Context: For the second time in a row, upgrading the Kernel resulted in a black screen at boot for me.
See also: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=455598
After a fiasco with my 72 year old father in law’s laptop, I no longer recommend Linux Mint to people. On a fairly new Asus, multiple attempts at installing were needed to get it running, and he had constant issues that pushed him away from it. Installed Ubuntu for him, no issues over the past year. Sure it has snaps. He doesn’t know the difference and everything seems to be working fine. The goal is no IT support calls from the old man and Ubuntu achieved it.
Ubuntu has fucked me and my sister over. Bazzite has been doing ok and I've been looking in to Cachyos
Ubuntu LTS? It can still have rough edges depending on your hardware, but solve them and you got five years of peace.
I run CachyOS with Hyprland, after using EndeavourOS for quite some time. I definitely recommend either one, if you’re willing to learn to do things via terminal.
Fedora would have achieved the same goal.
I’ve ran Fedora on and off for years, by my measure, it’s not old man proof.
I’d say it’s no more or less than Ubuntu. An immutable flavor like Silverblue or Bazzite would be more resistant to the technologically challenged, which is why I always recommend one of those to new Linux users first.
Debian: If it’s not natively support and stable we’ll make it supported and stable, no matter the cost.
I tried multiple distros over the last year to find a good one to recommend to someone I know. My experience with mint was a mediocre startup followed by mediocre use for a few days, followed by a boot failure. Very disappointing from a distro I frequently hear recommended as a newbie-friendly option.
yeah when I first switched to Linux everyone suggested Mint to me, like they always do, so I tried that. It was miserable, didn't work well with my Nvidia GPU, and almost made me go back to Windows. then someone suggested CachyOS to me and I'm glad they did.
When you're done with CachyOS I recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - just as someone recommended me once after I was done with CachyOS :)
OpenSUSE TW gang rise up. I also got this black screen issue OP talked about but snapper rollback solved that (for now).
Some people have test environments that aren't their prod environment.
Others stick with a distro that has better validation and/or long-term support.
Please don't blame the kernel devs.
Please don't blame the kernel devs.
Agreed... almost certainly not a kernel issue. Linus is famous for absolutely losing his shit if a kernel breaks userspace
Totally understandable crushout
Fedora or *buntu for easy general stable use. Mint has never been well maintained.
I thought Mint was just Ubuntu without Snaps.
Mint forked for UI tweaks initially but never had a lot of funding or experienced devs. The snap thing was way later. I really should have included debian
I like Debian. I don't really use it anymore but it's solid. I only really use Arch these days.
I know it's an LTS version, but 5.15 is not exactly a new kernel release. It's EOL next year. I've been on the 6 series kernel since switching from Windows, and have yet to have anything break on update.
Edit: also, that kernel release is less than a year after the 6800 xt was released. I'd imagine that newer kernels would have a whole bunch of bug fixes.
Well that's something to keep an eye on.
That said, I'm on LMDE6 which is firmly stuck on the 6.1 LTS kernel branch, so I might not see any problems until I upgrade to LMDE7 and get 6.12 (or go nuts and install something else entirely).
My mint install doesn't even let me use that old of a kernel version, I can only choose from 6.8, 6.11 and 6.14.
I’m using the 21.3 LTS release. That may be why I have more kernel options.
Since in my experience something always breaks when upgrading any Linux OS, I’ve come to try to avoid that.
21.3? Why not upgrade to the latest?
So build your own. ;)
Hint: :q!
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