this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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What makes this weirder is that while all older distros have this problem, none of them come anywhere close to being as bad. This is probably partly because of Ubuntu's start as a noob-friendlier distro, but I don't think that completely explains it.
Being noob friendly is why I chose it.
I'm not a programmer or a sysadmin, My linux experience is entirely contained to the past 5-6ish years I've used it to avoid using Windows 10.
Every single problem I've had, no matter how ultimately minor it was, has been a enormous fuckin ordeal to figure out and solve, in large part due to the 15+ years of ancient, non-relevant knowledge.
So I'm probably gonna end up switching distros soon, since i'm tired of troubleshooting and still have weird, minor shit happening.. Just frustrated a bout doing it because I finally got steamtinkerlauncher working properly, which was an ordeal in and of itself.
And its gotten to the point I even hate talking about the issues I have, cause someone inevitable swoops in and be like "Well, just run (command) -help" to figure out what to do, and I'm all like.. okay, fucking great. That doesnt help because I dont know whats fucking wrong. Cant use -help if I dont know what command i need to fix this weird problem that no internet searches are showing me any kind of solution or even a hint for.
edit Sorry, apparently my annoyance boiled over into a rant.
I feel you. I really do. User friendliness is what got me to try out Ubuntu in the first place. My Open Source OS journey has been long and weird, but we have that in common.
If you're looking for an OS with good documentation that's going to make your Steam gaming easier, I can suggest Nobara. It's easy to install, and while it's own documentation is a little sparse (it's less than a year or so old), you can use Fedora documentation 99% of the time. And as a bonus, steamtinkerlaunch is a one click install on Nobara. I think. I did my install for my gaming rig like 8 months ago, so don't quote me.
More importantly, though, is that Nobara has a friendly discord filled with helpful folks, including Glorious Eggroll himself - the guy who made Nobara, and a contributor to many Open Source projects and maintainer for Proton-GE which, if you use Steam on Linux, you might have heard of.
As a bonus, the Fedora community is helpful too, as evidenced by me 😀.
I was considering Linux mint, since its something new, but still on a familiar debian base and and familiarity with things like ppas which make getting software easier than compiling it.
but I'll read up more on Nobara. Just concerned that I'll be back to day 1 know nothing switching bases.
I'm a long time Debian user, and I switched to Fedora when 38 was released because I wanted to try something new and shiny (well, Gnome 44 mostly).
It was kind of disappointing. With Debian, I had to work to get it perfectly functional on my laptop. Fedora just... worked happily out of the box. Almost nothing to tweak.
I don't know the nature of your problems and solutions, but be assured that the knowledge you gained will still be useful. Nowadays most distros are more similar than they are different. I successfully used Arch Wiki and Arch Forums on Debian issues, because even if they are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, their building blocks are basically the same.
It's not that bad, really. Nobara is Fedora based, and has access to their large package base. Nobara's custom update tools are also excellent.
Fedora doesn't have PPAs, but it does have COPR, which is kinda like halfway between PPAs and Arch's AUR. Lots of packages. I hardly ever compile anything from source these days.
Okay okay, stop twisting my arm! :p
I'll back up my files and switch to Nobara as soon as I beat the game I'm playing, since I dont want to risk having that get borked again