Ubuntu is outdated linux, it part of Debian-family, which goes by the misleading name 'stable'. Its not stable like a table. Its stable like software versions are frozen, despite bugs being fixed.
Fedora isnt Arch, I think most Debian-family users don't realize they are unrelated. Fedora is just well maintained and generally up to date.
I switched to Fedora this year, and I've been super pleasantly surprised. There are some sharp edges (Mostly due to Wayland and Flatpaks), but I don't think I'll be going back to Debian any time soon. Things seem way more stable than on Ubuntu.
In your experience, does Fedora handle these better than Ubuntu?
edit: I use it on a thinkpad, ymmv
Tried again a few months ago and it's a breeze with an llm creating all the commands and code and troubleshooting.
eg vibe coded a text transcriber similar to windows Voice Typing.
I recommend for people that want things to not change and not get new bugs every update to use an LTS distro like Kubuntu and only get latest kernels or drivers from a PPA or upstream if you really have to. I am not running the latest KDE stuff and I feel fine, I am not suffering in pain for some cool new feature in Plasma and some new bug, I am comfortable with the existing features and existing bugs.
Ironically, my best experience so far in that regard is an arch variant (CachyOS).
That said, people shouldn't be afraid of experimenting to find the best software for their purposes, and something like Linux Mint is still a great option to recommend to people who are new to Linux.
There are some valid usecases to use rolling or some bleeding edge distro, like if you want to contribute to KDE or similar project you would want to track latests library versions, but for doing say a web dev job and soem enterteminent an LTS distro works better, you do not upgrade and you have the surprise that GNOME removed yet some new feature you were using, or soem stuff in Plasma broke and now you get a ton of notifications about something not working, or maybe you did not read the Arch forums before upgrading and you had cool package Y that conflicts with cool package Z and now your system is unbootable and you need to fix it instead of doing your actual work. (Arch fans should first Google Arch upgrade briked my system before commenting that this never happened to them).
Btw I used Arch in the past too when I had more free time and loved thinkering with my system.
I want to have VMs that are kind of like Arch but a little bit more stable, yet have very latest versions of everything I need with minimal risk (no need for the bleeding edge at all times; Manjaro does this semi-okay with its two weeks grace period).
I recommend docker-compose based tools, especially dockge [1]. It drastically cuts down on the surface of weird things you have to deal with. Just put up a reasonable distro (I recommend Debian here, since Fedora tends to get some SELinux issues which would confuse beginners), install docker, and run it. You don't have to touch anything else system-wise (maybe except setting up encryption when installing)
Most self-hostable services provide docke-compose files, which you can just paste in with some customizations, and run it from there.
Tailscale for external access is probably the easiest solution.
I got my brother, who's not a techie and who lives at the other end of the world, to install Proxmox and get GPU passthrough working.
> Just put up a reasonable distro (I recommend Debian here
Proxmox is basically Debian.
Proxmox allows to do things that are totally overkill for beginners indeed but it's still simple to use for simple stuff.
I think we should encourage beginners, like my brother, to use solutions like Proxmox, not discourage them.
Most games using anticheat won't run on VMs without a fight too. Your Proxmox supports taking a memory snapshot and restore, which would allow most cheats to work if they are convenient enough.
For every person like your brother we have many more half-serious people who need some type of reward before committing more mental effort. Wtf is a storage pool? What do I do with all these clusters, high availability thing it keeps asking about? Flattening out the learning curve is a nice benefit on its own.
The virt-manager is easy for most Desktop folks looking to drop Win11 in a frozen backing-image sandbox with a local samba folder loop-back mount (allows fake network share in Win11 or MacOS guest OS.) =3
Also, nobody should be buying an (overpriced) Raspberry Pi for self-hosting, when used mini-PCs are faster, more reliable (no SD card, better cooling), and often cheaper.
Finally, I don't think you should use Proxmox in a home setting: too much abstraction, too much overhead (mainly memory). Use Docker where it makes sense, and deploy the rest bare metal.
I'll take my turn on the soapbox to say I hope people keep posting about their adventures and misadventures in trying something new. I'd much rather be reading that then seeing yet another post on LLM-based agentic startups or pelicans riding bicycles.
