I recently (two weeks ago) decided to finally switch from Windows to plain Ubuntu as a daily desktop. I'm well experienced with it from managing servers and have used it occasionally at a desktop in the past.

I've had - and continue to have, a ton of minor and a few large problems.

First, wifi. Apparently there's often problems with Intel killer 6e laptop cards, which required me to enter loads of console commands that I didn't understand to fix. I did finally fix it, but I'm not sure exactly what did it. A couple of hours work over a few days to fix this.

I work from an external monitor plugged into my laptops HDMI port with the lid closed, and it seems Ubuntu is massively confused by this. I'm constantly having to open the laptop to get a login screen to show, then logging in and closing it, then opening it again because now the desktop doesn't show.

My laptop screen resets to minimum brightness every restart.

I did a driver update and suddenly my external monitor wasn't recognized at all so I had to roll back.

And at least several hours more on other issues. Oh yes, if I suspend then try to wake, I get a black screen or occasionally the Ubuntu startup screen but can never get back to the login screen until I do a hard reset.

The Bluetooth audio was set to headset quality (mono) and the only way to fix this, following 20 minutes research, was to install a different audio settings app.

All of these things, I can fix. I don't want to, but as a technically savvy user I can do it, with enough hours put in. But there's no way I'd suggest anyone else in my family or friends to use it unless they clearly tell me that they would enjoy tinkering with their operating system.

Ooof! That sounds rough and also makes me realise a huge oversight in my original comment.

I've been using linux on desktop for about 12 years and will always pick a laptop that's known to have good compatibility otherwise the endless hardware issues are a big timesuck.

Some distros are better than others for hardware support but I think it'd be disingenious to make out like any solve the problem.

If you have a laptop with good support, or even better, a linux specific one, it really is an experience that can work out of the box.

Maybe that's a big part the appeal of being buy-in-a-shoppable. Somebody has figured out for you what works, and you don't have to be your own guinea pig.

> Some distros are better than others for hardware support

I did some reading around the and consensus seemed to be that Ubuntu should be one of these. Do you have any suggestions that are likely to have better hardware support than Ubuntu?

No, it's not a distro problem. You need to use a laptop that has good Linux support, one that has hardware well supported by the mainline kernel or through well-maintained easily installable modules. System76 makes such laptops, for example.

I ran Linux on the desktop and then laptop for 8 years ish when I was younger. It was a huge timesink. It taught me a lot about how systems actually work (what is a kernel, what is a kernel driver, why does crashing kernel code hurt worse than crashing user code, what is pid 1, why do daemons double fork, etc etc) but now as an adult with a busy life I don't see myself using Linux like this again. I can probably debug issues much faster than I could when I was younger but the last thing I want to do with my free time is figure out why runit couldn't spawn the log service to tail my logs for the service that I tried to run.

maybe pop os in that I think they ship some additional drivers in top of Ubuntu's, but I doubt it'd make a difference. Ubuntu was a great choice for driver support, but like you found, that sadly doesn't mean everything will work on every machine.

Hardware problems are a frequently understated barrier to switching, particularly for laptop users. Long time Linux users are generally selecting their machines with Linux compatibility in mind and so don’t see much of this, but the corpus of potential switchers haven’t, and it creates a lot of friction. It’s difficult to convince people to replace their perfectly good laptop with something else just for the sake of trying out an alternative OS.

Also, it's pretty common to install linux to revive old laptops that might have outdated hardware.

I guess that's a different baseline?

If I try out linux and it breaks my laptop, I'm mad at linux.

If windows stops supporting my laptop, or updates make it unusable, and linux makes it usable, I love linux.

Yes, this is an important point. In future, I will always buy Linux compatible laptops and I'm sure most of these problems will go away.

> from Windows to plain Ubuntu

It is unfortunate that Ubuntu still has the mind share it does. I abandoned it a while ago as too unreliable. It is effectively Debian testing (they call it testing for a reason) with proprietary addons that have even less testing than Debian testing.

Originally, Debian making it difficult to get non open source firmware during installation was a reason for using Ubuntu, but now even that justification gone. Meanwhile Ubuntu anti-features like snap accumulate.

I agree that I'm not happy with the startup times of snap packages. But these are not the reason for my problems, and if Snap was the only problem I have, well I can just not use it. Probably even uninstall if I want, change to KDE and a different app store.

People keep suggesting that I try their favorite distro and that it won't have these problems. But when I dig a bit deeper into any of the suggestions there's plenty of recent threads like mine.

As someone else above said, people who plan to run Linux will choose hardware that's known to work, and won't have these problems. That's the key, it's not about the distro you choose, it's the hardware.

Fedora might support your hardware better, (newer kernel) and not have snap.

Windows also sometimes has these kinds of problems. Plus I usually have to dig up many commands to turn off user-hostile defaults or free up a quarter terabyte of disk space wasted. Was an obscure diskadm cli I’ve never heard of.

The perfect OS doesn’t exist, maybe not even a good one.

> Windows also sometimes has these kinds of problems

Undeniably, over many years of using Windows I've had many problems. But never this amount on a fresh install. And most windows problems can be fixed with driver updates or changed settings. Linux problems pretty much all require you to be comfortable entering console commands, which the vast majority of people are not.

As mentioned, every windows install will want to run obscure disk cli to free up tons of disk space and probably a few powershells to stop ads, telemetry. Sometimes malware mitigations. Not all of them have gui options.

Every OS I spend several hours setting up. At least with Linux I’ve automated it.

> Not all of them have gui options.

Well, I just run a tool like ShutUp10 once after installing Windows and 99% of these problems are gone.

However, I'm well aware of those problems with Windows. I switched, after all. However, you know what Windows doesn't do? Force me to keep opening my laptop screen to get a login on my external monitor, which I don't think is fixable. Or reset my laptop screen brightness to minimum every day so that I can't even see the login prompt without closing the curtains.

It is probably fixable. I had to write a script with xrandr run by lightdm at boot, to fix my monitor config. One is in portrait mode.

There might be a better solution, but I found this one first and stopped.

It's good to know that "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" still holds true after all these years. From the way many talk, I honestly thought it might have changed.

Not really, last year I was foolish enough to have bought a NUC without properly checking its Linux support, because I assumed usually the problems nowadays would only be laptop related, on desktop like systems we're pretty safe.

Never managed to find a distribution that supported the UEFI bios, booting from an internal SSD, only from external storage via SSD, after so many attempts across a few months, I also managed to burn something on the motherboard.

Conclusion, 300 euros thrown into the local recycling center.

I know Linux systems since 1995's Summer, do regularly manage Linux servers at work, and still this thing failed on me, now imagine regular people.

The things you mentioned work fine in Linux. There’s one exception, in that brand new intel/amd hardware typically takes three to six months to get decent support. During that time one should use bleeding-edge Fedora which should get better every week.