Distro hoping is fine. But there is a certain feeling you get when you can fix your own problems by reading the arch wiki
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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I love fixing arch by reading the arch wiki, or fixing ubuntu by reading the arch wiki
I tried to find a solution for my failing marriage in the arch wiki. The arch wiki instructed me that the problem was consulting the arch wiki. Thanks for saving my marriage, arch wiki!
I set up my login manager for fedora and my grub for fedora using the arch wiki....
How to enter arch wiki if no internet
On your other Arch laptop, obviously. You need multiple pre-owned ThinkPads loaded with Arch at any given time to maintain workable redundancy, just like you need several clean pairs of programming socks.
My experience has been the opposite. I built a new PC last year, and only Fedora and Arch recognized the Radeon GPU and the Intel Wi-Fi. Mint was shipping a kernel that was too old to recognize either one.
On new hardware it's generally easier to use a rolling release distro in my experience.
You're more likely to have a newer kernel and drivers that support things like wifi cards.
IMO, you shouldn't have to learn Arch just to be able to get a new PC. Eventually, people who like Ubuntu and Mint are going to want to upgrade to a new computer, and they might be in for a shock once they do. That kind of thing is what pushes people back to Windows.
If you can't install something like EndeavourOS or tumble weed then you likely were not going to be able to reload an os anyway.
Installing vanilla arch is a very useful activity to do at least once so you know how the system works but don't have to use vanilla Arch and can use any of the derivatives so long as it has the latest kernel / drivers for your hardware.
And IMO, that needs to change. Mint has released ISOs with updated kernels which does help. But expecting everybody to eventually graduate to a rolling release distro by the time they want to buy a new PC is just going to send people back to Windows.
Honestly, for a grandma distro, I'd use Fedora Silverblue nowadays. Very up to date, and you might as well uninstall the terminal for how useless it is.
Agreed. Out of all the distributions I have tried, Fedora (and its various spins and derivatives) are what tend to have everything actually work out of the box.
Me: Oh and Mint, could you also add my old printer that I can't get to work on any other OS I've tried?
Mint: Sure thing.
me: hey mint, suspend automatically.
mint: no.
me: suspend manually then.
mint: no.
me: shutdown
mint: no.
....
sudo shutdown now
sudo shutdown now
No.
For your case...
Alt + SysRq + O
My cat's favorite key combo
Ha. On Windows I had this ancient Ethernet Canon IP printer. Windows hated it, even with the supplied Canon drivers and network Utility. It always needed messing with every time to get it to show up as a printer on the network.
When I moved to OpenSUSE I went into YAST2 printer discovery. It found the printer right away, and suggested a model, and asked if I wanted to install the GutenPrint driver for it. Yes please. And do you want to announce this printer to others on your network (via CUPS) Yes. Done. Worked 100% with no Canon utilities.
If I put my Mint computer to sleep, the wifi adapter stops working completely. π€‘
First thing to do on most linux distros, but especially mint, is turn off everything sleep-related forever.
I feel like no OS can get sleep to work properly lol
Sadly, MacOS is leading the pack with sleep working as expected. This is the most cursed timeline.
If I had to guess it's because Apple controls both hard- and software. Sleep is a delicate business where both the OS and the hardware have to work together to get it right. Linux and Windows run on an endless combination of different hardware components whereas Apple knows exactly on what hardware their OS will run.
Fedora gnome was the definition of perfect. It was so stable that it was boring. The KDE one on the other handβ¦.. Letβs say it has never worked for more than a day for me.
Don't you put that evil on KDE, Ricky Bobby!!
If KDE was a woman... I'd take her out for a 3 course meal, split the bill bc she don't need no man to take care of her (or her baby), drive her home using the scenic route, walk with her from the car to her front door, then ask for consent before giving her a goodnight kiss
my wifi in mint works perfectly. getting the screen to rotate in tablet mode is another story.
Never had an issue with that, are you perhaps using an Nvidia gpu?
yep. I've used the open drivers and the Nvidia drivers. Nvidia drivers seem to work better most of the time but the screen rotation almost never works.
Weirdly, I never had an issue with screen rotation. I always keep my two side monitors in portrait mode. I found it would usually be very minor issue (usually color or compositing related), but every once in a while a new driver would just make the system unbootable and I would get to play the "boot from a thumb drive and play detective game". If I wanted to do that, I'd play Myst or some shit :)
This juxtaposition.
Iβm a big nixOS fan but Iβm also quite lazy and I will just run something like Nobara because I just want things to work out of the box and immediately be able to launch any app that I want.
Modifying everything from a single file is weirdly satisfying for me and I just stopped using it since there were some packages that just did not run on Nix.
Yeah I mean if it doesn't run what you want then it's not worth it π
How does this happen? Do not most major desktop Linux distros more or less run almost the same kernel with the same driver modules? (Except in the case of Debian being several years behind the rest).
TLDR, computer SAYS NO!
Each distro has its own flavor, and sometimes that flavor leads to things not going the way the user or even maintainer of said desktop applications intended.
But at the end of the day, there's only one program in control of all the hardware. They're all getting the kernel from the same place, the distros aren't writing their own kernels except for a few tweaks here and there.
But at the end of the day, thereβs only one program in control of all the hardware.
Is there though? There's a surprising amount of layers hidden away particularly in the UI. If any one of those layers fucks up then wifi no workie. There's also like 700 programs that all do the same thing, but not all of them work. Very fun to find out that they changed X in an update and now all the automations you had set up need updating.