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This makes me want to move back to Linux, but last time I tried Ubuntu (2020) there were lots of little annoyances. Off the top of my head: - Screen tearing. I

This makes me want to move back to Linux, but last time I tried Ubuntu (2020) there were lots of little annoyances. Off the top of my head: - Screen tearing. I Googled around and installed the Nvidia drivers for my laptop, but it never went away. - No detection of tablet mode. - No auto screen rotation. - Slow Blender rendering. Probably a PEBKAC with my driver setup, but it just worked in Windows and it was easy to select Nvidia vs. integrated graphics. - MS Teams shared my desktop as a giant blur. - LibreOffice is still bad and incompatible with what my company does in Office, though that may matter less with Office Online. Is there a distro that Just Works more so than Ubuntu? I'm sure I could have solved all of the above with enough time and effort, but I'm not in a good position to do that right now.

FpUser 5y ago
Snap alone is enough for me not to use new Ubuntu. I am sticking to Linux Mint for now for my own desktop setups. Servers are a bit different story.
hawthornio 5y ago
Elementary OS is positioning itself a Linux distro that Just Works TM, but I haven’t used it anywhere near as much as Ubuntu/Gnome so I can’t definitively say.
- pjerem 5y ago
  For what it's worth, Elementary OS is really a cool OS as long as you don't expect to be able to customize it. Its UI and ergonomics are really different from the Gnome/KDE/XFCE and is really consciously designed. The trade of is that you have to love it or hate it because you can barely change anything, but it deserves to be loved. I'm back to Windows for an undetermined span of time but I'll gladly reinstall ElementaryOS as soon as I can probably pay for it.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    How is it really different from GNOME? The interface looks like modified GNOME, the apps look similar to their GNOME counterparts, and they even refer GNOME in their HIG.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      It's just simply not Gnome at all. It's not even a fork. Most of the base apps are developed by the ElementaryOS team (with their own framework on top of Gtk) and they are really impressive. So, listing differences with Gnome would be like comparing Gnome & KDE.
- Brakenshire 5y ago
  I don’t think they put any emphasis on tablet or 2-in-1 support, so might not be a good choice for this person. I think it’s an excellent choice for a standard desktop or laptop.
rvanlaar 5y ago
- Give Pop!_OS a try. It's main selling point is that it just works with modern hardware. Aside, don't expect switching OS-es to be a walk in the park. Most things will work as good as on windows. You'll probably have to do some custom configuration for your laptop. Tweaks for your specific laptop model will be documented on the arch wiki.
- cassepipe 5y ago
  I don't know. I installed Linux Mint three years ago and it was kinda of a walk in the park. Only now I don't have to take care of my OS (why is it slow? What are those things running on startup? Is this malware? Etc. Is this program legit?). It just gets out of the way.
coldpie 5y ago
I'm a long-time Linux user and my job is to develop open source software primarily used on Linux. My suggestion to you is to get a Mac. I'm not aware of any Linux distros that are suitable for non-developers. I wish it was otherwise, but it just isn't.
- zorrolovsky 5y ago
  > I'm not aware of any Linux distros that are suitable for non-developers This is quite a bold statement. I'm not a developer and recently installed a number of linux distros to try which is best. Some of them were actually easier to install than Windows or MacOS. For example Linux Mint was a breeze, and I used full disk encryption and other 'advanced' settings.
- FpUser 5y ago
  Actually I put Linux on my mother's laptop. Since then the amount of support calls got down to nothing. Her use is of course limited to just web browsing / email.
- skohan 5y ago
  I think it depends on what you do with it. I have a linux machine which I use primarily for Steam and watching movies, and I feel like anyone could do it (except for the install of course, you would need a technical friend for that)
npteljes 5y ago
Regarding office, ONLYOFFICE promises higher degree compatibility with MS formats than the other offices, while still being open source.
1337turtle 5y ago
Sounds like you have a more complex 2in1 setup. Linux isn't great for those since those system are heavily designed to be used with Windows and will require the Linux community to play catchup and implement the correct drivers for Linux to play nice on it. Recommend a simpler laptop that is well known to work well with Linux. There are resources out there to determine how well Linux will run on it before purchase.
- fouric 5y ago
  If someone asks for a software/OS recommendation, "get better hardware" is generally not the right advice.
  - 1337turtle 5y ago
    Correction, I'm saying get worse hardware. :) I just worry about people swearing off Linux forever when they can't successfully install Linux on their Microsoft Duo Surface that just released a month ago, and then they post about the horrible time they had with Linux. In the past decade I have never had any troubles installing Ubuntu on any computer I've owned. It is plug and play most of the time! But nobody talks about when things work just fine :)
