Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here’s a quick summary of my situation:
I’m thinking about what distro to put onto my new Laptop, which will be used for University, Work, and just general daily usage. I am currently using EndeavourOS on my main PC and have been decently satisfied, but I want to experiment more. I’ve already asked if Arch was fine for this situation, to which the answer was a general “Yes, but keep x in mind” and I’ve asked about NixOS, where the answer was generally a no.
I’ve been looking around a bit more, and now I’m kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven’t quite decided). It seems to be cutting edge, compared to Arch’s (and by extension EndeavourOS’s) bleeding edge, and I’m wondering what you all think of it. From what I can gather it has basically all traits which people used to enjoy in Ubuntu, before Canonical dropped the ball on that. While it’s not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent, but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR and reduced applicability of the Arch Wiki?
I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
Edit: I feel like I need to clarify, I know about the difference between EndeavourOS and Arch, I mostly just brought it up as a note that I am somewhat familiar with arch-based systems, and as a question of if it’d be stupid to just go with raw Arch, as EndeavourOS is basically the same, but with a more comfortable installer. I should have specified that more clearly in the first place, my apologies.
Controversial opinion: unless your university studies and work is in OS development, then you should go for Windows or Mac. You won’t have energy or time to keep fixing your laptop OS when an update breaks the Bluetooth driver or whatever when you have a class to attend and assignments to do
While not choosing a bleeding edge distro is a good idea, there are plenty of stable Linux distros to choose from. And it’s not like Windows is a paragon of stability either. And buying a Mac is a whole other story.
I agree with this in general, but you still may want to consider using Windows or Mac if there’s university only software that is Windows/Mac-based and doesn’t play nicely with VMs, which is really common in test-taking software (since it’s essentially spyware). An alternative would be dual-booting if you want to deal with that.
The reason I say this is that when I went back to school and started course work, there was an online class that mandated the use of certain test-taking software. I tried to get it to work in a VM (by masking the clues of being in a VM), and it kept shutting me down. I ultimately had to borrow a friend’s laptop to take all of my quizzes and tests, which was a real pain. Thankfully, I only had that one class like that, but any others would have driven me to get a cheap throw-away Windows-only box.
In the end, I’d stay away from bleeding-edge for school work, so Fedora is probably your better bet, but there may come a time that you will need to use Windows (much to your chagrin).
Yeah, I had sound and printing break on Windows, too. And my mom’s Windows PC breaks every year and a half. I’d say go for linux if you’re comfortable with that, it’s pretty robust. Or MacOS that also seems not to break.
(Of course something like Arch or EndeavourOS is more complicated and may break. Fedora, Debian, Mint … will be a better choice for stability. My Debian install runs without mayor issues for 5 years now. If you don’t do silly stuff an mess with the system, they’ll outperform windows.)
Most people choose an OS because they’re used to that specific workflow and know the quirks and how to get around. That’s why many peoole use Microsoft, not because it’s better. School/College/University is a good time to try something. After that you’re pretty much stuck.
I’ve literally never had issues like this with Linux updates, tbf I use Debian and Debian derivatives so maybe that’s why (Debian on my laptop, Ubuntu server on my nas/server, Debian and Mint for my 3d printers). On the other hand I’ve had horrible experience with Bluetooth in windows for audio, some devices losing audio mid meeting but remaining connected for examole.
A better advice would be: Don’t install updates when you have a class to attend and assignments to do. There is always a risk of breaking something on any OS.
Honnestly when i was still using windows. It broke so much more then linux ever did. Having windows updates break and forcing it to roll back was never fun to say the least.
If it has to be stable and keep running arch might not be the best choice. But fedora debian or perhaps opensuse would do just fine.
This is the right answer.
What are you studying OP?
My opinion has been to install PopOS on all my laptops. It’s consistently needed the least amount of fixing to get things like fan curves, or keyboard backlights, etc working
Arch in desktop.