if you’re unfamiliar with Linux and do not want to deal with a lot of troubleshooting you shouldn’t use arch. You chose a distro that comes with a very minimal configuration, which makes it your job to get a lot of it working. It’s also a rolling release, apps will update more often and with less testing, meaning you’re likely to experience bugs.

OK, I’m gonna make this simple, since it seems like no one has tried to do that for you. There’s only 3 points

1. Do not expect to buy hardware and THEN use linux

2. When choosing a linux distro, do not choose one that requires you to compile anything

3. Your killer problem - battery life - is 100% a hardware support problem

4. Do not expect to buy hardware and THEN use linux Technically no operating system actually works this way. The problem is that every single hardware vendor works with Microsoft to ensure it works on Windows before they release it. You cannot just buy hardware and then later decide to use Linux. You must always check for linux compatibility, and often distro compatability, before buying your hardware.

The reason for this is that every single piece of hardware needs a driver and not every single piece of hardware has a driver in Linux, and not every driver properly works with the hardware it was built for.

So step 1 is always review your preferred distro for support for your target hardware and don’t just wing it. There’s a lot of shitty broken hardware that Linux devs haven’t built workarounds for and only work in Windows because there’s money to create driver workarounds.

This isn’t that strange in the world of hardware, it’s just something MS managed to prevent everyone from dealing with through it’s monopoly power and Apple prevented everyone from dealing with it by only allowing OSX on it’s hardware and controlling all the updates. In any other world, you don’t just buy random components for your car, or buy electronics without worrying about EU vs US outlets or buy power supplies for electronics without researching voltage, amperage, and polarity. It’s just a thing you have to do.

2. When choosing a linux distro, do not choose one that requires you to compile anything

If you want a “just works” experience, then you do not want to be doing it. The forum link you posted is bonkers. There is no way someone with your level of experience should be bisecting anything. You fell into a hole, asked for a way out, and that forum gave you a shovel.

You want to stick with distros that are ready to go: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, openSuse, Fedora. My personal opinion is every beginner should start with Mint, but everyone’s got opinions.

3. Your killer problem - battery life - is 100% a hardware support problem.

Whatever components you’re running don’t have whatever driver maturity is needed for power management. That could be a lot of things, and there’s no fix unless you want to become a volunteer device driver developer, which is like asking if you want you to become a volunteer suspension bridge repairperson. It’s not a real option for you. That means you’re stuck waiting for someone else to write support for whatever hardware you have. Bringing me back to point #1, do not just attempt to put linux on any old hardware - you must research compatibility as part of your purchasing process.

I’ve been running linux for decades. In the beginning, it was a nightmare. I had to debug it every week, sometimes multiple times each week. Nearly every problem was something I caused trying to fix some other problem. Nearly every problem I was trying to fix was ultimately just a lack of out-of-the-box hardware support and hardware auto-configuration. Fast-forward to 2007, I bought my first thinkpad. I researched linux support and bought one that I knew worked with Debian. Worked first time, no tweaking. Fucking beautiful.

Except some features of the laptop didn’t work. I needed to manually configure the pointer device.

But then, I bought my second thinkpad in 2010. Everything worked, and all the config was through graphical settings tools. Amazing.

Well guess what. I bought a new thinkpad a few years ago. I really wanted a Ryzen. But Lenovo only had the first gen available for sale, the second gen was sold out. I saw the support was perfect for the second gen, but not perfect for the first gen. I bought it anyway.

Wouldn’t you know it. The motherboard has hardware bugs that the drivers just don’t handle gracefully. There’s a fight between Lenovo and the driver developers over it. It never gets fully resolved. However, the battery life problem gets resolved. Now I have 2 bugs:

1. sometimes I have to plug and unplug my external camera into the USB multiple times because the mobo can’t negotiate the connection properly.
2. Sometimes the laptop fails to return from suspend and I have to reboot it.

Both of these suck, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. I could post on a forum and spend literal weeks trying literally everything everyone tells me, but I know what the problem is - hardware/driver support. I could volunteer to become a driver developer, or to work with a driver developer and give them absolutely everything in detail so they can maybe find the time to fix it, but the reality is, I bought unsupported hardware and this is the consequence. Had I bought the second gen ryzen thinkpad, I would not have these issues.

So don’t try to force your way through this sorta shit and then assume everyone else is going through the same thing. Only buy hardware with components you know are going to work, only use distros that are simple to install and operate. And don’t try to solve problems that are caused by failing to adhere to rules 1 and 2.

First of all, Arch has very few use cases imo for the average person, Debian is extremely stable but most of its problems come from outdated packages, maybe try fedora or something similar? just a suggestion.

Also, buggy is the wrong word, i’m being pedantic, but the problems you’re experiencing are very real, but most likely not from bugs.

