Need help choosing a distro for laptop (again)

About a year ago I bought a secondary laptop and put Linux on it. At that time I went with Linux mint. It worked mostly fine, until I tried to upgrade to Linux Mint 22. In the process of upgrading, the upgrade tool completely bricked my bootloader. As a result, I can no longer boot into the device.

Because of what happened, I don’t feel like continue using Linux mint, and I am looking for a new distro for the device.

Core specs:
Core i7-6820HQ, 16GB RAM, Integrated Graphics, 500GB SSD
No nvidia stuff to worry about.

Things I’m considering (but open to more suggestions):

  • Pop_os!
    Many people are recommending this but I heard power management is bad on non system76 laptops

  • Manjaro
    I’m not against arch based distros and I kinda like the idea of a rolling release for a desktop system

  • Mainline Ubuntu

  • Fedora
    Something I’ve been looking to try but rpm is kind of a pain so I don’t know if it is a good idea

Try plain Debian. Or Devuan if you’re more adventurous. (Devuan is Debian w/o the systemd cr@p )

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What specifically are you wanting to do with this device? It’s clearly not your daily driver, so what is it used for? If it’s a testing/experimental machine, then try out everything.

RPM being a pain is mostly because people don’t like change… that’s actually most of the Linux community. Whether you like APT, Pacman, or Flatpak, etc, it doesn’t matter in the long run as long as it works for YOU.

For laptops I like to keep my setups simple, boring and stable, so I chose Rocky Linux, the RHEL spinoff.

It has been years and I am yet to have updates break anything.

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I do not have a preconceived notion of what a package manager should be like. Yeah rpm is “slower” because it does additional checks so that things dont break, something that I think you see the value now. Start considering Fedora.

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I liked POP Os when I used it. Overall had a decent experience. I just had general linux issues when running my favorite games, but outside of that it was perfectly fine.

I’m about to go back to linux, but going to try dual booting Bazzite this time around. Heard it’s pretty solid.

On my laptops I run Mint and never had any issues with them. Been running it roughly 5 years, but I find myself using my laptop less and less in lieu of my desktop. It’s very strange that upgrading it hosed your system. But I always keep a backup via Clonezilla just in case.

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Fedora as a daily driver here.
I think the annoyances I have come down to my overall system being “out there” (AMD and Nvidia GPU, ZFS, etc.). And Davinci wants some libraries that dont ship with Fedora.

Running Debian on my Secondary, no complaints (not even with Davinci).


Maybe I have just wandered around too much, because I have no preference whatsoever anymore.

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I like APT (I’m used to it more), personally, but yes, I don’t care as long as it functions properly (edit) and Linux in general functions properly unless you use some sub-sub-sub-derivative.

obligatory

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In my experience on a 7th gen and 8th gen intel laptop (thinkpad t470/t480):

  • Pop!_OS: Very comfy ‘normie’ distro. Updates well integrated into their app store / the DE. Things for me, by and large, ‘just worked’ - until I got a multimonitor setup. Then gaming suffered a bit, for some reason inputs would get dropped. The power management on a laptop, though, works well enough - the main thing for me that gives me pause is that it doesn’t set the battery charge thresholds on non-system76 laptops. Or does it intermittently. Normally one would install tlp for that, but both tlp and system76 recommend not running both on the same machine, as they conflict with each other. The other concern is just that 22.04 is still the current version, and whatever the next version is going to be is hung up on COSMIC’s development. Leaves the distro in a weird limbo until that is sorted out, and it’s on a very old version of GNOME in the meantime (no VRR support, for example).
  • Ubuntu: I installed 22.04 with root on ZFS and tried to do the 24.04 upgrade. it bricked itself as well. The machine was purely used to test that process, so the best I can say is normal advice for any OS upgrade on any OS – backup first, test backup, then do upgrade. :slightly_smiling_face:
  • Fedora: It was ‘fine’, I just couldn’t get past the ‘why am I using this?’ dissonance after all the redhat rugpulling. At a strictly technical level though - it pretty much just worked, for the limited things I was doing on it (a browser and a mail client). YMMV.
  • Debian (stable, specifically): Just worked, but took more setup to get to a similar level of polish as any of the above. And the software is, at present, a fair bit out of date. No firsthand experience with version to version upgrading, personally. Supposedly the next version is sometime this year.

Personally though – I’m more of a ‘least resistance’ person. I don’t really care what the package manager is, I barely touch it after the first 30 minutes of using the machine. What matters is that the things I need updated can get those updates, and that the software I use will play nice (or not, looking at you Synology and your laggish update cadences that hard nope out because kernels are too new, or specific file system requirements, etc.). But the speed of fetching and installing those updates? I just go get a drink, stretch, or do them at the end of the day and let the computer work while I sleep. :yay:

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I like Fedora (but this is just a “taste”. Like a “taste” regarding ice cream)

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I’m not the only one!

Actually same thing happened trying to go from Ubuntu 22 to 24.

Even fresh installs of the newest don’t work for me.

I stuck on Cinnamon Mint 21. It looks nice. But I also use it on my nas and most of my interactions are SSH from my windows machine.

My question is, are you looking for some specific feature, or just want something that feels good to you?

Cuz if you’re going by feel, I’d get all the USB thumb drives you have laying around and create live UBS of each of these and just test drive till I find the one I like best.

Debian has been my go-to for nearly 20 years now, I’ve only used XFCE but you can have your choice of desktops.

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Boot loaders reside on a seperate partition from your os, i cant tell you how many times i have accidentally, or an os upgrade has accidentally bricked my boot loader. Its simple to fix, really just requires some distros install media(most have a live preview mode you can use), and you just reinstall the boot loader. I use grub2, reinstalling is simple and striaght forward, regardless of how many os’s you have installed and generally assuming you set the config right it detects all os’s on your system.

Honestly i would not pick any distro over another due to bricking a boot loader.

With that said i have of recent become an Arch fan, i’m a total masochist these days, doing everything the hard way.

OpenSuse tumbleweed is my go to for laptops. I have tun it on intel macbooks, thinkpads, an hp 8" intel atom tablet. It just works on everything I have thrown at it. While I prefer Debian distro’s I do like OpenSuse for laptops.

I second and third debian.

POP_OS my guy! (another vote for)

I have had pretty much nothing but good times running it as my go to system for anything from 2011 iMacs (with a SSD upgrade) all the way up to my current desktop and laptop (5600x/RTX 2060 desktop, 2022 ASUS G14 laptop).

As with any Linux system, there are occasional blips in the experience but overall it really is a rock solid choice.

It likes at least 4Gb of RAM (but 8Gb or more is better) and the pop shop (app store) can take its sweet time loading in content most of the time. But, in return you get lots of little nice thing pre installed and what seems to be one of the better user friendly distros which is suitable for old people or power users alike.

The best thing about Linux though is, you can just try it and if it doesn’t float your boat or rock your wagon, just reinstall something else. Why not “Carpe Diem” as the kids say and use this as an opportunity to try a few and see what works for you?

Go with pure debian

Sorry for the late reply,

What I was looking for is more of a stable-ish distro than something on the bleeding edge, as the device also serves as a backup in case my primary laptop is having issues.

I went with Popos in the end.

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What’s painful about RPM? I’ve been daily driving Fedora for about 3 years now after distro hopping between the Debian ecosystem and Arch Linux. I honestly find DNF to be a far better package manager than APT.

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