int_19h 5y ago
Linux Mint and Zorin OS are two examples. But I still wouldn't say they're "good enough".
C19is20 5y ago
...try being an audio engineer on Linux.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  It's awesome? It's how I do all my audio.
HKH2 5y ago
This might fix screen tearing for you (it did for me anyway): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoid_screen_tearing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoi...
exceptione 5y ago
As a long time Windows user that tried Linux in the past with no avail, I finally found my love in Manjaro KDE. Because it is based on Arch, it is closer to cutting edge which is a good thing wrt hardware support. I especially love that you can just switch kernels from the GUI. The good thing is that it Arch with safety belts, with a wide array of curated packages. If you feel more adventurous, you can also reach out for arch packages from the same package manager. Being on KDE means I am ahead of Windows. Using MS Teams in ungoogled chromium for maximum privacy works. I have no experience with Nvidea drivers, but I see a lot of hits at disabling the Nouveau driver. But again, this might be solved with running a more recent kernel. It's not as simple as Windows, but my time investment to read the release notices is minimal. An other benefit is that your system doesn´t slow as your os install ages.
- chokma 5y ago
  I tried Manjaro recently - just in time to run into the Nvidia update disaster (black screen on boot, broken X-server due to system update). And no amount of fiddling with the config files and nouveau / proprietary drivers brought the system back into a usable state. So back to Ubuntu it was...
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    I'm not arguing that this will necessarily fix your woes as I have no experience with any Nvidia hardware but one of the greatest but in hindsight obvious discoveries I made with regards to management of my Arch based system was discovering how to downgrade packages. Once you know how to do this, it's a lot less painful having to deal with broken updates - which are pretty rare anyway. I personally cannot stand using Ubuntu and it seems I'm not alone in that regard. I hear nonstop issues with it from my friends who tried it and I attribute a lot of failed Linux converstions of people thanks to it. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Downgrading_packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Downgrading_packages
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Same exact experience here. Now I get why people told me to avoid rolling release distros. I used Manjaro entirely because of its i3/bspwm DE versions. Ubuntu now has a good equivalent in the form of regolith. Avoid Manjaro if you care about long term system stability
tpoacher 5y ago
for me Linux Mint was the first (and therefore last) linux that worked so well that there was no point experimenting with other linuxes anymore. it's supposed to be "ubuntu-based", but the usability difference between the two is night and day.
- zorrolovsky 5y ago
  I agree! Linux Mint is very easy to install and to use. I tried both the ubuntu and debian flavours and I love the simplicity and elegance of cinnamon.
Macha 5y ago
> - No detection of tablet mode. Well, Microsoft are getting rid of tablet mode in Windows 11, so soon it will be at parity :p
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
I've found WPS Office to be pretty good after trying LibreOffice and having some compatibility issues. I use Ubuntu, but don't do anything heavy graphical, so don't have those issues you're mentioning and it works great for me.
philliphaydon 5y ago
I had the issue with Screen Tearing, its baffling to me that out of the box Windows with no GPU drivers for AMD/Nvidia does not suffer from this issue, yet this issue has existed on Linux since the dawn of time. However, moving from Ubuntu to Manjaro (KDE Plasma) based on recommendation from someone on HN, oh it almost /just works/ without issues. There's just little gotchas along the way but atleast it doesn't make me want to tear my hair out like Ubuntu flavours do.
COGlory 5y ago
So for some quick background, I currently operate a number of Linux PCs. 3 GUI workstations at work. 2 headless servers (one at work, one at home). 2 desktop PCs (one at work, one at home). I also have multiple laptops running Linux (including a Dell XPS with Nvidia graphics), and I have a PinePhone (Linux phone). I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable. There are two major things in the way: 1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia. 2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed. On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs. That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).
cultofmetatron 5y ago
been disappointed by everything except PopOS
mackrevinack 5y ago
pop os seems to work better out of the box than ubuntu. i use pop myself and screen rotation works ok (x1 yoga gen4) but i get screen taring every once in a while. zorin os is another one to check out. ui is more like windows and i think it has a tablet mode

