I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.

I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.

On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.

Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!

Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.

There’s this neat life hack where you drink enough and forget all about the taste - and most of the previous night, to boot!

I don’t actually drink though, tastes like shit.

Is SteamOS even available for desktop PCs yet? I don’t think it is.

From the SteamOS page:

We expect most SteamOS users to get SteamOS preinstalled on a Steam Deck or device that incorporates SteamOS. The only devices officially supported on SteamOS right now are Steam Deck and Legion Go S. We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other AMD powered PC handhelds has been improved.

Until this changes, which I think is in the works, I recommend using some other popular distro.

Guix is a package manager you can install on most distros and works beside other package managers, similar to Snap and Flatpak. And it’s a distro.

Have you ever argued on the Internet?

In this economy?

You did the right thing. We in general have to willing to inconvenience ourselves to hang on to what privacy we still have. I’m sorry the situation is so difficult for you, but I applaud your determination. To thine own self be true.

Honestly? If you can, refund it and tell them why.

I basically jumped from XP to 8.1 and I was amazed at how much of an improvement 8.1 was on a technical level. Yes, the UI was horrendous, and any usability expert should have been able to tell you it was a terrible idea, but apparently they weren’t listened to. Luckily there was Classic Shell that restored a proper Start Menu, so I never had to use the horrible touch interface.

8.1 was the last good Windows (with caveats). When support ended I went back to Linux, because 10 and 11 are enshittified to all hell.

Wait, is it 2006 already?

No luck needed, it’ll go fine. You pretty obviously have all the experience you need.

I remember the first raindrop and the first acorn… I knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Linux Kernel came from Outside.

Better for what? The question in isolation is fairly meaningless.

Don’t take what Linux users say as gospel. There’s a wide variety of opinions that - yes - generally have some basis in truth, but usually it comes down to personal preference. Just because a vocal minority hates on systemd doesn’t mean you now have to switch to Devuan. FOSS is full of opinionated and passionate people, but you should always use what works for you. Don’t let others dictate how you use your computer and what code you run. Free as in freedom.

Now, having said all that, Canonical is suspect, don’t use Ubuntu. Mint is fine.

I hope this means they’ll release it on GOG.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Christ.

It was 20 years ago and Microsoft was terrible and Windows was awful. Later on I used Windows 8.1 somewhat out of necessity until it was deprecated and went back to Linux because Microsoft is terrible and Windows 10/11 is awful, but now with all kinds of invasive telemetry.

Stallman outlined our choices and told us this is where we were headed back in the 1980’s. Since then, we have consistently made the wrong decisions. All is not lost, but the situation is dire.

The choices are there, you just have to be willing to inconvenience yourself.