always needed messing with every time to get it to show up as a printer on the network.
When I moved to OpenSUSE I went into YAST2 printer discovery. It found the printer right away, and suggested a model, and asked if I wanted to install the GutenPrint driver for it. Yes please. And do you want to announce this printer to others on your network (via CUPS) Yes. Done. Worked 100% with no Canon utilities.
Mint: It’s already set up
My experience has been the opposite. I built a new PC last year, and only Fedora and Arch recognized the Radeon GPU and the Intel Wi-Fi. Mint was shipping a kernel that was too old to recognize either one.
Agreed. Out of all the distributions I have tried, Fedora (and its various spins and derivatives) are what tend to have everything actually work out of the box.
My first distro has been Nobara after swapping off windows.
It really is dummy proof.
For those on the edge. Just do it. Windows 11 is free to go back to. You risk nothing by giving Linux a try.
The guy behind Nobara does a LOT of important work to make Linux usable at home, especially when it comes to gaming. And in case anyone doesn’t know, he is a software engineer at Red Hat, the company sponsoring Fedora, the distro that Nobara is based on.
Opensuse Tumbleweed tho
On new hardware it’s generally easier to use a rolling release distro in my experience.
You’re more likely to have a newer kernel and drivers that support things like wifi cards.
IMO, you shouldn’t have to learn Arch just to be able to get a new PC. Eventually, people who like Ubuntu and Mint are going to want to upgrade to a new computer, and they might be in for a shock once they do. That kind of thing is what pushes people back to Windows.
If you can’t install something like EndeavourOS or tumble weed then you likely were not going to be able to reload an os anyway.
Installing vanilla arch is a very useful activity to do at least once so you know how the system works but don’t have to use vanilla Arch and can use any of the derivatives so long as it has the latest kernel / drivers for your hardware.
And IMO, that needs to change. Mint has released ISOs with updated kernels which does help. But expecting everybody to eventually graduate to a rolling release distro by the time they want to buy a new PC is just going to send people back to Windows.
Honestly, for a grandma distro, I’d use Fedora Silverblue nowadays. Very up to date, and you might as well uninstall the terminal for how useless it is.
Mint has a GUI menu where you can select a newer kernel.
Thankfully Ubuntu will focus on shipping the newest kernel each release and Mint’s gonna profit of it. Also there’s newer kernels you can switch to optionally.
Me: Btw how old are your packages?
Mint: Its rude to ask the age of a distro
Me: well are the maintained properly?
Mint: uhhhh… Some of them are
That’s a big part of why I switched to OpenSuse XD
I tried basically every distro on my laptop and fedora worked all hardware 100% out of the box + printer + fingerprint reader + all day battery life
Fedora gnome is so good it makes Linux boring
I wish my fingerprint scanner worked D:
Honestly, the only two problems I have had at all are fingerprint scanner (like, lowest priority for me), and the battery continues to drain quickly even when I close the laptop or put it in sleep mode or whatever it’s called
Ah I’m sorry to hear that all I can suggest is trying to look up what your specific hardware is and see if there are any solutions on archwiki or something
I did make sure to get a thinkpad because I heard they have excellent Linux support so it is possible your hardware just doesn’t have a proper solution yet 🤷♀️
But I am not a coder so I don’t really know how to do anything but google and try
Linux being boring is a good thing. I want my OS to be boring. I use Mint, BTW
The enterprise-adjacent distros are pretty good for that, I’ve found
e.g. RedHat→Fedora or Suse→OpenSuse
Fedora gnome is so good it makes Linux boring
Is this a workflow thing? I was looking at Fedora last week and I’m interested to hear what you like about it.
I’m on Cinnamon and made everything look like OSX, but it seemed like gnome would have a learning curve. And as much as KDE looks like Windows NT, something a touch more modern does seem nice.
I used to use KDE but so many small visual inconsistencies and oddities would annoy me that I was definitely already feeling like trying something else. Also I really like fingerprint login which kde had trouble with.
Switched to gnome just to try and once I setup my extensions it just felt right. (Extension manager downloaded from regular App Store)
Fedora has a great gnome implementation that is preconfigured much better than any other distro I tried. Fractional scaling was available without configuration and gnome’s online account login + fingerprint login also worked out of the box.
Everything just works but my thinkpad is also linux certified which could explain why everything is so easy. Still, other distros required more gnome configuration work and I’d have random problems with sleep mode, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.
Also, it brings me a little personal peace of mind knowing the distro is supported by fedora and red hat. That is serious institutional support and I think is just a good thing for Linux generally but also could explain why fedora has an edge to me
Thanks for the details here. Fedora is a bit more secure than Mint, so I was hoping to jump over there if everything worked. But I didn’t do my research about gnome extensions beforehand, so customizing the UI was a hill I didn’t expect.
Interesting, my experience was the opposite. I tried multiple gnome based distros, but I always hated it. Was ready to try and accept it to use Linux, but then I finally tried KDE and it felt like such a breath of fresh air. Granted, I haven’t used it much yet, but from the little I did, I love it so much more than gnome in every way.
If I put my Mint computer to sleep, the wifi adapter stops working completely. 🤡
First thing to do on most linux distros, but especially mint, is turn off everything sleep-related forever.