I updated Nvidia drivers from version 580 to 590 on Ubuntu 24, using the additional drivers window. Rebooted. Now instead of the OS, it's booting into something called "BusyBox (initramfs). with a shell. No error message. I don't feel like dedicating an indefinite time to fixing it. Maybe now LLMs will have replaced searching forums and Stack Overflow.
It is this class of problems that has kept me from switching. I'm not sure if it would be easier to track this down, or install the OS clean again. I lament having to make this decision.
This is why everyone in the linux world has a very sour taste for nvidia. It's not their fault per-say, but they did opt to go this route versus contributing their drivers to the kernel like everyone else.
I wish I could fix the things, I'll fully cosign the beef the hacker community has for Apple on that front. That being said, I don't see myself buying a Windows laptop anytime soon.
Root cause: Ubuntu and some other distros recently switched to a GUI backend called Wayland. I don't remember upgrading, but maybe it happened during a system update? It has disabled low-level device inputs except for mouse movement. You can use window-based events instead, but IMO this is a mistake. An OS-level function shouldn't block hardware access. I want the OS to facilitate software and hardware; not create friction.
Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out.
There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.
Feel free to get in touch if you want to talk to someone (for free advice) about this porting problem you're having.
Overall it seems much more performant if that makes it any better
No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11.
I keep hearing about Wayland problems, and I pray they don't reach me when Mint switches; that the relevant problems will have been fixed by them time Mint does switch.
The workstation which I use as a server is only powered up when I need it.
> I used Syncthing for file synchronization and PiHole as my local network DNS server to block unwanted incoming traffic.
Nitpicking but a local DNS resolver doesn't block unwanted incoming traffic: it prevents unwanted domain names from resolving. Arguably if it blocks traffic then it's ongoing traffic that it blocks.
Maybe he meant that the machine running PiHole also runs a firewall? I use unbound, not PiHole, so I'm not that familiar with PiHole (maybe PiHole also acts as a firewall?).
Just one suggestion, I would put the lab network on a separate vlan and access it through a VPN (or tailscale, netbird, etc.) that way you don’t bother with any security risk and only you can access it once you are authenticated to the network, and even if you want to expose a service to the public, you can do so by reverse proxy or service-specific features like funnel from tailscale, so you replace ddns and portforwarding and keeping things secure.
>There are still issues with driver and software compatibility but it is getting better in the recent years thanks to projects like Wine and Proton .
OP, stop using outdated linux. Debian is intentionally outdated. You will never have a good experience with drivers when you are always using 2 year old kernels and software. 99.9% of humans think the word 'Stable' means bug free, but that isnt what Debian means by it.
I recommend Fedora, which is not Arch, its just up-to-date linux.
So as of today the latest "stable" release of Debian is a month old.
By contrast the last stable release of Fedora is Fedora 43, released on October 28, 2025 which four months old at this point.
Really once you get software that works all of this is pointless anyway, you have working software and you update once every year or so, or when you find you need to.
When you "need" to update is so personal that it cannot be predicted, but your FUD about Debian being universally old and outdated is clearly misleading at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
Debian Trixie, to my knowledge, comes with Linux kernel 6.12 LTS. Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel -- currently 6.18 -- to support their devices. There are also countless stabilization patches (I heard some of my acquaintances praising their Linux kernel upgrades as finally giving them access to all features of various Bluetooth periphery but did not ask for details).
Having a modern kernel is important. With Debian though, it's a friction.
Can it still be done? Sure, or at least I hope so as I want to repurpose my gaming machine as a remote worker / station and the only viable choice inside WSL2 is Debian. I do hope I can somehow make Debian install a 6.18 kernel.
Furthermore, you putting the word "need" in quotes implies non-determinism or even capriciousness -- those two cannot be further from the truth.
Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough.
...and none of that is even touching on the issue of much older versions of all software in there. I want the latest Neovim, for example. For objective developer experience reasons.
Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
Admitting that getting 6.18 on Debian is some sort of insurmountable mountain is not something I would do in public while trying to show off my expertise. I'm not running it, because I don't need a kernel that's been out for 5 minutes and offers me nothing that can't wait a month or two. I'm running what's current on testing, which is 6.17.13. It's about a minute of work to switch to testing. I run stable on all my servers, and testing on my laptops, it is a triviality. But to all you bleeding edge software people, it's somehow rocket surgery.
> Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel
To run the latest version of Progress Quest. Need biggest number available.
> Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough.
So, it's really still Windows, then. I assume you've moved from spending years ranting about how Linux people were purist server admins and Windows was for users and just worked, and now you've chosen the same posture after being pushed out of Windows.
> Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
You're not a typical user. Most users want a functional computer, not the largest numbers they can find.
All the best.
We're so fucked from a security perspective.
This is the point where I'm supposed to describe my self-hosting solution on my so-called homelab, where my blog lives. I won't, because it's both stupid in smart ways and smart in stupid ways, therefore it sucks all the way.
Self-hosting is like any hobby. Half-ass it and you'll half-like it.
I've been doing it for several decades now, it doesn't suck at all for me.
Personally, I self host because the benefits I receive simply aren't available anywhere else at the level of quality I've come to expect - Jellyfin is a great media player, it's free, and I don't want to switch. Pihole provides ad protection and privacy for my whole home network. It's also free. Homeassistant is amazing, and free. Etc etc.
Only if you don't care about your time or if your media collection is tiny.
Don't get me wrong, I love my 20 TB hard drives full of Linux ISOs, but it's a hard sell on anyone who doesn't have 'dicking about with computers' as their hobby. Regular old piracy using torrents has been a easier sell in my experience, once you can get over the hurdle of getting someone familiar with using a torrent client and the relevant search bar. Popcorn Time back in the day made that hurdle trivial. Getting people to use Jellyfin isn't hard. Getting someone to be the family/friend group Jellyfin sysadmin is a significantly tougher sell.
Pihole and the like is an easier sell, since it can be mostly set and forget, but it's not free unless you already have a computer which isn't doing anything, and even if you do, that computer isn't guaranteed to be one which has near-zero running costs when you factor in electricity.
The same sorts of problems apply to most things you can self-host.
So it really depends on the use case and many factors, if it works for you, great, otherwise and you are willing to pay some subscriptions, then be it.
And yes, you can game on linux nowadays, finally! Even get better performance due to Windows bloat. Office, OBS, internet, video...everything is working...yet it still is not there in usability.
To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE. Last time i tested it was on suse and fedora in virtualbox last year and it worked but neither distribution was there just yet in UX. This time, I downloaded the tar version from jetbrains website. I could not open it(maybe due to it being run in live cd mode in virtualbox) or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy. So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version. Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks...) and after downloading it with some arch file extension i could not install it. I could open it and see usr and bin directories but that helped me fuckall and i was not willing to tinker with this bs in 2026. Then in Aurora, it has bazaar for flatpacks, before i wasted bandwidth to download the IDE in vain again i preemptively wanted zip manager, there was pea..something. So i clicked install, it did and .. nothing. Nowhere to be found. Tried multiple times and no result. Could not find it anywhere. So I said F that and am sticking with the indian windows spyware. The devil you know and whatnot.
Maybe Cachy don't have 7z, I don't know. But Arch (its base) has it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/7-Zip , and I never had any trouble opening 7zips in any Linux either from console or any graphical tool.
https://ubuntucinnamon.org/ (recommended for new players)
https://linuxmint.com/ (recommended for students)
Ubuntu Desktop 24 LTS: Kernel 6.0.8 will work on older GPU/Laptop hardware, but OS will be deprecated in 2029
Ubuntu Desktop 26 LTS will be out in a few months: Will be supported till 2038, but note old GPU drivers may not work on more modern Linux Kernels above >6.0.15
The normal Ubuntu Desktop requires a few days to make it usable, and a lot of customization to make it enjoyable. However, network printer and webcam access is usually trivial to install. google equipment installs before you buy... ymmv
Dual boot from two SSD if you need to work on the machine. You will swear less when (not if) you break something, and not everything windows works in Wine or kvm. =3
You didn't need 7zip, you can extract compressed tars natively. In fact, IntelliJ's docs tell you exactly what command to run.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/installation-guide.html#...
sudo tar -xzf idea-*.tar.gz -C /optKDE has the "discover" app which does what it looks like you want (including installing intellij with 1 click). [1]
There's also bazaar for gnome which offers similar things [2]
Ubuntu also offers the "snap store" which similarly offers a 1 click install of apps. [3]
The mistake you made is going directly to the app distributors for installation. Because there's no unified linux it's impossible for app distributors to offer a single way to install their apps. They can't count on your PC having anything. That's why intellij distributes with a tar.