I will say its interesting how a lot of tech people (myself included) tend to gaslight ourselves into believing stuff is easy, like the fediverse and linux, sure it makes sense to you but it likely doesn’t make sense to the average tiktok/bluesky user.

You need quite a bit of fiddling to get everything set up, and then it just works

Any chances you guys could suggest me one setup that “just works” no ifs and no buts? Or does it not exist in the Linux world?

You’ve given so little insight into your experience

My most recent hardware has been fine

• My framework 13 amd has worked perfectly with Fedora Kinoite.
• My Minisforum UM780XTX has been a great Steam console with Bazzite
• My desktop is a gigabyte x570 board with a ryzen 3700X and a 5700XT GPU, has been solid for years, running Fedora KDE and then Kinoite.
• My workstation at work is a HP 845 G11 and it works fine, also running Fedora Kinoite

In the past I’ve had thinkpads (an X1 carbon and a T485), also good choices

Over my 12 years of using Linux as my daily for work and home (and about 13 years of fiddling with it on and off before that), avoid realtek hardware, avoid nvidia gpus, avoid switchable graphics, avoid strange OEM feature devices. Check hardware for compatibility before you buy it. Stick to mainstream distros, not niche 1 man community distros. I’ve moved to immutable/atomic distros because they are harder to tinker with outside of user space, as historically tinkering is what got me into trouble, now I do that in a container away from my base OS.

I use Linux since 1998 or 99 (can’t remember precisely). I’ve tried everything. From Arch to Gentoo and RH to Debian. If you want stability, you go with either Debian, or Linux Mint. I personally use Debian-Testing (Trixie) on my main PC (it’s very stable, unlike Sid or Arch or other rolling releases), and Mint on my laptops. I’ve found peace that way.

Tl;dr - Use Mint, as for other bug complaints pics or gtfo

Running the mainline distros I’ve never encountered an installation that didn’t “just work”. I’ve thrown mint on basically every device people in the family have any no one has come back to me for any software breaking bugs.

The only bug I can remember messing me personally up was a few years ago when a bad grub update stopped booting my arch machine, but that was more me than the os’s fault. Which is more than people who got bricks from CrowdStrike can say.

If you can narrow down anything beyond “bugs” and “basically all distros” you don’t want help. There’s tens of thousands of distros and an infinite number of possible bugs.

I’m running Linux mainly on a Microsoft Surface Go 1 and on a 2012 MacBook Pro occasionaly, so no friendly Linux machines.

On the Surface Go, except getting it to boot on the USB drive and some bluetooth problems everything works flawlessely.

On the MacBook, except a wifi card problem once a year, everything works fine.

I’m running Fedora Workstation and was using Ubuntu before (Fedora suits me better). Maybe you should try one of these distributions before trying a more difficult one.

I’m really encountering less bugs than on Windows at work.

Could you be more specific? What bugs have you found? What distros have you tried?

Honestly, it just works or not works as much as other operating systems. I’ve just come to like its way of working or not working more than others. I get it. When something doesn’t work the symptoms usually let me know where to look for a fix.

By now this comes down to experience and the ability to read and understand error messages.

When I watch people online in videos messing up with Linux it usually seems to be due to them not reading correctly and ignoring vital information, skipping stuff or trying to alter some process in a misguided way. See Linus Sebastian entering “yes, do as I say” without realising that the system is trying to keep him from making a fatal mistake.

mint cinnamon. your experience sounds a lot like mine whenever i try any other distro. mint is the best.

Buggy how? What specifically is an issue? Have you ever gotten to a stable and working point? If so, what changed?

I personally only use Linux in servers. It may take a while to configure initially, but then I don’t touch it in any meaningful way for years.

TL:DR Buy a pre-installed laptop of your liking, be it windows, Mac or even Linux-based.

I guess non tech users would go into a store and buy a laptop with Windows or MacOS pre-installed. You boot it up, go through some questions and boom you are ready to go.

It appears that you are expecting that same experience with a DIY installation of an unsupported OS on some random hardware. You cannot expect it to be so smooth.

So what I really suggest is that you get a laptop that is designed with Linux in mind from scratch.

Go to tuxedocomputers.com or system76.com and just buy a preconfigured Linux based Laptop. It will work out of the box. Problems solved. Easy peasy.

It’s very strange that you’ve made a post about bugs but chose not to list any of the bugs.

Like, how can we make a recommendation if we don’t know what types of issues you’re running into? What type of hardware you have? What expectations you have?

It just kind of screams of disgruntled user syndrome. These are community lead projects so, yes, they’ll have bugs. But if people never say what they are or what issues they had with what they used, the best the rest of us can do is just guess!

There are bugs, but they’re less annoying for me than the deliberate enshittified features that exist in current versions of windows.

That being said, I don’t run linux on a laptop, and so my experiences have probably been less buggy than yours