FpUser 5y ago

Snap alone is enough for me not to use new Ubuntu. I am sticking to Linux Mint for now for my own desktop setups. Servers are a bit different story.

hawthornio 5y ago

Elementary OS is positioning itself a Linux distro that Just Works TM, but I haven’t used it anywhere near as much as Ubuntu/Gnome so I can’t definitively say.

pjerem 5y ago
For what it's worth, Elementary OS is really a cool OS as long as you don't expect to be able to customize it. Its UI and ergonomics are really different from the Gnome/KDE/XFCE and is really consciously designed. The trade of is that you have to love it or hate it because you can barely change anything, but it deserves to be loved. I'm back to Windows for an undetermined span of time but I'll gladly reinstall ElementaryOS as soon as I can probably pay for it.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  How is it really different from GNOME? The interface looks like modified GNOME, the apps look similar to their GNOME counterparts, and they even refer GNOME in their HIG.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    It's just simply not Gnome at all. It's not even a fork. Most of the base apps are developed by the ElementaryOS team (with their own framework on top of Gtk) and they are really impressive. So, listing differences with Gnome would be like comparing Gnome & KDE.
Brakenshire 5y ago
I don’t think they put any emphasis on tablet or 2-in-1 support, so might not be a good choice for this person. I think it’s an excellent choice for a standard desktop or laptop.

rvanlaar 5y ago

- Give Pop!_OS a try. It's main selling point is that it just works with modern hardware. Aside, don't expect switching OS-es to be a walk in the park. Most things will work as good as on windows. You'll probably have to do some custom configuration for your laptop. Tweaks for your specific laptop model will be documented on the arch wiki.

cassepipe 5y ago
I don't know. I installed Linux Mint three years ago and it was kinda of a walk in the park. Only now I don't have to take care of my OS (why is it slow? What are those things running on startup? Is this malware? Etc. Is this program legit?). It just gets out of the way.

coldpie 5y ago

I'm a long-time Linux user and my job is to develop open source software primarily used on Linux. My suggestion to you is to get a Mac. I'm not aware of any Linux distros that are suitable for non-developers. I wish it was otherwise, but it just isn't.

zorrolovsky 5y ago
> I'm not aware of any Linux distros that are suitable for non-developers This is quite a bold statement. I'm not a developer and recently installed a number of linux distros to try which is best. Some of them were actually easier to install than Windows or MacOS. For example Linux Mint was a breeze, and I used full disk encryption and other 'advanced' settings.
FpUser 5y ago
Actually I put Linux on my mother's laptop. Since then the amount of support calls got down to nothing. Her use is of course limited to just web browsing / email.
skohan 5y ago
I think it depends on what you do with it. I have a linux machine which I use primarily for Steam and watching movies, and I feel like anyone could do it (except for the install of course, you would need a technical friend for that)

npteljes 5y ago

Regarding office, ONLYOFFICE promises higher degree compatibility with MS formats than the other offices, while still being open source.

1337turtle 5y ago

Sounds like you have a more complex 2in1 setup. Linux isn't great for those since those system are heavily designed to be used with Windows and will require the Linux community to play catchup and implement the correct drivers for Linux to play nice on it. Recommend a simpler laptop that is well known to work well with Linux. There are resources out there to determine how well Linux will run on it before purchase.

fouric 5y ago
If someone asks for a software/OS recommendation, "get better hardware" is generally not the right advice.
- 1337turtle 5y ago
  Correction, I'm saying get worse hardware. :) I just worry about people swearing off Linux forever when they can't successfully install Linux on their Microsoft Duo Surface that just released a month ago, and then they post about the horrible time they had with Linux. In the past decade I have never had any troubles installing Ubuntu on any computer I've owned. It is plug and play most of the time! But nobody talks about when things work just fine :)

int_19h 5y ago

Linux Mint and Zorin OS are two examples. But I still wouldn't say they're "good enough".