This, however, is typical in linux. Using a package manager is how you do things in standard linux, those package managers have just been typically ran by the command line.
[1] https://apps.kde.org/discover/
[2] https://github.com/kolunmi/bazaar
[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/trust-and-security-in-the-snap-store
Maybe try something more commercial like Zorin OS?
> yet it still is not there in usability
I want to wholeheartedly disagree with you. Nothing comes close to Linux in terms of usability for me, but a lot of it is about what you're used to, I've used Window's, I've used Mac, Mac I could live with, but I'll never intentionally use Windows again.
> To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE
Ok, let's begin; this one is partly JetBrains' fault, and partly yours.
You can open a terminal and type `paru jetbrains-toolbox`, hit enter a couple of times and it's installed. Don't know what `paru` is? I recommend reading the frankly excellent documentation from CachyOS[0].
> or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy
You didn't specify which Desktop Environment you chose, this is important when helping newcomers because each comes with its own set of tools; but in Gnome's (what I use) the file manager, called Nautilus, I can right-click almost any archive type and will be presented with "Extract", "Extract to..." as well as a few other options. I just looked up how KDE does it, in case you're using that, the file manager is called Dolphin, and apparently you might need to install an archive tool first such as Ark and/or 7zip, gotta give you that one, I'm a little shocked, that's a pretty shitty OOBE in my opinion, but a quick search and you'll now probably be confused because the solution is here[1] but they say to use `apt install...` which you don't have on an Arch based distro. But once you know what the file managers you do have access to are, it should be easier.
> So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version
There certainly _is_ a Linux version. `paru 7zip` and I get at least 3 legit options; the base package, an architecture optimised package, and a GUI for it, as well as a dozen or two community options. You can also try the standard arch package manager aptly named "pacman"; `sudo pacman -S 7zip` and it installs it for me after I hit enter to confirm, don't even need to choose the package. Wtf is `sudo`? That's how Administrator is typically done in Linux.
> Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks
On Gnome there is "Software" which supports Flatpaks as well as other package types; don't worry about snaps, you don't want them, and there's Octopi from CachyOS. In KDE there's a GUI called "Discover". There are a bunch of others such as Bazaar which you mentioned.
Usability really isn't an issue in Linux once you know the way of your distro; If you're used to Windows, then it's _different_, sure, and in that case I'd suggest taking an hour to read the CachyOS docs; Arch Wiki (CachyOS is based on Arch) is also an amazing resource for all things Linux, and learn a little about how software management is different, we don't (usually) pull random crap from websites, we install from package managers, and sometimes compile the source ourselves.
If you didn't choose one of the two DEs I've mentioned (Gnome, KDE), I'd recommend giving them a go, they're both very mature and usable. If you're into Discord, I can suggest hitting up the CachyOS or another distro's Discord servers, there's lots of helpful people there willing to help, if you had any other questions give me a shout.
[0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/navigation-guide/ [1] https://discuss.kde.org/t/how-to-add-extract-here-right-clic...
I think that's an artifact from running just the liveimage and not installing it fully to the VM. I'm 99% certain Ark is included in a default Cachy/KDE install.
Anyhow.. "You can open a terminal and type".. yeah, no. This is exactly what I or any other Windows/desktop user does not want to be doing on a desktop computer. Linux always promised to get rid of this "just use terminal bro", which is what being a desktop OS is all about, but it never got there..it seems.
The premise of my test was to see whether the OS is ready out of the box(the main point of a linux distribution, after all). But neither was. Again, I am not saying it is not usable. I am just saying it requires more work to be put into it from the get-go than I am willing to put in, despite having the skill and knowledge to do so.
Then stay on windows. You'll have the same issues with MacOS from time to time.
If you're willing to learn things you have plenty of options. If not? You'll be limited. Tradeoffs.