If you want something easy, you can install one of the “Just Works” distros. Even though Manjaro advertises themself as beginner-friendly, they certainly are far from it.
Debian was a horrible choice actually, my laptop’s WiFi card didn’t have a kernel driver available at the time. Tracking down the correct one was an interesting journey by itself, getting it compiled and loaded was another. In my 20 years of Linux experience I’ve compiled my fair share of drivers from source, but this thing was a complete disaster and simply refused to work.
I even tried Ubuntu (still feel dirty about that one): also no support out of the box.
So I needed a rolling release, as kernel support would drop fairly soon. Being downstream from Arch I reckoned any major issues will be worked out in Manjaro before hitting their release.
So far I’m actually quite happy with it, my only gripe is the stability of Pamac. The frontend tends to hang during updates from time to time or require a manual database update to show available updates again.
And of course the issue with packages not building anymore, until you clear the build cache. The (bi-) weekly reboots because of kernel updates are annoying, but something I can live with.
Meanwhile:
My W11 Pro PC: I’ll wait installing my monthly updates until you give me the okay. And I’ll wait for the reboot until you say so.
My Manjaro laptop: sorry, I couldn’t build package X. Go f*ck yourself while I provide you with no information on how to fix this.
*A manual build cache clear later*: all good! But now perform our weekly reboot.
It’s ironic, but these days Windows updates actually give me less issues AND require less reboots than Manjaro. 😞
The problem there is the word “Manjaro”
Unfortunately while they market themselves as beginner friendly that’s simply not true
If you want something easy, you can install one of the “Just Works” distros. Even though Manjaro advertises themself as beginner-friendly, they certainly are far from it.
Debian and PopOS are both great choices.
Debian was a horrible choice actually, my laptop’s WiFi card didn’t have a kernel driver available at the time. Tracking down the correct one was an interesting journey by itself, getting it compiled and loaded was another. In my 20 years of Linux experience I’ve compiled my fair share of drivers from source, but this thing was a complete disaster and simply refused to work.
I even tried Ubuntu (still feel dirty about that one): also no support out of the box.
So I needed a rolling release, as kernel support would drop fairly soon. Being downstream from Arch I reckoned any major issues will be worked out in Manjaro before hitting their release.
So far I’m actually quite happy with it, my only gripe is the stability of Pamac. The frontend tends to hang during updates from time to time or require a manual database update to show available updates again.
And of course the issue with packages not building anymore, until you clear the build cache. The (bi-) weekly reboots because of kernel updates are annoying, but something I can live with.
You should give Endeavour OS a try
Or Mint