C19is20 5y ago

...try being an audio engineer on Linux.

fartcannon 5y ago
It's awesome? It's how I do all my audio.

HKH2 5y ago

This might fix screen tearing for you (it did for me anyway): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoid_screen_tearing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoi...

exceptione 5y ago

As a long time Windows user that tried Linux in the past with no avail, I finally found my love in Manjaro KDE. Because it is based on Arch, it is closer to cutting edge which is a good thing wrt hardware support. I especially love that you can just switch kernels from the GUI. The good thing is that it Arch with safety belts, with a wide array of curated packages. If you feel more adventurous, you can also reach out for arch packages from the same package manager. Being on KDE means I am ahead of Windows. Using MS Teams in ungoogled chromium for maximum privacy works. I have no experience with Nvidea drivers, but I see a lot of hits at disabling the Nouveau driver. But again, this might be solved with running a more recent kernel. It's not as simple as Windows, but my time investment to read the release notices is minimal. An other benefit is that your system doesn´t slow as your os install ages.

chokma 5y ago
I tried Manjaro recently - just in time to run into the Nvidia update disaster (black screen on boot, broken X-server due to system update). And no amount of fiddling with the config files and nouveau / proprietary drivers brought the system back into a usable state. So back to Ubuntu it was...
- vimacs2 5y ago
  I'm not arguing that this will necessarily fix your woes as I have no experience with any Nvidia hardware but one of the greatest but in hindsight obvious discoveries I made with regards to management of my Arch based system was discovering how to downgrade packages. Once you know how to do this, it's a lot less painful having to deal with broken updates - which are pretty rare anyway. I personally cannot stand using Ubuntu and it seems I'm not alone in that regard. I hear nonstop issues with it from my friends who tried it and I attribute a lot of failed Linux converstions of people thanks to it. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Downgrading_packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Downgrading_packages
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Same exact experience here. Now I get why people told me to avoid rolling release distros. I used Manjaro entirely because of its i3/bspwm DE versions. Ubuntu now has a good equivalent in the form of regolith. Avoid Manjaro if you care about long term system stability

tpoacher 5y ago

for me Linux Mint was the first (and therefore last) linux that worked so well that there was no point experimenting with other linuxes anymore. it's supposed to be "ubuntu-based", but the usability difference between the two is night and day.

zorrolovsky 5y ago
I agree! Linux Mint is very easy to install and to use. I tried both the ubuntu and debian flavours and I love the simplicity and elegance of cinnamon.

Macha 5y ago

> - No detection of tablet mode. Well, Microsoft are getting rid of tablet mode in Windows 11, so soon it will be at parity :p

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

I've found WPS Office to be pretty good after trying LibreOffice and having some compatibility issues. I use Ubuntu, but don't do anything heavy graphical, so don't have those issues you're mentioning and it works great for me.

philliphaydon 5y ago

I had the issue with Screen Tearing, its baffling to me that out of the box Windows with no GPU drivers for AMD/Nvidia does not suffer from this issue, yet this issue has existed on Linux since the dawn of time. However, moving from Ubuntu to Manjaro (KDE Plasma) based on recommendation from someone on HN, oh it almost /just works/ without issues. There's just little gotchas along the way but atleast it doesn't make me want to tear my hair out like Ubuntu flavours do.

COGlory 5y ago

So for some quick background, I currently operate a number of Linux PCs. 3 GUI workstations at work. 2 headless servers (one at work, one at home). 2 desktop PCs (one at work, one at home). I also have multiple laptops running Linux (including a Dell XPS with Nvidia graphics), and I have a PinePhone (Linux phone). I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable. There are two major things in the way: 1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia. 2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed. On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs. That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).

cultofmetatron 5y ago

been disappointed by everything except PopOS

mackrevinack 5y ago

pop os seems to work better out of the box than ubuntu. i use pop myself and screen rotation works ok (x1 yoga gen4) but i get screen taring every once in a while. zorin os is another one to check out. ui is more like windows and i think it has a tablet mode