I feel like no OS can get sleep to work properly lol
Sadly, MacOS is leading the pack with sleep working as expected. This is the most cursed timeline.
And in true macOS fashion it only works if you stay within the Apple ecosystem.
Applications and sleep are intimately tied to native macOS workspaces, which are themselves cursed af.
If you use an alternative manager, like Aerospace (which reimplemented workspace/tiling), then applications cannot sleep properly, leading to severe battery drain.
Feren OS on a ThinkPad L390 sleeps and wakes perfectly. Probably because of thinkpad
SteamOS gets it mostly right
I’ve literally never had a problem with this…that I know about.
What are you all turning off?
Ha! It’s the one issue that’s been giving me the biggest headache through multiple distros. To be fair I believe most of my problems originate from Nvidia hardware and software.
I’ve been having this exact same problem. I don’t have a fix, but hey, comradery.
It’s annoying, but it isn’t feeding my data into the AIs.
Usual suspect, the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card. Milk spoils? Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Card! Freshly divorced? Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card!
Not true, sometimes it’s DNS.
Nah, it’s not DNS
Narrator: But it was DNS.
This juxtaposition.
Leaving aside Arch and Nix for the moment… imagine rating Ubuntu over Mint. The depravity of the human mind know no limits.
I don’t think this is a rating, but a diagram showing how tall the socks of the users of each distro are
unrelated, but what on green earth happened in the inbox?
They’ll never see your question
sometimes lemmy doesn’t mark messages you’ve read and replied to as read, so voyager continues to show as red. the real question isn’t “do i have the notification number” it’s “has the notification number changed”
for me, inbox zero will remain 105 until i decide to empty the whole thing
Damn, I need to buy longer socks.
You really do not. You’re all good.
damn, my socks have been shrinking
I wonder where RHEL would fall in that scale?
probably around the Fedora level, they’re fairly equivalent.
The REAL question is, where does Hanna Montana OS fall on the scale?
in 2010
EDIT: FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
Since when does Facebook have a distro?
Been using Fedora on several laptops and desktops, and haven’t had issues with wifi. Or with anything else for that matter. For me, everything in Fedora just works and never breaks.
The first bug I’ve seen was recently. Apparently an update broke the ‘shutdown and update’ function in Fedora Workstation. So now when you press it, nothing happens. Then when you try shutting down, the PC will shut down without updating. It’ll update and shutdown upon next boot. Can confirm Fedora KDE is unaffected though.
And Kinonite by extension. I updated and restarted because I like fresh kernels.
Don’t judge me, it’s my kink OK. In my sad, pathetic little white bread life in the middle of nowhere.
I remember this sort of stuff a long time ago. There were wifi drivers that were either linux, but closed source, or horror of horrors having to resort to ndiswrapper…
Of course, the Ubuntu derivatives made this easy enough by just including it, but Fedora was much more purist about open source and so wouldn’t even tell you about rpm-fusion, let alone enable proprietary drivers for basic network access.
Now Fedora has edged a bit more practical and proactively let’s users know about how to add proprietary stuff and the wifi industry takes Linux seriously, if not for desktop use then for all the embedded use cases they would be left out of without good Linux support. Fedora is still a bit far on the ‘purist’ side still (try to play a lot of media using dnf provided software, it will tend to break), but not as hard as it used to be)
Am I the only MF that prefers Fedora over the other distros?
Nope. I bounced through about 5 distros before settling on Fedora. I’ve been on a little over a year and no real complains from me.
Nope, there are dozens of us. Dozens!
I’ve been using Fedora for a long time because it’s actually up to date and tends to have the best of what the open source community has to offer, while still having some opinionated defaults to make things run smoothly.
Never had a problem with WIFI drivers. NVIDIA on Wayland however… (not Fedora’s fault the proprietary drivers are garbage, its done what it can by at least making them easy to install)
If Arch didn’t exist, I’d probably be a Fedora user
Fedora gnome was the definition of perfect. It was so stable that it was boring. The KDE one on the other hand…… Let’s say it has never worked for more than a day for me.
“btw can you please install the latest nvidia drivers?”
“latest?”
switches back to Fedora
Why do I need latest? Why do I need even know version of a driver for my hardware?
Since the drivers continue to be worked on after the release of the hardware. Some new functionality for new games may be developed. Or bugs may be fixed.
Seems like a dishonest question. Unless you are only using GPU compute professionally with out of date software.
Someone I personally knew almost gave up on Linux because their mint install would have screen tearing issues due to an outdated driver module and kernel, since Mint follows close to Ubuntu’s kernel releases which are slow.
Cutting edge and bleeding edge kernels is one of Linux’s biggest strengths because 99% of driver modules are in the kernel, so keeping it up to date will significantly reduce the chances of issues with your hardware, especially if its anything new.
You dont need to know the version, but knowing that your updates are based on cutting edge latest stable is what can save you from driver headaches.
It’s useful to have updated drivers if a game or something isn’t working, otherwise it’s hardly a big deal, just need to keep the sysyem as up to date as it needs to run your sysyem, i’m on mint since October and never uad any headaches, even updates drivers recently to try to resolve an issue.
Literally describes my last couple weeks distro hopping
Shopping for wifi adapters is not fun
TLDR; make quadruple sure that the card you’re buying uses an Intel chip, and that the chip has drivers in the kernel version you use.
I use mint, btw
